Yes, they didn't but then there were very few multiple account players until they did use bonds. Bonds gave the company a lot more money than regular membership. When you had to pay real money for it, it was very common to have players with only one account. If you saw a player with 3 accounts or more, he was most likely a pker and they only made up 8% of the accounts, even with multiple accounts.
In a poll they did in 2007 to support their decisions to get rid of the resource gathering bots, by putting all the resources in a grand market, they found that 46% of the players played the game for the skills, not pking, which only made up 8% of the player base. Another 42% played the game mainly for the quest, and thus had to do a lot skilling. Even those that played the game for the minigames (10%) were more common than pkers. ONLY merchants (4%) were fewer in numbers, despite jagex stated belief.
Unfortunately, in the early days of osrs, they did another poll and lumped skillers in with pvm/bossers, and thus made it look like the vast majority of players wanted mainly combat updates. Ever since then they have made it harder and harder for skillers to play the game and the number of players online had shown that.
Due to jagex decisions to snub the skillers, the player base went from millions of active accounts, to less than a quarter mil and now with the rising bonds, its going to fall to much less that. IF the bonds hit 10 mil, they will be lucky to have 100k active accounts.
19-Jul-2023 17:39:18
