After burning down an iconic MMO casino, Old School RuneScape spends 2 years crafting a new anti-gambling bomb because 'Deathmatching' was a huge source of real-world trading

Old School RuneScape Smite collab — (Image credit: Jagex / Hi-Rez / YouTube via Xbox)

Two years ago, Old School RuneScape banned the Duel Arena, an area of the game where players would gather to gamble for money and high-level gear through combat. Now, developer Jagex says it's banning an alternative form of high-stakes dueling.

In a statement, Jagex said that in 2022, it had decided that the Duel Arena was "unacceptable" in line with its rules against real-money trading (RMT). Since then, it says, "players have been pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable" in their attempts to find another way to get their gambling fix.

One of those ways was "Deathmatching," a to-the-death PvP fight where the winner would get to keep the agreed-upon high-end gear that the loser dropped. The problem, says Jagex, is that Deathmatching is "majorly, if not always, linked to real-world trading." As a result, it "takes away from genuine PvP," and as an increasingly common source of RMT, has also become associated with account purchasing.

Jagex says it's spent two years working on banning Deathmatching because it didn't want gambling players to simply move onto less visible spaces. The developer admits that those players are likely to try that, but "we've been working hard to ensure that we have a robust system in place to accurately detect and punish players participating in this activity."

Deathmatching will be banned in seven days' time, resulting in a three-day ban and "wealth removal" for a first offense, with repeated infractions resulting in permabans. If you're simply engaging in standard PvP, however, you should be fine, as Jagex thinks it's nailed down a way to only target the RMT side of Deathmatching.

RMT has become an increasingly big issue across several MMOs over recent years and is certainly not something limited to Jagex. OSRS does, however, remain a substantial draw for traders, and things like Duel Arena had the capacity to be a major part of that. Our resident RuneScape expert, Austin, tells me that "untold trillions" of gold exchanged hands on the sands of the arena, and even if Deathmatching was only a small slice of that action, it still would have been something Jagex was keen to shut down.