Haha, Runescape players, haha!

Inevitably, this happens. In all MMORPG's, even in the days of Ultima Online, there were always major bugs.

The fact that these bugs occurred on MMORPG's however meant that the effects were widespread, and exploited to a large degree.
Take for example the disaster last year in World of Warcraft. A large new update featuring a new instanced dungeon had a boss that used a spell that diseased players. Once diseased, they would die very shortly (due to the massive health degeneration as one of the properties of the spell).
However, some players escaped from the dungeon (don't ask me how, I'm not WoW expert... yet) and into a town (probably through a summoning spell I guess). I forgot to mention... the disease was contagious. Not only did players in the towns the originally-infected escaped to get affected, but so did the NPC characters. The NPC's were able to hold off the plague, as they could self-heal fast enough not to die. The side-effect was that this meant they permanently carried the disease, never being allowed to die and be rid of it. Not only were the hapless players diseased and killed by it, but they were diseased by it again. Once they died, they felt relieved to be rid of the disaster and thought it only short lived, but the plague had spread to many towns throughout Azeroth and Kalimdor, and thus there was widespread disaster. Thousands of players became infected.
Blizzard attempted to quarantine the infected in certain areas, however some managed to wiggle free and keep playing in the wide world, continuing to infect people.
This caused much chaos, but eventually Blizzard released a patch, and much laughter was shared afterwards.

Then there was Guild Wars' big screw up. Albeit less impressive when compared to the above, for some reason there was a trader-glitch, and usually expensive and rare runes became extremely cheap. Players were buying them by the bucket load. Arenanet rolled back the servers though, so nobody kept their profit.

And now Runescape has been affected by a huge glitch. With the introduction of Player Owned Houses in their game, a bug had been found by a couple of players, and they began to exploit it. Through this glitch, they could PK people outside the designated player-killable area ("The Wilderness"). They boxed a few hundred players into areas by keeping doors shut, and slaughtered them. They were unable to fight back (because they hadn't experienced the same glitch).
Many players lost many expensive items and sets of armour. The player responsible for exploiting it has been banned from the game, and Jagex has released an official statement of their apology (also stating they couldn't rollback the servers due to the game's structure).

So haha Runescape players. I did tell you that Player Owned Houses sucked, I just never anticipated they'd bring on such a thing.

Out.