The Falador Massacre - RuneScape Documentary

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Willmissit has once again made an amazing video. Had the honor of being there myself that day and in all the chaos I did not pay attention to what was happening all around me as the young kid I was - I just ran and ran away.

👍︎︎ 13 👤︎︎ u/iamgeneve 📅︎︎ Aug 06 2022 🗫︎ replies

This is incredible

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/Time_splitter 📅︎︎ Aug 06 2022 🗫︎ replies

This is an amazing video with plenty of information I've never heard/seen of before. Kudos to willmissit for this documentary!

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/screwdriverfan 📅︎︎ Aug 06 2022 🗫︎ replies

I made that thumbnail, very cool.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/uberdigger77 📅︎︎ Aug 06 2022 🗫︎ replies

I was in school during the event but I saw the aftermath.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Aug 06 2022 🗫︎ replies
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Events like the Falador Massacre in 2006 will forever be a part of RuneScape history. A ticket came in, saying someone's running around Falador, killing people. The Falador Massacre is one of the most well-known events to have ever happened in RuneScape. Bro, there's... There's open world PvP. People are getting killed outside your house. This is Durial321. One of the most extreme versions of bug abuse... Was the Falador Massacre. In a way, this video doesn’t need an introduction. The 6th of June, 2006. The Falador Massacre. One of the most infamous glitches in RuneScape history. The day that the most popular free MMO in the world saw players cut down in cities, in places they had always thought were safe. The official documentary. The official history book. Its own space on wikipedia. Even being canonised in the lore and having official ingame events to commemorate the 10 year anniversary. People have talked about and referenced the massacre extensively. Heck, you’ve probably already watched a mini-documentary about it before. So what else is there to say on what is probably the most documented event in RuneScape’s long history? What can I tell you that countless of YouTube videos and player interviews haven’t already? Well, I never make a video unless I can tell you something new on the topic. And after months of collaborating with Jagex themselves, getting the inside scoop and diving through every other piece of media made about the Massacre, we’re finally ready to give you the whole story. Time to buckle up and bank your items, because it’s time to unravel the 16 years of history that have piled up since the events of the Falador Massacre. Our tale begins back in 2002, somewhere in the mystical fantasy land known as New Zealand. 12-year old Lincoln has heard about this new, cool game called “RuneScape”, and decides to sign up to it. A novel, medieval adventure game designed by a trio of nerdy british brothers with a sense of wit and charm that you don’t really see in other MMOs of the time. The vast world is the perfect place for a 12 year old to get lost in. And blissfully unaware of where this road would take him, Lincoln finishes punching in his details, and is ready to enter the world of Gielinor for the first time. Lincoln, who you probably know better as “Cursed You”, his in-game name, is quickly hooked by RuneScape and starts putting in some serious hours. He’s eventually joined by his close friend, Josh, who calls himself "Cursed Y0u" with a zero instead of an O. The duo play together and call themselves the "Cursed You Brothers" since their names kind of look similar if you squint hard enough. Lincoln quickly falls down the PvP rabbit hole, becoming an avid player-killer who raises his stats and improves his gear solely to get better at taking down other players. He finds a good amount of success in this path, and becomes relatively rich quite quickly. When RuneScape 2 was released in March 2004, introducing the Duel Arena alongside it, Lincoln turned away from the Wilderness and went all-in on staking; 1v1 matches with some heavy bets on the line for the winner. Now, in 2004, most stakes were done through magic rather than melee or ranged. Lincoln already had decent PvP skills from his time before the Duel Arena but he could get an even bigger advantage if he raised his magic level to the max. In fact, he discovered that he could get 250 exp per game tick by carefully using the Charge spell, available to everyone at level 80 magic. With the wealth behind him to buy all the supplies he needs, he quickly achieves 99 Magic in early 2004, becoming the 254th person to hit the milestone. Now, with only 254 people at 99 Magic, and only a fraction of them actually using the skill to stake, it’s not hard to guess that Lincoln did very well for himself at the Duel Arena. If you knew what to do, staking was an incredible moneymaker. And Lincoln sure as hell knew what he was doing. The only thing he didn’t know was what he was going to do with all the money he’d made. That is, until a little birdie told the 14 year old Lincoln how much his RuneScape gold was worth on certain sites. Lincoln started offloading some of his excess wealth to third party sites turning his gaming habit into an actual real-life moneymaker. Highly against the RuneScape rules, if you weren’t aware. But somehow Lincoln scraped by on just temporary mutes or bans, never receiving anything permanent. This might come as a surprise to you, but giving a 14 year old a slap on the wrist when they do something wrong generally doesn’t stop them from doing it again. And so, the staking proceeds kept making him richer in real life selling gold for about $17,000 New Zealand dollars equal to about 10,800 US dollars in 2006. And whilst his throwaway accounts got banned after selling all it had, his main account remained active - and looking innocent in the eyes of Jagex. Now, Lincoln wasn’t offloading EVERYTHING through his alts. When you have that much money, why not pimp out your account? So, he dumped some of his wealth into buyable skills, achieving pretty respectable results such as rank 318 Prayer with a level of 91, and rank 109 Crafting with a level of 95. It’s just a shame that he started to train those skills so much later than everyone else. If he’d been able to grind the buyable skills from their release, he’d probably have been able to snag a few Rank 1 positions on the leaderboard. Wouldn’t that be funny? Anyway, you’ll never guess what they released on the 31st of May 2006. Construction. The hottest new skill on the market. Released on a Wednesday as far as Jagex were concerned. But that UK to New Zealand time zone meant that it dropped on a Thursday night for poor Lincoln. A school night, no less! The burdens of real life stopped him from securing an early lead, but he certainly put in the work. Buying up as many resources as he could from the World 2 trading hotspots, he had the materials, he just needed the time. By the time he hit 65 Construction, he was Rank 35 on the hiscores. That’s not that far from Rank 1. It actually seemed… doable. It was time to go all in. Cursed You sold two partyhats from his collection to fund his construction supply, giving him 250m in liquid assets. This wasn’t just enough for 99, this was enough to splurge on it. Cursed You