[2020] Follow Up: Discounted Key Oddment Exploit – August 24th 2020

I literally just came back to RS today and this was a hell of a read.

Obviously this has been made incredibly more difficult by how long the bug was active.

4 of the accounts above have been proactively so that we can do further investigations before taking a final action.

Proactively what?

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I feel like this one is tough because this was an exploit that was very clearly and visibly active to do, and the fact it took so long to address probably led to people using this method as normally game breaking things like this are addressed quickly with comms put out.

I imagine some streams were even shown with the method so this has caught out people who just did it via word of mouth. :(

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EDIT:

I spoke to Wazzy on his stream here's my main points

• I feel like this should have been posted on a stream day so a official stream can then follow this up afterwards.
• The fact, that it took 7 hours to identify the issue to then fix it has created this problem where people have assumed it's "fine" and then being banned because of it, it should have been spotted quicker and dealt with sooner.
• I saw the posts about people paying for keys legit and being banned and that really isn't ideal whatsoever and has exacerbated the issue much more.

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EDIT 2:

An additional point

• Do the rollbacks, and issue a final warning outlining the entire issue, but a ban I feel like is a bit excessive, it was a very visible exploit.

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EDIT 3:

Likely my final edit, but the conversation on what is considered bug abuse has to be considered, someone who uses a method to get outside a boss barrier to then attack the boss without taking damage is in essence bug abuse, the bug abuse stance really needs official confirmation

Just Echoing my replies to this twitter post on Reddit too.

We've classed this this as an exploit, not a bug. The exploit allowed players to gain a significant advantage over other players, which we deemed unfair. This has also been the reason we decided to take action.

The following might not have been reflected in the follow up news post, but we've used a very high thresholds in order to ensure only those who knowingly exploited this for their personal gain got punished. Your average Joe will not have received any punishment.

I didn't realise this happened prior to my original message but that's just crap :(

It is an exploit, absolutely not a bug.

How did you notify them? And did you get an acknowledgment the issue was known?

At the time I wrote the post I said it was but have said afterwards it’s an exploit, didn’t want to edit it at the time to suddenly change the messaging.

Hi everyone. We appreciate there are a lot of thoughts and feelings around this topic, and we hear you. Thanks for your patience while we all regrouped here at Jagex over the course of last night and today.

We have been reviewing this further with key team members and senior team leaders, and we do feel this warrants a deeper investigation which we will be doing over the coming days. In the meantime, we do feel that the initial player bans were done in accordance with our policy on knowingly exploiting a bug or error (found here: https://www.runescape.com/game-guide/rules). However, we will also be discussing this in our review as well as part of that deeper investigation.

This will be an absolute priority for us when we all return to the studio on Tuesday  (Monday is a Bank Holiday in the UK). We are aware that this is after the ban expiry for 3 day accounts, and we'll be taking that into account if any reviewed action takes place.

We'll continue the conversation with all of you as soon as we can, whether there are changes to these actions or otherwise. Thanks again for your patience on a response and we'll have updates to share as soon as those conversations take place on Tuesday.