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A July 2018 Old School RuneScape update caused a faulty item-to-coins calculation to generate the game’s maximum coin stack—2.1 billion coins—when certain players died. Jagex took the game offline 19 minutes after the update went live and announced its first-ever game rollback, restoring the world to just before the update. The incident was a death-triggered currency bug, not a system killing players.

What caused Old School RuneScape to generate billions of coins?

The bug followed an update intended to improve game integrity by targeting bots and gold farmers in the Thieving skill. As PC Gamer reported in 2018, the update included a calculation for converting an item stack into coins. The calculation was meant to check for overflow beyond the game’s integer limit, but faulty logic could apply to other item stacks.

Jagex developer Mod Ash was reported as saying that players with certain items could generate maximum cash stacks on death. The reported output was 2.1 billion coins, the game’s maximum coin stack. The death condition was specific to the bug; the report does not say that every player death triggered it.

How did Jagex respond?

  1. It took the game offline. Jagex said Old School RuneScape went offline at 11:49 a.m. BST, 19 minutes after the update went live.
  2. It announced a rollback. Jagex planned to restore the game to its state just before the update. That would undo all activity in the brief affected window, not just remove coins created by the bug.

In a statement to PC Gamer, Jagex said it had no estimate for how much gold was generated while the bug was active. It expected the rollback to resolve the imbalance, but the statement did not provide a final total.

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What did the rollback mean for players?

A rollback restores a game’s shared state to an earlier point. In this case, Jagex’s announced plan was to return Old School RuneScape to just before the faulty update. That approach could reverse both the unintended coin generation and legitimate progress made after the update. It was a broad restoration, rather than a narrow patch or a selective currency adjustment.

The contemporaneous report does not give a player-by-player impact list or explain precisely how individual losses were handled. It also does not establish an exact amount of currency created or removed. The maximum stack size is not a measure of the total generated.

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How Jagex’s current support guidance relates to the incident

Jagex’s current rollback guidance describes game-wide rollbacks as extremely rare and a last resort to protect game integrity. It also says Jagex cannot roll back an individual account on request.

For Old School RuneScape, current lost-item guidance says there is no general lost-item service, while listing limited exceptions such as losses caused by a news-post-verified exploit, staff error, or a Group Ironman storage malfunction. The page says affected players in those cases are usually identified automatically. These are present-day support rules; they do not establish what compensation, if any, applied to particular players in 2018.

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