Like a dragon on a pile of gold, this MMO player boasts 43 years of pre-paid subscription time

Old School RuneScape is grindy even by MMO standards. It can take months to reach the max level in just one of the game's 23 skills, and literal years to hit 99 in all of them, which is a major end goal for many players. That being said, if I had, I don't know, 43 guaranteed years of pre-paid premium membership ahead of me, I'd probably feel a little comfier knowing for a mathematical fact that I've got all the time in the world to grind the MMO at my leisure.

At least one OSRS player claims to have amassed exactly this subscription stockpile. Reddit user namirhassan shared their membership stash with the community earlier this week, boasting a staggering 16,000 days left. That's just under 44 years of pre-paid subscription time, which has got to be enough to get 99 Agility at the very least.

This being a frankly catastrophic number, some players understandably suspected that this image was simply photoshopped. I reached out to namirhassan hoping to ask about their functionally infinite membership but haven't heard back. I've also reached out to developer Jagex to see if anyone can validate the figure. The image looks accurate and makes photoshop vetting difficult, but it's worth noting that this isn't necessarily an impossible or costly figure thanks to the ways OSRS membership can be acquired.

Like most MMOs, you can pay for OSRS membership with real money on a monthly or bundled basis, with 6-month or 12-month chunks saving you money in the long run. The last time membership prices were adjusted was April 2022, which set a year-long subscription at $79.99.

However, you can also fund a subscription with in-game items called Bonds. These can be purchased for real money, but without the same bundled discount. One Bond goes for $7.99 while 10 Bonds runs $79.99. Each Bond is worth 14 days of membership at base, with more days added for bulk redemptions – a full year for 20 Bonds, for instance.

Importantly, these Bonds can also be sold to other players for gold. Yes, this does make it a developer-endorsed way to buy in-game gold with real money, but OSRS players have mostly put away the pay-to-win pitchforks because Bonds don't generate gold from thin air and they give free-to-play players a way to acquire membership without spending real money. If you can spare the gold every two weeks, you can play forever without breaking out the credit card.

At the time of writing, one Old School Bond goes for 9.3 million gold. There was a spike to around 10m at the end of November – and people have joked that a mass purchase from namirhassan buoying demand could well be behind that spike – but the price has been pretty constant ever since a crash in late October. 9 million gold is a reasonable average Bond price for the past three months, and we can use that to roughly calculate how much 16,000 days of membership would be worth.

The yearly math is easy: assuming you always bought membership in 12-month bundles, 16,000 days would cost you about $3,500. But if you bought Bonds in-game, you'd need roughly eight billion gold – an unthinkable amount for most players, but not unreasonable for the wealthiest folks out there. Getting a single mega-rare item drop for the likes of 3rd Age tools could almost fund the entire thing. The max gold stack in OSRS is 2.147 billion, but alternative platinum tokens can be stacked 1,000 times higher, enabling monstrous cash reserves. In other words, it's quite possible this 16,000-day stash is a very real, very impressive flex.

In an even more terrifying, unquestionably real screenshot, an OSRS player in a league of their own jumpscared the MMO's entire community.