So, a month or so back jagex started a poll as to whether the players of runescape wanted to have free-trade and the wilderness back. My first reaction to this? Uh-oh. I pretty much stopped working on comics and artwork at this point, aside from a rather unfinished comptetition piece, until i saw how this whole thing played out.

Turns out? Overall pretty badly. I stopped playing runescape around the time the ban on "free-trade and the wilderness" really came into a big effect, around 3 years ago. I came back to a game with very little account hacking, almost zero real-world trading and no scamming whatsoever allowed. The community, whilst never perfect for runescape, was the friendliest I had remembered it being. With friend-orientated activities such as dungeoneering starting to take the place of conventional grind-to-99 skills and one-hit-wonder minigames.

Fast forward to a few weeks after the free trade update? Bots are swarming all over the essence mines and probably the tree spots as well (i've not personally checked), not even afraid to be level 3 characters with stupid names like "ysge", Scamming is back in a big way and I know of at least one person who has been hacked and lost a considerable amount of gp, as well as their name being changed to something humiliating.

And the icing on the really rubbish cake (some sort of fruit cake perhaps. with anthrax instead of sugar), i've heard you can now PAY to have a ban on your account removed. Essentially, you can pay to be exempt from the rules and do whatever you want too.

So, the question i've been asking is, do you really want to play a game run by people who will only do anything in the game so long as it gets the most amount of money? What's next? Payments for items and armor sets? Payments for bonus xp? payments for pre-leveled characters?

What's your opinions on this?