What is Bug Abuse in OSRS?
| Date | 2026-05-07 |
| Type | news-opinion |
| Video | youtu.be/76_3oQhlW8I |
Summary
Gnomonkey reacts to Jagex rolling back Rendy's level 3 skiller account from 99 to 78 Slayer for bug abuse, notes the missing context, and uses past bugs (crab splashing, Mokhaiotl, Tombs of Amascut 770, Sepulchre, Fortis/Farlamore altar) to discuss what counts as bug abuse. He argues both Jagex and the community share the blame: Jagex keeps its rules deliberately grey and punishes inconsistently, while players should know obvious abuse when they see it.
Outline
- 0:00 Rendy's Slayer rollback from 99 to 78 and the tweets around it
- 1:36 Analysing the situation: the unknown method and the 50% XP gap
- 3:21 Impact on the skiller high scores
- 5:00 Debating bug abuse rules: the ATM analogy
- 7:18 Past bugs: crab splashing, Duke mining, Mokhaiotl shield, grubs three-tick Tbow
- 13:55 Inconsistent punishment: Noob Type's ToA 770 versus Sepulchre
- 17:05 Grey areas in the rules: third-party client plugins
- 20:21 Conclusion: both Jagex and Rendy at fault, community and rules
Topics covered
Opinion: Rendy Slayer rollback
- (0:00) Rendy had his Slayer level reverted by Jagex from 99 down to 78 overnight, which Gnomonkey jokingly calls the greatest drop in Slayer XP of all time, with a tweet mentioning a loss of 8.9 million Slayer XP.
- (0:26) Rendy said he found a new method requiring him to proactively multi-log on many accounts, averaging 45k XP per hour, and spent three months on it, which is why he had not uploaded in three months.
- (0:55) Jagex replied that during routine checks at the start of the week a number of accounts were flagged for abnormal amounts of XP, the bug was fixed the same day, and any accounts that abused it had their XP removed, not just Rendy's.
- (1:29) Gnomonkey notes the rollback came right after Rendy tweeted about getting untrimmed 99 Slayer on a level 3 combat account, and says Jagex calling it a routine check feels a little disingenuous, though other players probably were affected too.
- (2:30) Rendy said the 'current meta' for level 3 Slayer is 30k XP per hour and that his method gave an average of 15k more XP per hour, taking over 200 hours of in-game time; Gnomonkey notes that is a 50% increase, not a small one.
- (3:00) Jagex said it would welcome opening an avenue to talk more directly about what is and is not deemed acceptable, to help avoid similar situations in the future.
- (3:57) Gnomonkey says nobody has context on what exactly Rendy's method was, neither Rendy nor Jagex has said, so he does not want to side with either Rendy or Jagex until it is known.
- (3:57) Gnomonkey says it is silly that people instantly jumped to Jagex bad, Rendy good without context, while acknowledging many people feel Jagex hates Rendy and retaliates against him.
- (21:41) Gnomonkey thinks Rendy should probably have known better, but without the full context it may not have been obvious that the method was bug abuse.
- (22:11) Gnomonkey says that if he got 50% faster XP on a level 3 account, he would not quietly train it for three months but would ask around first, especially someone like Rendy who has been banned before.
- (22:41) Gnomonkey concludes that both Rendy and Jagex are at fault to some extent, and that both have poor track records.
Level 3 Skiller
- (3:27) The current level 3 Slayer meta, as Gnomonkey understands it, is attacking the monster on a different account and then finishing it off with something like a goblin war hammer hitting a zero on the last hit splat, because Slayer XP is 50% for whoever deals the most damage and another 50% for whoever hits it last.
- (3:27) The best known Slayer method for level 3 accounts gives about 30k XP per hour, according to Rendy and Gnomonkey.
- (4:27) JCW is probably the best known level 3 skiller and also used the 30k XP per hour partner Slayer method but was not getting 45k XP per hour.
- (4:57) Jagex has separate high scores for skillers, and a level 3 can be looked up there; JCW is number two and Rendy would have been number 23 on the skiller list.
- (6:01) Rendy is one of the few level 3 skillers to have completed Priest in Peril, and the method to do that has apparently been patched out, so he has access to Morytania and its regions.
Hiscores
- (4:57) At the time of the video the full front page of the skiller high scores was not yet filled out, and Rendy would have taken one of those slots.
- (5:29) Gnomonkey says Jagex cares a lot about the integrity of the high scores, especially the front page, though Jagex has never said this explicitly; it is just the vibe that this is protected.
- (6:57) Gnomonkey thinks the high scores page, with its unfilled front page, was probably what pushed Rendy's case over the edge versus Jagex letting it slide.
- (17:38) Gnomonkey says that anything relating to high scores or world records is more sacred to Jagex, so players are more likely to be banned for abuse in those areas.
Bug abuse
- (6:57) Gnomonkey says OSRS players constantly look for loopholes and rationalise them with 'how do we know this is not intended?', and he compares abusing an obvious bug to taking money from an ATM that is spitting out 100 dollar bills, which would still be theft.
- (8:29) Gnomonkey says that when something is not obviously bug abuse and is not hampering high scores, Jagex typically does not ban players or roll back accounts for it.
- (8:59) Duke Sucellus mining, a tiny AFK mining XP rate of around 10k XP per hour during a boss fight, was patched out but nobody was punished for it, which Gnomonkey considers questionable emergent gameplay.
- (17:38) Gnomonkey says multi-logging is against the rules, but the only time Jagex would ever ban for it is something like Deadman, where staying logged in for 24 hours wins a competition; he says this is not spelled out anywhere.
