Old School RuneScape (OSRS) has a cancer, and that cancer is crime. Or, well, it's repeated violations of Jagex's terms of service, anyway. The game is beset by perfidious players who buy in-game gold and items off black market sellers using real-world money, a process called Real World Trading (RWT).
Okay, yes, some version of that happens in a lot of MMOs, but it's a particular thorn in the side for Jagex and its players, leading as it does to legions of bots infesting the game in order to vacuum up gold to sell later on. Now, Jagex has decided it's no more Mr Nice Guy time: the punishments for buying gold are getting harsher.
"Buying gold off a real world trader is already very clearly against the rules, but historically we've treated the buyers more leniently than the sellers when issuing penalties for real world trading," said Jagex in a post earlier today. But no longer: "As part of our clamp-down on those gold-farming bots and the harm they do to Old School RuneScape, we're now taking a harsher line against players caught buying gold from them."
In other words, don't expect to get away with a slap on the wrist just because you were only buying gold or an in-game item from some shadowy guy in a trenchcoat. That's no longer an excuse, and Jagex says you can expect anything up to a permanent ban for blowing your real-world cash on RWT. "Our agents will issue bans, temporary or permanent depending on the situation, even for first offenses, as well as confiscating items from the offenders."
So far as I can tell, OSRS players are pretty psyched about the Eye of Sauron turning against buyers as well as sellers. "Amazing news! Thank you!" reads the top-rated response to the announcement on the OSRS subreddit. "Skip temporary. Perma ban all of them everytime," says the RuneScape community's equivalent to Dirty Harry.
There is a degree of negative sentiment, though, not because anyone's upset about RWT buyers getting the book thrown at them, but because some players don't trust Jagex to do it. Some note that Jagex has made similar pronouncements before. In 2021, the studio announced a growing team meant it could "begin to clamp down on buyers," which clearly didn't make much of a dent. In 2007, Jagex wrote that "We really do mean it when we say that buying gold for real-world money = a permanent ban."
So I forgive people for taking a 'wait and see' approach to see if Jagex makes good on this one. But if it does, then the OSRS Bernie Madoffs of the world can expect a long stay in the slammer.
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