Update September 21, 2016: Jagex’s Mod Osborne has taken to Reddit to outline how why he thinks Bank Bidders will be such a great feature, and how we can expect it to look when it’s released.
And the first reveal is that Jagex won’t be rolling Bank Bidders out as a feature, instead Mod Osborne believes it will be implemented as an event that occurs once every few months, similar to currently recurring events like The Drop or The September Raffle. “It’s not a persistent piece of game content,” wrote Mod Osborne.
If you’re looking for more activities than you can shake a stick at, here are some other great MMOs on PC.
“So, what will it look like on launch? We’re still designing that, but one pitch hits all of the buttons for me. Imagine there are five anonymous accounts in front of you (and they will be completely anonymous – we are not interested in manipulation of the game) and you examine each of them to find out their stats, account age and some other relevant details. You have one ticket and one ticket only: you cannot purchase any more than that, and the cost of that ticket is somewhere within the realms of 100,000gp.
“You decide who to place your ticket on; you decide on the account that looks most likely to be awesome. Everyone else does the same, placing their 100,000gp ticket on the account that is most likely to give great spoils. At the end of the week, no more tickets can be placed. We (Jagex) randomly pick a winner of each account. And, then, one by one, the bank accounts of each of the banned players is revealed, most likely on a stream. We find out – as I said before – whether the player has a bronze pickaxe, or a surfeit of great stuff.”
Of course Jagex are going to reward the wisdom of all players who selected the correct account by giving them something rare and special, most likely a cosmetic item.
Mod Osborne also made a case for why he thinks the event is special: “It will be a shot in the arm of fun, that’s worth logging in for. I also love Bank Bidders because it highlights, on a very large platform, that botters do not prosper. They get found out, they get their items taken away, and their accounts are no longer theirs.”
Finally, Mod Osborne addressed player concerns that the feature would flood the game’s economy with previously locked away rare items. “It is important to note that rares would be, well, rare on Bank Bidders – in terms of the broader economy, Bank Bidders would be adding a miniscule and negligible number of rares. The same goes for resources: we have looked into these accounts and the number of resources that would be added into the economy, and Bank Bidders wouldn’t make a dent on the daily introduction of resources into the game. It doesn’t even nudge the graph.”
So fear not, Party Hats won’t be flooding the Grand Exchange at a couple of gp a piece.
Original Story 18 September, 2016: Runescape’s annual community gathering RuneFest has been rumbling on this weekend where developers Jagex had a little surprise for attendees and the hard-working players at home.
On stage yesterday, as part of the rundown of what’s to come in the now 15-year-old browser-based MMO, the creators of Runescape announced they would be holding player auctions on the contents of banned players’ bank accounts.
The activity called Bank Bidders, inspired by trash reality TV show Storage Wars, will not allow bidders to know the contents of the accounts they are bidding on adding a bit of mystery to the auctions.
While you might end up with an inventory full of dirt, occasionally Jagex does ban insanely high value accounts for exploiting XP farming methods so you could just as easily end up on top of a goldmine.
Just like the TV show, you are given a glimpse into the value of the account, though instead of getting 30 seconds to look at a pile of junk in a garage in the American mid-west, you’re told how old the account was when it was banned, and how it ended up under the banhammer.
At least now all those ill-gotten resources aren’t lost into the void, eh?