- (20:15) Gnomonkey says Jagex maintains the grey area on purpose so it has the right to ban or not punish whenever it pleases, which he does not think is fair, and he thinks Jagex should define clear rules.
- (20:31) Gnomonkey advises erring on the side of caution and double-checking with Jagex when a bug affects high scores, world records or world firsts, because that is when Jagex really cares.
- (20:45) Gnomonkey says Jagex lives in the grey to such an extent that people are encouraged to hide bugs, and that world record chasers in communities like the Theatre of Blood community hide advantages because they know Jagex will patch them.
- (26:01) Gnomonkey says players should be capable of recognising that something completely infinite or five times better XP is obviously abusing the method, and that Jagex should also define the rules more clearly.
Crab splashing
- (7:29) Before it was patched, players could one-tick cast spells at crabs in a raid while completely AFK, getting around five times the XP of normal splashing because of the one-tick attack speed.
- (9:29) The crab splashing method had a variant in Tombs of Amascut on the Kephri puzzle pillars, which were also one-tick; Fire Surge gives 50.5 XP per cast at 36,000 casts per hour.
- (10:01) People were banned for the crab and Kephri splashing method and it was patched out immediately after people leaked it on YouTube.
Doom of Mokhaiotl
- (10:01) During Gnomonkey's world first attempts at Mokhaiotl he found that stalling long enough on the shield phase, around 10 minutes, would insta-kill Mokhaiotl out of the shield with a massive hit splat; he only did it once because a Jagex moderator was in his chat, and asked them to patch it.
- (10:31) Gnomonkey says the Mokhaiotl shield stall bug could have given a delve record of around 80 to 90 at the time, when the record was about 30 to 40, so it was obviously not intended.
- (11:38) At Mokhaiotl, attacking the grubs or leeches heading toward the boss with a weapon sets your cooldown to that weapon's attack speed, so you can shoot a slow weapon at the boss, swap to a blowpipe to shoot a leech, then swap back to the Twisted bow and shoot the boss instantly for a three-tick Twisted bow attack.
- (12:08) Muffin found the grub three-tick Twisted bow trick and told Gnomonkey; Jagex moderators said they were not sure about it and to hold off, then later decided it was fine and left it in the game as emergent gameplay.
- (12:40) Gnomonkey says he held off using the grub attack trick for about a week until Jagex decided it could stay, and told viewers in chat who found it to leave it alone until they knew.
Tombs of Amascut
- (14:49) At one point Tombs of Amascut had a bug that let players activate invocations they were not supposed to, including all timer and death invocations at once, allowing raid levels up to 770.
- (14:49) Some players abused the invocation bug to get Osmumten's fang kits with no difficult invocations on, by turning on all the death invocations to barely reach raid level 500, which Gnomonkey calls very clearly bug abuse.
- (15:10) Jagex had a cap in place so that loot in Tombs of Amascut does not increase beyond a 600 raid level.
- (15:12) Noob Type completed a raid level 770 Tombs of Amascut, which took many attempts over multiple days, and the raid itself took 1 hour 20 minutes.
- (15:12) Noob Type's raid level 770 clear gave 1.9 million gp loot, after which he got a three-day ban that was updated to a two-week ban.
- (15:38) Gnomonkey thinks banning Noob Type was silly because he gained no benefit and used the bug purely to make the raid harder, though he argues one could say Noob Type abused a bug and should have known better.
Hallowed Sepulchre
- (15:38) At Hallowed Sepulchre, a bug let a player lowered to one HP and wearing the hallowed ring run through all the traps without being hit or teleported back.
- (16:11) Records set at Hallowed Sepulchre through the one HP trap bug still stand on the board today, which Gnomonkey says makes them impossible to beat legitimately.
- (16:11) Gnomonkey says Hallowed Sepulchre is the best XP in the game, and that the bug also affected max XP rates.
Libation bowl
- (18:38) A recent bug in the Prayer wine method (Libation Bowl style altar) had the altar not running out of wine after an update with no patch note, so one wine lasted forever for bone shard Prayer XP.
- (18:59) Gnomonkey says players claiming Jagex might have intended the infinite wine are being dumb on purpose.
Third-party clients
- (16:45) Gnomonkey says you can probably find an exception in a plugin to just about every one of Jagex's third-party client rules.
- (17:16) A plugin feature that indicates where projectiles will land, such as the Zalcano rock indicator that shows where rocks will fall before they appear on screen, is allowed under Jagex's third-party client rules.
- (17:32) The Nylocas plugin lets you dim the text on Nylocas based on a customised wave and number of ticks after the wave spawns, and for bigs or smalls only, which can show when they will explode; Gnomonkey says this is allowed because it is set up ahead of time and not manually triggered.
- (17:47) A Watchdog-type plugin that told players when to tick-eat certain items was completely axed by Jagex, while the Nylocas dimming remains allowed.
- (18:13) Gnomonkey says Jagex has a stance that it can ban you for any reason and does not clearly lay out a line in the sand, so plugin rules have exceptions the whole way through.
Jagex
- (0:55) Rendy also said Jagex recently rolled back a bronze defender and the collection log on something that took 30-plus hours of prep and a thousand poison dynamite, a case Gnomonkey says he has no context on.
- (20:25) Gnomonkey says Jagex has a track record of inconsistent punishment, sometimes banning people for getting no benefit from touching a bug, and sometimes letting people abuse bugs to their heart's content.
- (20:45) Gnomonkey says Jagex patches a lot of emergent gameplay that does not need patching, creating back and forth between the community and Jagex.
- (21:01) Gnomonkey says many player-versus-monster players do things that Jagex would consider bug abuse without being banned, so it seems unfair that Rendy is punished while these players run free.