After Tournament Scandal, RuneScape Dev Unsure What To Do With $20K Prize

The winner of last week's Deadman Autumn Invitational, the premier RuneScape competitive event for the season, has been disqualified in a cloud of problems that, according to developer and publisher Jagex, includes "targeted DDoSing, allegations of staff favoritism, broken game mechanics, and unfair disqualifications."

Old School RuneScape's Deadman mode is a unique form of player vs player (or PVP) game design where the entire game world is turned into an arena for combat. Hosted on separate servers from the main game, Deadman is a way of encouraging competitive RuneScape players and clans to focus in on that form of gameplay while allowing RuneScape itself to exist within the strange world of competitive esports. A key feature of this esports strategy is the Deadman Invitational series, which is made up of seasons and culminates in a Final Hour where the final surviving players of that season compete to be the last person standing and the winner of $20,000.

The Deadman Invitational is more complicated than your average esports tournament, however, because it is build from the skeleton of an MMO.

To make it to the final stages of the Autumn Invitational, players had to fulfill two critical objectives. First, they had to be one of the top 2,000 RuneScape players during the autumn season of the Deadman PVP mode, which opened all the way back at the beginning of July. Second, they had to login to a special Deadman server on September 18th so that they could begin to level up new characters who needed to survive in a permadeath gameplay mode until September 23rd.

To put this in perspective, playing in a Deadman Invitational is like playing two months of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds before playing a five-day-long game that takes place inside of a level grinding session for World of Warcraft. When the permadeath, PVP gameplay had whittled the 2,000 players down to 200, they were all transported to an archipelago where they were forced to duel. Then, when those 200 had been reduced to merely four players, those players were then put into a combat scenario where only one could win. The last player standing, 5PLUS50K12, was awarded $20,000 dollars after this harrowing ordeal.

However, the problems in this Autumn Invitational started well before that moment, when the playfield was down to 200 players. From the perspective of the tournament's design, this is the moment when players who are grouped together in clans are, at least theoretically, turn on each other. The goal of the island design idea is to make sure that there is a final person standing for the 2v2 and 1v1 battles that finish up the Invitational.

But one entire island of remaining players was controversially disqualified due to their failure to fight in the eyes of the tournament organizers. Many other players, in an unrelated-yet-compounded incident, were disconnected from the game in what some community members are calling a mass DDoS attack.

In Jagex's statement about the event, 5PLUS50K12's ultimate disqualification has been chalked up to his running of a botnet that garnered him and his clanmates an unfair advantage, although the exact use and specification of what that bot net was doing mostly exists in the land of YouTube speculation.

The Autumn Invitational has revealed that RuneScape is both hugely popular and perhaps also not quite ready to step into the spotlight of other contemporary competitive esports. Blatant player manipulation of both in-game actions (such as the botnet) and out-of-game DDoS attacks suggests that Jagex has a long way to go with fostering a competitive community that respects both the competition and other players.

While the Deadman competitive mode might be one of the most interesting ones out there, it also seems like some members of the community are making it a risky venture to wade into.