Source FT Alphaville article
“Bots are basically okay” - New Jagex management
Discussion | J-Mod replyHi all, I just wanted to give some reassurance regarding the quote from the article mentioned in this post.
We know bots exist, just as much as you do when you see them in-game, but it’s important to highlight that the article does not accurately reflect our strategy. Our priority is to always ensure every player has a good experience when playing both RuneScape and Old School RuneScape.
Since the news of the acquisition came about, many of you have been saying we’re not banning bots on purpose, mostly pointing to how we’re padding out player numbers. That just isn’t true and would not be good for the game. We are banning bots, more than we ever have before. But the reality is, and this is something we’ve said time and time again, it’s an arms race. As fast as we ban them, new bots are made. We’re constantly working to keep ahead of this race, and we ARE working on bigger initiatives to tackle botting as a whole, although we aren’t ready discuss the details of this just yet.
To give some context in the form of data, here are some ban stats:
- Last year we banned over 6.9 million accounts.
- So far in 2024, each week on average, we ban over 2,300 RuneScape accounts.
- So far in 2024, each week on average, we ban over 67,000 Old School RuneScape accounts.
- Of these accounts, 2,800 are for botting popular boss-related content.
- Each week, around 1.5T GP is removed from the RuneScape economy.
- Each week, around 900B GP is removed from the Old School RuneScape economy.
We do hope to have further information in the coming days to cover some areas around botting, and how we’re handling bans, but it won’t go into the detail of the longer-term improvements. That will come later in the year, as we continue to develop our tech and tools. I also know this is something we’ve said in the past too, but it is happening, and I ask that you be patient as we work towards much bigger improvements than we’ve seen before.
Also, I’d like to point out that whilst it’s commonplace for people to have more than one account, I recently looked over the results of the annual survey and I can safely say based on that data alone, it’s not at the scale that has been quoted. Most respondents state they play on one account, with some of them having 2 accounts. It’s not that common for players to have more than 1-2 accounts total. Our internal data tracking systems say pretty much the same thing too.
I hope this provides some much-needed clarity for now, and I’ll end this by saying the following... Having Membership on multiple accounts does not factor into our decision making for applying bans. Ever.
I understand Jagex is a business and things need to be kept quiet. But I really appreciate some statistics like this where you first acknowledge the problem and then follow it up with you saying that Jagex is working on a fix (where you also say you can’t say much about it understandably), but also share numbers with us showing it is being tracked. Haters will always hate, but for this community that likes to point click and see numbers go brrrrrt, I think the whole community appreciates seeing some raw numbers on display.
In addition to being a business, jagex would also want to keep initiatives quiet so as to not tip off botters.
Also, in any industry, serious technical advancements are not simple projects. Even an intermediate strategy for tackling bots efficiently can take months to plan and years to develop / implement.
It is easy for us common players to point at the bots and yell about how nothing is being done. However, the goal is to develop a system that effectively manage the problem in the long term rather than short term brute force battles.
And for anyone who's ever worked on a legacy system, The phrase "without breaking anything else" should inspire cold sweats
r/DeadbyDaylight had the same issue with cheaters. They HAD to keep quiet beyond “we know it’s a problem, we’re working on it” and the community continued to doomsay until the update dropped and fixed a ton of issues. Not sure how they are now since I don’t play much, but I don’t remember cheaters the few times I played after that.
Cheaters are still common, though not for the average player. They have a 3rd party program that allows them to stream snipe and just ruin the days of streamers.
There's also the problem of subtle cheating. Someone might boost their movement speed by 5% when nobody can see them. You wouldn't know they are cheating but they are. Subtle wallhacks are also a thing and impossible to notice unless you have ways to see people through walls (like being a t1 myers with scratched mirror)
You say it’s an arms race but how come there’s obvious bots hitting crazy amounts of boss kc, single skill xp, etc that go unbanned for insane amounts of time.
Apologies for being super lazy, but I think Goblin has already said about as much as we're able to say on this topic generally, so sharing it again here in case you missed that:
ACT are working on trying to find a consistent and enforceable way to remove these players from the HiScores so that real players are actually able to secure spots - note that this applies to all content in the game, including things like CG. The ACT and Game Engine teams are investigating manual removal from the HiScores for accounts that have already been banned, should be banned or for any other reason should not still be appearing on the HiScores. Note that there are some players who are permanently banned but still appearing on the HiScores who are included in this manual removal.
And to add to that, a lot of these accounts are played by real people rather than botted. I do not doubt that some of them are involved in illicit activity, but what is posted above covers that point as much as I'm able to.
This comment always worried me cause it talks more about removing bots from high scores instead of permanently banning them.
