Last weekend, Jagex held its annual RuneFest event in London, where the studio demoed its mobile edition and teased plenty of upcoming content for both regular flavor RuneScape and its crankier Old School RuneScape cousin. Yes, even the bank rework that’s been promised for at least a hundred years.
But the headline event of that convention, the 2000-person Deadman Invitational, went badly awry when one group of players formed a temporary alliance and were disqualified for refusing to fight, causing community uproar. It gets way worse:
“The last survivor of the final has been disqualified. A standard subsequent investigation into the winner of the tournament took place and the winner was responsible for the creation of a bot farm. Naturally all accounts linked to this botting activity have now been banned. This then raises the question of what to do with the prize money. At the moment we’re discussing what to do with it. A few ideas we have at the moment are another charitable donation, dispersing the money among the finalists, or carrying it over to the next season (or a combination of all of these).”
The studio says it hasn’t been able to prove other allegations against participants relating to the DDOS attacks during the show. But yeah, bot farming. In RuneScape. Who saw that coming?
