18 March 2013 - Dealing with Games of Chance

Hi everyone,

We talked at the beginning of the year about how we wanted to make 2013 fun, memorable and special to all of you. We’ve still got a lot to do, but are starting to make good progress, especially in the war on botting and gold farming. From listening to your feedback we've made changes to address an issue that many of you brought up as a point of concern: player-run games of chance.

Also known as flower games, hot/cold games or dicing, these games of chance had grown to become a major problem for the community and for us as the administrators of the RuneScape. In these games of chance, “hosts” offer other players a deal - usually by publicly spamming - and take a bet on the outcome of a randomised event.

Such activities create many problems: they encourage spam advertising; the trust-based trades are rife with scamming; they're disruptive to the game's economy; they create feelings of unfairness; and have links with real-world trading and gold farming.

From the recent forum discussion thread on this topic started by Mod Mark, it's clear that the overwhelming majority of you do not want this activity to remain in RuneScape. As such, we are making the following changes:

Firstly, with immediate effect, we’re making an addition to the rules of RuneScape:

You must not advertise, organise, promote or participate in player-run games of chance, where game money or items are staked on the outcome of a random activity.

Any account found to be involved in such games of chance will receive a strike against their account. As with other offences, this will escalate from muting to temp-banning, and then to a last-resort action of permanent ban.

While the hosts and advertisers of such activities are the obvious part of the problem, the players taking part are also at the root of the issue. If we’re to stamp out this type of disruptive behavior, everyone involved needs to be held accountable.

The full details of this new rule can be found in the Rules of RuneScape. As with all rules, this applies to both the main and old school services.

Secondly, in today’s game update we’ve made changes to certain in-game items which are regularly used in games of chance: mithril seeds, the Easter Ring/Ring of Egg, the Seal of Approval emote and the Classic Cape emote. To prevent their use in games of chance and to reinforce fair play, we have removed all randomised outcomes and actions from these items:

Planted mithril seeds now always grow the same coloured flower, although picking the flower will still result in a randomly coloured flower in your inventory.
Using the Ring of Egg will now always turn your character into a blue egg.
The Seal of Approval emote now chooses the same seal every time it’s used.
Clicking on the Skill Cape emote button when wearing the Classic Cape will always display a rune hatchet image.
As with our war against botting, this is an ongoing effort and not a one-off resolution. We will continue to monitor the situation and make updates as appropriate in an effort to provide the fairest and most balanced resolution to this issue.

Thank you for your comments on this topic so far. Please continue to give us your feedback so we can ensure we’re tackling the problem in the long term. Let us know on the forums.

Thanks for reading,

Mod Pips
Executive Producer

Full details are available on our FAQ here.

Discuss this here.

In Other News

This week’s update has also made Momentum a persistent, toggled ability, much like Incite or Single-Way Wilderness. No adrenaline is generated while it is active, and it is still cancelled by use of any other ability.
From today, Diango will be able to replace items with combat stats which have been obtained from the Squeal of Fortune. This carries of a fee of gold coins relative to the highest wield requirement for the item that you can access. Please note that following items cannot be retrieved from Diango if they have been destroyed prior to today's update: shark fists, TzHaar whip, Cupid bow, rosethorn wand, broken heart.
The bonecrusher now crushes all bones dropped by a vanquished enemy, rather than just their guaranteed drop.
All references to player-run games of chance have been removed from the Quick Chat options.
Superior player-owned ports armour can now be repaired at any stage of degradation.
Solomon's Store now stocks a range of cosmetic items that you may have missed out on before. See here for further information.
A selection of minor bug fixes have been made across the game. Please see the patch notes for details.