I’ve seen some feats of gaming persistence in my time, but never before have I witnessed an MMO player spend eight years grinding a hated activity specifically so they could one day instantaneously max out an equally hated skill. Such was the achievement of Old School Runescape player NC State, who recently reached 200 million experience in the unpopular Agility skill in under a minute after cashing in XP tickets which took years to collect.
my_buddy_lord_speed_aka_the_pinata_aka_nc_state from r/2007scape
NC State’s friend, Reddit user h0dgep0dge, shared a Twitch clip of the finale, which has left many OSRS players downright speechless, and for good reason. Even as someone who put roughly 5,000 hours into Runescape pre-OSRS and has continued to keep up with the game, it’s hard for me to articulate the psychic damage that training Agility at all inflicts, especially using the Brimhaven dungeon that NC State chose to grind.
People sometimes joke that playing an MMO is just clicking on the same things repeatedly, and that’s a painfully accurate description in this case. Training Agility involves running tiny point-and-click obstacle courses on a loop, with virtually no variance or meaningful skill expression. The Brimhaven dungeon is particularly unpopular because it backloads its meagre XP gains by tying them to tickets that you can cash in for rewards.
But if you did, for some unholy reason, want to jump from 22 million Agility experience – which is already way above the max in-game level of 99 – to 200 million in under a minute, I suppose this would be the way to do it.
The OSRS high scores confirm NC State is the 120th player to reach max Agility experience, and I’d wager they’re the first to have done so exclusively using the Brimhaven dungeon. Rough math from Reddit user ElMico estimates this grind would have taken upwards of 5,000 hours of game time with near-perfect play, and all in the same dungeon doing the same few things.
On top of that, this might be the most XP any OSRS player has ever earned within 60 seconds, with the possible exception of the popular wine-stacking cooking technique. “I’m in the same clan as him,” reads a comment from Redditor RikdoKosh. “It was the craziest [clan chat] announcement I’ve ever seen. Seeing him get 50m, 100m, 150m, then 200m in like 30 seconds.”
I can offer no words but these: the human spirit is both amazing and unknowable.
Speaking of wild MMO achievements: after 200 hours of attempts, a Destiny 2 player has made history with a solo raid challenge thought to be impossible.