Last Monday, RuneScape developer Jagex issued an announcement regarding actions taken against player accounts who were found to be cashing out items to receive more oddments than the cost of a currently discounted Treasure Hunter key, allowing players to generate a surplus of oddments which the studio considered to be an exploit. In total, over 4,000 accounts were found to be performing the action, with 835 accounts getting a 72-hour ban, 65 accounts getting a 14-day ban as well as XP and item rollbacks, and four accounts being proactively suspended barring an investigation.
The problem, however, as MMO Fallout notes, isn’t that players were performing a malicious exploit so much as taking advantage of poorly implemented costs by Jagex:
“Nobody bothered to check to make sure that the discounted treasure hunter keys couldn’t offer back more than they cost at such a reliable amount. It’s an amateur level mistake and another in the line of Jagex refusing to admit that they embarrassingly screwed up and are throwing blame on the community to compensate. It’s also another example of them using the word ‘exploit’ when it comes to another mistake causing their real money system to give more reward than they’ve meticulously programmed it not to.”
As of this past Saturday, Jagex amended the initial announcement, claiming that the devs have regrouped and will perform a deeper investigation starting this Tuesday, though players who have faced bans are still getting punished. “In the meantime, we do feel that the initial player bans were done in accordance with our policy on knowingly exploiting a bug or error. However, we will also be discussing this in our review and investigating further,” reads the addendum.
As for this week, RuneScape has put out its usual update, which addresses Crystal Chests and broadcast channels among a number of other things.
