With the changes to and eventual closure of the Duel Arena, the Old School RuneScape team promised a replacement. Now that full replacement has been revealed: The PvP Arena. The new option has several differences intended to create a better and balanced player experience and reduce the scams that had become all too common.
The Duel Arena was shut down (and demolished!) to begin the new year following some changes back in November. The number of scams and RMT spammers began to make a longstanding feature need to change. Yet those changes were always meant to be a bridge to a complete replacement. That replacement is designed to be more secure but still intended to let players have the duels (and rewards) that come with good competition.
The PvP Arena works like this: indicate that you’re looking for a fight and the system will take care of it. Keep playing and get notified when a match is available and once confirmed, you’ll be taken to the PvP alternate save world to fight a player of a similar skill level. Since all these PvP battles are taking place on an alternate server, when you participate, all of your levels and items will be left behind and you’ll get a standard set of stats and get to pick a combat style, which will bump up certain stats. Then you pick a secondary combat style different from the first.
Once fights are complete, you’ll earn rank points and reward points if you win a PvP match (1v1 battle or tournament) that the game arranges for you. While you will be able to create duels and tournaments manually, these won’t reward those points.
Following the efforts to reduce RMT and make the experience better, any non-cosmetic rewards will only be usable in PvP enabled areas. You won’t be able to attack anything but other players with them too. Some of these rewards are untradeable, where you would expect them to be tradeable. This is by design to further reduce appeal to RMT spammers and scammers looking for items.
You can see the full list of rules, rewards, info on grouping, and more in the new, overhauled PvP experience replacing the old Duel Arena over at Old School RuneScape. OSRS is also marking its 9th anniversary