How i read it is that jagex is trying to make players feel like there are no bots while the bots still run in the background. I dont know how else would you read Goblins comment? Especially the "manual removal from the hiscores for accounts that should be banned". I have no idea what you guys are cooking but why not just ban them at that point instead of remove them from the high scores
How do you get from this:
removal from the HiScores for accounts that have already been banned, should be banned or for any other reason should not still be appearing on the HiScores.
To this:
This comment always worried me cause it talks more about removing bots from high scores instead of permanently banning them.
It very clearly states that the problem is such that accounts which have already been banned or in general should not be appearing on the high scores - are currently still appearing on the high scores and they are looking for a way to remove such accounts from the high scores.
The way it reads to me is that an account being banned doesn't actually remove them from the high scores automatically.
User deleted comment
3mo
So any account with tens of thousands of KC is a bot? Shall we start automatically banning accounts once they reach that threshold?
"and yet cannot even detect bots that an untrained casual can detect"
What did you detect, exactly? You've detected nothing other than that an account has tens of thousands of boss KC. "Oh, but it must be a bot, it has barely any levels or other boss KC!" Sure, then, let's start auto-banning any accounts that meet those criteria -- no way we'd ban any real people on accident that way, right? Oh, and what are the criteria, exactly? Before killing 30,000 Zulrah, you need 7 Skotizo KC, 350 Barrows, 65 herblore, 57 slayer? Are you going to tell the bots that, or keep your random criteria hidden? In fact, better yet, let's just put you in charge, and any time you see an account you think is a bot, it gets banned. If it's a real player, sucks for them, and if it's a bot, guess what -- they're making a new account and going straight back to what they were doing in a matter of hours.
Oh, and one more thing: if you truly think only bots are getting tens of thousands of KC at a boss, I'd invite you to consider why people care about hiscores integrity in the first place: because there are actually people trying to get on the hiscores, which is a feat that requires tens of thousands of KC at most bosses. The dude named Rank 1 Cerb has over 200,000 KC at Cerb right now. Shall we go ahead and ban him as well?
Maybe the answer here is, in fact, that trying to manually remove every single account that you are pretty sure is a bot is either going to lead to an unacceptably high number of false positives (which do matter -- imagine losing your only RS account that you've played on for years because some guy was "99% sure" you were botting) or annoy real players by gating content behind effectively random, unrelated objectives (which wouldn't even stop bots anyway). And yes, I would find the latter much more annoying than knowing the hiscores has bots in it.
So any account with tens of thousands of KC is a bot? Shall we start automatically banning accounts once they reach that threshold?
Any account rapidly climbing the hiscores should be manually reviewed, yes.
Or that Jagex is intentionally putting a blind eye towards these bots? Or worse, being paid under the table by the organizations to keep the bots up and running?
Not only is this insane, it's just stupid. Even if they were doing something like this, they wouldn't be running some shady under-the-table scheme, they would just ban fewer members bots and rake in the extra bond money. There are so many easier ways for them to be greedy and self-interested that don't read like a fanfic.
A) that's not really the topic at hand and you bringing this up isn't a counterpoint to me telling the person they misread the message.
B) An untrained casual can probably look at a really suspicious high score and go "huh that's sus". What they can't do is consistently identify bots without mis-identifying some of the batshit crazy people who play this game in the dumbest ways imaginable.
Jagex doesn't manually detect and clear out bots, they make systems to do so automatically. Botters have spent way more time and money as a collective of hundreds if not thousands of developers trying to circumvent these systems compared to jagexes small team, and on top of that an automated system can't be too aggressive without a high rate of false positives.
That was not my read on the post at all, but rather that already-banned accounts are still on the hiscores despite being banned, thus the manual removal being necessary IN ADDITION TO the already-applied (or imminent) ban.
I can think of one "any other reason" as well - someone smuggling items onto an Ironman via disallowed methods shouldn't get to stay on the Ironman hiscores, but maybe wouldnt catch a full ban for it.
That's some tin foil hat shit
I appreciate your response and touching base with the community. However, I do want to add that bots and gold farmers reaching top page boss kcs and 200m combats shouldn’t be a thing. Period.
That’s honestly just unacceptable and ACT needs to do better. Ever since the whole Trident situation, I’ve lost complete faith in that area of Jagex.
I respect the osrs devs and cm team though. You guys are the ones that keep this game alive.
You also have to consider some of those accounts are gold farmers and hand played. So nothing can be done about them in official terms until they move large quantities of gp.
Thanks for the reply, good to hear it from the unicorn’s mouth so to speak
I think a portion of the community have been asking for years for someone to regularly release bot ban analytics. What’s crazy is how no one will go through and regularly monitor/ban those top related boss KC accounts.
Just open the first few pages of the high scores. Stats/KC/EXP in certain skills make some blatantly obvious. It’s demoralizing as a player to know your contributions to the game and the hiscores is irrelevant.
