Old School Runescape, the proudly antiquated model of RS Gold that still looks and plays like the match I snapped innumerable hours into when I really should've been studying, is obtaining a raid. Its next raid, as it occurs: The Theatre of Blood. A fantastic raid requires good rewards, so when the Theatre of Blood was declared late last year, players were anxious to find out what clearing the multi-man challenge could earn them. Jagex responded with Justicar armor, a new best-in-slot armor set (above). There was one small problem: players absolutely hated it.

Actually they hated it so much , for months, the Old School community dogpiled the armor on the 2007scape subreddit and memed it into hell and backagain. They memed onto it so tough that Jagex is now completely altering the armor's design. Virtually all of Old School Runescape's updates undergo participant polls, but this is the first time a suit of armor was forged in a passion of memes. The irony is that while gamers hated the'final' armor revealed earlier this season, they loved the prototypes shown when the raid was announced. Initially, the Justicar armor was bulkier and part of a trio of armor sets, West tells me, but as the Theatre of Blood moved from obscure idea to actual content, the armor shifted with it. Players said there was enough DPS equipment but not enough tank gear, so it had been narrowed down to only one armor collection. And if they were just going to use one set, Jagex figured they might as well make a new one based on the armor worn with the raid's huge bad.

"We believed changing it a little made sense," West says,"but players were not quite on board with the original proposal we shared on stream. And then, well, Reddit went wild." The memes came out hard and fast. Others thought the new armor didn't 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 a meme that the updated armor was by another artist, and that the artist who made the prototypes had abandoned Jagex. But something amazing occurred. Even as memes blotted out the sun, slowly but surely severe suggestions started to shine through. It started with primitive Photoshop jobs, but soon appropriate examples and fan art began to crop up. Players rallied around the idea of a bulkier, blessed armor set inspired by the Runescape god Saradomin, so that they moved back into West's prototype layouts and made some changes. Driven from the memes and motivated by elements of West's designs and Cheap OSRS Gold other players' ideas, legend_arts created a hybrid armor design so good it not merely silenced the memes, it got the attention of West himself.