Hey all, understandably there has been a lot of chatter following action that was taken against a number of accounts yesterday. It’s taken some time to get this out as we wanted to reach out personally before posting this, but hoping this provides some well-needed clarity for you all ahead of the weekend. Earlier this week, we identified an issue with Partner Slayer that allowed some accounts to gain Slayer XP and Slayer points in a way that was not intended. We have since fixed the bug, and we opted to remove the XP and points gained through this method from any accounts that used it. For clarity, here’s what that looks like: Slayer XP removed: 39,240,000 Slayer Points removed: 118,287 Accounts impacted: 12 We’ve seen some confusion around why action was taken when an existing method for Partner Slayer has existed for some time now, and the XP rates for doing so are considerably lower than what you’d expect if you were a main doing the content yourself. We want to make it clear – existing known methods for using Partner Slayer are fine; they can continue to be used, even when assisting with a lower-level or niche account build. Partner Slayer has a check that requires the player to have killed at least some of the assigned creatures to get the rewards from the task. In this instance, this was not working effectively for small tasks, more specifically boss tasks. This allowed players to get rewards without ever interacting with or slaying the creature. Slayer should entail at least some slaying. Since the bug is now fixed, here’s a rundown of how we reproduced it, which we believe should illustrate the problem. In this example, Player A is a character capable of killing bosses and with a high enough Combat level to be assigned them, while Player B is a Level-3 character who’s partnered with Player A for Partner Slayer. Both Player A and Player B avoid specific quest completions and utilise specific block lists + task storage to narrow the pool of available tasks so that Boss Slayer tasks are more common than usual (note that this behaviour is fine and intended, but does increase the effectiveness of the bug that we’ve hotfixed). Player A receives a Partner Slayer Boss assignment, sets the quantity to 3. Player B talks to the Slayer master and also sets the quantity to 3. Players A and B travel to the assigned boss. Player A kills the boss 3 times while Player B stands ‘nearby’ (within a 30-tile range). Player A receives 5,000 Slayer XP for completing a boss task. Player B receives 5,000 Slayer XP for completing a boss task, despite not contributing or interacting with the NPC at all. Player B needs to contribute at least 20% of the total kills towards the task, but 20% of 3 is 0.6. Since Old School always rounds down, this means they’re eligible for the completion bonus even if they have 0 kills, effectively granting them Slayer XP for watching their partner kill bosses and doing no actual Slayer or interaction whatsoever on their own. While Player B’s contribution is too low to earn Slayer Points on a task-by-task basis, they’re still eligible to earn points from Task Streak milestones, which also means people benefitting from this bug were able to rack up substantially more Slayer Points than any Level-3 character would otherwise be able to. How did we detect the bug? On Monday, May 4th, we noticed a Level-3 character had broken into the top 10 for ‘Daily Slayer XP Gains’ across all account types. Given the limitations that Level-3 characters face, ranking in the top 10 for all players is entirely unheard of and triggered an investigation into exactly how those gains were being made. We went on to discover that despite this same character averaging around 55,000 XP/hr, they had been breaking the 90,000 XP/hr mark, which is drastically higher than what we’ve seen in the past for limited builds like this, and at times even competing with main player rates. From there we spotted that the majority of the gains being made were in increments of 5,000 XP at a time, so we began exploring the Boss Task completion bonus as the likely culprit to investigate for reproduction steps. Once we were confident we’d correctly identified the issue, we ran checks to find any players who had received this 5,000 XP bonus without any task contribution, and opted to remove XP from any players who had performed this multiple times (meaning players who tried it once to see if it worked weren’t docked any Slayer XP or points). What now? We love the creativity of the OSRS community, especially when it comes to emergent gameplay and specialised account builds. Restricting quests, optimising how you play, and forging your own unique path are all parts of what makes Old School the great game that it is. Our approach to actioning against bug-abuse has, as you’ve rightly pointed out, been inconsistent. Yesterday, we believed the removal of XP and Slayer points was the right way to solve this, especially as some accounts were competing for top ranks in the HiScores. In hindsight, we feel like we got it wrong. Despite no permanent bans, the punishment felt too severe, and it could have been handled much better. As a result, we’ll be carefully reviewing the XP that was gained as a result of this specific bug abuse and restoring a portion of that back based on expected rates that similar account builds would get if they were interacting with the content based on established metas. Looking forward, we want to provide better clarity on what behaviour might result in action being taken against your account, and how we make it clearer to you what we consider bug abuse vs emergent gameplay, or fun ways to push the boundaries of the game. This will take us some time, but we’ll share more on official channels when we’re ready. In the meantime, when it doubt, please use the in-game bug report feature and we can take a look. submitted by /u/JagexAyiza
Originally posted by u/JagexAyiza on r/2007scape
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