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.
Cases of Rollbacks[]
There was a rollback on 6 February 2016. 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 43 crashed due to inadvertent third-party interference, which caused large numbers of legitimate players to log in to world 43 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.
World 347 glitch[]
On 24 April 2018, Jagex were performing scheduled maintenance on USA worlds, which involved the permanent Deadman Mode world, world 345, being temporarily transferred to world 347. Deadman Mode mechanics were inadvertently applied to world 347 early, and players were not forced to log out before the mechanics took effect. Because of this, for less than two minutes, any PvP deaths would result in the dying player losing experience and the 10 most valuable stacks of items in their bank.
Jagex identified three players who died during this period, two of which Jagex suspected of being bots. In an extremely rare instance of Jagex reimbursing players for lost items, Jagex added 15 old school bonds to the affected legitimate player's bond pouch, as well as giving the affected player 12 months of membership. Jagex also offered to restore the affected player's lost experience.
Coin pouch glitch[]
On 12 July 2018, an update introduced a glitch where stackable items would turn into 2,147,482,647 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 would be temporarily banned.