Jagex announces official Old School Runescape private servers, because the grind can always get grindier

I fear and respect Old School Runescape players. As someone who has a long history with MMOs and live-service games, I've stomached plenty of grind over the years. But the OSRS player doesn't merely tolerate grind—they relish in it, willing to devote themselves to the near-ascetic self-denial of killing a mole for 8 months. And soon, there will be grinds to endure that we haven't even begun to imagine. Over the weekend, Jagex announced Project Zanaris, the studio's name for customized OSRS community-run servers, where players will be able to design the parameters for the Runescape grind themselves.

Essentially, Project Zanaris will offer officially-supported OSRS private servers. The community server project is still in its early stages, but Jagex said players will be able to host their own version of Old School Runescape where they can "tweak different elements to create a brand-new gameplay experience." For example, Jagex said community server hosts might make all NPCs deal more damage, set a server-wide Ultimate Ironman mode, or enable PvP in every area.

A community server browser will let players search and filter public servers, and server owners can gate access to specific groups of players. Jagex said it'll eventually provide moderation tools for community server owners, but doesn't have specific details to share yet for how those tools will work. "We know how important it is for server owners to protect and maintain their servers," Jagex said.

The studio also said it's "looking into" letting players copy their characters from the OSRS main game to community servers, but only as a one-way process. Otherwise, players could just set up private servers where they've juiced the drop rates on high-end items to bring back over to the main game. Anathema to OSRS, in other words.

As for how much running a community server will cost you, Jagex is "still working out the full cost breakdown," but it says hosting a server will vary in price based on player cap. "There will be a charge for players looking to rent a server from Jagex," the studio said, which sounds to me like they're imagining a Minecraft Realms-esque model.

While Jagex doesn't specify whether free OSRS players will have access to community servers, the Project Zanaris FAQ says community servers will be "for any of our members looking for new experiences," likely indicating that you'll need a membership subscription to play—a subscription that's about to go up in price at the end of this month.

Jagex seems keenly aware that announcing such a huge feature could leave some players with a sense that it's using development resources that could be put towards creating fully new content for OSRS, and made sure to underline that the team developing OSRS community servers is its own distinct dev team.

"To be clear, Project Zanaris is being looked after by an entirely separate team," Jagex said. "No time or resources have been taken away from Old School to create this exciting new concept, and we still plan to keep creating amazing Old School content, just like we have done for the last decade."

Jagex said community servers are "a long way off," and that the studio will "be light on details surrounding Project Zanaris for some time." However, alongside a new Project Zanaris-focused feedback channel in the official OSRS Discord server, Jagex said it'll publish "a more in-depth Q&A within the next few weeks." The studio also said it'll eventually run closed and open community server beta tests, so OSRS players can get an early shot at building a server where everything is lethal and nobody can trade, as God intended.