How a bunch of Reddit memes became the very best armor in Runes
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Old School Runescape, the proudly antiquated version of Runescape that still looks and plays like the match I sank countless hours into once I actually should have been studying, is getting a raid. A fantastic raid needs good rewards, so when the Theatre of Blood was announced late last year, players were not able to RS Gold find out what clearing the multi-man challenge could earn them. Jagex responded with Justicar armor, a new best-in-slot armor set (above). There was one small problem: gamers absolutely hated it. They memed onto it so tough that Jagex is currently completely changing the armor's design. Virtually all of Old School Runescape's updates go through player polls, but that is the first time a suit of armor has been forged in a fire of memes. The irony is that while players loathed the'closing' armor revealed earlier this year, they adored the prototypes shown while the raid was declared. Initially, the Justicar armor was part of a trio of armor sets, West tells me, but as the Theatre of Blood moved from obscure concept to actual material, the armor changed with it. Players said there was sufficient DPS equipment but insufficient tank gear, so it was narrowed down to only one armor set. And if they were only going to use one group, Jagex figured they might also create a new one based on the armor worn by the raid's big poor.
"We thought changing it up a little made sense," West says,"but players were not quite on board with the first proposal we shared on stream. And , well, Reddit went crazy." The memes came out hard and quick. Some players said it was too similar to existing armor, such as armor from Runescape 3, the newer, mainline version of Runescape. Most demanded a return to the model designs. Others believed the new armor did not look tanky enough and liberally provided some choices, with some calling for a more drastic redesign.
It got so bad that a few players began to seriously believe a meme that the upgraded armor was by a different artist, which the artist that made the prototypes had left Jagex. But then something amazing happened. Even as memes blotted out sunlight, gradually but surely serious suggestions began to shine through. It began with crude Photoshop jobs, but soon appropriate illustrations and fan art started to crop up. Players rallied around the notion of a milder, blessed armor set motivated by the Runescape god Saradomin, so that they moved back to West's prototype layouts and made a few adjustments. Inspired from the memes and inspired by Buy OSRS Gold elements of West's designs and other players' suggestions, legend_arts made a hybrid armor design so great it not only silenced the memes, it got the attention of West himself.