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Follow Up: Discounted Key Oddment Exploit – August 24th 2020

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Hey all.

We have been investigating an instance in which it was possible to cash out items to receive more oddments than the cost of a currently discounted Treasure Hunter Key, allowing players to generate a surplus of oddments.

This discount became available in-game around 11:30 game time. We were notified around 18:00 of the exploit and at 19:10 we removed the discount with a hotfix.

In total we’ve identified around 4,000 players who attempted the exploit. There was no noticeable effect on either the economy or XP gained on the day as a result.

Following our investigations we have categorised the players into three separate groups:

  • Players who may have tested the exploit will not have action taken against them
  • 835 accounts have clearly exploited the discount and will be banned for 72 hours
  • 65 accounts have severely exploited the discount and will be banned for 14 days – they can also expect experience and Item roll backs

    • Four of the accounts above have been proactively suspended so that we can do further investigations before taking final action.

    We want to take this opportunity to remind everyone that we do not tolerate bug abuse or exploits in RuneScape. We hope that our actions and communication today make this clear.

    Saturday August 29th 16:00 Game Time

    Hi everyone.

    We appreciate there are a lot of thoughts and feelings around this topic, and we hear you. Thanks for your patience while we regrouped over the course of last night and today.

    We have been reviewing this further with key team members and senior team leaders, and we do feel this warrants a deeper investigation. This will happen over the coming days. 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 (found here: https://www.runescape.com/game-guide/rules). However, we will also be discussing this in our review and investigating further.

    This will be an absolute priority for us when we all return to the studio on Tuesday September 1st (August 31st is a holiday in the UK). We are aware that this occurs after the ban expiry for the accounts suspended for three days, and we'll be factoring that in if any reviewed action takes place.

    We'll continue the conversation with all in the meantime, regardless of if there are changes to these actions or otherwise. Thanks again for your patience – we’ll have updates to share shortly.

    The RuneScape Team

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