Old School RuneScape

Old School RuneScape is Jagex's official term for a previous version of the Runescape game that was introduced from a backup of the Runescape source code as it had been on 10 August 2007.

This version of the game was announced in a news post on 13 February 2013, which was followed by the opening of a poll to determine community interest on 15 February 2013. The poll, which ended 1 March 2013, decided, among other things, whether an additional membership fee would be charged for access to the game.

The poll ended at 00:00 UTC on Friday 1 March 2013. The final tally of votes was 449,351. Though 500,000 votes are needed to allow no additional membership fee, Jagex stated that the first six months of Old School RuneScape will not have any additional charge. Jagex will review this again in September; if the community is still growing and active by then, then it will remain free.

Despite it having originally been stated that servers would take one to two months to be opened following a successful poll, on 22 February 2013 as part of an Early Access scheme Jagex opened over 50 Old School RuneScape servers and gave a month of free Old School RuneScape membership credit to it to all of those who had voted in the poll. The game quickly saw player counts equalling those of the main version of the game, which has since been labeled "eoc scape" by the community in order to distinguish it.

Old School RuneScape works similarly to RuneScape Classic in that it can be played with the same account that one plays the main version of the game; yet stats, items and quests are separate and non-transferable. All players regardless of achievements in other versions of the game begin Old School RuneScape on tutorial island with a blank character. As a result, an economy and money supply has had to emerge from nothing since release.

Levels
Old School RuneScape will be in four different levels, each with increasing vote requirements. The current amount of votes can be seen on the official vote page. Regardless of the outcome, any voter will get a free month of Old School RuneScape game time. Although the vote count only reached 449,351 and not 500,000, Jagex decided not to charge the additional fee of five USD for the first six months (excluding the free month).

Yes Level 1
The first level requires 50,000 votes, and is the absolute minimum amount of votes required to guarantee the Old School RuneScape release.
 * $15 additional membership fee
 * No game updates or bug fixes
 * Critical maintenance only

Yes Level 2
The second level requires 250,000 votes.
 * $5 additional membership fee
 * No major updates, only critical bug fixes
 * Small development team
 * Possibility of modern-day anti-bot technology over time, if needed

No Level 3
The third level requires 500,000 votes.
 * Free with current membership
 * Some content updates, anti-bot technology added if necessary
 * Maintenance will be done on a regular basis

No Level 4
The fourth level requires 750,000 votes.
 * No additional membership fee. Free portion of the game will be open for everyone.
 * Content updates will be decided upon by regular polls.
 * Modern anti-bot technology added if necessary
 * Large development team for continuous maintenance

Features that will be introduced
The following table shows the features that will be introduced in to OSRS. Jagex allowed other features from the 500,000 vote mark to be introduced in the game.


 * *** Only for six months. Jagex will review this again in September and if the server is still active and growing then it will remain free.

Trivia

 * Uncleaned herbs are grimy in Old School RuneScape. However, on the 10th of August 2007, uncleaned herbs were still unidentified. This was intentionally done by Jagex to prevent players from scamming. Unidentified herbs were reinstated on the 25 February 2013.
 * On Day 1, the Old School Servers hit 50k online players after being up for only 4 hours. During peak times, player count has been seen to rise up to 62,907. However, during offpeak, the count has dwindled to as low as 17,913. Both the current record high & low values happened on the 10th of March.
 * Jagex stated that 8,229,459 unique users had logged into the game in the 2 week period before the vote was announced. Although there's only 1.8 million listed on the high scores & many of them are trialers that have gained little or no exp. It also means over 6 million were F2P & not eligible to vote unless they activated memberships.