opted to build Mahogany Tables, using a butler to turn logs into planks for him. A very expensive - but very fast - method. Beyond this, he also recruited three friends to buy any and all mahogany planks they saw being traded on the public market. This wasn’t just to increase his supply: this was to ensure his competition wouldn’t have any for themselves. While three people weren’t going to be enough to monopolise the market, they were enough to put a huge dent in it. As he stormed to Level 78, he still only had half the exp that Rank 1 had accumuldated in this time. Both Monkey Moejo and Xn00bxfrei had 3.2 million exp to Cursed You's humble 1.7 and there was no doubt that they also had surplus cash of their own to throw around. Cursed You was fast, but he had an education and a bedtime to slow him down. There was no way he’d be able to do this alone. So it’s a good thing he wasn’t alone. He was one half of the Cursed You brothers, remember? So, over the weekend, he brought in Josh to work in shifts. While Lincoln slept, Josh would keep playing, keeping the grind going until Lincoln awoke the next morning and took over again. 24 hours a day of nonstop efficient training over the weekend - now his competition were the ones who couldn’t keep up. As he reached level 88, Cursed You hit rank 1 on the hiscores for the first time. The end was in sight - he just had to keep the momentum going. Lincoln PLEADED with his parents to let him take a few days off school to do this if he could train all day, the rank was his for sure. But if he couldn’t, his foes would have a chance to overtake him. Upon hearing their child ask to take time off school to spend the day playing video games his parents looked at each other, did the responsible thing, and said... Yes. Who knows why they let him do it. Maybe they knew about his RWT earnings and thought of it as him working overtime at a job? But whatever the reason, it cemented his ultimate fate in unchangeable stone. Now that his name was up in lights at the coveted Rank 1 position, a lot of eyes fell on Cursed You. And this was during the RuneScape golden era. Who was this kid who came out of nowhere? How did they overthrow the competition so quickly? Can I see his house? The average player in 06 didn’t really understand the game especially when compared to the modern knowledge we have of its mechanics. Everyone had just assumed that Rank 1 Construction meant that you had the coolest house in the game, and had pimped it out to the max. Cursed You’s house was just a collection of empty rooms, with naught but a single mahogany table that was being destroyed and rebuilt over and over. He didn’t need anything else. That would be, dare I say… exp waste. Of course, it wasn’t just adoring fans trying to get in touch with Cursed You, cheering him on or begging to see his ultra cool omega house. His competition slid into the PMs to ask when he was ever going to log out. Or how big his bank was, because theirs was definitely bigger. If you had 500m, they had 501m, that sort of thing. RuneScape was really just a kids playground back in the day, huh… The race was a lot closer than Cursed You would have liked, however. Even after the days spent nolifing the skill, his rank 1 position was dangerously close to being overthrown. What’s worse, as he reached level 96, he was forced to take a break. Not by his parents, mind you, they were happy for him to sink all day into the game. It was by his clan, DI, who were threatening to kick him out if he didn’t join them on a PKing trip. Just ignore the fact that he was racing for a historic milestone, I guess. RuneScape really WAS just a kids playground back in the day. This actually gave Cursed You a reason to spruce up his house, however. Since everyone would want to have a look at it after the clan event finished, he threw up some minor furniture as decorations for the party he’d be hosting. This didn’t last long, however, since he really needed to get back to training, and he forcibly kicked out all the PKers from his house party. Sometimes, foreshadowing is relatively obvious. This PKing trip could quite easily have cost him the race. But, once again, fate intervened, and he not only kept his rank 1 position - he finally gave himself a buffer. By level 98, he was 1.2m exp ahead of rank 2, and him being the first to 99 was basically a given. With his future achievement locked in, he wasted no time preparing to celebrate. Since you can’t invite people to your house in building mode, Cursed You decided to make flatpacks to get the last few drops of exp with his friends and clanmates around. With a few planks and a couple clicks, Cursed You became the only player in RuneScape with 99 Construction to a small and intimate audience that didn’t overwhelm his computer in the slightest. Foreshadowing- With his achievement immortalised in screenshots, Cursed You opened the house to the masses of people who had been requesting a private tour of the residence for days. Calls to action were posted on all the popular fansites and official forums, telling people to subscribe to Will Miss It and to hit the bell to be notified of all future uploads. Or, as he put it, “Feel free to drop by right now - im on w111 with chat on. Rimmington btw”. So, everyone remembers the Massacre as taking place on 6/6/6. It’s catchy, good optics, yada yada yada. But Cursed You is from New Zealand. That’s so far off the side of the world, that half the maps don’t even include it. So the timezones have gotten pretty muddy here over the years some people say the party took place on the 5th, some say the 6th, some say the 7th. The uploader of the original Falador Massacre video claims the party was held at 7pm Australian time, which would be about 10am in the UK. But Jagex staff claim they were woken up at 2am to try and fix the resulting issue, so that doesn’t match up. Luckily, we don’t have to guess. Cursed You’s party invitation was posted at 11:09pm UTC; 1 hour prior to Jagex’s timezone placing the party at just past midnight in the UK on the 6th of June 2006, and still on the 5th of June for our American friends. Funnily enough, Lincoln gave his buddy Josh absolutely no credit for all the hours he put in working on Construction during those late nights. He couldn’t risk getting banned during his own party. Foreshad- Party-goers rushed to the house, building up quite an audience in a very short period of time. In only minutes, hundreds of players poured in - all eager to see the Construction King, and the castle he had made. One such player was the (also) 16 year old Brian, hailing from the United States. Brian was… pretty much a nobody, really. Just your average RuneScape player at the time. A super cool teenager who was into metal music and video games, unlike any other 16 year old at the time. He’d actually got into RuneScape because of a friend of his; VooDooLegion who he’d met previously on a different game. Brian first tried out RuneScape in May 2005, making his first account, which you all probably guessed the name of. That’s right, it was… “s2 cell”. Early on, he died to a scorpion and lost all of his items, and decided to just make a brand new account instead of rebuilding. From that point on, Brian would go by a new name. One that would go down in the history books forever. I mean, let’s be real here. You