With the RuneFest announcement being made earlier today many of you will have noticed that you are able to buy your tickets, hotels, food, drink and souvenirs using bonds. Last year showed us that there are a huge amount of Old School players that love attending RuneFest and we thought it is only fair that we should start a discussion about whether you wanted to take advantage of this offer. The one thing to be clear about is that this is just a discussion and you won’t suddenly wake up one morning to see bonds appearing in Old School. If bonds are introduced they will be done on the communities terms and only after passing a poll.
The benefits of bonds have been well documented, they help in the battle against bots and real world trading, you can use them to buy membership (which is particularly useful when it comes to the F2P trial) as well being able to use them to pay for your RuneFest trip. The one thing you as a community need to be aware of is that at some point a player will have to buy that bond for real world money and will trade that bond for gold coins. That is the reality of the system and you can’t have one without another.
The movement of gold between RuneScape and Old School via the gold swapping clans is well established and has been facilitating the use of bonds in Old School for a long time now. Bringing bonds directly into Old School will remove the risk that gold swapping clans bring.
We know that some of you may see bonds as a prelude to other microtransactions like treasure hunter or Solomon’s store. Again, if this community wanted these we could do them, but we are pretty sure you don’t. If you want bonds in Old School only to be used for membership and RuneFest only then we can do that. If you don’t want bonds in Old School at all then you won’t see them.
This decision is for the community to make, and we think now is the right time to ask this question – how do you feel about bonds in Old School?
See the main RuneFest post here.
Discuss this on our forums.
Mods Alfred, Ash, John C, Mat K, Reach, Ronan & Weath
The Old School Team