If you’ve ever played any game online odds are you have player or have heard of Runescape. Afterall, it is in the Guinness Book of World Records for the Worlds Largest Free MMORPG with over 200 million accounts. Well 2 Runescapians have actually paid for their tickets and hotel rooms by using in-game items. So how is this possible?
In most cases this would violate game rules for real-world trading, but Jagex have made it to where if you have in-game bonds, you can use them for their upcoming event RuneFest in London. Jagex introduced Bonds a couple years ago where you could use different payment methods to get an in-game Bond and use it to either sell for GP (in-game currency), or for other things such as a 14-day membership subscription. So for 2 tickets and 2 nights at a hotel would cost 180 bonds, which if you bought that on the Grand Exchange would costs a little over 1 Billion gp, or 500 million gp each.
Ever since the introduction of Bonds, 81% of those bonds have been used for Membership days and as also reduced the amount of in-game bots by 81%. Vice President of Runescape Phil Mansell had this to say…
“Our community responded fantastically to the introduction of Bonds a year ago, which resulted in many millions of Bonds being purchased and redeemed. A year later, nearly 20% of RuneScape players pay for their membership subscription through their in-game efforts and half of the premium RuneCoin currency comes from bond redemptions. This has also helped bring greater stability to the game economy, and has reduced incidents of gold farming and botting to an all-time low.”