almost certainly know Brian by a different name. That one being… Durial321 quickly fell in love with PKing, just as Cursed You had done all those years ago. If he wasn’t in the Wilderness, he was training his combat skills or preparing to jump back into it. VooDooLegion eventually introduced him to 3v0luti0n X, a large PKing clan that had built up a good reputation in the community. They had weekly events where they would do things like kill all the players at the Wilderness Greater Demons, before the addition of Obelisks in April 2006 let them spread their reign of terror over the entire Wilderness. This was still 2006, so no-one was crazy at it or anything but Durial definitely knew how to PK, and he certainly had a taste for it. And sure enough, in the early evening of the 5th of June 2006 US time, Durial was sitting on Teamspeak with some of his friends when one of them, Alien, told him to come visit a house party in World 111 - the Australian Homeworld. Cursed You was the first person to hit 99 Construction, and was hosting a massive party that EVERYONE was going to. So, sure enough, Durial decided to hop over and see what all the fuss was about. Interestingly enough, Cursed You had made a dungeon, a floor of the house where people could fight each other when PvP was turned on. Showing up with some basic gear he was wearing at the time, he stepped through the Rimmington portal, and got to partying. And by partying, I mean bashing other people’s faces in. Perfectly safe, of course. You didn’t lose anything if you died in the dungeon, it was just for fun. You’d just re-enter the house, climb back downstairs and start all over again. That’s all it was ever meant to be. A place for safe, friendly PVP. Now, when I said everyone was at the party… Out of the 1200 players online in the world, Cursed You would in later years estimate that 800 of them were all at the party. RuneScape worlds could reasonably hold up to 2000 people spread across the map without too much trouble. But if you had a lot of people in one place, such as the 800 attendees cramped inside Cursed You’s home, things started to chug. And boy, was it starting to lag. About 30 minutes past midnight UK time, Durial, barely able to see what was going on, died in the dungeon and respawned outside before re-entering and made his way over to the throne room to see what the “magic ball thing” was. And as he gets to it, the screen freezes completely. A loading message appears in the top left of the screen. And before he knows it, he’s back in Rimmington, outside the house portal. So was everyone. Cursed You had kicked all several hundred players out of his house, in a desperate attempt to stop the lag. His house was now only open to his friends - some of which joined him back inside, eager to keep the party going as a small gathering that only the cool kids could partake in. The game lags, the minimap is filled with white dots, and the main game is covered by an endless sea of players obscuring everything. But something’s not right. Some players have… healthbars? And they’re going down? Maybe they’re being attacked by a random event or something? No, they only just left the house. Nothing should be attacking them just yet. Trying to figure out what’s going on, Durial clicks into the ocean of players, expecting to walk to a different spot. But instead, he’s given an “attack” option, just like the one he had earlier while he was in the dungeon. Oh dear. So, what just happened? You might be surprised to hear this, but no-one is actually 100% sure what the cause for the open world PVP glitch was. In the years that passed, a few theories have circulated in the community. Depending on who you ask, you’ll usually hear that it’s to do with either the combat ring, where being expelled from the house while you had combat enabled let you keep it, or the scrying pool, where being able to spectate somewhere else in the game turned you into an invisible player, and being expelled while using it in a PVP-enabled room let you spawn there with PVP still enabled. But there’s no shortage of other theories, such as it being down to a last minute code change with the kitchen larder. But here’s the thing: Durial was by the Throne Room when he got kicked out. Using none of those things. And Cursed You’s clan party at 96 Construction didn’t result in the bug despite also expelling his avid PKing friends then. And it’s not like they didn’t try finding one. So, what gives? Well, searching for answers, I got in touch with one of the most important developers at the time, Mod Ash, to shed some light on the whole situation. Keep that name in mind, we’ll be seeing more of him later. Ash didn’t know for sure what the exact cause was, but he knows a lot about why it happened, and so do we. As such, we can make some pretty good guesses because of it. How the Player Owned House handled combat was… weird. When you had PVP challenge mode enabled in the house, it applied a variable to EVERYONE in the house that allowed combat. Literally, a blanket variable of “you can attack anyone, anywhere”. You can kinda see how things went wrong, now. But wait, if this variable allowed you to attack anyone, why does PVP challenge mode only work in the dungeon? That’s because the House also had a second variable. If you were on the ground or upper floor, or the house didn’t have a dungeon at all, the option to attack other players was hidden. A hacky solution, sure, but if you wanted to make a pvp mode that only applied in the dungeon, it definitely worked. You just had to make sure that these variables were wiped whenever you left the house. Using the portal, teleporting, logging out the developer of the skill, Mod John A, thought of all possible ways you could leave the house, and made sure this variable was reset when you did any of them. But clearly, something was missed. Knowing what we know now, there’s a good chance that this missed check has to do with a piece of high level furniture - the Greater Magic Cage. Requiring 89 Construction, and only a week after the initial release of the skill, most players had never seen one, nor interacted with it. Neither had Cursed You built it when his clan mates believed they found a bug the day before, as shown in the image they took in the Throne room during the same party - all which would explain why the bug wasn’t found until now. As the cage is used to trap people, that means additional variables are applied to them, which may have muddied the waters for the code. As mentioned earlier, Durial explained in an interview 3 hours after the event that he was in the throne room to check out the cage. But he’s not the only one. A Swedish user on the DI forums explained only an hour after the Massacre that also he could attack people after being teleported from inside the Greater Magic Cage. None of the J-mods who had a part in the fixing of the bug knew for sure what actually caused the variable to be smuggled out of the house. Even the skill’s developer explained in the RuneScape history book that he missed something, but couldn’t specify what. Now obviously, the bug can’t be abused today. We’re going to be talking more about that later. But to get a true understanding of the Greater Magic Cage’s involvement, I made a last attempt to find the cause of the bug by messaging upload manager Mod