Server


 * Not to be confused with Servant.



The Servers are the computers that host RuneScape. Servers are maintained by Jagex and by contractors retained by Jagex. They are distributed across the real world. There are several types of servers used in RuneScape.


 * The first server players will meet is the hosting server, which runs the main RuneScape website. It is unknown how many individual computers manage the site and as to whether the Grand Exchange Database, RuneScape Forums and Hiscores are all on this server.
 * After selecting the 'Click Here to Play' button on the home page, the game first does a loading process which includes connecting to the Download server.
 * The optimal World server for the player is selected upon loading the game, although players may select another server to connect to if they wish. Each world allows 2000 players to be connected at once. There are currently 139 worlds (three are German-speaking, two are French-speaking, four are Portuguese-speaking and one is Quick Chat only), but more are routinely added.
 * The player is connected to the Login server when the loading process is completed and a world server is selected.
 * After logging in, the Friends list and Ignore list are loaded after connecting to the Friends server.
 * The RuneScape Forums have their own servers, which are accessible even when the game servers are down.

List of servers
This is the list of servers as of 10 May 2012, including Jagex-defined world themes, P2P/F2P status and whether or not lootshare is enabled on that world. It is recommended that players connect to the server closest to them, or that have a ping number of less than 100, as they will experience more reliable connections and less lag. However, this is not mandatory.

* The German servers are located in Finland, Sweden and the Netherlands.

* The Brazilian servers are located in United States.

On 2nd November 2011: 4 new Europe Free Servers were added and several worlds were removed or re-numbered.

Isolation of worlds
Each world server known by the short name world is fairly isolated. A player may be logged in to at most one world server at any given time. A delay of 20 to 25 seconds is in place between logging out of one and logging into another world.

For the most part, events that occur in one world will not affect any other RuneScape world. For example, character/item respawns and ore regeneration are all managed individually for each server. Additionally, players (along with chat messages) contained in one world will not be visible to players in another world. The only exceptions to this is the Grand Exchange which trades with players on all worlds, and the "Strange Power" which occurred on the 23rd of January 2010.

World switching
Prior to the move to infinitely stocked shops, player would often change worlds rapidly to buy from one store many different times. However, the shop improvement update gave most stores infinite stock, and later the personalised shop updates returned infinite stocks, but made stocks for a particular player independent of world. Therefore switching worlds is no longer advantageous when buying from stores. However players still switch worlds often in order to find more favourable conditions (e.g. more populated) for Activities, player killing or trading. This technique is known as world switching or world hopping.

Players may switch to less populated worlds for fewer players, so they can have more monsters, logs, ores (etc.) for themselves, however, there is a slower respawn time for many objects on less populated worlds - this includes both rocks and trees.

Persistence of character state
When a user logs off of a world, all settings particular to that character are saved to the player's account profile in a global database. Therefore, when logging into a different world, the character's skills, inventory, etc. will be restored to the same state, regardless of which server the character last logged onto. The only exception is that if a player goes from a members-only world into a free world, his/her statistics will be restored to the normal level.

Themed worlds
After the Themed world update on 13 August 2007, a new column on the far right of the world select screen was added by Jagex. This column highlights worlds associated with certain activities and servers Jagex have designated as the worlds that should be used for certain activities (due to certain servers not being able to cope with high levels of activity).

This makes it easier to find people who wish to do the same thing, like Trouble Brewing or Castle Wars.

These worlds are recommended by Jagex as the best place to perform these activities. However, they are only recommendations; players may still use any world they want to perform these activities, with the exception of LootShare, which is only available on the appropriate themed worlds.

All themed worlds display the flag instead of the country flag in the world select menu.

Trade
Worlds where players gather in the large cities (such as, Falador, Varrock or Seers Village) to trade items.

Rune running
Worlds where players can run runes for money or craft runes to raise their Runecrafting skill.

High Risk Wilderness
Worlds where players can kill each other in the Wilderness where the Protect item prayer and curse are disabled.

Role-playing
Only one world is officially designated for role-playing - world 42, though other unofficial worlds do harbour active role playing. It was intended by Jagex that players will get together with either friends or others they meet on the role-playing forums and then act out their role-plays (commonly called igrp or In-Game Role-Plays) as if they were in another setting (including new names for places/characters/items and a group of people going from one place to another).

Group questing
These worlds are where players gather together and do quests. They are popular for players looking for a partner for either Shield of Arrav or Heroes Quest.

Party room
The 1 February 2011 update deleted Falador Party Room worlds, and they can now be accessed on any world.

Skill Total
On these worlds, players with a total level of 1000/1500 or over can log on to these worlds, free-play and members respectively. Besides the total level requirement, there are no further limitations. Both of these were originally limited to players with a total level of at least 1000, but the March 2010 update increased the requirement. Skill Total (1000) and (1500) worlds are on some occasions called "anti-noob" worlds.

Player defined world themes
Certain worlds have acquired themes defined by the player-base designated for particular activities. This is usually to socialise with similar players who share interests or to participate in events which require many people, such as Activities or parties. These worlds are:

Technical issues
Sometimes a technical issue will occur which may cause every game world to crash and log out players in the middle of the game; it may or may not also affect the RuneScape Forums. Players may not be able to log back in if the login server is also affected. The problem is usually resolved in a short time. A server rollback may or may not occur which will reset players back to status before the crash occurred. (This rollback is different from an edit rollback or revert.)

Occasionally only a single world will crash/experience a glitch and depending on the problem, the other worlds may be purposefully taken offline, or not. Information about this will appear in the forums Technical Support section. Other fan sites may also have information if the forums are down.

