Anti-Gold-Farming Measures

Today sees the latest in our series of initiatives to stamp out botting, gold farming and dishonest play in RuneScape.

It’s a sad fact that the vast majority of gold farming activity takes place in the free game, where it is possible to create disposable accounts that can be used to generate in-game money and send it on for illicit real-world trade in defiance of our rules. Today’s measures will reduce the effectiveness of this practice by a factor of 100, to show these people once and for all that ruining your game is not only unacceptable, but also a waste of their time.

From today onwards, newly created free to play accounts will be subject to a number of trade limitations, consisting of:

New free-to-play accounts can only give away gold coins or items, or make a trade with an imbalance in the recipient’s favour, to the value of 25000 coins per 24 hours. This limitation also applies to drop trades.
New free-to-play accounts can make Duel Arena bets with no greater imbalance than 25000 coins per 24 hours.
We have also made a change to Wilderness PvP, where noted items will only appear to the original carrier when dropped upon death; not the killer. This affects all accounts – not just ones subject to the limitations above.

The last thing we want is to make trading difficult for our long-standing and bustling free-to-play community, so existing free-to-play accounts will be unaffected. What’s more, there is no limit to the value of gifts that can be received by a new free-to-play account, so there’s nothing to stop a new player from receiving a helping hand from a high-levelled friend. Needless to say, balanced trades between players are not a problem, either.

The limitations will remain in effect until the affected account purchases membership. Subscribing will remove these restrictions permanently, even if the subscription later ends and is not renewed.

These measures are a decisive next blow in our ongoing battle against botting and gold farming. We are fully committed to stamping out this insidious form of cheating to ensure you the fair game experience that you deserve.

Mark Gerhard
CEO & CTO

I'm hoping this does stop the gold farmers, although they only need to pay for members once to unlock the unlimited trade feature, hopefully their business isn't worth the effort of paying the membership cost as I imagine they have 100's of f2p gold farmers so would be quite costly to put members on each account.

Guess we'll see how this goes and if it works - fingers crossed!

I can't help but feel bad for all the legit free players who spend so much time with the community, fighting against bots and sparse updates, and repeatedly get updates like these working against them. That said, from a business standpoint, it makes perfect sense. Giving a way such a vast game for free just doesn't happen with companies, and it's unrealistic for people to expect Jagex to do so. It's like 6 bucks a month with a credit card to play members. That's exceptionally cheap. I don't feel like free-to-play players should be able to complain about restricted features when they're for a good reason and they're in a FREE game. If it was a game breaking bug or something, then certainly complain, but over something like this. No.

Definitely a fan of this update, but I know a lot of people will say it's not right.

rofl gf me trying to transfer stuff to my skiller

rofl gf me trying to transfer stuff to my skiller

It's against the rules anyway, so probably best not to. Don't want to risk either account, you know?

I hope this update will keep more bots out of the game. I agree with Evaluate that it sucks F2P is becoming so limited, but he's right in saying that it makes sense from a business standpoint. Any other MMO that has a free version has major restrictions on it; I don't see these changes making things much different.

Even though F2P was a little more prominent in the past, times are changing. The P2P bots are being banned and I believe Jagex is wanting to replace that lost money by urging people to become members. Membership for this game is pretty cheap, anyway.

rofl gf me trying to transfer stuff to my skiller

there is no limit to the value of gifts that can be received by a new free-to-play account, so there’s nothing to stop a new player from receiving a helping hand from a high-levelled friend.

You can still do that. You just cant make an account after today, get lots of money on it, and give it to someone.

And you made the account the other day, so you're not affected.

Existing F2P accounts are not affected, which is great,as I have a few .
But...in saying that I never suffered when the trade restrictions were in anyway.

ahh k so its not that bad then.

Sounds great to me. Current F2P accounts are not affected and future accounts will not really know what they are missing..or it won't be as big a deal. It is necessary action for them to stop gold farming.

I love it and especially because my friends can still give me millions of coins worth of gifts...

PHREE GOLD PLOX!