It’s so aggravating to regularly report accounts and just see they’re still active, weeks, months or years later.
Releasing statistics is lose/lose for Jagex. With people being able to compare numbers if they go up then its "dead game, bot epidemic, all these bans and still bots everywhere" and if they go down its "dead game, bot epidemic, they're not even bothering anymore"
This isn’t the case. In games such as wow it was a sign of strength when they published numbers. It meant something very dire when they ceased to do so. Not publishing numbers just makes your community distrust you
those stats are cool and all but when random redditors look at the hiscores to find obvious bots / goldfarmers and they get banned an hour later after literal months its hard to trust basically any bullet point in that post
I know a lot of people like to talk about this. “Jagex should just hire someone to sit at GE” “Why can’t jagex just have someone look over the high scores”
But for them to have someone sit somewhere, find a suspicious account, review it to confirm that there is botting occurring and not just some dude with no life. That’s only going to net you a handful of bans per hour.
Their time and money is a lot better spent having their employees put hours toward developing systems to detect and ban these bots in large swaths.
I know that 99% of them are bots, but in theory a player could also just grind out the requirements and camp zulrah all day every day. So just being an “obvious” bot isn’t enough, they have to prove they’re botting so normal players don’t get caught up. That slows it down too much to be impactful
I understand that it would probably FEEL a lot better to have a portion of staff manually catching and banning bots one at a time, but it’s just so inefficient compared to their current approach.
> We are banning bots, more than we ever have before. But the reality is, and this is something we’ve said time and time again, it’s an arms race. As fast as we ban them, new bots are made
If this were true, the front page hiscores for nearly every single boss would not be absolutely flooded with bots. This is not something small that happens overnight, or even over a month, that could have just been missed.
This is something that is pointed out repeatedly and never addressed. Sure, you may be banning a bunch of low tier bots that fill jugs of water in f2p and such, but you guys are absolutely ignoring the thousands of bots that are in the top 100 of every single boss highscore.
This straight up confirms the statement from management in the article about bots with membership being left alone.
Looking at the top for for the first non-slayer boss on the highscores, artio, it has blatant bots at #1, #3, #5, #6, #8 and #10. 2 others are likely bots too. That's a well over 1000 hours at a single boss per bot that was only released a year ago.
Every single boss hiscore is like this.
His response explains that, for whatever reason, banned accounts for botting are actually banned, but they do not leave the hi scores. For whatever reason, I believe they intend it to, but the hi scores has forever been one of their jankiest places code wise.
So there has to be manual removal of names from the hi scores even after a perm ban.
but how are they able to get there in the first place? why does it take potentially months to a year to ban bots when they're in plain sight and operating 24/7 for so long? that's the issue, less so how "boo hoo bad that looks on their visuals"
I've had friends be banned for RWT, and every time they are off of the HS. Why would botting bans be any different?
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If you take the average numbers of these bullet points and compare them to the number of bots banned last year (which was a year where a lot of people complained about a lot of bots). You will see that the total (if trends keep the same) will be 3,6m bots banned in 2024. That's almost half the bots banned in 2023. This is not the look you think it is. This is actually extremely telling and I'm surprised they didn't have you guys run the numbers before you posted this.
Hey, could you ojectively add to this comment
but it’s important to highlight that the article does not accurately reflect our strategy.
Is the quote from ft correct or wrong, it sounds like you agree it's correct but it's more complex?
basically trying to say that it's taken out of context and that the quote doesn't reflect their banning strategy i.e. they're not keeping bots around on purpose.
bots are ok
vs
there are bots that will slip through the cracks, that's just reality, there's not much we can do about it, and that's ok
Just start banning gold buyers lol
Based take. Also get rid of bonds as a way to buy money and have them as purchasable for gold from the ge at an infinite supply. This way they act as a money sink only
they need to actually sell the bonds for real money otherwise theyre just giving out free memb
nah dude why dont you guys simply just stop bots. You know, the thing that has existed on every single MMO for decades and not a single company or developer has figured out how to eradicate from their game.
Is that so much to ask?
I play OSRS, Destiny, and Overwatch. (before you ask, no I'm not okay, clearly).
All 3 of the communities seem to think that they're infested with cheaters and no other game ever suffers.
Valorant is a good example of a game that is really good about cheaters. I played a LOT (I'm also not ok) and I could count on one hand the amount of people I encountered that I genuinely suspected were cheating.
Issue is of course that it requires a seperate anti-cheat program that boots itself on system start
Anyone who thinks banning bots isn't a major problem that every large online game deals with should look at TF2 as the posterchild of this.
Its been years of nearly constant lobbies filled with bots that auto-headshot and votekick real players, and makes matches on official servers nearly unplayable.
An update goes out that breaks or restricts them for a small period, and then they're right back at it.
