I've been keeping an eye on a fascinating microcosm of MMO economics for a while now, and it's officially hit a boiling point over in the Old School RuneScape community. The recent release of two new enemies, one spitting out millions of gold despite being easy to kill, and the other locked behind an endgame quest yet struggling to drop anything worthwhile, has confused and rankled the OSRS faithful, to the point that developer Jagex recently delayed a planned Q&A session so it could instead focus on ironing out some loot tables. In April, zombie pirates were added to Old School RuneScape.
These are weak mobs averaging level 28 with just 35 hitpoints, found en masse in the PvP-enabled Wilderness, albeit not too deep into the Wilderness. They're easy to reach, easy to kill, and – based on player reports and according to the reputable OSRS wiki – can net you upwards of 2 million gold an hour, with the bulk of that profit coming from weapons and materials which, while small payouts individually, add up very quickly. They're such easy money, in fact, that the countless bots that infest OSRS like termites in an oak tree very quickly descended on pirate zombies in droves.
Fast forward to this week and we have the release of While Guthix Sleeps, a new Grandmaster-tier quest. I say new , but this is actually the re-release of a quest that first came to plain-old RuneScape in 2008, newly revived for Old School RuneScape with a few changes. While Guthix Sleeps carries fairly hefty .
