RuneScape to Auction Off Banned Players’ Inventories

Jagex, developer of fifteen year-old MMORPG RuneScape, has announced that it is introducing a new feature to the game which will allow players to bid on the inventory items of banned users. The feature, dubbed Bank Bidders, has been compared to reality TV show Storage Wars, and will allow RuneScape players to bid on job lots of items in blind auctions.

““We’re only going to tell you a little bit about these accounts,” Dave Osborne, lead designer of RuneScape, told the audience at the this year’s RuneFest conference on Saturday (via RockPaperShotgun). “We’re going to tell you maybe the age of the accounts, what they liked to do, maybe their skill levels, and then we start getting you – we’re still talking about it, maybe there’s a raffle system, maybe it’s a bidding system, but ultimately one of you will win that account and whatever is in it.”

Osborne then revealed a concept image of the feature (above), which shows the 12-year-old account of a banned woodcutter – punished for using a macro to cut wood – and his secret inventory to be bid on. Since the account is so old, it’s a fair bet that this woodcutter is carrying some tidy loot, but the true contents of the character’s pockets are unknown.

The full RuneFest 2016 Twitch stream can be watched here (skip to 1:46:00 for Bank Bidders coverage).