Rollback

A rollback is the reversion of in-game content to an earlier state. Rollbacks within Old School 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 rollback can also be referring to a Jagex Moderator resetting a player's stats.

Rollbacks have been a point of player concern, particularly the fact that items may be duplicated if a player is able to predict a rollback.

There was a rollback on 6 February 2018. People reported cases of being rolled back at least 20 minutes. This was most likely due to a bug where players were finding themselves unable to log in for hours; these players got the Your account is already logged in message even though their accounts weren't logged in.

There have been various other instances of rollbacks occurring, such as during the celebration of Old School RuneScape's fifth birthday, when a world crashed, presumably due to Jagex Moderators spawning too many items on the ground at once. Players were, again, unable to log in, and received the Your account is already logged in message. Once the world was restarted, players found their accounts to have been rolled back to approximately 30 minutes before the world crashed.

Two months later, on 29 April 2018, world 343 crashed due to inadvertent third-party interference, which caused large numbers of legitimate players to log in to world 343 at the same time, as well as many items being dropped on the ground. Again, players could not log back in and were rolled back to approximately 30 minutes before the world crashed.

On 12 July 2018, an update introduced a glitch where stackable items would turn into 2,147,483,647 coins, the highest possible amount a stack of items can hold. The game servers were taken offline while Jagex investigated the issue to fix it, and after approximately six hours, the game was made playable again. The servers were rolled back to the time of the update, meaning players who played between the update and the reboot would lose up to 20 minutes of progress.

Some players used coins generated by the glitch to purchase bonds for membership. Jagex removed the illegitimately obtained membership from these accounts and players who abused this bug were temporarily banned.

On 28 February 2019, an update accidentally added a twisted bow spawn by the Farming Guild. Although initially Jagex considered tracking down the bows spawned and removing them, as well as other items bought with them, the game was taken down approximately two hours after the update. The servers were rolled back to the time of the update, and the game was made online after two hours of downtime.

As with the coin pouch glitch, players who abused the glitch by purchasing bonds with wealth from the illegitimately obtained twisted bows had action taken against their account.

On 4 June 2020, with the release of Sins of the Father, a problem occurred involving players' save states that involved items in players' equipped items and items in their inventory disappearing and being replaced by other items. This resulted in a rollback of the game servers.^[1][2]

On 19 January 2022, with the release of Shattered Relics League, a save state glitch was found upon the creation of more Leagues worlds, leading to some players having their main profile's levels transferred to their Leagues profile. On top of this, gamemodes were switched around in the main game. Main profiles are affected by this rollback.

On 23 March 2022 with the release of Guardians of the Rift, there were issues when dropping untradeable items. Regardless of where they were dropped, they instantly appeared for other players, enabling them to pick them up. Jagex turned the game offline about 20 minutes after the update to perform a rollback.^[3][4]

On 10 December 2022 Jagex announced a rollback for an unknown reason. The worlds had gone down prior to the rollback.^[5]

On 1 October 2024 at 07:05 UTC, an emergency server maintenance was announced to begin at 07:20 UTC due to excessive duplication of potions through the use of the newly released potion storage. During the 15-minute timer before the downtime, all methods of item trades were locked down, meaning that all items were untradeable, shops could not be accessed, and the Grand Exchange was unusable, among other measures. Due to the item restrictions however, many players would permanently lose their untradeable items such as Fighter torso and Fire cape when playing PvP minigames such as Bounty Hunter. Due to the loss of untradeable items, a rollback was issued 5 minutes before the shutdown timer at 07:20 UTC.

• Farming crops that have not fully grown continue to grow as normal during a rollback, due to the growth time working off a real world clock. This is not the case however if the seeds were planted during the time that was rolled back, as the game would have no memory of the seeds being planted.^[6]