Santa has come to RuneScape and he has a present for everyone! He can be found in Varrock, Falador, Ardougne, Catherby and Yanille. We're not going to say what the present is. Like all good Christmas presents that's a surprise. Santa will be around for roughly two weeks on both free and members servers, so there's lots of opportunity for people to get a present. After those two weeks Santa will leave RuneScape. Don't lose out, get your present before he goes as you won't be able to get one afterwards. Players who lose their present don't need to worry though as they will be able to get a replacement from Diango in Draynor Village.
Flax
We have now made flax easier to pick again. It no longer blocks. You can get a random number of flax from the flax plant before it disappears (It works in a similar way to the oak trees). It now regrows more than twice as quickly too.
Castle Wars Changes
Many people have pointed out to us that the rewards for Castle Wars are too easy to get. It hardly takes any time to get the tickets for a full set of Castle Wars armour. We agree, the ticket prices were too low. In actual fact it was a little too easy, and risked devaluing mithril armour for new players. To avoid unbalancing the game we have therefore changed the current decorative armour to be equivalent to steel. But don't worry, to compensate we will be putting a variety of higher level goodies to buy with your tickets, into Castle Wars next year (including decorative armour equivalent to adamant and mithril). For people who have the current castlewars armour and are wishing they'd saved their tickets for better future Castle Wars rewards, we will give them the opportunity to trade their armour back in and get their tickets back when new rewards are added.
We have been receiving reports that players are getting their own teams flag and then running up and down stairs in their own castle so people can't follow them. This makes them virtually impossible to kill and protects the flag till the end of the game. This wasn't in the spirit of the game and could lead to some very unbalanced results. To fix this, when going up and down stairs, you can no longer take your own teams flag AWAY from its starting area.
We have now fixed it so that you can no longer take the castlewars equipment and flags out of the gaming area. We have also fixed a bug which let you be an imp, sheep or bunny outside of the gaming area. Be warned that taking advantage of a bug to remove equipment intended only for castlewars into other areas (such as the wilderness) to gain an unfair advantage is bug abuse. If you find a bug, report it to customer support - Don't try and abuse it to your advantage. If you deliberately abuse a bug it can lead to a permanent ban (see rule 4).