Real-world trading

Real world trading (RWT), also called real world item trading (RWIT), or real money trading, is the act of trading anything outside of Runescape (usually real world money) for RuneScape items or services, or vice versa. Real world trading is against rule 12, and players who break it risk being permanently banned. It is even illegal in some countries as well, as it is selling stolen property (compare it with selling pirated movies).

There are two classes of real world traders: personal sellers and companies. Personal sellers are people who exchange virtual items and real money between friends, while companies (collected by gold farmers) do it with the public. Many gold farmers use macros, which is against rule 7.

Because real world trading is against the rules, some players have tried to find legal loopholes, such as claiming that the real money is paid for the time spent, or that the transfers or real and virtual items are independent. However, Jagex still says that these methods are against rules.

Over time, Jagex has banned many players for this behavior and has implemented some updates in-game to stop this, but it has not been without controversy.

On the Runescape December Behind the Scenes, Jagex imformed everyone that they would be taking EXTREME measures in order to finally rid of RWT. A quote from the article, "On a more serious note, many of you will be aware of our efforts to stop real-world trading and how some of our recent updates have been part of that. You may have questions about it: What does it mean? How does it affect the game? How big a problem is it? What are the ways of dealing with it? To answer these questions and more, we'll be releasing a very important Development Diary on the subject." On December 10th, known as the Runescape D-Day, Jagex created a Development Diary to explain what they've done with Real-World Trading. They found just about every way possible to keep it from happening, including making the 3k trade difference, changing drops, and getting rid of Runescape's most famous thing. Player Killing.

In place of pking, they replaced it with a mini-game named "Bounty Hunter". In this, you are assigned a player in the arena to kill, but you can kill anyone there, and anyone can kill you. They also released "Clan Wars", a game where you and your clan go up against another clan in a war. This is a safe minigame, so if you die, you'll keep your items. Going back on PKing, now the wildnerness is basically useless.

Due to these updates, riots broke out all across Runescape, most noteably in Falador on World 66. In tons of chaos, a normally empty world was as hard to get into as World 2 on a weekend. There were also many smaller riots going on around, and tons of players were quitting. This proved to be costly to Jagex, but assured us that it would all be fine.

Real World Trading has been much more devastating to Runescape than ever even thought. Not only had there be illegal trades of money for items and gold, but it caused many larger problems. As of now, there is no way of truly trading Runescape items for real money. But as time goes on, there will likely be some flaw that allows people to do it once again. Hopefully they will be smart enough to not try this, as it may become even worse...