Players succeed in voting to boot RuneScape microtransactions

RuneScape players have voted to boot a vast amount of the game’s microtransactions to the curb. After developer Jagex called for the vote this week, it required 100,000 players to decide whether the massive multiplayer online game will continue as is or take a huge step away from the last 13 years.

Update Oct 31, 15:35: Jagex has said in response to the news:

“We’re thrilled that the vote has passed so quickly and that our players believe this is the best direction for RuneScape.

“We’ll be sharing our plans with our community once the vote closes on 12th November, but in the meantime we’d encourage our players to keep voting – every single vote matters to us and will act as a clear signal to us on how they feel about MTX and Treasure Hunter.”

Story continues:

As we reported yesterday, the vote will eliminate almost every kind of microtransaction from the game. The only one remaining is “Bonus XP”, a purchasable boost that Jagex reasoned certain players would want to help fit the game into their lives. It doesn’t immediately net you the points, but gives more when doing tasks in the game.

This does mean that once they roll the results into the game itself, there’s going to be an “amnesty” period for items related to the microtransactions. Things like Protean items, which are acquired through the Treasure Hunter mini game, give players the full XP for that particular skill the item is connected to, but don’t output anything. So a protean ingot won’t give anything if used, just the XP.

Jagex has said that this will be an “extended” grace period for players to use the items up. It’s recommended that players who’ve stashed them over the years wait for the next double XP event and burn through them then.

RuneScape players seem happy about microtransaction vote

Over on Reddit, a fan of the game posted a thread with over 2000 upvotes. It’s simply titled:

“We f#cking did it! We won!”

The top reply jokes that since Treasure Hunter is gone, Jagex will introduce a new feature: Squeal of Fortune. This was the original microtransaction mini game before Treasure Hunter came on the scene in 2014.

Another seemed a little surprised it “took more than 24 hours”, but another did point out that RuneScape 3 isn’t “exactly thriving”. However, the common consensus appears to be positive, and it’ll be intriguing to see how Jagex takes the MMO forward from here.