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"There are very clear (and recent) instances of RWT occurring on our end," Ayiza said in a follow-up message. "This wasn't an overnight decision, and I'm confident the ACT have made the correct call with the evidence they have to hand."

BTCs suggested in his video that the real-world trading ban may have been triggered by one of his in-game gold giveaways, something that he apparently does regularly—and that he's very careful about, he said, precisely to avoid getting caught up in any RWT trouble. At least three other player accounts were banned as part of this incident, apparently because they were being used to store some of BTCs' massive hoard of gold.

As noted by GamesRadar, BTCs has previously faced allegations from other Old School Runescape players that his gold giveaways are fixed, so that supposedly random giveaway winners are actually paying for the gold on the sly. There are also complaints that ranks in BTCs gambling clan were being sold through Discord. There's no concrete evidence available to the public to prove these allegations, but a good chunk of the Old School Runescape community on Reddit doesn't seem too surprised by this outcome, or convinced by BTCs' defense.

The just-introduced RuneScape battle pass has nowhere near the longevity of the 22-year-old game to which it belongs: after debuting the pass on September 4, developer Jagex plans to terminate it on December 3, it wrote in an October 6 update post.

RuneScape fans have won the war. They initiated it immediately after Jagex debuted the Hero Pass, which tacks onto the $80, 12-month, premier membership tier that unlocks every RuneScape area and gameplay mechanic. The Hero Pass was meant to give players a new event every three months in which they would do things like earn points for cosmetics—so, your typical battle pass, but players already couldn’t stand RuneScape’s increased reliance on microtransactions in its Treasure Hunter loot boxes.

"These themes are not reflective of a direction we're taking RuneScape in," Jagex said, in its blog update. "Hero Pass was a misstep," it admitted, whilst stating Hero Pass will run its full course "for those who invested time or money" into it.

Jagex pledged to get players involved in the development of new features earlier, citing Community Hitlist and Comp Cape polls as current examples. "If we do explore a new reward system, the message is clear - we need to involve players from the outset. We would also ensure this new reward system has no paid disparity, through types of membership or otherwise, around any content buffs or similar power-affecting concepts."

As was the case with Old School Runescape player Darth Microtransaction last week, some redditors are also unhappy with what they see as the preferential treatment BTCs received from the Jagex moderation team, which had an extensive private conversation with him immediately after the ban was imposed—a level of support that most players never see. That's about the only similarity between the cases, though. Unlike Darth Microtransaction, who glumly accepted responsibility for failing to properly secure his account (which was ultimately restored), BTCs said the problem in his case is the anti-cheat team at Jagex, who he described as "dumb" and "corrupt." Whether innocent or not, I strongly suspect that's not going to Buy RuneScape gold help him win his case.