Runescape Bots and Real World Trading

The announcement by Jagex today that they had banned 8000 runescape accounts and seized 6 billion runescape gold sent shockwaves through most of the community.

Many players realised that some bots and plenty of real world trading was taking place, but they failed to grasp the scale of it and how it has impacted on the overall runescape economy. This is the seedier side to all MMORPGs in the last couple of years and continues to become a greater influence even after Ebay Delisted sales of virtual currency.

I had longed to see Jagex publicly tackle the issue in this way and even sent in an email with a way to get all legitimate fan sites on the right side of Jagex. I felt the problem would have started to come under control after Ebay took their stance. However, it simply added fuel to the fire and increased the determination of bot users to gather up large sums of virtual gold and sell to players for real dollars.

Jagex have learned that it is going to be a long fight to get it back into check and many current runescape members are feeling hard done by - having to work their way up in skills only to find the prices of items highly unstable, rare item prices rising out of reach and their favourite training locations covered by bot users.

The discussion on the runescape forums had reached more than 70 pages at the time of writing this and it didn't look like it was going to stop there. Many of the most popular fansites also have long discussion threads relating to this incident.

Overall, price instability could be highly volatile over the next week or two as the impact of further bannings takes place within the game and as Jagex increase their mechanisms for effectively detecting and efficiently removing the problem sources.