What was the knife bug?
The knife bug is an old bug where players could equip knives which were then a useless item but spawned upstairs of varrock general store. Apparently when Jagex created knives they put 3 weapon aim and weapon power on it but at first they were useless, it was only when flecthing came out in members that knives became useful. Each knife gave an additional 3 weapon aim and 3 weapon power to whatever you wielded.

Many players were banned for this bug such as Bigkingsfan, Grubyyyyyyyyy, Trupimp, Silentboy05, etc. Silentboy and Trupimp's permanent bans were later made into temporary bans and they got to play on their characters again.

The beginning
The first I ever heard of it was whispers in the game of some players being able to hit 30s. This was Jan or very early 2002, I think, and the max hit was supposed to be 30 with 99 str and no one had 99 str yet.

How the knife bug worked:
Special note: this does not work anymore and these pics are recent ones, not from the actual time that you could do the knife bug.
In your inventory have a weapon. Knives should be in the space to the right of the weapon. Click on the mini map so that your char starts walking then click on "drop the weapon." Now, as I'm sure we all know, if you try to drop something while you are walking it doesn't drop until your char has stopped. Before you char stops moving, right click on the weapon, as shown on the pic below:

In the pic below it shows that the weapon has been dropped, however the "wield weapon" option is still available and the knife is now in the place where the weapon was. If you click on "wield" then the knives were wielded!

When a knife was equipped it added weapon aim and power, the more knives you had equipped, the more weapon aim/power you had. The only drawback was if you equipped a lot of knives you had no room for food.

Someone gave me this pic of a newb using knife bug and hitting 25 with a bronze hatchet and knives on a greater demon.

Day of the knives

Now apparently some people had discovered the knife bug but it was a closely guarded secret. However, a lower level player X Magna X if I remember correctly couldn't resist showing off and numerous people saw him hitting a 30 which was impossible for him to do because it would have required him to have 99 str (which he couldn't possibly have due to his total xp which was seen on hiscores). Then the secret itself was posted in a Runescape fansite forum.

After the secret was revealed it was total chaos for one day as everyone tested/pked/trained the knife bug. People were hitting huge numbers left and right, people with even mid level str could hit 30s while those with high str easily hit in the 40s.

Funnily enough since there was only one source of knives people would stand at the knife spawn and check to see which players were collecting knives, which included RS's famous poeple.

Fixing the knife bug

After a time Paul took partial control of the situation as he started banning people for using the knife bug. Most players then stopped using it on their mains but low level wildy was full of noob pkers hitting 30s.

Hohto gave me this pic of the old-style rainbow system message of Angel2002 being banned.

It was actually a day of much fun, hardly anyone seems to have lost much and people enjoyed hitting all of those high numbers. New players were made with names "knife" or "knives" in it to remember this day.

The next day the bug was fixed and knives could no longer be equipped. A punishment was also added - those who logged in with knives equipped in their inventory died instantly. This is what actually led to a lot of people losing their valuable items, most notably Buffyslayer was instant killed when she logged in and lost her rune kite which at the time was worth over 10 million gp or so.

Aftermath

The result of this was several high level players were banned such as Bigkingsfan, Trupimp, Silentboy05, Angel2002, Grubyyyyyyy - all of them pkers who were supposed to have used the knife bug to pk with.

Paul Gower's own words on the knife bans:

yeah yeah i let two banned characters back in

Paul Gower

Quest Master

Joined: Jan 29, 2002

Posts: 311 Posted: 2002-02-26 10:42

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Yeah the 2 characters I letback I have no record or evidence that they actually used the bug to attack any other players. I don't even have any evidence to say they used it to train. Unlike all the other players banned for using the knife bug.

They are only as guilty of bug abuse as the many many characters who got caught by our automatic system for using knives in that they had them in their inventory, and the players who had the knives in their inventory only received an instant kill and a warning. So trumpimp and silentboy05 both had harsh punishments for what they did compared to the other players in the same situation.

I know for a fact both bigkingsfan and grubyyyyyyy were using the bug to pk.

Angel200 got into combat situations with 2 other players, used it to train and already had his character black marked from prviously

god24027 or whatever his name is used it extensively, so did unholy babes and several others.

Dj aztech was already black marked as a problem player.

It may seem bannings and unbannings are a bit random, but I'm actually trying to be as fair as possible based on evidence.

No this does not mean I tolerate cheating, there are at least 600 banned characters who are never ever coming back whatever.

No this does not mean I will let other player who whine at me have their characters back, in fact if angel2002, robinhood2 and whodabest whine at me again I will start threatening to ban their current characters.

Both trupimp and silentboy05 are both very high on my watch list due to having previous bans aswell, so they'll have to be very carefull or they could get banned for the smallest of things.

[ This Message was edited by: Paul Gower on 2002-02-26 10:45 ]

Some links:

Angel2002 asking for his char back after Silentboy and Trupimp were unbanned

Paul talks about the knife bans (the quote above was taken from this thread)