Easty. As a Jagex employee since 2008, few J-mods know the game’s coded secrets better than Easty. As an upload manager, he’s been in charge of implementing all code involving hotfixes and new updates since 2010. Next to this, he’s had a pretty big interest in bug abuse; keeping in touch with RuneScape’s bug abuse curator and learning the ways of how to break the game both internally, but also externally. Some might remember him from the rotten potato documentary, where Easty was shown to be in contact with the old bug abuse communities. If anyone at Jagex would be able to look up the code and find the bug - it’d be him. But, even Easty couldn’t say for sure. The Construction code has changed a lot over the years, and the closest we can get to the original code is from August 2007 - being the same copy of the game used to bring back Old School. Already at that point had Jagex made several changes to avoid the Massacre from ever happening again. But Easty could, after reviewing the 2007 code, make a guess at what happened in June of 2006. Hold on for this, because we’re getting a little technical now. When standing in the Greater Magic Cage and somebody pulls the lever, it traps the players inside. If the player chooses to drop them down to the dungeon, an animation plays where the player is falling. As we know, Cursed You expelled everyone from his house whilst our known PKers were in the cage and the Swedish user did explain the cage was in the process of ‘teleporting’ him when he was kicked, suggesting the animation had been activated when Cursed You hit the emergency brakes. Based on how the code worked at the time, Easty believes this caused a rare instance where two actions happen in the opposite order of what they’re meant to do. Assuming Cursed You expelled everyone in the same game tick as a different player sent the trapped players to the dungeons, the game prioritises the action activated by the player with the highest Player Identification Number, or PID for short. In 2006, the number each player had depended on how long you had been online on a server. The longer you stayed online, the higher the number you had. And obviously, Cursed You had been online for longer than most of his party guests making his action of expelling the guests take priority. So when the hundreds of players, including the ones in the cage, spawned outside the other action was still queued up, and played directly after they all had been kicked. Since getting dropped into the dungeon would register your account as being in the dungeon, the variable saying you’re on the upper floors of a house disappears, and PvP mode becomes activated. So, in summary, you have a variable that turns on open world PVP, and another that stops it if you’re on the ground or upper floors of a player owned house. This is supposed to be removed when you leave the house, but the developer forgot about the Greater Magic Cage, and now you have “open world PVP” turned on thanks to stupidly specific circumstances. As long as you don’t log out, hop worlds, or teleport, the variable stays visible. Okay, enough on mechanics, it’s time to talk about the carnage. As players start dropping, panic spreads around the Rimmington house portal. Some people still have no idea what’s going on; others know exactly what is going on. Some players run as fast as they can, not wanting to lose their expensive items they had brought to the prestigious party. Others are just deer in headlights, unable to avert their eyes from the disaster unfolding before them. A partyhat is quickly lost in the chaos to a player named Yeti 90, punching his victims to death with nothing but a pair of boxing gloves. Others are dying to mere shadows; killers avoiding attention by hiding in the masses. Some of the bug abusers likely teleport or hop worlds in an attempt to make the most of this once-in-a-lifetime chance, only to wipe the variable they accidentally smuggled out. Attending Player Moderators sound the alarm. With their Silver Crowns piercing through the chatbox like a sword of light dispelling the dark, they warn players to run, report the bug abusers, and beg those same abusers to stop before it’s too late. Others rush to the Player Moderator Forums to open a direct line with Jagex, hoping to get in touch before these random killings turn into a full-fledged massacre. Meanwhile, at Jagex HQ, Moderators Mat K, Mark R and Murdoch make up the entirety of the community management team this evening. Having been working for just over 6 hours at this point, it wasn’t long until they could finally head home, as their shift ended at 2am. But as the ones to deal with Player Moderators, they quickly notice the reports coming in over their P-Mod emergency ticket system; all repeating the same warning about open world PvP. Receiving reports of similar nature almost daily, most who are false alarms, the three J-Mods on duty are sceptical. But nothing is normal about the sheer volume of reports flooding in; it was worth checking out. Mod Mark R and Mod Murdoch jumps in-game, teleports to Rimmington and quickly discovers that the reports are entirely real. Trying to do what they can to remedy the situation, they start warning players to run away and bank their items. Ironically, this just sends more players towards the hot zones of danger, when they could have just logged out and been perfectly safe that way. But it was late at night, people were panicking, none of them were prepared for a situation like this; and it was likely just as chaotic in the office as it was in Rimmington. While Jagex managed to get some of the abusers, they’re actually struggling to get them all. You know how you can’t log out of the game until 10 seconds after combat? Turns out even Jagex couldn’t get around that requirement, and so if someone attacks a player, and then just attacks someone else within 10 seconds of their last kill… They just can’t be logged out. Sure, the moment they stop, they’ll be slammed by their ban; but until then, they can go as long as they want. The Rimmington mass cascades into a system of predators and prey, with those expelled with the attack buttons able to murder any other player in the game and those without unable to attack back, stuck in a non-PVP zone, only able to watch as their health ticks down until they lose everything they’re carrying. With two J-mods unable to do anything but watch the chaos unfold, those with items to lose run north to the nearest bank, hoping to deposit all their items before they’re forcibly stripped of them. Some players are quick to escape, but not without trouble along the way. One of the bug abusers, Jonathizzle0, follows the crowd north to attack players attempting to get to safety. He gets no kills, and attempts his luck against an unsuspecting player doing a farm run. Inside Cursed You’s house, however, the Construction King and his friends are completely unaware of the chaos they’ve caused outside. They’re just chilling and enjoying the afterglow of their friend’s achievement. However, a lot of the reports flooding from the P-Mods in are name dropping him and his party, so a scrambling staff team decide to lock his account just in case he’s somehow enabling the bug. A temporary ban to save countless of players’ items would be a worthwhile trade, after all. So Cursed You is issued a ban, he