11 May 2007 - Bots and Real-World Trading Update

In a follow up to last week's news post, we thought we'd let you know exactly what we've been doing in order to remove those who cheat from the game.

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Firstly, we've been upgrading our detection software to ban the bots from the game. We've also been particularly focusing on cleaning up the members' version of the game. Bots on the members game are banned significantly more quickly. Of course, the free version has seen a fair share of bans, too.

The Investigations in the Community Unit (ICU) have worked hard, double checked all the facts to make sure we're only getting the cheats, and then have banned 19075 accounts for breaking Rule 7.

We've made significant progress over the last week, but there's still lots more for us to do yet.

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Secondly, and equally importantly, as we warned last week we are now banning people who are BUYING RuneScape gold for real-world money - those people who are funding the whole problem in the first place. In the last week we have banned 2300 accounts for breaking Rule 12 by buying RuneScape gold.

Clearly a lot of people buying gold thought they would get away with it, so were quite surprised when they actually got permanently banned. This goes to show that we really do mean it when we say that buying gold for real-world money = permanent ban. We have reliable ways to trace this now. (These are NOT people lending items to their friends, we really are sure they were genuinely buying gold for real world money.)

Note: These weren't bots, these were players who built up their account, sometimes over years, but then threw it all away by cheating and buying gold for real-world money. This means that all the time and money they spent on their account was wasted – and all because they wanted to get ahead of others by using unfair means and tactics.

Have a look at the following examples of accounts banned for real-world trading activities in the past week and decide whether you think it would be worth risking your account. You won't get a warning - you'll just find your account banned, and that will be that.

These are just 2 examples out of the 2300 total.

Player X Total Level: Over 1600 Total time in-game: 140 days, 8 hours Status: Permanently banned for real-world trading

Player Y Total Level: Over 1550 Total time in-game: 89 days, 14 hours Status: Permanently banned for real-world trading

A pretty silly thing for them to go and do, I'm sure you'll agree. Don't make the same mistake.