Citing safety reasons over rising problems with bots and bugs, developer Jagex, has announced that the classic Runescape experience, which apes the original 2001 release of the game, will be shut down later this year. While it's been a long time since it has been fully supported -- as "Old School Runescape" and the standard Runescape experience have -- classic will soon be shuttered for good.
The problem stems from the continued development of the two main branches of Runescape. Jagex has reached a point with the game where it's management tools are no longer compatible with Runescape classic, which means that it cannot be updated as needed to prevent bugs and to thwart bots, which there have been a growing number of in recent years.
"We feel that we can no longer offer long term service reliability due to the growing risk of unrecoverable game breaking bugs," Jagex said in a statement."The number of bugs is getting worse, and we're gradually seeing the game breaking. It's important to highlight that these are bugs which we can't fix due to the unsupported nature of the game."
With that in mind, it's now gradually scaling back the game and will slowly shut down its features over the next few months, culminating with the game's final shut down on August 6 at 12AM PST. From that point on the game will no longer be playable and the classic mode will not allow logins any further.
Of course we can expect some private and unofficial servers to pop up in its wake, but players should be very careful about what login credentials and payments they give to any such services.
