Old School RuneScape has always had a soft spot for strange player-made challenges. Some players chase rare drops for years, some lock themselves to tiny areas of the map, and others find ways to train accounts that look almost impossible on paper. That spirit is part of the game’s charm. This time, though, one unusual grind landed in a much messier place after Jagex reset progress on a YouTuber’s account only hours after a long-awaited milestone.
The player at the center of the discussion is Rendi, a well-known Old School RuneScape creator with a taste for edge-case account builds and rule-bending experiments. He had just finished a roughly three-month push to reach 99 Slayer on a level 3 account. For anyone outside the RuneScape bubble, that is not a normal training path. Slayer is usually tied to fighting monsters, and level 3 accounts are extremely limited by design, so making serious progress already requires a lot of planning.
How The Grind Worked
Rendi had hinted that the method involved the Slayer Partner system, though he had not yet published a full breakdown when the account action happened. That system allows players to share Slayer tasks and complete them alongside each other. According to the details discussed around the case, the method also involved multi-logging across many accounts, helping push the target account’s Slayer experience to a reported average of about 45,000 XP per hour.
That rate matters because this was not a short novelty grind. Old School RuneScape experience curves rise sharply at higher levels, and the famous old reminder still applies: level 92 is only about halfway to level 99 in total experience. So when the account was later rolled back to 78 Slayer, the number on the skill tab did not fully show the size of the loss. A huge portion of the work had effectively disappeared.
Rendi said the rollback came on May 6, after three months of grinding and less than a day after the achievement could be celebrated. He was also not the only player affected. Others connected to the same training method were hit as well, which made it clear that this was not simply a one-account moderation mistake or a quiet private correction.
Why Jagex Acted
Jagex’s Ayiza first framed the action as a decision made for the health of the game, with bug abuse at the center of the ruling. When players asked how this differed from other low-level training routes that are only somewhat slower, Ayiza said the issue came down to how a level 3 account was interacting with the content. He also said the team had judged this case as bug abuse, while noting that the comment section was not the right place for a deeper technical explanation at that moment.
That limited early explanation left plenty of room for frustration. From the outside, players could see a creator finishing a strange but very RuneScape-style grind, then losing the progress right after the finish line. Without the full bug details, many people treated the rollback as a broader statement about old training tricks, unintended mechanics, and how much freedom players should have in a game built on unusual systems.
The Community Reaction
The response spread quickly because the timing was so sharp and the account was so visible. Players on social platforms and the Old School RuneScape subreddit used the case to revisit older complaints about consistency. Some asked why this method deserved strong action when other issues, including ones they saw as more damaging to the wider game, had not always seemed to receive the same level of urgency.
One common argument was that if Jagex now wanted to treat unintended skilling methods more strictly, many older training approaches would also need to be reviewed. Another point raised by players was that Old School RuneScape contains many loopholes, legacy quirks, and odd interactions, making it hard to tell when a method is clever emergent gameplay and when it crosses into abuse. Even the jokes followed that mood, with players teasing that harmless memes might be checked next.
The Bug Behind The Rollback
After the debate grew, Ayiza posted a longer explanation on the Old School RuneScape subreddit. The issue Jagex said it could reproduce involved Slayer Partners receiving credit for very small boss tasks. In a case where the task required only three boss kills, the partner contribution rule could round in a way that allowed an account to receive the boss-task Slayer reward while doing no real Slayer activity of its own.
The result was a payout of 5,000 Slayer XP even when the partner had only watched the other player complete the boss kills. Jagex noticed that much of the suspicious progress was arriving in repeated 5,000 XP chunks, then traced that pattern toward the boss-task completion bonus. From there, the team worked on reproducing the steps and identifying accounts that had received those gains more than once.
Once Jagex isolated the players tied to repeated XP gains from that bug, it applied a targeted rollback. Ayiza also acknowledged an important part of the community’s complaint: past action against bug abuse has not always been consistent. That admission did not erase the rollback, but it did address why many players felt unsure about the boundary between pushing the game’s systems and stepping over a rule line.
