The folks at Runescape have posted an overview of the changes in their recently overhauled Offence System.

As part of our focus on the RuneScape community, we’ve transformed our offence system; we’ve also made some changes to the Rules of RuneScape. Most importantly, many offences will now expire after 12 months.

The main reason we’ve done this is because we accept that many people learn from their previous mistakes, especially small offences committed long ago. This means that if you have an account that had offences on it, it’s entirely possible that they’ve been removed!

To support this, we no longer issue black marks, we simply record the offences themselves. If you log into the Offence Appeals page, you’ll see two pillars: one records offences that can result in being banned, the other records offences that can result in being muted. It should now be much simpler to see your account’s status and where you stand.

Read more here.