Gold is the most valuable resource in many a game, but especially in “Old School” RuneScape , a game that has been around for literal decades and has an economy of its own. Part of the benefit of in-game gold is the ability for players to extend their memberships with it. Naturally, when a new update introduced a bug that caused mundane sources of gold to spit out, well, billions of gold, bad things happened. Over the course of about 20 minutes, players had easily reached the 2.147 gold limit and predictably used it to purchase tons of membership time.
What can you do, as a game developer, when something this bad for business happens out of the blue? You hit the kill switch. Old School RuneScape was shut down nearly 20 minutes after the update went live, and developer Jagex performed a server rollback during that downtime. The game is back now, but that’s not the end of the story for people who took advantage of the situation.
Jagex said that not only were all the purchased bonus memberships being removed, but that the players who bought them “will also see action taken against their accounts and will temporarily be removed from the game.” Otherwise, everyone should be good, though some players may encounter a problem with their save files. That is a problem the company is working to resolve.
Source: PC Gamer