For as long as Old School has existed, unofficial clients have existed alongside it. While these did not initially cause significant issues, over time some add-ons offered by clients have become too intrusive, affecting the gameplay in unacceptable ways and competing for players’ attention by offering increasingly over-powered benefits.
Whilst we’ve always made it clear that players using unofficial clients are doing so entirely at their own risk, we’d like to take this opportunity to offer some clarity.
As the game's owners, we need to look both at the current situation and where things will inevitably go in the future. We’ll be more pro-active in protecting the interests of the game by outlining what features aren't acceptable, and by acting if these features are abused. We'd like to note that it's impossible to list every potential feature, so here we give general principles and examples.
We consider features which enable you to bypass gameplay mechanics to be unacceptable, like those which might indicate where projectiles would land, where NPCs might spawn, or which protection prayers to activate.
The same can be said of features which might modify how you select actions in the game or change how you click on menus, players, or NPCs, especially where the feature leads to you using fewer clicks than you would when using our client.
Examples of unacceptable features (note - these are merely examples, and are not an exhaustive list):
- Features which allow you to engage in Blackjacking NPCs with fewer clicks than our client would allow.
- Features which allow you to interact with altars with fewer clicks than our client would allow.
- Features which allow you to interact with construction hotspots and items with fewer clicks than our client would allow.
- Features which allow you to interact with logs with fewer clicks than our client would allow.
- Features which tell you where Vorkath’s attacks might land.
- Features which tell you where to stand to avoid Zulrah’s attacks, and what protection prayers to activate.
- Features which tell you what the next Demonic gorillas attack will be.
As we’ve said, this is not an exhaustive list, and we reserve the right to add features to this list in future. We’ll continue to monitor community concerns about other specific features and offer more clarity if it’s needed.
We’re assessing our options on how best to enforce this, but ultimately use of unacceptable features, which we consider to be detrimental to the community’s experience of the game, will result in account bans.
However, we don’t want players to be left in constant fear of possible bans, so we’ll give advance warning if any additional features are being considered for the list.
This statement isn’t meant to cover all possibilities, since new ones may emerge at any time, but it should give you more clarity about what you can or can’t do in the meantime. We hope to be able to offer more clarity in the future, and we’re going to reach out to the community to identify the right long-term solution which strikes the right balance between player enjoyment and game integrity.
Thank you for your patience.
The Old School Team