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. It can even get them in legal trouble as well, as the real world trading companies sell stolen Runescape property.

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 do it with the public.

Rule breaking
Real world item traders often get money and items in-game through devious means; they use bots to gather money and items, exploit bugs in the game, and scam players of their items and accounts, therefore making them the cause of the majority of rulebreaking ingame.

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 10 December 2007, 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, albeit with some penalties. 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. Much later, Jagex also made player V.S. player worlds where players can attack each other anywhere in the world except in some banks and guilds.

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 been illegal trades of money for items and gold, but it caused many larger problems. Jagex stated that many RWT's committed credit card fraud, using stolen credit card numbers to pay for their p2p gold-farming accounts, costing Jagex a large amount of money.

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. Another method was transferring the items between accounts via Bounty Hunter. If one wishes to keep their account as safe as possible it is strongly advised that you do not visit ANY sites offering services that break any one of the RuneScape rules, as most of them will request, or through use of malicious software steal your account information. After the update the cost of gold rapidly increased. Some RWTs have been using the Grand Exchange to merchant items with the Buyer and Seller, by buyer buying a certain item at its lowest, and then selling it back for its highest. This is Very common with low trade amounts. Higher Amounts usually do not use this method, but them simply macroing the Buyer's Account.

Drop Parties
On May 15 2009, in order to further combat the problem of real world trading, Jagex made it so there are only two worlds for drop parties, and a bank PIN is needed to deposit items into the chest.