It got so bad that some players started to seriously feel that a meme the upgraded armor was by a different artist, and that the artist that made the prototypes had left Jagex. But something amazing happened. Even as memes blotted out the OSRS gold, gradually but certainly serious suggestions began to shine through.
It started with crude Photoshop jobs, but shortly proper illustrations and fan art started to crop up. Players rallied around the idea of a bulkier, blessed armor group inspired by the Runescape god Saradomin, so that they moved back into West's prototype layouts and made a few changes.
Driven by the memes and motivated by elements of West's designs and other players' ideas, legend_arts made a hybrid armor design so great it not merely silenced the memes, it captured the attention of West himself.
"When I first pitched into the neighborhood over Twitch, I was expecting a small response," West says. "Because when you're revealing best-in-slot items, you've either got no answer --which is what you're aiming for really because that means they're happy--or cheap RS gold you receive an extremely loud response which, as we have all seen on Reddit, is exactly what occurred.