is forcibly disconnected from the game, and his house immediately closes with all of his friends forced outside into the masses. Players are dying, PMods are shouting, and even a couple JMods are there trying to save the day. To call it a reality check is themunderstatement of the century. Cursed You is informed about the chaos over Teamspeak, and does a cheeky little bit of ban evasion by hopping on to his real world trading mule account, Hidden P Hat, to check out the situation for himself. Durial321, still in Rimmington, has spent the past minutes observing rather than abusing the bug. Though we know he attacked somebody in the town and discovered the variable still applied to him, it’s likely he paused once the J-mods showed up. They clearly didn’t know about him just yet; otherwise Durial would’ve been just another ban in the Rimmington carnage. But Brian had always been a PKer. It’s the whole reason he played the game. And he’d been given the ability to attack anyone, anywhere. There was no way he was ever going to resist taking the plunge. His teamspeak friends, who were fully up-to-date on what was going on from the perspective of Durial himself, all encouraged him to keep going. But they had to be smart about it, and laid a plan to do as much damage as possible. He splits off from the crowd, also making his way north towards the nearest bank but he’s not here to deposit his valuables, he’s here to bring them out. While running with the fleeing masses, he tells one of his Teamspeak companions, P6 emx60, to wait by the Falador bank, so he can accept some items in a trade. By this time, Jonahizzle0 has also made his way to the Falador east bank, still attacking players in the area. After finally getting a kill, he is attacked by a different player who also has the PvP variable still applied, Runescapego1, who is much better geared to fight. Jona teleports off to escape, simultaneously ending his minutes of attention in the spotlight. As Durial arrives in the bank, Runescapego1 pledges to protect the bystanding players from future killers. Little does he realise the largest predator of them all is just a few squares away, getting ready to seize the moment all of his days in PVP had been building towards. While most people were still attacking random players in Rimmington, Durial and his encouraging friends were ready to abuse this bug to its fullest potential. He knew the consequences. He knew he wouldn’t make it out of this unpunished. But he knew this was his chance to go down in history as a legend. He heads out of the bank and enters a trade with his waiting friend. What items did he trade, you ask? …Well, we’re not sure. There’s no way to know what was in his inventory. It’s a pretty safe bet to assume that Durial was offloading some of his most valuable items, fully expecting an incoming ban for his upcoming actions. But with both of them ending the trade with a “thanks”, it was time to make history. Brian and his Teamspeak friends had laid an evil plan. While players had started to reach Falador to bank their items, no-one had reached the neighbouring towns. So, taking a leisurely stroll, Durial made his way to the once-named Ghost Town. If he’d tried to teleport with an Amulet of Glory, he’d have lost his PVP variable - something he didn’t know about, but avoided by sheer luck. If he’d tried to world hop, in an attempt to tear up the busy hotspots of world 2, he’d have also lost the variable. There were many opportunities during the night where Durial could have easily come to an early end and he just happened to avoid them all. And so, Durial arrived in Edgeville with the rogue variable still primed. The unsuspecting players in Edgeville thought nothing of it; people go there all the time, after all. No one could have expected that it was going to be a Ghost Town once more. With the element of surprise on his side, Durial immediately started swinging at the players, targeting those bearing the most expensive items. PKers returning from the Wilderness with hard-won spoils, alchers barely paying attention to the game as they tore through their giant piles of items, and those displaying their obscene wealth through equipped items. As Durial’s spree is going on, his friends on Teamspeak are calling people over to Edgeville for Durial to slay. One of the unfortunate victims answering the call, is Primo a wealthy player carrying his beloved green partyhat. Just second after he steps foot inside Edgeville, Primo is dead. Brian is filled with adrenaline seeing the expensive paper hat appear on the ground before him - and equips the infamous Green Partyhat that he’d wear as his spree continued. As the kills racked up, players started crowding around Durial, wondering what was going on, as the killings continued. Around this point, Durial removed both a white and a yellow party hat from their previous owners. However, he was actually unable to pick up much loot for himself, as the greedy onlookers seized the opportunity to grab what they could, descending on partyhats and high level gear like the vultures that they were. Durial knew a ban was incoming, he wasn’t in it for the money - he couldn’t be. It was a bloodlust driven entirely by an adrenaline rush, a lust for chaos. As fearful players fled Edgeville, they made west for Falador, hoping to get away and, eager to hunt down the rich and wealthy just within his grasp, Durial gave chase. While Durial has already torn up Edgeville and is making their way to Falador from the north, players in Rimmington finally heed the advice of the JMods and make their way to Falador to bank their items, having seen all the bug abusers in the area start to disappear and believing the glitch to finally be over. Even Mod Mark R and Mod Murdoch fall for this misconception, seeing a peaceful Rimmington, and believing it’s all over. Rather than follow the players to Falador, they log out believing their job to be done. Fresh blood runs to Falador from the south, running straight north in hopes of finding safety. They slam into the refugees from Edgeville, with the one man army hot on their trail. Rimmington may have found peace, but that’s because the chaos had all gone north. And with a mass amount of targets congregating in Falador Square, and Durial descending from the north, the stage is set for the greatest disaster RuneScape has ever seen. Anticipating what comes next, some bystanders fire up their recording software, not wanting to miss a second of what follows. And with players starting to drop like flies, more and more eyes are morbidly drawn to the madness. But those pale in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of eyes that would descend on the videos of the event over the years to come. Some of the most infamous RuneScape footage that has ever been uploaded to YouTube. For five long minutes, the rampage razes Falador to the ground. PMods beg players to get away and bank their items, but people are enthralled by the history in the making, and the pleas go unheard. Friends message friends to come see, and as word spreads around the game, more and more people descend on Falador to watch the bloodshed for themselves. Within the last hour, the 1200 players on world 111 had reached its max capacity of 2000 with several more queuing up to get in. Mere hours earlier, this had been Cursed