Literal years where you're more likely to queue into a match that is half-filled with bots on both teams than to play a normal game with real players.
Ive put stupid amounts of tens of thousands of hours into other MMOs like conquer online, 2 moons, SWTOR, Tera, GW2, Lost Ark, WoW, FF14, ESO, maple story, PSO1&2, BDO, and no game comes anywhere NEAR as close to the number of bots this game has,
Id even go as far as to say OSRS alone has more bots than all those other games I mentioned combined.
No one would argue with you in any of these other communities but it's so engrained and normalized in OSRS that people defend it.
Which of these games allow rmt/scam/services spam of OSRS's scale in one central spot reliably on every server 24hrs a day in front of God and everybody for anyone to see, allow streamers to normalize playing a new bought account every day, allowing random people who have never organically interacted in-game to trade huge amount of currency since swapping is allowed.
It's crazy the things they allow that might benefit some negligible amount of players that compromise the game this much.
WoW alone banned 270k bots in december 2023, which is basically equivalent to osrs' banning of 67,000 bots per week in 2024
if you've played wow any time in the past 10 years and never noticed the bots you're actually just stupid
Funny how you picked December the month of christmas when games are at their all time peak player count, when the month before that they only banned 180k bots, thats why I said on average of 200k bots per month
i just picked the first result that popped up on google lol
thats why I said on average of 200k bots per month
i hadn't read every post you've ever made, but your math is flawed in there because you're counting retail players too. these bot bans are for wow classic only, which has a population significantly lower than runescape's. ironforge pro says around 500k, but that only counts people who parse in raids and do pvp
i know you didn't arrive at your current position by using logic so i won't get you to abandon it by using logic, so i'm just gonna let you have your melty though
I mean, if these numbers you're giving are accurate, then you're on pace to ban roughly half as many this year. Easy to make inferences from there.
Sure. I have a friend I know irl who bots, I have reported him at least 6 times. Yet there he remains, with max combat stats and various other 99s. What a joke of a lie
Just to point out a few flaws in your comment, that you claim.
We are banning bots, more than we ever have before.
Last year we banned over 6.9 million accounts.
in 2024, each week on average, we ban over 67,000 Old School RuneScape accounts.
67,000 x 52 = 3.4 million, half the amount of accounts you had claimed to ban the previous year.
in 2024, each week on average, we ban over 2,300 RuneScape accounts.
Even if we add up the total Rs3 accounts it still dosent amount to the number you claimed for 2023. 67,000 + 2,300 = 69,300 × 52 = 3.6 million accounts.
So either you are lying about the amount of accounts you have banned or about banning the most you ever had just as a way to save reputation.
So far in 2024, each week on average, we ban over 67,000 Old School RuneScape accounts.
On track to ban 50% less accounts than last year.
There has been a big slow down in anti-botting actions.
Wow if we assume that OSRS/RS3 bot bans represent actual botting between games, it’s wild that OSRS gets roughly 30x as many bots as rs3. I can see why, but still. Crazy.
Hi.
I'm watching this subreddit and keeping up to date with major news surrounding Runescape, but I have not been playing since 2015.
I really want to return to the game, but the longer I keep paying attention to the news surrounding your game, the more saddened I am and the less likely I'm to start anew.
From what I remember, the worst thing back in 2015 were bots spamming at grand exchange or farming magic logs, but since then, from my outsider's perspective, something has changed within your community. I'm going to list off some topics that I remember reading about in here, and I will try to find the relevant threads:
- Bots are sniping account names in a matter of minutes. This happened to some well known username. EDIT FOUND
- Bots are targeting particular players and verbally harassing them, trying to get them banned. This gives no physical benefit to the bot's owner. EDIT FOUND
- Bot farmers have their own communities, and they organize themselves, trying to protect each other or spin the narrative here on this subreddit in their favor. EDIT FOUND
- Bots overtaking brand-new content.
- Bot killing in Wilderness becoming a viable money making strategy.
- General toxicity, including doxxing threats, racism and death wishes. EDIT RESPONSES TO MY COMMENT ARE A GREAT EXAMPLE OF GENERAL, UNNECCESARY TOXICITY
This is not good. You have mentioned that you are banning on average 67 000 accounts, but this is not an achievement, because you are not addressing the root of the problem: the influx of 67 000 bots into the game, that you know of, every week.
Even if I were to play an ironman, I simply don't feel comfortable in giving your company a monthly subscription fee, while knowing that the game's economy runs on bots, and that every week, 67 000 bots are created, each one of them damaging the integrity of your game.
I hope I can return to your game someday, but it won't be today.
Yeah, why can’t RuneScape just fix a problem that has been on every MMO with an economy since the beginning of time?
