Runescape, the MMORPG game recognised by the Guinness Book of World Records as the most popular free-to-play MMO game has taken a new step in protecting its players from a recent spate of MMO-related account hacking. From what I understand, it works kinda like Steam when it comes to authorizing devices. Check out the rest of the press release for details:

Jagex, the creators of the hugely popular and multi-award winning free-to-play online adventure game – RuneScape.com, today announced details of Jagex Account Guardian (J.A.G) –  a new free security feature that provides enhanced account security to protect RuneScape players from unauthorized game access commonly known as ”hijacking”.

Once enabled by players, J.A.G will allow players to associate specific trusted devices with their account to provide security beyond the traditional username/password.  Players can enable J.A.G  through their account settings on the RuneScape.com website, thereby helping to ensure their RuneScape account, and valuable in-game items are secure.

“Ensuring the integrity and security of our valued community’s information has always been a top priority for us, this recent update serves to strengthen the number of other innovative countermeasures we have developed over the past years” said Mark Gerhard, CEO of Jagex.

“Unfortunately a lot of people tend to use the same username and password on other websites, many of these are not well managed from a security standpoint and end up becoming compromised, others are simply phishing websites intended to steal player credentials, sadly the industry also has a very long list of high profile games publishers that have been hacked resulting sensitive customer account information being in the public domain”,  Gerhard went on to add, “Our players put a significant investment of both time and effort into their RuneScape accounts so it’s incumbent on us to remain at the very forefront of protecting their investment.

Once a player has enabled the Jagex Account Guardian, if their account is accessed from an unregistered device the player will have to go through additional layers of validation  to ensure that the account is not being hijacked.