Hey everyone, Mod Mac here, Vice President of Product & Player Strategy.
Today, I wanted to share an update on our commitment to level up our Account Security & Services.
We know this is something many of you passionately want to see improved. RuneScape accounts are more than just a game save – they’re the embodiment of your adventures, your hard-earned accomplishments and your valuable time. You want to see that they are protected at all costs and there’s clear areas where we can do better. We hear you.
So, in 2019, we set off on a multi-year mission to make those long-desired improvements a reality. We were faced with old technologies, spaghettified code, and ultimately a legacy codebase was not up to the task. So, we began the complex endeavour of architecting the new Jagex Publishing Platform in parallel with a myriad of additional efforts to make RuneScape better, and we’re finally bringing these improvements to life.
Here’s just some of what’s to come this year:
Stronger Account Security
We’ll be strengthening our password systems to finally support more complex passwords, while also adding additional protection to shut down brute force password attempts.
We’re also adding support for Multi-Factor Authentication recovery codes should you lose access to your 2FA device. With our upcoming Jagex Account system, we’ll also be introducing the ability to link all your characters under a single set of login credentials too.
Improved Player Support Centre
We know the existing account recovery process can be a point of frustration, so we’ve made sure to offer a much-improved solution as part of the new upcoming Jagex Account system.
We’re also working on an upgraded Support Centre experience, including exploring a Live Chat service for select support queries, to improve the accessibility of our Player Support.
The Jagex Launcher
Our Jagex Launcher just launched into Open Beta, and it’s the first step in providing a more seamless, secure experience on Desktop. We have much more to come that will enable faster and more convenient play.
On top of these upcoming changes, we’ve also been working on other to better protect your experience. Whilst we know there’s a lot more to do, I’d like to share some of our progress to date:
Reinforced Protection of Character Data
The Login Lockout was a perfect storm of a number of failure points, including hardware. We never want our players to go through something like that again.
We’ve significantly upgraded our cyber resilience both at a hardware and software level to protect against this, while also implementing cloud-based save backups to keep your characters safe.
The War On Bots
Bots are a detrimental factor to your experience. In 2020, we shut down the RSBot from the Powerbot website – and we’ll continue our zero-tolerance approach both in and out of game.
Right now, we’re banning around 100,000 Bots per week. While our systems are not bulletproof, we’re making continual improvements to our systems to keep Bots out of the game as best we can.
Safeguarding The Experience
Protecting the economy is something we know is important to everyone, and last year, we expanded our efforts to tackle Real World Trading (RWT) on a number of levels.
We’ve begun to target the demand for RWT gold by issuing warnings, timed bans and permanent bans to Gold Buyers. To date, we’ve issued 38,000 warnings and bans to players.
We’ve been continuing to target the supply of RWT by shutting down sellers - beginning with Arcus & Bogla gold selling sites in 2019, with 18 more shut down over the past year. More will follow.
We’ve also removed the Duel Arena as it was a flashpoint for toxic behaviour from the game – which accounted for 38% of all RWT bans.
One thing you may not know is that fraudulent payments are a part of third-party Gold sales and RWT too. To combat this, we’ve introduced a top-of-the-range system to track and block fraudulent payments which will limit the incentives for bad actors to attempt stealing accounts.
In Closing
We are fully committed to making RuneScape progressively better and the fruits of multiple years of efforts will be realized this year.
Members of the team will be joining the RuneScape Q&A Livestream this Wednesday (March 23rd) to go into this into even more detail. Please do join us if you’d like to hear more.
Thank you for your continued support and happy ‘Scaping!
--Mod Mac and the Publishing Platform team