Rollback

A Rollback is the reversion of in-game content to an earlier state. Rollbacks within RuneScape, are used under very strict and rare circumstances. They are generally used to eradicate a problem that cannot be corrected by conventional methods. A different punishment for using macro/botting software is a rollback for the skill botted to level 1.

Cases of Rollbacks
15 July 2007- Server Breakdown

On this day, every player was unable to log into RuneScape, and every player in every world still in the game were forced out of the game without warning, regardless of any activity. Many thousands of players were online at this time. All accounts which were online at the time were rollbacked until the last time they logged in. Many people had claimed to lose expensive PvP loot such as Dragonfire shields and Abyssal whips.

14 April 2010 - The Daemonheim Nature Rune Bug

A bug while Runecrafting within Daemonheim, granted 2,000 experience per Nature Rune crafted, and as Rune Essence within Daemonheim is stacked, this led to many players reaching level 99 Runecrafting within half an hour of the glitch being discovered. This forced Jagex to shut RuneScape down for approximately 4 hours during which time, they made a rollback of player data before the glitch. This led to huge rants on the Forums, players spamming the official sticky article reaching over 3 - 4 pages per second. Forum Moderators stated people were being banned for this, and due to the sheer volume of the spammers, many accounts were likely to have been punished for this. There was no update timer for this rollback, everyone was just forced out of the game without warning.

30 June 2010 - Server Breakdown

Similar to what happened in 2007, many players were not able to log in for more than an hour because of a server breakdown. Anyone who tried to log on received the message "Your account has not been logged out from its previous session." Those who were on (few players) when this happened were automatically logged out and were rolledback.

Effects of rollbacks
In the event of a rollback, any experience gained within that that time is lost, as well as monster drops, or even clue scroll rewards. If you received a clue scroll before the rollback period, you will still have that clue, but you will most likely receive a different reward than before. About 10 minutes before the rollback, any player logged in will receive a message telling them there will be a system update, along with a timer next to it. At the end of that timer, the player will be forced out of the game, regardless of location or activity.