Update, September 1st
Hello everyone.
Thanks for your ongoing feedback concerning the discounted Treasure Hunter key and Oddments exploit that emerged on Monday.
Firstly, we take responsibility for the exploit and apologise for it. The cause was a combination of two differing mechanics: our Oddments discount system (which assigns discounts on a time-limited rotation) and our Loot Duels Treasure Hunter promotion. We had not foreseen the consequences of this edge case for one of our newer systems. We fixed it as soon as we were aware of the problem.
Whilst not being a 'bug' in a traditional sense, it was a problem that had the potential to be exploited by a small number of players, and that indeed turned out to be the case. Our systems identified just under 7,000 players who purchased keys using Oddments during the time period of the potential exploit being live. Of these:
- 835 accounts were identified as having purchased an excessive amount of keys (between 500-2,000) with Oddments during that window, and were clearly taking advantage of the exploit.
These accounts received 72-hour bans for 'bug abuse - minor'.
- 61 accounts were identified as either having purchased an excessive amount of keys (between 500-2,000) with accompanying XP gain (over 20m XP), or having purchased over 2,000 keys with Oddments along with an unbalanced key/spend ratio.
These accounts have received 14-day bans for 'bug abuse - moderate', with accompanying XP rollback.
- 4 further accounts have been banned for 14 days pending further investigation.
Because this was something unintended on our part, the actions are more lenient than those we would typically implement for bug abuse - and the 85% who tested the mechanic, rather than abusing it, are not subject to any further action. We would again like to highlight that the impact to the in-game economy was minimal.
Whilst we hotfixed the solution at around 19:10 BST on Monday 24th August, we have also disabled discounts on Treasure Hunter keys in the Oddments Store for the foreseeable future. The addition of a daily item purchase cap is also being considered.
Whilst we take responsibility for the mechanics not working as intended, we do ask that in these situations (which do happen from time-to-time) you let us know if something doesn't seem right. And a big thanks for those who did exactly that this time. You can either report the bug in-game, or let one of our team know directly (and privately) on Twitter, Reddit or Discord. For more guidance on this, check out The Rules of RuneScape.
We understand that with a game as varied and intricate as RuneScape, it's not always possible to provide an exhaustive rundown of every unacceptable interaction between every one of our ever-changing systems. But where possible we do want to encourage fairness and openness when playing, and we'll have more specific guidance in place for when Treasure Hunter key Oddments purchases return.
We would love to say that we will never see bugs or exploits in our game, but that is sadly not realistic. However, what we can say is that we will act as quickly, fairly and consistently as possible on the infrequent occasions that things like this do happen. We will only punish those identified as clearly abusing these bugs or exploits.
The RuneScape Team