One player couldn’t keep their ridiculously lucrative OSRS heist quiet for long.
OSRS Trick Reportedly Nets Player $100,000 in Real-World Cash
Written by Ollie Bradley at 01/23/2023, 07:17 AM
It's an OSRS trick for the history books. Through wit, bot scripting, and the savvy application of a pre-patch exploit, a wily Old School RuneScape player has seemingly managed to earn enough gold to net them $100,000 in real world cash. Now that's what we call "play-to-earn".
Twitter user Lyrn's money-making scheme was reportedly carried out over the space of two weeks, and managed to rack up a whopping $500 billion gp. It took advantage of a November 30th update which added a certain perk to hard combat achievements. Namely, one that gave players a 50% zeal discount when imbuing items in Soul Wars.
Un-imbuing items, however, could still net players 80% of the item's full cost, meaning that for a little while players with this achievement could infinitely profit from imbuing then un-imbuing items.
So that's what Lyrn did with the help of scripting bots that reportedly netted 2.7million zeal tokens per hour. And with one Soul Wars zeal being worth about 3,000 gp, that's just over 8 billion gp per hour.
This reportedly ended up with Lyrn netting nearly $500 billion gp before the exploit was patched in mid-December. They then told OSRS YouTuber SirPugger via Twitter that they managed to sell 400 billion in gp for IRL cash, which would equate to over $100,000, before Jagex finally caught up to them and hit them with a ban. Though with that much money in the pocket, we're sure Lyrn didn't spend too much time crying over it.
SirPugger laid out the details of the OSRS trick in the video below.
It's certainly a heist worthy of the OSRS exploit hall of fame, and one that has garnered mixed reactions from the community. Some were peeved at the impact Lyrn seemed to have on the OSRS auction house market, while others have praised them for their lucrative audacity.
Then there are those that don't believe it happened at all, and that the video was made through a private server. Either way, everybody is now waiting for Jagex to confirm or deny that this was the case.