Two years ago, Old School Runescape banned the Duel Arena, an area of the game where players could use high-end equipment to bet. Now developer Jagex says it’s banning an alternative form of high-stakes duelling.
In a statement, Jagex said it decided in 2022 that Duel Arena was “unacceptable” under its rules against real money trading (RMT). Since then, it said, “players have pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable” to find another way to satisfy their gambling urges.
One of those other possibilities was “deathmatching,” a life-or-death PvP match where the winner got to keep the agreed-upon high-end gear that the loser lost. The problem, says Jagex, is that deathmatching is “mainly, if not always, associated with real-world trading.” As a result, it “removes real PvP” and, as it is an increasingly common source of RMT, is also associated with account purchasing.
Jagex says it has been working for two years to ban deathmatching because it didn’t want gamblers to simply move to less visible spaces. The developer admits that these players will likely try to do this, but “we have worked hard to ensure that we have a robust system in place to accurately detect and penalize players who engage in this activity.”
Deathmatching will be banned in seven days, resulting in a three-day ban and “asset confiscation” for a first offense, repeated offenses will result in permanent bans. However, if you only play normal PvP, you shouldn’t mind as Jagex believes it has found a way to only attack the RMT side of deathmatching.
RMT has become an increasingly large problem in several MMOs over the past few years, and it’s certainly not unique to Jagex. However, OSRS remains a significant draw for traders, and things like Duel Arena could be a big part of that. Our resident Runescape expert Austin tells me that “untold trillions” of gold changed hands on the sands of the arena, and even if deathmatching was only a small part of that action, it would still have been something Jagex was keen to stop.
Speaking of huge amounts of gold, An OSRS player has created an MMO Pokédex by tracking down players with rare names.
