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. Legally, every item in Runescape is the property of Jagex, and can therefore not be considered as personal property of the player. For that reason, players who conduct RWT violate rule 12, and may risk being permanently banned without warning. In severe cases, RWT may result in a prison sentence, as it is considered a crime in many countries.

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 (where the items are collected by gold farmers) do it with the public. Many gold farmers use macros, which is against rule 7.

Rule breaking
Because real world trading is against RuneScape's rules, some players have tried to find legal loopholes, such as claiming that the real money is paid for the time spent, that the transfers or real and virtual items are independent, or even that they were selling a joke and it came with an account/money. However, Jagex still says that these methods are against rules.

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

Jagex's initial response
On the 'RuneScape' December 'Behind the Scenes', Jagex informed 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."

Jagex's actions
On December 10th, Jagex created a Development Diary to explain what they've done with Real-World Trading. They found nearly every way possible to keep it from happening, including removing unbalanced trading, making a limit on how much people can stake in the Duel Arena, changing the way dropped items act, modifying the Party room and getting rid of player killing in the Wilderness, which was a favourite activity of some players. Jagex also stated that the Wilderness change was not only due to real world trading, but also because of their own decision to change the pvp aspect of the game. 

To replace PKing, Jagex added a new a mini-game called Bounty Hunter. In this, you are assigned a single player in the arena to kill, although you are still free to attack (or be attacked by) anyone. They also released Clan Wars, a game where you and your clan go up against another clan in a war of up to two-hundred fighters. To compensate for the loss of player-killers, Jagex also added very dangerous and powerful monsters called revenants in the wilderness, in order to make the wilderness dangerous, even without actual players to attack you.

Players' reactions
Due to these updates, riots broke out all across RuneScape, most notably 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 thousands of players reportedly quit the game. There was a common misconception that players that quit the game would cost Jagex money, however, the loss of tens of thousands of member RWT's far outweighed the loss of a few thousand quitting players.

Jagex revealed that Real World Trading had been much more devastating to RuneScape than anyone had thought. Not only had there be illegal trades of money for items and gold, but it caused many larger problems. Jagex stated that many RWT's used stolen credit cards to pay for their p2p gold-farming accounts, which cost Jagex large of amounts of money from reimbursements.

Real-world traders' reactions
Since the updates, most of the various real-world trading companies have begun requesting the customer's account, password, and bank PIN, and then farm the gold on the customer's account, similar to power-levelling, as this is one of the only few options left for real world trading.

It is strongly recommended that nobody attempts this, for three main reasons:
 * Since they have your account information, it is possible for them to steal your account, as well as some of your real-world money since you paid for it.
 * Many gold farming websites are run by the very same people who used stolen credit card information to run p2p bots in RuneScape in the first place - There is a very good chance that anyone who buys from these sites may have their credit card information stolen or used at a later date.
 * This method is still considered real-world item trading and is against Rule 12, as well as being against Rule 6, which forbids account sharing. Your account may be permanently banned by Jagex if you buy gold or items from these sites.