Old School RuneScape devs face loot-hungry MMO players after an endgame quest spits out worse items than an easy mob so profitable it became a bot farm

I've been keeping an eye on a fascinating microcosm of MMO economics for a while now, and it's officially hit a boiling point over in the Old School RuneScape community. The recent release of two new enemies, one spitting out millions of gold despite being easy to kill, and the other locked behind an endgame quest yet struggling to drop anything worthwhile, has confused and rankled the OSRS faithful, to the point that developer Jagex recently delayed a planned Q&A session so it could instead focus on ironing out some loot tables. 

In April, zombie pirates were added to Old School RuneScape. These are weak mobs averaging level 28 with just 35 hitpoints, found en masse in the PvP-enabled Wilderness, albeit not too deep into the Wilderness. They're easy to reach, easy to kill, and – based on player reports and according to the reputable OSRS wiki – can net you upwards of 2 million gold an hour, with the bulk of that profit coming from weapons and materials which, while small payouts individually, add up very quickly. They're such easy money, in fact, that the countless bots that infest OSRS like termites in an oak tree very quickly descended on pirate zombies in droves. 

Fast forward to this week and we have the release of While Guthix Sleeps, a new Grandmaster-tier quest. I say new, but this is actually the re-release of a quest that first came to plain-old RuneScape in 2008, newly revived for Old School RuneScape with a few changes. While Guthix Sleeps carries fairly hefty skill and quest requisites, and your primary reward for completing it is the ability to craft some new weapons and hunt level 450 Tormented Demons which drop materials needed for those weapons. 

Although the main draw of the original Tormented Demons, hotly coveted dragon claws, had already been introduced to OSRS through a previous raid, many players were excited to see these demons make a comeback after all this time. However, many of those players were quickly disappointed to find that the new