Old School Runescape, the proudly antiquated version of Runescape that still looks and plays like the game I snapped innumerable hours into when I actually should have been studying, is obtaining a raid. Its next raid, as it happens: The Theatre of Blood. A good raid needs good rewards, so when the Theatre of Blood was announced late last year, players were not able to RS Gold see what clearing the multi-man challenge could earn them. Jagex reacted with Justicar armor, a new best-in-slot armor place (above). There was one little problem: gamers absolutely hated it.

In factthey hated it so much that, for months, the Old School community dogpiled the armor on the 2007scape subreddit and memed it into hell and back. They memed onto it so hard that Jagex is now totally changing the armor's design. And not just that, the artist behind the Justicar armor,"Mod West," is using designs submitted and voted on by players. Virtually all of Old School Runescape's updates go through participant polls, but that is the first time a suit of armor was forged in a passion of memes. The irony is that while players loathed the'final' armor revealed earlier this year, they adored the prototypes revealed while the raid was announced. Originally, the Justicar armor was part of a trio of armor sets, West informs me, but as the Theatre of Blood went from obscure concept to actual material, the armor changed with it. Players said there was enough DPS equipment but insufficient tank gear, so it had been narrowed down to only 1 armor collection. And if they were just going to use one set, Jagex guessed they might as well create a new one based on the armor worn by the raid's big poor.

"We believed changing it a bit made sense," West says,"but players weren't quite on board with all the original proposal we shared stream. The memes came out hard and fast. Some players said it was too similar to existing armor, such as armor from Runescape 3, the newer, mainline version of Runescape. Many demanded a return to the prototype designs. Others believed the new armor did not seem tanky enough and generously provided a few alternatives, with some calling for a more drastic redesign.

It got so bad that a few players started to seriously believe that a meme that the updated armor was by another artist, and that the artist who made the prototypes had abandoned Jagex. But something amazing occurred. Even as memes blotted out sunlight, gradually but certainly severe suggestions began to shine through. It started with Buy RuneScape Gold primitive Photoshop jobs, but shortly proper illustrations and fan art started to crop up. Players rallied around the idea of a bulkier, blessed armor group inspired by the Runescape god Saradomin, so they moved back into West's prototype layouts and made some adjustments.