Three years ago or more, I was a normal RuneScape player, at that time I was also very active on the RuneCrypt fan site. Eventually I was offered the position of forum moderator and I happily accepted. I made many contributions to RC and I felt proud to help the community out. At that time Kami didn’t like me because, well to put it bluntly, I was new. However as time went on him and I got to talking a bit, he told me a bit about bug abuse but never really got into much detail about it. We eventually got to be friends and he told me more and more, he even abused bugs with respectable RC users at the time, some of whom were in the staff, but I will not name drop.

One day I get a request from Kami, he asked me if I wanted to take part in helping him bug abuse. I was excited. I didn’t really think about it, but even now, I am glad I made the choice I made and I don’t regret it. I accepted, without thinking of the consequences it would bring me. Kami contacted me and asked me if I want to make money in RuneScape; I accepted and he told me what we were going to do. It was the first bug I was ever going to perform and I was excited, this after all, is what started everything. What we did was take the chest from the POH and put 50k in it, after performing the glitch, two people were able to remove 50k each. One was the guest in the house, and the other was the owner of the house being forced out (more on this later) and re-entering in building mode. The guest would then remove the money, followed by the owner. This gave 50k profit each time, it wasn’t super fast money, but it WAS a dupe and it was a decent income.

Eventually, I think Kami wanted another person to help us, so I thought of my cousin, known as Duralast500 online (well at least in RS at that time). Kami needed trustworthy people obviously so I vouched for my cousin seeing as if he did try to scam or anything I could get a hold of him in real life. This made a total of seven of us, Kami and Hipihoper, who were the main bug abusers; Pyro and Bubba – I’m pretty certain Pyro found a couple bugs and Bubba helped around a lot – Henry, who provided us with information about non-RS related things and helped around a lot too, and finally Duralast and me. All seven of us performed this bug and gained a lot of money.

Dura and I got really interested in bugging and learning more about how the game mechanics worked, we wanted to find some bugs as well, since we were the “newbies” in the group, so we just decided to mess around with things. We first started trying things with everyday activities we used to to, such as Castle Wars and trading, but obviously these have been around by quite some time (at that time) and were for the most part, bug-free. So then we decided to move on to the recently released player-owned houses. I don’t exactly remember what we did to find this, because like I said we were just messing around, but we eventually found out how to get other people into your house with building mode on. When we combined this with Kami and Hipi’s bug, the forced teleport, they came up with an awesome idea, which would give us even more cash flow than before, and even ruin (to this day) part of the RuneScape market…

Previously we could only get 50k out of a chest because it was the only item that could be taken out in both construction mode and normal mode, however only the owner could go into build mode. With the bug Dura and I found, it allowed anyone to go into building mode in other peoples houses. Then Kami and Hipi came up with the idea of trying to remove glories from the wall, normally if the owner does this, it gives you a glory and removes the glory from the wall, but since we tried to take them down with people who were “guests” in the houses, the game realized (after the glory is removed, I guess) that it is in fact not their house and leaves the glory intact on the wall, but by this point, the person already has a glory in their inventory, what this allowed was for a infinite dupe of glory amulets, and since you can obviously have as many people as you want in your house, we could have more than just one person duping glories at once. We started selling the glories we duped and since the demand started getting smaller we reduced the price more and more, they went from costing around 90-100k down to 40-50k, and to this day, the glory market hasn’t recovered. It doesn’t end there though, this bug could be done with any other item you can build in your house and take down…

Dura didn’t have legends quest completed so we tried to see if we could take the framed cape down, we could, and surprisingly, he was able to wear it. This also worked with suits of armor, more importantly, castle wars armor. We started with the lowest armor suits and we duped those, sold em for tickets and finally were able to dupe the blue/gold one, we had a couple sets of those, it was amazing how rare and hard it actually is to get those legit (because we had a lot of people saying ‘Wow! Nice!’). On a side note, you can still go into other peoples houses in construction mode (if you know how to do the bug, however, duping doesn’t work anymore).

