There's been a lot of discussion about recent bug abuse bans, and we'd like to share some insight into what's happened.
We took action against a content creator's RuneScape accounts. The accounts belonging to the content creator were used for malicious activity, including but not limited to, crashing of game worlds for the purpose of item and wealth duplication to be sold for real world monies, and exploiting an invisibility/invincibility bug in PvP combat scenarios.
The content creator is a very talented RuneScape player, their use of mechanics is inspired, but their actions - not shown in their content - negatively impact the wider community and game health.
Alongside these bans, we also took action against the accounts of a player associated with the content creator. This player has also engaged in malicious activity, including but not limited to, crashing of game worlds and repeated generation of rewards, e.g. from quests.
Lastly, we'd like to touch upon the subject of bug abuse in general. We know what constitutes as bug abuse, and how we react to it might not be widely understood. The fact is that some bugs are harmless and amusing, and we don't look to punish players for these types of low impact bugs. Other bugs aren't quite as harmless. There are exploits which can quite literally break the game worlds, undermine the game's health, and - as we saw in recent months - can lead to other players losing their items directly as a consequence (we rectified this fully). These bugs will be met with account bans. We strongly encourage you all to report bugs as you come across them. If you stumble across a bug and make it known to us quickly then you can rest assured that we'll thank you and no action will be taken. It's important to note that reporting a bug doesn't give you a pass to abuse it after reporting it, neither does reporting the bug after it has been abused, discovered, and fixed.
We're in awe of our amazing community, and we'd like to extend our sincere thanks to the vast majority of you who take great pride in reporting issues and working closely with us.
Old School Team
Following the posting of this newspost, you've had a lot of questions about our statement and actions taken. We've compiled some of these and answered them below.
Are the account bans related solely to things we've seen on videos?
No, the account bans are related to other issues not shown on video, but were mentioned in the original newspost above e.g. crashing game worlds.
How many accounts have been banned?
The creator mentioned has had at least 14 accounts banned this year.
The other player mentioned has had at least 48 accounts banned this year.
How did the bugs we saw in a recent video crash game worlds and cause dupes?
The account bans are not solely related to content you are being shown on video.
Why have you banned the players for discovering and reporting bugs, and not using them?
We are wholly confident that the bugs were abused prior to them being reported to us. Using the Prayer XP avoidance as an example, there are screenshots circulating of it being reported to us in May. It was exploited and fixed in mid-April, with an initial account ban occurring in mid-April.
Why are you banning players instead of fixing the issues being shown?
We fix these issues to the best of our ability as a matter of priority, often long before they're reported to us, and long before they're shown in video content.
If the players were abusing crashes, why ban them now rather than at the time of abuse?
To the best of our ability we did take action at the time of discovering the abuse. For transparency, dozens of account bans have been applied to the accounts in question in 2020 and 2021 linked to crashing game worlds.
We saw a video in 2019 about world crashing and duping. Is this the world crashing you're referring to?
No, there have additional instances of world crashing since then. E.g. world crashes in 2020 and 2021. We were able to fix the issues, revert the impact as best we can, and take action against the accounts at the time of the crashes.