During last weekend’s annual RuneFest event, RuneScape developer Jagex announced an interesting new feature coming to the venerable MMO in just a few months... Bank Bidders auctions.
The Bank Bidders feature will allow players to bid in-game currency on Mystery Boxes that contain gear that was seized from a banned player’s account. The contents of each Mystery Box won’t be known until the auction concludes and the winning bidder opens it, which means a participant could wind up bidding a boatload of currency for what amounts to a bunch of in-game junk, or they could strike gold and discover a treasure trove of high-level equipment or materials. According to Jagex, potential bidders won’t go in completely blind, as they will be able to see some basic details about the banned account whose stuff they are bidding on.
“We’re only going to tell you a little bit about these accounts. 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.”
RuneScape lead designer Dave Osborne compared the Bank Bidders feature to the popular reality show Storage Wars, in which people gather and bid on the right to open up a storage locker whose owner hasn’t paid rent for in months. The people bidding don’t know what’s in the locker until after they win the auction, which means they have to balance how much money they’re willing to bid against the potential money they could make by selling the contents of the locker.
The Bank Bidders feature is expected to go live sometime in November of this year.
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