In a series of events that feels 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 hijacked by hackers. GamesRadar (opens in a new tab) reports that Diddeboy – a notorious and not particularly beloved figure in the Runescape community – woke up recently to find that their maximum “split” account had been stolen. Even worse, whoever stole it had rubbed salt in the wound, renaming the character from Diddeboy1 to “Same Password Everywhere”.
This is serious and I need help, no idea how to do and not familiar with this. Used about 20,000 hours on this accumulator and is my only accumulator. Would love to have it back, but maybe lock it?😥March 12, 2023
If you’re not up to speed on your Runescape language, there’s a separator account (opens in a new tab) is essentially a sort of quasi-pacifist race: a self-imposed challenge that sees players try to maximize their skill levels while remaining at combat level 3, the lowest possible for players in the game. Diddeboy says they have spent 20,000 hours doing just that, dedicating 8000 hours (opens in a new tab) to max the game’s slayer skillset alone (how do you max a skillset called ‘slayer’ without increasing your battle rank? Cleaning of lamps (opens in a new tab)of course).
But most painful of all? Runescape players on Reddit (opens in a new tab) who checked out the current state of Diddeboy’s account, note that his match stats seem to be creeping up steeply. It looks like the hacker has ended a streak that has taken over two actual years of Diddeboy’s life.
RIP Rank 1 Distinguishes from r/2007scape
It’s not clear if the hack was an attack of opportunity or something more targeted, but Diddeboy has a less-than-good reputation in the Runescape community which may have made an attack more likely.
As a top ranked skill, they were notorious among players for criticizing changes to the game as “devaluing (opens in a new tab)” all the time they had spent cleaning lamps, while others recall times Diddeboy appeared to “talk” the achievements (opens in a new tab) by other players on separate accounts. Some people have found more than a little schadenfreude in Diddeboy’s current misfortune.
“The cub was a bit insufferable in terms of his performance,” said a Reddit user named NotTheBeeze (opens in a new tab)“but I wouldn’t wish that kind of pain on my worst enemy”.
At one point, the hacker also appeared to gain access to Diddeboy’s Twitter account (opens in a new tab), presumably because, well, they had the same password everywhere, but it looks like Twitter may have answered their prayers 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 yet.
There has been no word from Jagex about showing mercy and rolling his account back to a pre-hack combat level. If Jagex feels bad though, it should probably mandate that Diddeboy get a Bitwarden account first.