Posting stats like this sounds like misdirection. Quote all the numbers you want but if we still see them daily, it’s like putting a bandaid on a gunshot wound. You can still claim to be “fixing” the problem while not ever doing it. If you were serious you would permanent ban people the first time instead of taking their money again X days down the road when they win some bullshit ban-appeal.
Permanent ban only works if the system is 100% accurate, and if all botting is equally aggressive.
Ever hear of the phrase "If the punishment fits the crime"?
Player A: Grown adult that owns a 40 account bot farm
Player B: Literal child that uses an autoclicker because they're allowed in other games they play
You honestly think perm ban is the correct punishment for both players?
Let's go again.
Player A: Bots from his laptop while in a public library.
Player B: connects from his phone to do a farm run at the local library.
System bans accounts on the IP, well fuck Player B. Here's your perm.
See how it doesn't make sense to default to maximum punishment?
Just lip service at this point, what’s the point
Where's the link to the rest of it?
I can’t link because the automod blocked it but if you google FT Alphaville RuneScape it’s the first result. FT Alphaville is free to read you may need to sign up though
They told us CVC does not know how many bots there are in RuneScape, but that bots are not included in the overall player counts.
so they don't know how many bots there are but are able to subtract the number of bots (that they dont know) from the total character count?
The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't, by subtracting where it is, from where it isn't, or where it isn't, from where it is, whichever is greater, it obtains a difference, or deviation.
The guidance subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the missile from a position where it is to a position where it isn't, and arriving at a position where it wasn't, it now is. Consequently, the position where it is, is now the position that it wasn't, and it follows that the position that it was, is now the position that it isn't.
Is this just the improbability drive?
https://youtu.be/bZe5J8SVCYQ?si=R_Sfn3GGJEdZ2OB0
This should help clear everything up
K A L M A N Filters my beloved
It’s they are saying this though it’s because it’s what Jagex internal staff said. They are obviously saying what they know from what they can see and who they can speak too - so Jagex never had any idea.
Moderator removed comment
3mo
Why have you been spam refreshing for over 30 minutes replying to every comment and straight up lying? The website is real, the article is real, and the publisher is extremely respected in terms of bias and reliability. The article itself looks thorough and well-researched. Not to be rude but you are coming across as unhinged lol.
Not true, it very much exists on the FT
ft . com/content/c49749e7-54fb-46fb-b508-a4964e61e07f bruh heres the source
You need 99 in Maths to follow
Just got level 92 in maths so basically over 90% of the way to 99 maths...
I wonder what pet can get bonus chance at once hit 200m experience with math.
Quick mafths
I think what this means is that they cannot say with any degree of certainty, but they may have some estimates. They could have phrased that better, but it's not entirely contradictory.
It’s not flawless, but I imagine unique IPs are used to determine player counts when assessing things like this.
Based on the article, I think they're assuming that 1/3 of accounts are bots.
It actually says 2/3 accounts are bots in the example. But I also don't think it's using that example as a sample for the entire player population.
Ah, dangit! My stupid math skills. 😂 I should work for the new company!
Well we know who doesn't have his Math Cape now.
They're saying 2/3 of the multi-loggers specifically. Most real players still only play on one account
This is the sort of thing that everyone knows is true, but you can't actually say it out loud. By making this statement, they will inevitably disrupt the "equilibrium" they're talking about by encouraging botting.
Letting bots run rampant isn't great, but in terms of ways a single-minded profit-seeking investment firm could fuck up the game, this is probably one of the preferred methods. I can always stick to ironman. =D
What does sticking to an Ironman mean to you? Irons can bot the same a mains, it just will not affect the osrs economy.
Actually, irons can drop things to other accounts, so an iron bot could potentially harm the economy as much as a regular bot
Yes but theres zero reason to as its just throwing up barriers when there could be none.
The only type of situation I could think of is if you botted CG and got spooned in enhanced crystals before you got all your armor seeds. So the purpose of the IM account isn’t to be a bot, but if this happens at scale then it affects the economy. But this comment is most likely just an academic exercise.
Irons can bot the same a mains, it just will not affect the osrs economy.
That's the point. No ones complaining about the guy botting to 99 wc cause hes lazy.
The bots people care about are the ones interacting with the economy.
No ones complaining about the guy botting to 99 wc cause hes lazy.
Those people used to get banned all the time back in the day. They had a real hard on for cracking down on mains botting. Not sure if they still do
Except in this very thread you will find people crying about how bots ruin the “prestige” of their account (read: the prestige of spending 4,000 hours of their life maxing in the hopes that strangers on the internet will respect them), so it does affect more than just the economy, it affects how many people interact with the game, whether socially or anti-socially lol
I mean, that’s kind of my point. It’s pretty disheartening that someone could skip entire grinds on an Ironman. Botting Cg, 85 crafting, etc. yeah it’s separate from the osrs economy, but it undermines the actual point on the game mode. Some people have very strong feelings on that.
