On Sunday we did a livestream where we opened the discussion on releasing a full and permanent F2P service for Old School. If you haven’t watched the livestream yet, please make sure you do as this is probably the most important update Old School has ever had. You can watch the livestream here.

Last night we did an AMA on Reddit to answer any questions that you may have. After the AMA we spoke about when the right time was to poll whether we should add F2P and Membership Bonds to Old School. The demand we have seen over the last few days makes us believe that we should be polling this as soon as possible.

Currently we have a GE Tweaks poll running and when that finishes at 10am tomorrow, we will launch the F2P poll with the following question:

Should we add a full and permanent F2P service alongside Membership Bonds?

The F2P poll will be open until 10am GMT Wednesday 4th February.

Membership bonds are very similar to RS3 bonds with the main difference being that you will not be able to redeem them for anything other than membership. We will also not be introducing Runecoins, Squeal of Fortune, Treasure Hunter, Solomon’s Store or any other sort of micro-transactions – we wouldn’t add these without their own poll and there’s no plans for that at all.

When you purchase a Membership Bond through the website you can then either redeem the bond for membership or sell it to another player. If you buy a bond for in game gold from another player you will be able to easily redeem it for 14 days’ of membership.

Bonds have had a great impact on RS3 such as decreasing bots, decreasing the amount of gold entering the economy and reducing RWTing. We expect Membership Bonds to have a similar impact in Old School. There will be less bots, spammers, RWTing and a stronger economy so your efforts are worth more.

During the livestream on Sunday we spoke about why we believed introducing a full and permanent F2P service with Membership Bonds is the right thing to. Introducing Membership Bonds allows us to retain players who lapse out of membership when they have the option of playing a free version of Old School. The result is that we will be in the best position to grow the community over the next 5 years giving us the opportunity to expand the team and deliver bigger and better updates so you can enjoy Old School even more.

If you want more information, please make sure you watch the livestream or read the AMA. It is really important that you get involved with the discussion.

Discuss this on our forums.

Mods Archie, Ash, Ghost, Ian, John C, Mat K, Reach, Ronan, Weath

The Old School Team