Now for forced teleports… Ahhh, the main bug which most of our other bugs were based off of. It’s impossible to set a specific example because this was used for a lot of bugs, but here’s how it worked. To start off, it’s not, by game definition, a “teleport” because no spell is cast, we just call it a teleport because well, it took you from wherever you were back to the duel arena. To set up a forced teleport or FT, you needed three people. We had different “versions” of this, if you will, we kept finding better items to do it with and at one point we had to find a complete different way (still including the duel arena though) to do it because Jagex attempted to fix it. It’s very difficult to time it right and when I did it there were only certain people I could do it with, them being Kami and Alk (another RuneCrypt member); I could sometimes do it with Hipi too, the easiest was with Dura when we would be in the same room and count to three and click. What the bug involved was going into a normal duel, player #1 and player #2, they duel each other, and right after the second “accept” screen to get into the duel, player #2 would do something that would prevent him from going into a duel, then within 3 seconds (because duels take 3 seconds to start) player #2 and a third person, player #3, would have to start a duel. Then what you would have is 3 people in a duel, however only player #2 can attack both of them, and player #1 and #3 can’t attack each other. After this, player #2 or #3 would forfeit the duel leaving player #1 inside, once this is done, player #3 is not needed anymore. Player #2 would go and do whatever, go into castle wars and get bandages or barricades, or get in a high stakes duel with someone else, and if they were about to lose, or wanted to get the bandages or whatever out, all player #1 would have to do is log out by X-ing out of the screen. And behold, you’re automatically teleported to the hospital in the duel arena.

Right about in the middle of the glory dupes we needed a place to organize ourselves and eventually start a community. Kami bought the server and domain while I mostly did the maintenance and managing of the site, including making a full skin and adding add-ons, this allowed for us to have a “home” and be able to trade things easier and acquire things from other people (such as accounts or get help in certain bugs). We did a lot of activities too, for example, we would go to meetings with Jagex and Player mods (they have these every week on a regular server in a regular, but usually empty, place). We got a list thanks to our player mod friends and would just go there and talk, they also had a backup place to go in case someone found them, so they would do that, and we would show up there and the Jagex mods would be like “wtf?” and basically would ruin that weeks meeting. At this point we all still had our original accounts but that was soon to change.

One night Dura and I were bored so we went out PKing with our “die and not lose anything” glitch, this one was done by being forced teleported out of the mage training arena, and when you died the game thought you were still in there, and since you don’t lose anything when you die in there, you just respawn… strangely, in Lumbridge (or wherever your respawn point is). Well we went up geared up, I went with two sets of barrows and a fury and Dura went with full dragon and two other barrows set. We just messed around and eventually got killed, of course the people that killed us were really pissed off, we had fun and logged off… The next day we try to log in only to find out accounts banned, at first we thought it was because of what we did, but we found out everyone’s accounts got banned. And after this, is when we went platinum, we started buying accounts and hardcore dueling people and forfeiting if we were losing, we made billions this way, we had a lot of help from members of our community and we thank them for everything they did, we wouldn’t have gotten where we did without them.

And that is pretty much my side of the story. Do I regret this? Again, no I don’t and I would have made the same choice again if I could. I learned a lot from this, I learned how companies work and how to familiarize yourself with game engines, thanks to this I also found glitches in other games, small and single player games, but it’s amazing when you find something just by yourself. This also broadened my knowledge of coding and how to maintain a community online, and most importantly, won me friends that I know I’ll keep in touch with. A lot of people have also asked if we are coming back, the answer is, probably not. Kami is not so much interested in bugging RS anymore and we lost contact with a couple of bug abusers. I can’t encourage you to go out and bug abuse since I don’t want to get RC in trouble or have this blog taken down and since there ARE negative aspects of doing so, but what I can tell you is not to completely follow everything you’re told by Jagex or by any other company for that matter.

I’d like to use this last paragraph to thank a couple people for everything they’ve done in a way for me. First of all I’d like to thank my comrades, I’ve learned a lot from bug abusing thanks to you guys, and I’ll like to personally thank Kami for introducing me into this. Thanks to RuneCrypt for (at the time) giving me a so called “home” I was a kid back then and I really enjoyed playing the game and apart from that, you guys also helped me familiarize myself with running a community. To every single member that ever signed up to our site, thanks, every one of you made a difference, we wouldn’t be known that much without you guys and gals. And finally, Jagex, obviously we wouldn’t be or know what we do now without you, thanks for making the game, and seriously, you guys have a great sense of humor and it was cool that you didn’t shut us off immediately Oh, and fix that dupe with item lending, will ya?

-Racer Of All