Aftermath of the Bounty Hunter update

The aftermath of the Bounty Hunter update was the result of Jagex updating RuneScape with a number of changes designed to combat real world trading; these included two new mini-games: Bounty Hunter and Clan Wars, as well as changes to the trading system, the party system, and a number of others.

Background
On 10 December, 2007, Jagex added two new mini-games to RuneScape, along with adding more bankspace and allowing free players to use the Duel Arena. However, with the new Bounty Hunter game, Jagex decided to change the Wilderness. Jagex updated the Wilderness so that players could no longer fight each other. Instead, they must fight in the Bounty Hunter or Clan Wars mini-game.

Riots
Immediately, riots began to happen across RuneScape. Players began chanting various phrases, such as "Jagex ruined RS", "RuinedScape", "We pay to PK", and others. Worlds became full with players congregating in cities such as Falador and Edgeville. Eventually, Jagex moderators arrived at the riots to try to break them up, though without success.

Forum overload
The official forums were constantly up and down during the day; at times, more than 1,000 users were on the Rants forum; a record never before seen (the Rants forum is typically one of the most popular forums, but usually only averages 200 active users, rarely rising above 300). It is believed the forums can not handle the large volume of users ranting about the updates, causing them to continually be timed out. They come back within a few minutes to a few hours. The forums were overrun with users encouraging others to cancel their subscriptions and create more riots.

Mod Stevew Incident
On 25 June 2008, Mod Stevew was in the Arcanists 9 lobby. He was flamed by many players, he reportedly banned several of them from FunOrb. When asked about the Wilderness player killing being returned, he said it would not be coming back.



Subscription cancellations
According to TimesOnline the changes cost Jagex 60,000 subscriptions. This is likely to be the highest number of members lost to a single update. It is unknown, however, how many of these subscriptions were lost due to abandoned accounts or how many were lost due to the sudden decrease in RWT macro accounts.