Today sees the latest in our series of initiatives to stamp out botting, gold farming and dishonest play in RuneScape.

It’s a sad fact that the vast majority of gold farming activity takes place in the free game, where it is possible to create disposable accounts that can be used to generate in-game money and send it on for illicit real-world trade in defiance of our rules. Today’s measures will reduce the effectiveness of this practice by a factor of 100, to show these people once and for all that ruining your game is not only unacceptable, but also a waste of their time.

From today onwards, newly created free to play accounts will be subject to a number of trade limitations, consisting of:

New free-to-play accounts can only give away gold coins or items, or make a trade with an imbalance in the recipient’s favour, to the value of 25000 coins per 24 hours. This limitation also applies to drop trades.

New free-to-play accounts can make Duel Arena bets with no greater imbalance than 25000 coins per 24 hours.

We have also made a change to Wilderness PvP, where noted items will only appear to the original carrier when dropped upon death; not the killer. This affects all accounts – not just ones subject to the limitations above.

The last thing we want is to make trading difficult for our long-standing and bustling free-to-play community, so existing free-to-play accounts will be unaffected. What’s more, there is no limit to the value of gifts that can be received by a new free-to-play account, so there’s nothing to stop a new player from receiving a helping hand from a high-levelled friend. Needless to say, balanced trades between players are not a problem, either.

The limitations will remain in effect until the affected account purchases membership. Subscribing will remove these restrictions permanently, even if the subscription later ends and is not renewed.

These measures are a decisive next blow in our ongoing battle against botting and gold farming. We are fully committed to stamping out this insidious form of cheating to ensure you the fair game experience that you deserve.

Mark Gerhard

CEO & CTO