Recent events



 * In mid-April 2008, Jagex moved all eight servers from Eastern Canada to the United States.
 * On 23 April 2008, World 36 had a glitch where non-members were allowed to enter the world, but could only access free-to-play actions.
 * On Friday, 13 June 2008, all of the servers experienced downtime due to problems with one of the game's internet service providers, Telstra.
 * On 10 August 2008 all of the servers crashed multiple times during the day. The crashes lasted a few minutes but went down again soon after. The servers then completely went offline for the rest of that day.
 * On 15 October 2008, World 150 was added as the sixth German world with the introduction of PvP worlds.
 * On Thursday, 23 October 2008, an error with the login servers showed up. At 19.15 GMT all servers were down. The RuneScape Forums went offline as well.
 * With the release of the 150th quest a server blackout happened. The blackout lasted for about 50 minutes.
 * On 10 December 2008, World 150 moved from a German world to a French world.
 * On 2 July 2009, all the Australian and New Zealand servers went down. Players were logged out and when attempting to log back in, they were given the message that "Their account has not logged out from their last session"
 * On 16 July 2009, multiple servers were offline for a large amount of time. Jagex Mod Gibson stated, "We have pinpointed the world crashes to a problem with one of our servers in America."
 * On 16 July 2009, 41 worlds went offline. Some of the worlds affected were:1, 2, 4, 5, 7-9, 13-14, 17, 19, 21-22, 26-32, 37, 42, 47-48, 56, 62, 64, 70, 72, 100, 113. Jagex had the issue under control, although a few worlds remained offline for a while.
 * On 9 November 2009, various "Skill" worlds were released: they required a Skill total exceeding or reaching 1000 for free players and 1500 for members.
 * On 18 February 2010 some worlds went offline.
 * On 3 March 2010, accompanying the log in interface update, all flags marking countries turned to the Flag of the United States.
 * On 3 March 2010, world 114 was changed from being a skill total 1000 world to a skill total 1500 world, causing some upset for those newly excluded.
 * On 14 April 2010, all of the worlds, including RuneScape Classic, were down.
 * On 14 July 2010, world 31 went offline.
 * On 22 July 2010, nobody was able to join a clan chat, browse the forums, and add people to their friend's list or ignore list. Later on, the forums were back online and a few worlds were fixed while the rest of them still had no access to clan chat, the friend's list, and the ignore list.
 * On or before 26 August 2010, Worlds 170 and 171 are either removed or no longer visible.
 * On 9 October 2010, few Canadian servers went offline.
 * On 26 October 2010, many people experienced server disconnection issues. Some servers which may have been affected were: 21, 24, 32, 36, 39, 44, 46, 52, 54, 56, 58 (unconfirmed), 60, 64, 71, 77, 79, 82, 83, 84, 88, 89, 103, 114, 119, 124, 131, 137, 143, 148, 151, 157, 166
 * At the same time, half of the Australian worlds (107, 109, 110, 111) were either removed or became no longer visible. These worlds are still inaccessible as of 28 September.
 * On 1 February 2011, all of the player-vs-player, bounty hunter and bounty hunter (+1) worlds were changed to normal worlds.
 * On 9 February 2011, worlds 21, 32, 40 and 85 were changed from free-to-play to members worlds
 * On 25 February 2011 world 172 a P2P world was added to Runescape
 * On 15 May 2011, world 143 went offline for a few hours.
 * On 9 August 2011, all Runescape servers were forcibly shut down due to memory issues. This may be related to the new Grand Exchange.
 * On 29 August 2011, worlds 6, 9, 18, 22, 27, 29, 31, 33, 39, 42, 44, 45, 46, 48, 52, 58, 59, 60, 61, 64, 66, 70, 76, 77, 78, 79, 89, 91, 97, 98, 99, 100, 103, 104, 114, 115, 116, 129, 130, 131, 132, 141, 143, 145, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 164 went offline. The reason behind this is uncertain.

Trivia

 * The second world was added on 9 May 2001.
 * Before the 22 new worlds update, World 156 had not existed. However, players were once able to access this world using easy-to-decipher URLs. It was said that the world was a test server for JaGeX to test their updates in-game, but this has not been confirmed.
 * All new players spawn in Explorer Jack's hut in World 34.
 * Because they are other-language servers, worlds 63, 95, 122, 125, 126, 127, 128, 139, 140, 146, 147, 150 and 168 do not exist on the English server list. (as of 21:11, 9 May 2010 (UTC))
 * While some worlds will appear as "FULL" in the Lobby menu, a player can still access these worlds by adding them as a favourite world (by clicking the heart shape beside the world number) and then clicking it in their favourites list. This is particularly useful when trying to get on a server with quick respawn times. It is unconfirmed whether this is a glitch or not.
 * That was later fixed when the queue system was added in 2011. Players that attempt to join a full world will now be placed in a queue which you can see your place in in the lower left-hand corner of your screen. You are able to talk in your clan chat or private message from the lobby while in a queue. Once you reach the place of 1 you will be logged into that world.
 * It is noted that most riots take place in World 66.
 * Some years ago, you could see where the server was located, which was useful to find out or you would have a good connection with it. This was before the Ping was added to the list (the RuneScape servers previously blocked ping requests).
 * Jagex has stated that servers for the Caribbean region will be added in 2011 or 2012. These are set to be world 171 for Members which will be located in the island of Trinidad, and World 170 for Free to play, which will be located in the Dominican Republic.