[2023] Migrated to Jagex Account. "Account disabled". What am I supposed to do?

Hey I've had a look into this for you.

It is very rare for us to disable a Jagex Account and it is almost exclusively only used in situations where a Jagex account only has characters added to it that were not created by the person who owns the Jagex account.

This relates to account hijackers but can also occur where a character is shared or sold, and the character has ended up on a Jagex account that is not owned by the person who created the character. Further, the character creator would also need to reach out to us to raise the ownership challenge to instigate the investigation.

I can see from some of the responses you've had from our support team that there is some confusion. I think this stems from your inquiry to us which said words to the effect that your ‘character has been imported to a Jagex account that is not yours’.

In response, our support messaging focused on the link between your support ticket IP and Jagex account creation IP, which we could see matched, and so the advice given to you focused on checking the e-mail address used for the Jagex account as it was assumed to be a login confusion issue.

However there was an underlying character ownership issue, so we should have digged deeper and picked up on that aspect, so apologies for any confusion caused.

So that is what happened .. because there was a dispute raised with the ownership of the character, and we could see that the character was created in a completely different country to where you live, that triggered an in-depth ownership check, and as a result it was deemed that the character was created by somebody else. We therefore removed the character from your Jagex account.

As you had no other characters that you created on your Jagex account, your Jagex account was also disabled as part of this process. If your Jagex account also had other characters that you had created, then the Jagex account would not be disabled and you'd be free to continue to use your Jagex account to play those characters.

I hope that helps explain the circumstances of this situation, and I'd like to assure all casual readers of this thread that we only disable Jagex accounts in very rare situations, where the only characters on the Jagex account were not created by the Jagex account user (or where we hold evidence that the Jagex account user is under 13 years old and not eligible to play).

Thanks

Not sure that is fair - more accurate I would say 'tldr - don't add characters you didn't create to your Jagex Account' ...

What sort of questions do you expect that would be helpful? I've had a read and most of the comments seem to be players with opinions already dug in from threads such as this one - sadly. "Are Jagex accounts safe" - Yes! Upgrade now.

/u/Mod_Stevew's team have already created a Jagex Accounts FAQ and as you can see on the Upgrade your RuneScape character to Jagex account (step 2) there already is a 'warning' page with some other details players may find useful, that page is negatively affecting our objectives for Jagex Accounts but we understand how important that page is.

There's only so much reading an average player will do so we need to be careful how long each step is explained especially that page I linked above. How many players have you seen ask how rituals work in RuneScape for Necromancy because they spacebarred through the tutorial ;)

Oh no :(

Forgot where I am! Sorry everyone, got too excited talking about Jagex accounts haha

If you struggle during the account migration, feel free to reply here and I'll help :)

Don't worry we got you! People obviously move around, so that isn't an issue. However if someone then challenges the creation and claims that somebody else has imported a character they created to a Jagex Account, we'll then do an investigation.

1. Here you go
2. You'll need to access our games through the Launcher or our Mobile apps. The Jagex Launcher only supports our official RuneScape and Old School RuneScape Clients and RuneLite with HDOS becoming available in the future
3. The person who created the character can dispute things if somebody else adds it to a Jagex account, and we'll investigate case-by-case to try and help
4. The limit is 20 currently. You can re-order characters. Archiving characters is not a confirmed future feature, but the Publishing Platform team are looking into it

edit; for transparency, some of my answers above are direct C+P from resources we already supply not custom - a good resource spot is here

Ideally the challenge would come from the actual character creator, if we can verify their claim we can then move the character to another Jagex Account. Presumably you friend doesn't want the character, so if we do release an archive character feature in the future that might help.

Nope he is all good there - scenarios below .... (your friend would be the first one)

• Jagex account has multiple characters, some are not created by the Jagex account user, dispute arises, characters moved off the Jagex account but legitimate characters remain and can still be played

• Jagex account has multiple characters, ALL are not created by the Jagex account user, dispute arises, characters moved off the Jagex account and Jagex account disabled

• Jagex account has one character, it is not created by the Jagex account user, dispute arises, character moved off the Jagex account and Jagex account disabled

Nope, people move about all the time, if you created the character you are all good

Once you have a Jagex account he can't recover it because there is no manual recovery route - all recovery is tied to the Jagex account user. He can raise a dispute, in which case we will carry out an investigation, and one possible outcome is that we transfer the character to him, if we believe he created the character.

BUT if you created it, any investigation should side with you. In the unlikely event that the character is moved, you'll still have access to all other characters you created via your Jagex account.

We don't condone account sharing, but for our ownership investigation to kick in the creator would need to proactively contact us and dispute ownership - if they don't do that we will side with the current player and assume that the person playing the account NOW is the creator but has just moved - we assume good intent unless anyone challenges it!

Correct - we assume no foul play, if that is questioned, we'll take a look and try to reach a sensible outcome.

This, although you've phrased it in a way that I couldn't ;)

To be fair OP has probably been quite stung by this, they were gifted/shared/bought the account - and have now lost access, rules are rules but the guy's had a tough ride so I deliberately tried to position this as more an 'insight' than a 'smackdown'

With over 20 years of account creation and over 300 million accounts created - it seems to me there will always be disputes that will arise, but Jagex accounts are a massive step towards stronger account security and go a long way to minimise the chances of human error and malicious recovery

In short a move away from 'knowing info' and leaning more towards meta data held about the account - a factual data based review compared to an assumption based on what a person knows about an account - still not perfect, but more robust IMO. So answering the security question 'where were you born' (to which the answer 'hospital' is likely to score well) or knowing a historical password in a climate where data breaches/dox are common place - is now replaced with a more analytical view of factual data (geo/IP footprints and similar).

While I strongly disagree with your comments about my colleagues in support, Jagex accounts are not developed by our Support team.

The 'Web team' (now known as Publishing Platform) developed this system and maintains it, Jagex Support might need to be contacted if there are technical issues but they've been doing a great job of that behind the scenes.

The overwhelming majority of players have a smooth experience and have quietly just upgraded and now gain all the additional security features players have been begging us for. Winter 2017 is no more.

As for this specific case, as Steve mentioned - the player had already spoken to our support team twice. The person who actually owned the account had a great experience of our support team - they got their account back and its now much more secure on a Jagex account. If you aren't buying / selling or sharing accounts that are disputed, you have nothing to worry about.