How a lot of Reddit memes became the best armor in Runescape

Posted by Skyblue on May 22nd, 2021

Old School Runescape, the proudly antiquated model of RS Gold that still looks and performs like the game I snapped innumerable hours into when I really should have been studying, is obtaining a raid. Its next raid, as it occurs: The Theatre of Blood. A good raid needs good rewards, therefore when the Theatre of Blood was declared late last year, players were anxious to find out what clearing the multi-man challenge could make them. Jagex responded with Justicar armor, a new best-in-slot armor place (above). There was one small problem: gamers totally hated it.

Actually , they hated it so much , for months, the Old School community dogpiled the horn on the 2007scape subreddit and memed it into hell and backagain. They memed onto it so hard that Jagex is now totally altering the armor's design. Almost all of Old School Runescape's updates go through participant polls, but this is the first time that the suit of armor has been forged in a passion of memes. The irony is that while players loathed the'closing' armor revealed earlier this year, they loved the prototypes shown while the raid was declared. Originally, the Justicar armor was bulkier and part of a trio of new armor sets, West informs me, but since the Theatre of Blood moved from obscure concept to real content, the armor changed with it. Players said there was enough DPS equipment but not enough tank gear, so it was narrowed down to just one armor collection. And when they were just going to use one group, Jagex guessed they might as well create a new one based on the armor worn with the raid's huge bad.

"We thought changing it a little made sense," West says,"but players weren't quite on board with the first proposal we shared on stream. And , well, Reddit went crazy." The memes came hard and quick. Others thought the new armor didn't look tanky enough and liberally provided a few alternatives, with some calling for a more drastic redesign.

It got so bad that a few players began to seriously believe that a meme that the updated armor was by a different artist, which the artist that made the prototypes had abandoned Jagex. But something amazing occurred. Even as memes blotted out sunlight, slowly but certainly severe suggestions began to shine through. It started with crude Photoshop jobs, but soon appropriate examples and fan art began to crop up. Players rallied around the idea of a milder, blessed armor group motivated by the Runescape god Saradomin, so they went back to West's prototype layouts and made a few adjustments.

And then, a hero emerged: legend_arts, a talented and well-known Runescape fan artist. Inspired by the memes and motivated by Buy OSRS Gold elements of West's designs along with other players' suggestions, legend_arts created a hybrid armor design so good it not merely silenced the memes, it got the attention of West himself.