Jagex’s Senior Product Manager, Matthew Kemp, told Motherboard that the event ties in with the company’s values and “is very simple and straightforward” in that “players have to collect pieces of a rainbow that’s scattered around the world, and they put them together and create a rainbow-colored scarf.”
In fact, some players are plotting to riot (their word) in-game while the event is live, not against the LGBTQ community (they say) but “in support of keeping this game free of any agenda.” Just imagine really bad stuff, then crank it up to 11. Objections range from reasonable (the event wasn’t put to a community poll in accordance with the server’s guidelines) to tedious (no politics in my games! think of the children!) to overt homophobic screeds that I won’t reproduce or dignify here. Motherboard reports that following the announcement by a Jagex employee that a small gay pride quest will be implemented in the game, Old School RuneScape players have flocked to Twitter and Reddit to complain (the latter with over 6000 upvotes, though the original poster has since updated to note he no longer wants the event removed because of the inevitable “media backlash” that could tank the game’s rep).
Old School RuneScape’s playerbase isn’t showing its best side this week.