Runescape: Unbalanced Trade Riot

The Unbalanced Trade Riot (or the World 1 riot) is a riot that started sometime before (9 PM Jan 2. US eastern time) 1:00 A.M., UTC time, in early morning of January 3, 2008. This riot was caused by many F2P players finding that the update instituting a trade limit was unfair, and was unprovoked and unneeded. It is also the first major riot to ever occur in F2P.

A player stands at the Duel Arena for the very last second of full-trading RuneScape.

It started a year prior with the growing problem of illegal trade of coins, which is more commonly known as “real world item trading”. In the months prior to the Unbalanced Trade Riot, Jagex was cracking down on RWT by creating multiple updates to stop RWT, but unfortunately penalized legit players. Some players were also activating Protection Prayers, as F2P players cannot activate Retribution, a P2P prayer usually used in riots.

Unlike a similar riot, the “Pay to Pk Riot”, which lasted multiple days, this one lasted around seven hours; sometime before 1:00 A.M. (UTC), and ended sometime before 7:30 A.M., at which time only five, if even that many, people were still rioting.

As the rioting continued, many phrases where used as followed.

Pro-Jagex phrases

• “Go Jagex!”
• “RWT is abolished!”
• “Blame the gold-sellers!”

Anti-Jagex phrases

• “We hate Jagex!”
• “R.I.P. Runescape 12/10″ (Reference to the aftermath of the Bounty Hunter update.)
• “Trading is ruined!”

“Ruinedscape, not Runescape

• “Fagex, not Jagex!”

Impact

This riot is quite significant in the sense that this is the first time free players started rioting. However, due to the short lifespan of the riot, the riot is relatively small compared to the recent Pay to PK Riot, and thus received less publicity and moderators’ presence. Furthermore, the riot was held in World 1, where many players would be busy with their in-game tasks and the server was nearly always fully packed, and thus most players were ignorant of the riot.