You’s day. It was now entirely Durial’s, with a ferocious stack of people following him around an unhinged collection of people egging him on, asking him to kill them, or chanting “Dur scared” on repeat. After building up this army of followers, and clearing Falador of targets, Durial decides to head back to Edgeville - to take down the sneaky players who thought they’d managed to evade him. With impending doom returning to the edge of the wilderness, PMods continue to beg for help on the forums. Someone, anyone at Jagex - we need you. Well, they did have Jagex at the scene - having realised the problem had spread further than Rimmington, Mod Murdoch logged back in to try and solve the problem. If he could force Durial from the game, they could slam the banhammer on him - but Durial was unbannable as long as he stayed in combat. And high on the bloodlust of the bug, he wasn’t going to let enough time pass between kills to leave combat mode; with a pool of targets around him, why wait 10 seconds when you could immediately kill someone else? So, Murdoch went for the second best thing Jagex could do… that is, asking Durial as kindly as possible to stop, please and thank you. If J-mod powers weren’t going to save the day, maybe words would. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t stop Durial. However, Murdoch was hot on Durial’s trail: he had to slip up eventually. There was no way he could keep up the perfect murderous pace for hours on end. And, sure enough - Durial slipped up. Ghjjf, who just so happened to be the leader of Cursed You’s clan DI, became Durial’s last target barely surviving next to Barbarian Village. As Durial heads dead north to Edgeville on the hunt for more victims, too much time passes before he manages to strike again. 10 seconds are quickly gone. Mod Murdoch slams the disconnect button and Durial is ejected from the game, the almighty train coming to an immediate halt. Durial hadn’t been banned, however, only disconnected. Mod Murdoch were probably more concerned about getting the biggest perpetrator offline before doing anything more complicated. Durial immediately logs back in, but with the killer variable removed by the logout, his killing spree is done for good. Durial’s not stupid - he knows his time is up. So, with his last moments in Gielinor, he removes his green partyhat and trades it to his longtime friend - VooDooLegion. With his Harlequin prize in the hands of his trusted companion, Durial turns to dust, disintegrating into nothing as he is disconnected once more - with a permanent ban applied to his account. After about an hour of stress, fear and death, the infamous Massacre had seemingly come to an end. The funny thing is, Durial had managed to keep going for such a long time simply because he ran to a different town entirely to begin with. By the time the reports of Durials rampage had made it to Jagex, the killings in Rimmington and southern Falador had already lasted for 20 to 30 minutes. The largest predator might’ve been taken down, but who knows how many other killers were still running around in the game? Who knows what events haven’t reached Community Management’s ears? And who knows if it’s not all about to happen again; the bug was still in the game. This was only the start of a very long night for Jagex. To say night shift were struggling was an understatement. One of the biggest sources of stress was to do with escalation - with no developers in the office overnight, there was no-one on hand to fix the bug. Community Management certainly couldn’t do it. Do they hope for the best, cross their fingers that the bug doesn’t become widespread, with more offenders appearing, and let it get fixed in the morning? Or do they nip it in the bud here and now? Well, by the time the British clocks got closer to 2am and the end of their shift, the call was finally made. They needed backup. Just two weeks prior, Andrew Gower had been the only person in the system who had permission to add hotfixes to address issues like this but, by sheer coincidence, Andrew had recently delegated this responsibility to a different employee: System Administrator Mod Slake. Slake had seized the opportunity with both hands, and openly admitted that he would be more than willing to come in the moment an emergency needed him. Anyway, faced with his first emergency, Slake immediately called Andrew Gower in the middle of the night. Okay, that’s a little mean to the guy Slake was definitely up to the task, and willing to do his part in stopping the problem. But while he had the permissions to deploy a hotfix, he didn’t really have the technical knowhow to confidently stop the glitch without breaking anything else in the process. He needed a developer’s insight. Stirred at 2am, a tired Andrew Gower was bombarded with information about what had been happening in the game. Unprecedented problems. Open-world PVP. Players dying in the streets. They needed someone at the office to come over and fix it immediately. Andrew, annoyed to be stirred by the very person he appointed to avoid this sort of thing, told them to deal with it themselves, and gave them the number of the only other developer who had agreed to do emergency callouts. The man, the myth, the legend: Mod Ash. Ash, not recognising the voice, was confused by the call but agreed to come in regardless. Slake raced to Ash’s house, picked up the developer, and beelined to the office. With the right mind on the task, they quickly sussed out what was behind the bug. While they weren’t sure how the PVP status had been smuggled out of the house, they knew it was the rogue variable that had caused the massacre. It was a bug that had existed since the release of Construction, but no-one had known about it until this perfect storm. With the variable identified, it was easy to make a hotfix. Ash’s hacky middle-of-the-night solution was to temporarily disable PVP in the entire game, meaning nobody could attack each other inside any PoH or the Wilderness until it was turned back on. He also thought to make the game just stop reading the house PVP variable completely, effectively disabling it for any players who still had it active. Without knowing how the variable was smuggled out, they simply didn’t know if this was PoH-exclusive, or if a player could do it all again by using a different source of PvP. With that done, they could fix this more elegantly in the morning. Ash just needed to make a quick check that there weren't any glaring problems in his code, to ensure that it wouldn’t cause a second major incident. All in all, Slake and Ash’s work took them somewhere in the region of 2 hours - with the hotfix being deployed roughly around 4am UK time. As the party had started just after midnight, this gave a total of 4 hours from the start of the house party to the termination of the glitch. It had been a night of terror, a night of dread, a night of murder with countless bloodshed. But as Ash and Slake relaxed in their chairs the three community managers now at home could enjoy a well deserved rest. Because despite all the things the night had been, the night was finally over. Survivors of the massacre share their testimonies over all major RuneScape forums in the following hours. Long threads tell the tale of the terrors on world 111, calling it the “Doomsday Massacre” due to the