This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/PowerToTheSoviets on 2024-01-30 07:00:01.
What is Old School RuneScape?
Old School RuneScape is a retro MMORPG launched in 2013. Based on a 2007 backup of RuneScape, it's grown since its initial launch almost 11 years ago into one of the most successful MMOs on the market. Lauded for its immersive storylines, harsh yet rewarding progression system, and simplified feel compared to modern MMOs, it maintains a sizable following and reached an all-time record of over 125,000 concurrent players late last year.
Over the years, there has been endless drama in the community, to the point where we make calendars. I could probably write at least 50 short-to-medium length /r/HobbyDrama posts about all of our various controversies over the years. While the one I'll be talking about today is not the biggest drama in our game's history - that likely goes to 117HD - it was arguably the most disturbing one.
Politics and Rainbows
Historically, the Old School RuneScape playerbase has a had reputation for being politically right-wing. Trump supporters were/are very common throughout the game, and the themed world for the Wintertodt minigame is notorious for the toxic rhetoric in the public chat. For the most part, this didn't cause any notable issues with the devs, as a majority of the playerbase is American and Jagex (the owners of OSRS) are based in the UK. That all changed on 5 June 2017.
That day, OSRS developer Mod Wolf announced that a "small holiday event" would be coming to Old School RuneScape to commemorate Pride Month.
The response was...not favorable. Two of the most upvoted threads on r-2007scape from this period were "OSRS Should NOT have a pride event - from a mildy gay person" (which led to some amusement upon OP revealing their definition of "mildly gay") and "Yes, Gay Pride Is Political". Some people tried to emphasize that they were not being homophobic, but instead did not want "politics" in OSRS. Others objected to it not being polled - in Old School RuneScape, updates must be approved by 70% of the players (75% at the time) to be implemented in the game - but people quickly pointed out that holiday events are never polled because they're temporary content that gets removed after a few weeks.
The Protests
Things began to shift, however, as the event drew closer and protests began to pop up in-game. Autumn Elegy, a well-known and somewhat controversial player at the time, stated that he felt most of the objections to the protests were thinly-veiled homophobia, a sentiment echoed by many on the subreddit when his tweet was shared there.
The protests themselves were what made it clear to many people that anti-LGBT hate was at the core of most of the objections to the event. Many people wore desert robes at the protest (as an illusion to Muslim views on LGBT people), and people who wore the item rewarded for completing the event (a rainbow scarf) were targets of harassment.
And of course, all of this drama unfortunately put OSRS on the map. Many articles were written about this event in mainstream media:
Jagex, for the most part, ignored these protests. The Pride Event went on as planned, and while some people who were particularly nasty ended up getting muted or banned, there was little (if any) official response to how it was received. Many people pointed out that the response was highly disproportionate to the actual event, which was fairly simple, short, and took up very little space in the game world. But there would not be another Pride event for quite some time.
Things largely stayed this way until 2022, though in January 2020 former employee Mat K (one of the leads of OSRS until his departure) gave an interview with Shauny (another ex-employee) where he candidly discussed his thoughts on the 2017 Pride Event. He described the reaction to it as "horrific" and made no attempt to hide his disgust with the protesters' actions. He also noted that many of the people who protested were not regular OSRS users, stating that a thorough investigation afterwards concluded the majority of protestors were from outside hate groups. This interview also revealed that Wolf, the Pride Event developer, had his mental health severely damaged by the collective hate and fury that came from both the protestors and the anti-LGBT portions of the Internet as a whole. In 2022, Wolf stated "My only regret is that we didn't continue it yearly - caving into pressure, fear and hate".
Pride Returns
Then, in 2022, Pride returned. There was no announcement beforehand, and many players were surprised and expected a similar protest. Indeed, the news post announcing the event, when sorted by controversial, yields mostly positive comments.
What was different this time, however, was Jagex's response to the protestors, which could be accurately summarized as "go fuck yourselves."
r-2007scape was put on lockdown, and comments/posts protesting the event were swiftly removed. Players who protested the event with anti-LGBT rhetoric were banned, sometimes permanently. The area surrounding the event had its game mechanics altered to prevent common protest actions (starting fires, placing cannons down, etc). And the official in-game Pride march was heavily monitored to prevent disruption.
For the most part, things went well this time. There was no big media controversy, and the Pride march was well-attended by many enthusiastic players (including some, like myself, who are not LGBT but nonetheless appreciated an opportunity to rectify the past). There was an attempt to protest along the march route when players added objects like knives, ropes, and bones to the party chest in Falador, but that was about as bad as it got. And in a livestream discussing the event, Jagex made it clear that any protests only made them more determined to do it*.
As a way to acknowledge the events of the past, an NPC in the event was named in Mod Wolf's honor:
Another pride event happened last year, and it's now been added to the roster of annual holiday events. Some people still get annoyed, but Jagex has made it clear where they stand and what the consequences of disrupting an event are. All-in-all, that's a fairly good outcome in my opinion.
*I remember this livestream vividly, but for the life of me I couldn't find the transcript or the broadcast. If anyone can, I'll add it to the post.