about 3 years ago - /u/JagexHooli - Direct link

Hello ‘Scapers,

We have been investigating an exploit in Elite Dungeons that allows players to skip content in an unintentional way and have some important updates to share today.

Before we dive into the details, we want to be explicitly clear – skipping Elite Dungeons content to continually fight bosses is considered an exploit and will come with repercussions to protect the integrity of the game.

What's Happened So Far?

The Elite Dungeon Exploit has been something we’ve been looking into for some time, with it growing in priority for us over the past few weeks as the awareness and use of the exploit began to rise.

Since the early days of discovering the issue, we’ve deployed several smaller behind the scenes fixes to try and prevent abuse – but with each of the fixes, new workarounds emerged. It’s clear that resolving this will take some significant development work to identify a way to fully protect Elite Dungeons from this abuse.

The further investigations that will need to take place, followed by the actual work needed to implement any fix along with QA verification, puts our current production estimate at a minimum of two weeks of development time. This represents a significant amount of development work – work that needs to be balanced with delivering our schedule of regular content we know you want and expect each month.

What We’re Going To Do

Firstly, we’re going deliver a comprehensive fix as soon as we can. 

Protecting the integrity of the game is critical and we need to make time for this issue. We’ve heard you and we’ve made development capacity available immediately to get this into production. Our current provisional release date for the fix is estimated as March 15th and we’ll keep you updated if there’s any change to our projected timeline as development progresses.

Secondly, there’s the question of enforcement.

Moving forward from this message, anyone abusing this exploit will be subject to severe repercussions for their account.

We will also be taking action against the players who have already abused this exploit, including any possible ways that we can revert any gains from the abuse. Any ramifications will be based on the scale of abuse, similar to past exploit enforcements, and we’ll share more on this soon.

If needed, we also have a hotfix on standby to limit Elite Dungeons to Solo Story Mode, which would prevent further abuse until the fix is in place. This is really an option we want to avoid out of respect to the vast majority of you who enjoy the content as it was intended every day – but it is there if we need to take further action to protect game integrity.

Finally, we just wanted to close out with a thank you to all the players who have avoided the exploit and/or brought it to our attention. As many of you have rightfully called out, we could have been quicker off the mark and clearer on our stance. We first needed to have conversations to confirm the issues, options and actions to give you a clear picture of what we intend to do - and we hope the actions laid out today make clear the extent we’re willing to go through to protect the integrity of the game.

We’ll keep this conversation going and keep you updated as every element of this progresses. Back with more soon.

The RuneScape Team

External link →
about 3 years ago - /u/JagexHooli - Direct link

Originally posted by Fren-LoE

thank you, i'm glad to see a comprehensive response to this concerning issue. Please consider setting the dungeons to story mode for the time being as you will not be able to enforce those that are already abusing it from not continuing to do it. I know it wont be popular but its more important to keep these people from abusing the system and ultimately our game, let alone the integrity of some game modes.

That's totally an option for us if it becomes absolutely necessary. We're going to be acting as swiftly as possible on anyone abusing it from here on out - and if that's not effective enough, we have the hotfix lever as a backup plan as a more extensive preventative measure.