Old School Runescape, the antiquated model of Runescape that still looks and plays like the game I sank countless hours into when I actually should have been studying, is getting a raid. A good raid needs good rewards, so when the Theatre of RS Gold Blood was declared late last year, players were anxious to find out what clearing the multi-man challenge would make them. Jagex reacted with Justicar armor, a new best-in-slot armor place (above). There was one small problem: players absolutely hated it.

Actually , they hated it so much that, for months, the Old School community dogpiled the horn on the 2007scape subreddit and memed it to hell and backagain. They memed on it so tough that Jagex is currently totally changing the armor's design. Almost all of Old School Runescape's upgrades undergo player polls, but that is the first time that the suit of armor was forged in a fire of memes. The irony is that while gamers hated the'final' armor revealed earlier this season, they adored the prototypes shown while the raid was declared. Originally, the Justicar armor was bulkier and part of a trio of new armor sets, West informs me, but as the Theatre of Blood went from obscure concept to real content, the armor changed with it. Participants said there was sufficient DPS equipment but not enough tank equipment, so it had been narrowed down to only one armor set. And if they were only going to use a single set, Jagex figured they might as well make a new one based on the armor worn with the raid's big bad.

"We thought changing it up a little made sense," West says,"but players weren't quite on board with the original proposal we shared on stream. The memes came out hard and fast. Some players said it was too similar to existing armor, including armor out of Runescape 3, the newer, mainline version of Runescape. Others thought the new armor did not look tanky enough and liberally provided a few alternatives, with some calling for a more drastic redesign.

It got so bad that some players started to seriously believe that a meme the upgraded armor was by a different artist, and that the artist who left the prototypes had left Jagex. But then something amazing happened. Even as memes blotted out the sun, gradually but certainly severe suggestions began to shine through. It started with crude Photoshop jobs, but shortly proper examples and fan art started to crop up. Players rallied around the idea of a milder, blessed armor set motivated by the Runescape god Saradomin, so that they moved back to West's prototype designs and made some adjustments.

And then, a hero emerged: legend_arts, a talented and famous Runescape fan artist. Driven by the memes and inspired by elements of OSRS Gold For Sale West's designs and other players' ideas, legend_arts created a hybrid armor design so great it not merely silenced the memes, it captured the attention of West himself.