It began with crude Photoshop tasks, but shortly proper illustrations and fan art started to crop up. Players rallied around the idea of a milder, blessed armor set motivated by the Runescape god Saradomin, so that they went back to West's prototype designs and made some changes.
And after that, a hero emerged: legend_arts, a talented and well-known RS gold fan artist. Inspired by the memes and motivated by elements of West's designs and other players' suggestions, legend_arts created a hybrid armor design so good it not only silenced the memes, it got the attention of West himself.
"When I first pitched it to the neighborhood over Twitch, I was anticipating a small response," West says. "Because when you're revealing best-in-slot items, you've either got no response--that is exactly what you're aiming for really because that means they are happy--or you receive an extremely loud response that, as we've seen on Reddit, is exactly what occurred.
Obviously, what I did not anticipate was to get a different artist to pop up in. But when Legend_Arts posted his theory where he left it bright and shiny, it got like 10,000 upvotes on Reddit, which is why I subsequently went onto the livestream to let them watch me build it."
"It's a much more favorable position to be in than everybody just complaining and shouting. We had been cheap OSRS gold. But exactly what the memes brought, that was so great about this instance, was real people that really wanted to put together good designs. And as much as there were memes, the good ideas that people liked weren't overshadowed."