coincidental date of 6/6/6. The rants forums are flooded by angry players demanding their items back. Chancers try to capitalise on the opportunity, and also demand their items back, even if they didn’t lose anything some of them weren’t online for it at all. Screenshots circulate the forums. DI member Sopp4, also known as S Y N I, uploads his footage of the event to YouTube just hours after it ended - although YouTube was still fresh at this point, so most people preferred to share the file’s download link on Rapidshare instead. Durial himself replied to posts on RuneScape Community, in later years known as the Zybez forums, explaining some of his perspective of the entire event. His appearance on such a popular forum made it rather easy for people to get in touch with him. Players started to reach out, wanting their items back, but Durial was in no position to return them even if he wanted to. However, in a cruel twist of fate, Durial checks in with VooDooLegion a few hours later, asking for his green partyhat back on a different account only for VooDooLegion to refuse, sever all ties with Durial, and end their years-long friendship over some money in an online game. The legendary green partyhat was sold just a few hours later, shamelessly swapped for a yellow partyhat and a santa hat; with VooDoo keeping the yellow for himself and gifting the santa hat to a friend he clearly cared about more than Brian. Learning of the legendary figure at the heart of the massacre, a writer from Tip.it called Therat got in touch with Durial through the RSC forums about 3 hours after the Massacre had ended. Requesting an interview, Durial gleefully accepts, with the transcript of their conversation being posted in a tip.it forum thread titled The Falador Massacre (or “The Falidore Massacre” to be exact) This was the first time the event was referred to by this name, and due to the heavy traffic the site would see over the next few days, it quickly became the “official” name and the one that has stuck through all these years. Emerging from the ashes, 3 hours after the Massacre, was Cursed You. Andrew Gower had eventually gotten up to check on what was going on, and upon looking at the bans for the night, noticed that Cursed You wasn’t maliciously involved with the bug. There was no reason to keep him banned, so they let their law-abiding Construction King back in to continue his RuneScape adventures. This didn’t sit right with some of the staff, who despite agreeing that he had nothing to do with the bug, could see a range of alt accounts in Cursed You’s possession with suspicious activity in the real world trading market But nothing enough to issue a ban; placing his account under surveillance going forward. The bug hadn’t been properly fixed yet, mind you but it was now close to the start of the workday in the UK, and all hands were on deck once more. It’s an odd morning for the staff as they’re met by the garbage fire that started blazing overnight. The community outrage is at an all time high, a horrific glitch is being held back by a patchwork fix, and they all slept through one of the most significant events in RuneScape history. With Jagex being made up mostly of young developers and fresh faces in the industry, it’s an unusual and exciting day for them. They’ve never seen anything like this before. Regardless, they get to work on properly fixing the bug. Andrew Gower, upset that such an event happened in the first place, admonishes his team for not partaking in safer coding practices. During this conversation, he realises that the in-house programming language, RuneScript, doesn’t really have an easy way to check if a player is in a specific location or not. Sure, there are some hacky ways around it, but it leads to stuff like the two separate variables for house PvP which led to the bug anyway. So, Andrew just goes away and quickly codes up an entirely new system for the game to fix this. With the new code, it’s now possible to check what instance a player is in alongside what coordinates they’re standing on, and so the team ensures that all variables which enable PVP also check that the player is standing in the intended place. Wilderness PVP only works in the Wilderness. House PVP only works in a House. You get the picture; even if you somehow smuggled these variables out somewhere, they wouldn’t do anything since you weren’t in the correct place. There would never be a disaster of this type or scale ever again. Additional fixes have been made over the years to ensure bugs of similar nature truly cannot happen. Though unrelated to the Massacre, the PID system was changed in 2013 to now be in a random order rather than based on who had been online the longest, meaning bug abusers can no longer rely on their actions being prioritised in the system. Other bugs related to the PoH and variables have also been fixed in later years, which all in all creates a stack of safety checks before you even touch the ground when you leave a player owned house. Jagex has basically built a fortress of protection around the bug they couldn’t identify for so many years. Having proved himself with his eleventh hour aid, Mod Slake gives Mod Ash special permissions to deploy hotfixes to the game without requiring a system admin (such as Slake) to push it through for him. While Mod Ash tends to get a lot of the credit for stopping the massacre, Slake was equally important in saving the day. After all, Slake was the admin on call, he was the one who drove to Ash’s house and the office, and the one who pushed the hotfix through. Without him, there was nothing Ash could have done in this situation. As a last, but just as important, major change; players could now be banned even if they’re busy smacking down people in PvP. As for the people, Paul Gower took to the rants forum with some terrible news for the players. Apologising profusely to all of them, there was nothing they could do for the victims. The system wasn’t able to perform a rollback at this time, returning everyone to their state just before the killings, and there was no way they would be able to issue item refunds. As Jagex did not keep a backup of that sort of data, and legitimate requests were being drowned out by a sea of people trying to get free stuff, no-one would be getting anything back at all. Imagine permanently losing your best gear and not getting it back solely because some kids were trying to scam the system in wake of a huge tragedy. I know I’d be upset. The discussions on the days following the massacre saw people go back and forth between supporting and despising Durial. Some players felt a rollback was the right solution, with his ban being reversed alongside it. I mean, who could resist such a tempting glitch? Everyone would go around and kill as many people as they could if given the chance, right? Others thought the ban was justified given he had exploited one of the most serious bugs the game had ever seen, and knowingly went aroun murdering people to steal their expensive items. While Durial was permanently gone from the game, Cursed You was back in business, and enjoyed a reasonable status as an online celebrity following the massacre. Despite not taking part in it at all, his name was forever connected to it and everyone knew him. However, he was far from a golden child, and received