As you may be aware, last Wednesday (January 1st) a bug in the ‘Firework Festival’ Treasure Hunter promotion allowed some players to re-roll prizes indefinitely.
This bug affected players who had not participated in the previous version of this promotion that ran (without issue) in January 2018. As soon as we became aware of the problem, we followed our usual escalation procedures and deployed a hotfix within a matter of hours.
Sadly, some players chose to abuse the bug to generate large amounts of wealth. This is strictly against our rules , and always leads to related accounts being banned, without exception. To be clear on our policy: people who abuse bugs are not welcome in RuneScape, regardless of how long they have played or paid for.
Upon investigation we discovered that there was an increased injection of GP into the game during the period the bug was live (approximately double that seen on a typical day). This is not a significant amount in terms of the overall game economy, and Bond Prices and Grand Exchange Trades have not been adversely affected. We will continue to monitor this impact and take further actions if necessary.
At the time of writing, we have permanently banned 15 accounts and temporarily banned approximately 300 others whilst we investigate further and take additional corrective action to remove items, XP and GP gained through abuse of the bug.
Thank you to all those who alerted us to the issue, and for your patience whilst we investigated the matter.
The RuneScape Team
Community Manager! @JagexPoerkie07-Jan-2020 16:53:23
