RuneScape referendum restores content

By Robert Purchese Published 17 January, 2011

Historic - hope they had the Cameron.

Gigantic old browser MMO RuneScape has witnessed an unprecedented act: a referendum to reinstate Free Trade and Wilderness to the game.

It worked: as of 1st February, both features will return.

A massive 91 per cent of the 1.2 million people taking part voted that both features should return.

"We have the most incredible community of gamers and we wanted to demonstrate how much we value them by handing this game changing decision over to them," Jagex straight-talking leader Mark Gerhard commented.

"I firmly believe that the Wilderness represents the ultimate risk versus reward experience in any MMO and the incredible support for the campaign demonstrates that our players agree. It has been fantastic to watch the community mobilise in support of the update and we can now introduce these features certain in the knowledge that they are what our community want."

RuneScape head Christoph Vietzke observed that the community "have sent us a very clear message".

The Free Trade allows players to gift money and items to friends - an act that can aid the process of gold farming.

The Wilderness is considered the most dangerous area within RuneScape; a place where all items can be looted by other players from your corpse. Sounds like old-school Ultima Online.

Do you wish another MMO would hold a referendum to restore a feature? If so, what would that be?

Me? Reinstate the glorious berserker damage in Dark Age of Camelot. Or keep cleric Smite damage high and the area-of-effect, instant-cast mesmerise spell powerful. Can you tell which classes I played?

RuneScape!

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds. @Clert on Twitter.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (10) Latest comment 1 year ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • thomaspower0 #1 1 year ago

    So they ruined the game for about 4 years, and now they reintroduce the good features...

    Great marketing.

  • gjgjg #2 1 year ago

    bet the person who made the initial call to remove those features feels like a fool... A FOOL!

  • Mnia786 #3 1 year ago

    Didn't they remove the wildy in dec 07?
    It made it difficult but still playable but I left soon after (college, uni). To be honest, Jagex are the only MMO dev that did anything against gold farming - they could have sold it themselves like wow but didn't as they preferred that everyone was equal (unless you had a rich mate ofc). You could not walk past a yew tree on a f2p world without the being 100 x99df98gf9 lvl 3's waiting with their rune hatchets.
    Yes, it made resources cheaper but they said they lost money cos they had to refund credit card companies as most bot nets were run with illegal cc info.

    @dark, my bad. Remember some proper pro looking website where you could buy wow gold so got confused. Apologies!
    Edited by Mnia786 at 17/01/11 @ 20:12

  • darkmorgado #4 1 year ago

    To be honest, Jagex are the only MMO dev that did anything against gold farming - they could have sold it themselves like wow

    Eh? Blizzard don't sell wow gold.
    Are you sure you're not thinking of EVE and the plex system?

  • Timbercottage #5 1 year ago

    @gjgjg

    That would be Andrew Gower then

  • darkmorgado #6 1 year ago

    @dark, my bad. Remember some proper pro looking website where you could buy wow gold so got confused. Apologies!

    Fair enough. I'd argue that Blizzard has done a hell of a lot to combat gold farming, considering their substantial legal actions against bot operators and organisations that promote this sort of activity. Selling of gold is fairly common in so-called "free" MMOS though.

  • Branoic #7 1 year ago

    The whole referendum idea was a nice little PR stunt.

    "we gave the players a vote to say they wanted more stuff in the game, and they voted yes!"

    Well they'd hardly have voted 'no' would they?
    Edited by Branoic at 18/01/11 @ 07:16

  • roquey Verified Lead Quality Assurance Tester and Compliance Specialist, Universally Speaking #8 1 year ago

    Heh i decided to log in see if i still had my 100m, only to find my pass had been changed and i cant remember the bank pin code to see if id lost everything. fail

  • referendumnovoter #9 1 year ago

    Your article misstates the result of the referendum. You state:

    "A massive 91 per cent of the 1.2 million people taking part voted that both features should return."

    The correct statement is that 91% of the 1.2 million VOTES CAST were in favor....

    Jagex made NO effort to prevent multiple votes by players; in fact they actively ENCOURAGED making new accounts to vote with. The people in favor of the proposal tended to have more accounts to begin with, (PKers have more accounts than other types of players, generally) and people in favor tended to be fanatical and less honest in general (PKers and botters who were in favor of the free trade aspect).

    The end result was that "yes" voters multivoted in huge numbers while "no" voters tended strongly to vote once each. Only Jagex can say what the actual percentage of PLAYERS in favor was, but since they had obviously already decided to return free trade and the old wilderness before announcing the two votes (based on the incredibly biased and poorly designed polls), they are unlikely to ever release that data.

  • gypsyr0ad #10 1 year ago

    The biggest part about this vote is that Jagex claims to have over 10 million active players, and Jagex did nothing to stop multiple votes and they still only received 1.2 million votes on the biggest issue of the game.
    why didnt the other 9 million people vote?

    And the most comical thing about this that gold farming is back as well as all the bots, and people are thinking Jagex is trying to ban them all when in fact Jagex wants them in the game because they need the extra membership fees that goldfarmers are willing to pay.
    Mean while the games economy is failing horribly and Jagex seems more concerned with updating the game with more and more failed glitches that dump even more gold into the economy.

    Jagex once knew how to run a game but lost that idea long ago, and the only reason it is staying afloat is by the kids parents that pay for their kids and all the goldfarmers.

    So in short, I wouldnt recommend any game they introduce to my worst enemy, even if its free to play.
    Jagex forgot long ago what makes a game fun, they are more concerned with lining their pockets with cash, which any means possible.
    Their runefest was proof that they are desperate for money, since they charged a huge fee to attend and sold tickets that included an in game virtual item.

    Good marketing would have thrown that event for free as a way to give back to those who stuck by the game when it was at its worst, not leach its players for every nickle it could get from them, then sell out the game to goldfarmers.