another mute just a few weeks later in July 2006, for reasons unrelated to the massacre. Even in the evidence report you can see a player calling him a legend. Must have been a nice ego boost for the 16 year old. Pride comes before the fall, however, and with Jagex actively monitoring his account, only two months passed after that fateful night before Cursed You pushed things too far Or, rather I should say “Cursed Y0u”, since it was Josh playing on Lincoln’s account. While Lincoln was at school, Josh started to brag about real world trading on the account, while also attempting to sell gold. The ensuing report alerted Jagex to Cursed You’s long and shady history on the topic, and so the account was permanently banned for real world trading on August 25th 2006. Despite being banned, Cursed You still stood his ground that what he did on his account was a solo mission, claiming what ultimately nailed his coffin was actions done by an intelligent account hijacker. With both Lincoln and Brian removed from the game, the story of the stars of the Falador Massacre came to a swift close. Okay, that’s not quite true while the Durial account was permanently banned, that didn’t stop Brian from playing RuneScape. Durial321 was never to be let back into the game, with Andrew Gower even leaving a note on the account in the internal system saying it should never be unbanned one of the only 4 known account notes he ever left in the system during his 10 year tenure at Jagex. But even if Durial was gone, Brian did have other accounts to play on. Gifted “Azn Boi 763” from a friend, Durial was able to jump straight back into the game without having to start th long and monotonous grind from scratch. Jagex did also add a note to this account, connecting it to Durial321, but decided to let it slide since he wasn’t breaking any rules. I mean, other than ban evasion and account trading, but hey, who’s counting. His new account wasn’t a well-kept secret either; sharing the username on a fansite he made for himself Getting the status as an iconic player in the world’s largest MMO at age 16 must’ve been awfully exciting for Brian. He continued to be a part of 3v0luti0n up until February 2008, when he attempted to join a new clan of dastardly villains and terrifying PKers Reign of Terror. Durial didn’t last much longer, however, as he eventually quit the game some time in 2009; and has not been an active player ever since… As far as we know. As for Jagex, they tried their best to avoid acknowledging the Massacre for several years. After all, the incident was essentially a major case of bug abuse; it was a failing on their end, and to give it any credence would just be glorifying rule breaking, and encouraging future offenders. But time heals all wounds, and those personally affected by the Massacre moved on with their lives, either rebuilding their accounts or leaving the game for greener pastures. Avoiding the topic was the “official” stance right up until RuneFest 2014, at which point Jagex decided to start talking about it in preparation for the RuneScape Documentary. It was still something of an awkward topic,n though. With the rise of mass shootings over the years, as Jagex started to bring it up, they had to make sure they never glorified it. Staff members who had dealt with active shooter incidents in real life never found Falador Massacre jokes to be funny, so they knew how sore it could be for some community members. But still - it’s one of the most significant cultural events in RuneScape history. People who’ve never touched the game have heard of it. Whether you like it or not, it left a permanent mark on the game right in the middle of its golden years. In 2016, on the 10 year anniversary, Jagex decided to fully commit to acknowledging the incident by adding an ingame event that recreated Cursed You’s infamous house party; followed by a giant Durial321 miniboss that players could fight together. Even oldschool held an anniversary event, opening up a temporary world 666, where players could engage in open PvP in Falador without it affecting their account on the regular worlds. Jagex even added a new song - Massacre - to play on this temporary world, bearing a striking resemblance to Nightwish’s “Planet Hell”, but in the osrs soundfont. As Planet Hell was the background song for the most well-known YouTube footage of the massacre, many players associate it with the event, and to this day all the top comments on the youtube upload of the song are about RuneScape. Jagex also outsourced a gaming company to create a simple game for Facebook titled the Falador Massacre. Described as a top-down view of Falador as it appears in Old School, you’d have 3 minutes playing as Durial321 to get as many kills as possible. NPCs posing as players would pop in from all directions wearing different items, awarding a variety of points depending on the item. Unfortunately, Facebook wasn’t too fond of releasing a game holding the word ‘Massacre’ - and thus was rejected and never released. In the years after Durial left the game, his details were somehow shared online - likely as a result of one of the many leaks of the Zybez forum database, allowing imposters to log on and pretend that they were the PKing legend in disguise. This tricked various content creators into making videos about them, some of which has since been taken down. Many streamers have also claimed that they were actually Durial321 returning to the game, but these were all fakers trying to use the name to boost their audience. Believe it or not, Cursed You also eventually returned from the land of the dead sneaking back into RuneScape under the inconspicuous name “Curssed You”. See, two “S”s, it’s totally a different guy. I bet the second S stands for secret. Anyway, he streamed consistently for about a year, uploading several youtube videos during this time, releasing some never-before-seen screenshots from the Construction grind. He got in touch with Jagex moderators and some content creators, sharing his stories before fading away once more - joining Brian in the greener pastures that lie in the world outside of online gaming. Wherever the two of them may be now, they leave behind a legacy that will forever be a part of RuneScape history, gaming history, and all of the players that were there on that fateful day. Thank you all so, so much for watching this deep dive into RuneScape’s most famous bug of all time. It’s kind of funny thinking that, even after all these years, we never fixed the actual bug that caused the Massacre. They only added workarounds to stop it happening again. Far down in the code, that bug is still there, and honestly might always be there inside RuneScape for the rest of its life. If that isn’t a poetic metaphor for the legacy of the Massacre, I don’t know what is. Anyway, I really hope you’ve all enjoyed this video Until next time, my name is Will Miss It, and I’ll see you all later.
Info
Channel: rswillmissit
Views: 787,079
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: runescape, rs3, runescape 3, will miss it, willmissit, osrs, oldschool, falador, massacre, durial321, cursed you, bug, event, glitch, abuse
Id: _prl1Ohn-Ew
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 60min 27sec (3627 seconds)
Published: Fri Aug 05 2022
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