It's not just the ones affecting the economy, it's also the ones clogging up resource nodes like mining rocks and trees.
Exactly, once the cat bot is out of the bag it’s hard to get back in.
It’s a game where people will just not do something if they can’t be max efficient, and they just said out loud that you need to run a bot to be efficient, potentially very damaging.
Nice! I might supplement my main legitimate account with a Muspah bot and a CG bot. That should sustain bonds for all three and give me some extra gp to fund some more high end pvm
You laugh but I know a fair bit of end game players who have done this.
This isn't new. It's unfortunate but it's not new.
Pretty shitty for the new owners to say the internal thing though. It probably will make things a lot worse.
I definitely know a lot of end game pet hunters have purchased max combat alts (which have likely been botted) to help them max efficient pet hunt
It’s concerning that the source says “if you have 3 accounts, 2 of them are probably bots”
Perhaps the source is confused, and they are somehow conflating alts and bots? The difference between alts and bots seems like the type of thing that a PE guy would get confused about.
If you rewrite the source to references alts instead of bots, the part about "three accounts" kind of makes more sense:
The main focus within the game is to make sure the excesses of alts are policed and managed. Flagged accounts are managed out of the game, and therefore what is left inside the game is a sort of equilibrium of players and alts… if I have [three accounts] there’s a good chance that one of them is me and two accounts are alts… If a player is sufficiently committed to pay for three accounts, and have an account and two alts as part of its ecosystem, then so be it. But the management team of Jagex police excesses of alts and make sure that alts do not become problematic in the game.
User deleted comment
3mo
The last statement seems to conflict with your theory.
Why would it? If we're going with my theory of "PE guy gets mixed up", then Jagex could've conceivably told him these statements:
On bots:
The main focus within the game is to make sure the excesses of bots are policed and managed. Flagged accounts are managed out of the game, and therefore what is left inside the game is a sort of equilibrium of players and bots. The management team of Jagex police excesses of bots and make sure that bots do not become problematic in the game.
On alts:
If I have [three accounts] there’s a good chance that one of them is me and two accounts are alts… If a player is sufficiently committed to pay for three accounts, and have an account and two alts as part of its ecosystem, then so be it.
Standalone, neither of these statements are really problematic. But then the PE guy forgot about this for a month, got asked about it again by an FT reporter, and regurgitated the Jagex statements it in a way that conflated the two.
I'm not saying that it doesn't make sense for the source to confuse the two, I'm saying that the last statement doesn't make sense. Why would Jagex have to police the excess of alts? Jagex would love for everyone to make as many paid alts as they can. That's their business model.
If private equity is spending $1 Billion to buy a company, I would sure hope their due diligence in understanding the business is thorough enough to note the difference between alts and bots.
If it was just laziness than that’s also bad news because it’s a sign they don’t care about the company/game and just see it as another revenue source to be milked dry
Edit: the exact phrasing being “one of them is me and two of them are bots”, so it seems like they intentionally meant that you aren’t playing two of the accounts and you’re letting a script play out
If private equity is spending $1 Billion to buy a company, I would sure hope their due diligence in understanding the business is thorough enough to note the difference between alts and bots.
AHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Seriously, have we learned nothing from Twitter and Elon Musk...? (I know, I know, Im sick of hearing about it too, but its poignant here)
I have way more than 3 accounts and none of them are bots.
I think ultimately this is their way of saying they actually have no idea when someone is using bots, they just “think” they know due to indicators.
But if you insisted on staying online for 6 hours at a time farming something mundane, they would have no way to tell realistically for 100% sure if you were a bot.
So they just assume certain behaviors are bots, and are for the most part, correct. Just like the people trading their alts money and getting banned, they are just guessing with a high degree of accuracy, say 75-95%.
It's really saying the quiet part out loud, I don't think it's as bad as 2 in 3 but someone from the new group saying this so cavalierly isnt a good thing.
Statistically we all knew that anyway
I’m wondering if they mean like a player who has 2 rune dragons alts that run scripts but that funds bonds and PVE on a main vs someone with 10 Vork bots who’s RWTing it all
I can’t wait to see u/LivingxLegend8 tell people that it’s “fake” for the 100th time today. He’s putting in overtime
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3mo
HAHAHAHAHA no way. Dude confirms visits the botting subreddit. Article is being voted bombed probably by scared botters. Crazy shit to see.
The botting subreddit gets shown as suggested posts to me. Idk if I've posted in it, but I see a lot of comments from people who clearly don't bot. Usually along the lines of "you deserved it" on ban posts, etc. Having comments/visiting the botting subreddit is far from proof of someone botting lol.
Would you say that it's just the reddit bot economy? For every 3 accounts, only one is a real person, the other two are just downvote bots?
apple vision pro, sam sulek, kanye, and osrs botting… yeah that all checks out lmfao.
