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Since the Deadman Finals on Saturday evening we've been investigating what caused the issues we faced during the tournament. It was only once we had a solid understanding of the events that we could share any information. In this newspost we'll share information about the issues we encountered on Saturday.

Firstly, apologies are due. Players who have invested considerable time and effort saw their progress undone in seconds, and it is not good enough.

We returned to the office today, and we've spent time identifying the exact issues, and what caused them. You can click the tags below for insight into our findings:

Click here to read the issues log.

8:38pm GMT. We first encountered an issue when the surviving players from the Falador final area were teleported to the 1v1 Arena. Once a player is teleported to the 1v1 Arena, the rest of the world is filled with dangerous fog for that player. This is to ensure they are instantly killed if they are somewhere they should not be. To enable this, the 1v1 arenas are uniquely marked so that the game knows where fog should be. However, of the 128 arenas that players were teleported into, the majority were not uniquely marked as they should have been. Because of this, the game assumed that the players in those arenas were somewhere they shouldn't be and instantly killed them.

During the Permadeath stage, a player who dies is teleported to a jail cell in Falador and then logged out. They are unable to log back in from this point, as during the Permadeath stage, we do not let dead players back in under any circumstances. During the teleports to the 1v1 arenas, 93 players were killed.

The Permadeath stage has a pause feature, which is designed to be used if issues are encountered during the tournament. This pause can be manually activated, but it will also be automatically triggered by the game if more than 50 people are logged off at once. Because of the deaths in the 1v1 Arena, and the subsequent log outs, the tournament was automatically paused at this point.

Of the players killed, 54 were logged out. However, before the remaining players (39) could be logged out, the tournament was automatically paused, leaving these players in the Falador jail.



9:30pm GMT. We were not able to return players who were logged out to play, but we made the decision to try to afford the players left in the Falador jail an opportunity at playing competitively by resupplying them with stats and items. These players were then teleported to the 1v1 Arena to be joined by the players from the Annakarl final area.

Play was resumed in the Annakarl final area shortly after. We expected the players would be teleported right away, due to the remaining player count being below 256. However, at the time we resumed there were roughly 170 players remaining in the area, meaning that more players needed to die to trigger the teleport.



10:13pm GMT. Once the survivors from Annakarl rejoined the Falador survivors, we encountered another issue. Some of the areas contained three players. The cause is unknown, but we believe it is related to the manual teleporting of the Falador jail players. To tackle this we manually teleported players into different arenas.



11:06pm GMT. The 1v1 stages began. No issues were encountered until the Semi-Finals.



12:28am GMT. During the first semi-final, an issue was encountered which caused one of the players to be incorrectly 'marked' as the winner, and was teleported to the Final prior to the fight ending. This was caused by the game thinking the arena was smaller than it actually was. The player 'marked' as the loser ran to the outer edge of the arena, and were consequently incorrectly considered to have left the fight, 'marking' the opponent as the winner. We restocked both players and restarted.



1:15am GMT. The tournament ended with no further issues.


The issues we've detailed would have been identified if we conducted a large-scale beta playtest of the Permadeath stage in the days prior, just as we have done for the past few events. We made the wrong decision when we opted not to conduct a beta.

We've spent today identifying possible resolutions, and now we need to take time to see what is most viable over the next few days. The decision we make has to be the right one, and so we need more time to choose the outcome that works best for you.

We're committed to doing what's right by you. It's a priority of ours, and as soon as we have more information to share, we'll share it.

The Old School Team





( Source: RuneScape.com )