RuneScape Classic To Shut Down After 17 Brilliant Years

The fantasy game RuneScape Classic is being shutdown after 17 brilliant years much to fans dismay.

First released in 2001, the popular MMORPG introduced many to the world of online gaming, and although a sequel was released in 2004, the classic version was said to be favoured by thousands of fans.

Even today it has 1,000 players across more than five servers, as well as a dedicated streaming community on Twitch.

But this will soon be no more, as game developer Jagex announced RuneScape Classic‘s servers will officially go offline Monday, August 6 at 8am BST.

The news was announced in a farewell statement posted on both the Old School RuneScape page and the RuneScape page which sees the game developers explain they felt RuneScape Classic ran its course. They also admitted the dated version was plagued by ‘botting’.

It read:

For many years we’ve left all of the content from the original game available to play. Whilst it’s seemingly been happily plodding along since then, it is with great sadness that we have taken the difficult decision to say goodbye to RuneScape Classic, which we will be winding down over the next 3 months.

It has been amazing to see such dedication amongst those of you who have kept playing RuneScape Classic over the last few years, some of you have even managed to reach max total! However, it’s not all fun and games.

With advancements in technology helping to further support both RuneScape and Old School RuneScape, our tools are no longer compatible with Classic.

This is particularly a problem with our community safety and macro detection tools. The game is now easily abused with the use of third party macro tools, and botting has become an increasing issue.

Explaining more about this issue, they went on to add:

We’ve not fully supported RuneScape Classic for years, so why are we suddenly seeing it as a problem now?

The truth is that bots and lack of community safety tools are serious problems, however, we also feel that we can no longer offer long term service reliability due to the growing risk of unrecoverable game breaking bugs.

The number of bugs is getting worse, and we’re gradually seeing the game breaking. It’s important to highlight that these are bugs which we can’t fix due to the unsupported nature of the game.

As such, rather than have the game break indefinitely without any warning, we wanted to give everyone the opportunity to have their last goodbyes.

- Werbung -

Concluding by thanking fans for their support across the years, the statement was signed by the developers for both games (The Old School Team and The RuneScape Team).

Many fans took to Twitter to express their sadness about the classic game shutting down.

One user wrote:

Guys, please pray for me. I just read some really bad news. Runescape Classic is shutting down after 17 years. I’m gonna need a minute.

Another tweeted:

Very sad to hear Runescape Classic servers are shutting down in a few months for good. A historic staple of the internet being washed away forever just kinda sucks.

Runescape Classic – thanks for the memories, you will be missed.

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