Don't leave out WSB, that tells you everything you need to know about someone by itself.
Melly fan and still stans Kanye? A lot more makes sense now.
Of course he is, that's why we use the report button on him.
That's why you send the mods a modmail and get faster attention to it. His behavior is really strange.
So they've given us permission for all of us to run 2 bots alongside a legitimate account.
Pretty much, as long as you 'are committed to paying for three accounts'
So are bonds what get bots banned?
Kinda?, not paying jagex is what gets you banned. The article seems to say if you purchase membership on an account you can bot lol
Why would they care if it’s a bond or a direct membership? Bonds still bring in money, more even I think since they’re more $/time
Look man if you read the OP it says if you pay for 3 accounts you can bot on 2 of em. There's really only one way to interpret that
bonds are paying jagex though, as some whale paid jagex cash for them, but the only reason the whale aid jagex cash is that they have a gp value, so if the alts stopped buying bonds, their gp value would collapse, and whales would not pay jagex £ for them....
its a long winded path, but using bonds for membership is still paying jagex £
I just don’t understand how they can say “if you want to pay for 3 memberships…” like, do they think we wouldn’t just bot bonds for all our accounts? I’ve never understood that argument
Just think a little longer about that.
Someone at some point bought that bond from Jagex with real money.
bonds are still paying to jagex, only indirectly.
This will get me downvoted but some of you gotta get grounded in reality.
What jamflex managment wants to say but probably can't: look guys, the osrs team has been working towards lowering the amount of bots but the truth of the matter is bots are here to stay. For every bot you ban there's 2 more of them that pop up. It would be naive to think we can eradicate all bots just like that. They are a part of every mmorpg and we all just have to accept that.
But guys, lets be honest here for a second. This article will not make you lose interest in the game. You will be salty for a while, sure, but you are not going to be quitting the game or anything like that over an article like this.
What playerbase wants to hear: bots are bad and we're actively wroking towards removing them. The classic PR bullshit.
There's always 2 versions.
- is the version where the management tells you everything you want to hear so that your feelings and ego get a stroke so you are happily living in ignorance
- is the version what management really thinks but they can't really just say that out loud because people are going to get riled up
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3mo
reason we have so much bots is because of all different clients. if there was one c++ client everyone would use, busting bots would be a LOT easier. mat k said this when the runelite incident happened. most bot clients are just forks of runelite
but since gagex don't wanna make their own runelite wcyd 😂
wanna make their own runelite
Didn't they announce just that when showing the HD project? They even advertised it with plugin support if I remember correctly.
Yeah they are working on bringing it in-house for their client basically.
I suspect that once the official Runescape client reaches a point where it's Runelite Lite (without overly game-greaking plug-ins, but with many QOL), then they'll ban third party clients again. At this point Runelite is serving as a sort of beta, where they can see what features are popular, broken or stupid.
I'm also assuming that the Runelite dev has gotten an offer for either employment, or straight up buying his codebase and that he declined.
He's making a little over 1K a month with Patreon, being just a side-hustle and I suspect he has an actual job. If he was employed by Jagex he would miss out on a lot of extra income. (And let's face it, at this point in Runelites lifecycle, it's pretty much a moneyprinter)
What people don't understand about, "Why doesn't Jagex just buy Runelite," is that Runelite is publically open source. Buying open-source projects (with the intent to close-source them), while technically possible, is a logistical and legal nightmare. That's why they're instead getting help from Adam of Runelite rather than trying to manage the alternative mess.
It's naive to think jagex aren't developing the c++ client to shut down all the others. Runelite (and hdos) are on timers, maybe it's 1 year, maybe 5.
This is just not true. Programming wise, having a single centralized client will do nothing to stop botting
Exactly. Show me a game that has solved botting. Especially a game like osrs where it is an easy game to bot, AND the in game currency can be sold for legitimate currency. Like it’s not an easily solvable problem.
Only way it happens is a major crackdown on gold buying, thus removing the financial incentive to bot, and migrating users to a more secure client.
You mean like removing free trade?/s
even vanguard, one of the most intrusive anticheats in the gaming market atm, seems to have issues with cheating software. And people out here thinking botting is easy to fix lol
all bots
Enough with the all-or-nothing fallacies. Not a single person has said "OSRS should realistically have zero bots". You're taking a perfectly reasonable question like "why do so many bots reach the top of the hiscores and reach 200m experience, ruin minigames etc" and turning it into something completely different because you have no valid argument against the original point.
Basically this. The C++ client will make it harder, but not impossible to bot.
Once it has feature parity with runelite and they force everyone to switch, I can see it getting better, though they also have to figure out a way secure the mobile client.
