In a series of events that feel like some kind of marketing stunt by Big Password Manager, an Old School Runescape player with over 20,000 hours on a single character has had it snatched away by hackers. GamesRadar reports that Diddeboy—a notorious and not especially beloved figure in the Runescape community—awoke recently to find that their maxed-out “skiller” account had been stolen. Worse, whoever stole it had rubbed salt in the wound, renaming the character from Diddeboy1 to “Same Password Everywhere”.
If you’re not up on your Runescape lingo, a skiller account is essentially a kind of quasi-pacifist run: a self-imposed challenge that sees players try to max out their skill levels while remaining at combat level 3, the lowest possible for players in the game. Diddeboy says they’ve spent 20K hours doing just that, dedicating 8000 hours to maxing the game’s slayer skillset alone (how do you max a skillset named ‘slayer’ without upping your combat rank? Cleaning lamps, of course).
But most painful of all? Runescape players on Reddit who checked out the current state of Diddeboy’s account note that its combat stats seem to be creeping precipitously upwards. It looks like the hacker has ended a streak that’s taken up over two actual years’ of Diddeboy’s life.
RIP Rank 1 Skiller from r/2007scape
It’s not clear whether the hack was an attack of opportunity or something more targeted, but Diddeboy has a less-than-great reputation in the Runescape community that may have made an attack more likely.
As a top-ranked skiller, they were notorious among players for criticising changes to game that “devalued” all the time they had spent cleaning lamps, while others recall times that Diddeboy popped up to “shit talk” the achievements of other players on skiller accounts. Some people have found more than a little schadenfreude in Diddeboy’s current misfortune.
“The dude was a bit insufferable about his accomplishment,” said a Reddit user named NotTheBeeze, “but I wouldn’t wish that kind of pain on my worst enemy”.
At some point, the hacker also seemed to gain access to Diddeboy’s Twitter account, presumably because, well, they had the same password everywhere, but it looks like Twitter might have responded to their pleas faster than Runescape developer Jagex. The Twitter account is now silent, with the hacker’s tweets deleted, but it doesn’t look like Diddeboy has regained access to Runescape just yet.
There’s been no word from Jagex about showing mercy and rolling back his account to a pre-hack combat level. If Jagex does take pity, though, it should probably mandate that Diddeboy get a Bitwarden account first.