Thursday, November 22, 2007

Jagex Battle with Runescape Scammers

Jagex have attempted many things to combat the scammers in runescape and have succeeded to a limited extent with recent changes and planned future changes to the game.

Runescape scams come in various forms and many old scams were initiated by macro users buying up all resources available in the shop and controlling the number of large scale suppliers of resources.

In early october, Jagex redone how shops work and now there is a tabbed window where the shop stock is infinite but more expensive than the player stock. This improvement by Jagex has resulted in making an impact on legitimate merchanters in the game but has also made a much bigger impact on players using macros to buy shop stock that could later be used in trade scams with quick switching of numbers.

The development in october was the first in a series of game developments aimed at limiting the impact of players who try to scam other people. Lootshare helped to prevent so called friends lying about what was dropped in multi-combat zones when fighting larger monsters while the assist system directly helped people protect their items by borrowing the skills of other people... meaning no items were traded which would prevent a scammer from being able to logout after receiving items.

This bodes well to impact how much scammers affect playing runescape, but all players should still be aware of trust scams and never to become a victim of these by lending out highly valued items to so called ingame friends. In addition, players should not download any suspicious files on any runescape fan site as it could lead to a keylogger being installed.

An interesting thread on zybez community forums can shed more light on this type of behaviour:
Zybez Helping the fight against runescape scam sites