Posted by What you need to know about Jagex Accounts and the closed beta.
Hacked accounts and account security for OSRS have been an issue for as long as the game existed. This is because the in-game currency, OSRS gold, has a value outside of the game, and the game security is currently not excellent, which leaves accounts vulnerable to being hacked. Since there’s money motivation from the value of the in-game currency, we have both motifs for crime and vulnerabilities. Plenty of ill-intended people profit from exploiting this vulnerability and hacking accounts.
Taking Needed Security Measures
The hacked accounts are generally used in two ways: they are either depleted of anything that holds OSRS GP value and then abandoned, or they are further traded or sold generally to what’s known as bot farms. Generally, inactive accounts are hacked more often. Still, upon the return of the original account owners to the game, they get an empty bank or a banned account since players used it for botting.
This has frustrated many players, and since there is no item retrieval for Old School RuneScape, Jagex has been unable in many or most of these sad cases to do much for the victims. This has put the whole community in a bad position since everyone risks being hacked due to poor security, even when running a 2-factor authenticator. Even though Jagex brought info about account security through in game content: the Stronghold of Security, and even rewarded the players for going through this very content with a pair of colorful boots and more bank space, more was needed. The community rightfully demanded more account security.
This motivated Jagex to finally take steps towards improving the overall security of their accounts, and is on the way to accomplishing this with the Jagex accounts, which are currently in the closed beta stage.
Another measure of security taken by Jagex in expectations of the Jagex Accounts is blacklisting most third-party game clients. After that, Jagex integrated the most popular third-party client, RuneLite, into the Jagex Launcher. It has been encouraging the players to use it to switch between Jagex games and different accounts. This is because OSRS will allow for one character per account, and many veteran players have more than one account.
Planning the Steps
Jagex has only invited a minimal number of accounts to participate in the closed beta so that they can make sure that everything runs smoothly. After that, they plan on inviting more accounts to the closed beta.
While Jagex has yet to provide a timeframe for the closed beta since they are trying to take all the time they need to ensure everything is good, the next step will be an open beta where everyone who wants to hurry into better security can participate.
What you should take extra care of when upgrading your OSRS account to a Jagex account is that once you bring your main over, you should carefully decide whether or not you want your other characters or accounts linked to the same Jagex account or not. This is because you can create multiple Jagex accounts instead of one and add the characters, but you cannot log in to multiple characters belonging to different Jagex accounts. Keep that in mind when you look for your favorite OSRS Quest Service.
Parting Words
If one of your characters gets banned for whatever reason, that ban will extend to all the characters linked to the same Jagex account so that you might lose access to all of your OSRS GP from all your characters. However, using the Jagex account system will give you better security, so you will be less likely to lose your hard-earned OSRS gold using your OSRS accounts for sale because someone hacked your account.
Once you import your character to the Jagex account, you must set up and start using the new two-factor authenticator, and the old one won’t work anymore. The first character you import will be your main one and act as the upgraded account. After that, you can import more accounts or create new accounts or characters.
Jagex Launcher is available for Windows and MacOS, and Jagex will soon force all players to transform their Old School RuneScape accounts into Jagex Accounts for better account security.
