Developer Jagex has made radical changes to its official stance on third-party clients for Old School RuneScape. Moving forward, most third-party clients for OSRS will be banned. This means that players playing on these clients will be forced to transition to a legal client or have their accounts suspended. Players have until June 24 to transition.
Although this ban will affect a lot of clients, the most popular clients will remain valid. After June 24, four clients will still be considered legal with players being able to use them freely. These are the official Jagex client, RuneLite, HDOS, and OSBuddy. The aforementioned clients are the ones the majority of Old School RuneScape players use.
In the revealing blog post, Jagex details why it has chosen to ban most OSRS third-party clients. The post reads: “over time some client add-ons have become too intrusive, affecting the gameplay in unacceptable ways and offering increasingly over-powered benefits.” The developer also explains that some of these clients allow players to “cheat their way through content,” and “provide easy access to bot scripts.”
Coming to RuneLite
The inclusion of RuneLite as a legitimate client is not surprising, as the official Jagex Launcher already had an option to play OSRS via RuneLite. The post also reveals that Jagex is in discussions with OSBuddy to have that added too. HDOS is a more surprising inclusion, but it does make sense. The client converts OSRS’ graphics to closer represent that of the 2009 version of RuneScape. It offers a harmless visual alternative for players who prefer that look to the game’s vanilla visuals.
Some players prefer using the now-banned third-party clients for OSRS due to the niche plug-ins they provide. For various reasons, a lot of these plug-ins were banned on RuneLite, but they will now be allowed. An example is the removal of death animations which were banned under Jagex’s old third-party client guidelines.
