In a news post on the game’s official site, mod_ayiza announced the end of the line for RuneScape Classic on behalf of the Jagex team. The full post is below but to summarize: advancements in the day-to-day technology to support the newer versions of RuneScape, combined with an increase in bots and hacks, on top of the locked community of players for Classic have made it too costly to continue to support. But to give fans as much time as possible to play, Jagex made the announcement today, well ahead of the August 6th deadline when the servers will be shut down.
“RuneScape Classic was the first version of RuneScape, released in 2001.
For many years we’ve left all of the content from the original game available to play. Whilst it’s seemingly been happily plodding along since then, it is with great sadness that we have taken the difficult decision to say goodbye to RuneScape Classic, which we will be winding down over the next 3 months.
It has been amazing to see such dedication amongst those of you who have kept playing RuneScape Classic over the last few years, some of you have even managed to reach max total! However, it’s not all fun and games.
With advancements in technology helping to further support both RuneScape and Old School RuneScape, our tools are no longer compatible with Classic. This is particularly a problem with our community safety and macro detection tools. The game is now easily abused with the use of 3rd party macro tools, and botting has become an increasing issue.
We’ve not fully supported RuneScape Classic for years, so why are we suddenly seeing it as a problem now? The truth is that bots and lack of community safety tools are serious problems, however, we also feel that we can no longer offer long term service reliability due to the growing risk of unrecoverable game breaking bugs.
The number of bugs is getting worse, and we’re gradually seeing the game breaking. It’s important to highlight that these are bugs which we can’t fix due to the unsupported nature of the game.
As such, rather than have the game break indefinitely without any warning, we wanted to give everyone the opportunity to have their last goodbyes.
The RuneScape Classic servers will be taken offline at 8:00am BST on the 6th of August 2018. After such date, it will no longer be possible to log in to the Classic game. You will, of course, be able to continue playing as normal up until that date.
Thank you for your support over the years.”
I’ve added the date to the Watch List calendar and a page will be up for RuneScape Classic soon.