This is exactly right, and the backlash reminds me of when Mayor of London Sadiq Khan was reported as saying 'terrorism is part and parcel of living in a big city'. He obviously wasn't saying 'enjoy yr terrorism lol', he was saying that the state does what it can to eliminate terror attacks but the state is not omnipresent and the sheer number of people living in cities in the 21st century (combined with the limited resources of the state) means that individuals should take reasonable preparedness measures to stay safe.
As also to bots (although with much lower stakes). Jagex would love to eliminate bots but it's always going to be an arms race against increasingly sophisticated software and bot evasion mechanisms - if they can eliminate enough bots that it doesn't substantially impact the player experience, that's a reasonable goal to strive towards. It certainly doesn't mean they condone or encourage 'low level' botting, it's just setting realistic expectations for what they can achieve.
I think everyone agrees that some amount of bots is unavoidable. It's the sheer amounts of them AND how far some of them get. Check the Highscores there are top 20 accounts KC wise for pretty much all bosses that have bare minimum stats and only have KC in that specific boss, it's 99% a bot or a gold farmer, both of which is bannable (due to rwt).
How about the shameless advertising bots at the GE? you don't even need a system for this, a mod can go through the world and nuke them in 10 minutes.
The anti cheating team is either working with stone age tools or are too few in number both are a result of Jamflex being cheap.
Naturaly you can't get rid of bots, it's an everlasting armsrace
However the "pr bullshit" as you call it us necessary, the morality on matters like this needs to be very clear.
Articles like this only serve to entice people that otherwise woulden't to try botting.
Yeah I kind of agree with both of you but I'm a bit worried this snippet is going to encourage more people to bot.
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3mo
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3mo
I'm still not sure! Maybe you could spam a few dozen more comments just in case?
It’s on the FTs website, I don’t know how much more legit you can get
Dude is either on drugs or a bot owner.
/u/LivingxLegend8 is a /r/WallstreetBets user who probably has a stake in either Jagex or CVC and is high on copium that maybe his comments won't tank his investment.
Mod Ash ain't going to fuck you bro
Lol, time to start bottong? What the actual fuck
Two lines above what OP quoted:
A person close to Jagex told us the actual bot figure may be even higher, with around 6.9mn bot accounts “detected and purged” last year.
Good luck buddy, hope you aren't part of the 6.9 million, I'll make sure to Res tag you for the inevitable 'wrongful ban' thread.
So bots with membership are OK. Essentially, all the bots that get banned are f2p.
So if you make a muspah or vorkath bot and don't rwt the gold, it'll never get banned. Maybe not even if you rwt.
This is what I don’t like about the stats they release. I know beggars can’t be choosers but I’d like to see a bigger data set on bans including what percentage are members, what percent are accounts that are inevitably recovered and claimed to be hacked, etc
Just get rid of all bots. I'd rather the ecosystem be hard and all players than easy and 1/3 players.
I agree so hard, but do this and fix the drop tables and people will cry
What the fuck, is this real? What a way to spit in the face of legit players.
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3mo
It’s a real article posted by the financialtimes with the Author’s names posted. I just checked. The Author’s have existing previous work. Please stop spamming all over the thread.
So I can bot on my ironman and pure, just not the main? Amazing news, 99 agility here we come!
Another fine addition to the runescapen2024 drama calendar
Thanks Jamflex, I’ll start my side huddle now!
If bots are part of the RS economy I’ll happily do my part!
In all seriousness though, this isn’t anything Mod Matt K hasn’t already told us.
So basically botting is okay, but I can go fuck myself on getting my account unbanned that was hacked and botted on by the hijacker back in like 2016
Ok. Can the sub change its policy for botting content? I want some guides on how to bot.
Cool, exactly what I wanted to hear before starting my 1st bot farm! Can't wait to make bils and ruin the economy
one person botting wouldn't ruin the economy when the economy has many, just sayin.
As if I was the only one who had this reasoning. If people realise Jagex has no intention to ban bots, setting up bot farms for passive income will basically be the new meta. Not botting would become highly inefficient.
I love how pointing out that bots are allowed to exist because they're paying customers would have been ridiculed and dismissed only weeks ago. People for some reason seem to get weirdly triggered over the very rational and extremely obvious idea that jagex deliberately allows them to operate.
About time they told the fact what some people like me already knew for long. After all, all mains are quietly accepting bots as part of the economy whenever they are buying stuff - most notably supplies - from GE. Buying gold ain't the issue since bot-owners can just do it for fun like crashing shark's value for revenge or fund their own accounts with unlimited cash to have fun at the end-game.
Ps: I don't care is this fake or not, because it only steps back to the "already knew for long" -state.
What are you guys gonna bot on our 2 bots we're allowed?
lumbridge cows and then the inferno after my pure is ready
You know what? At least they are honest and transparent. That's way better than what we had. The old management just didn't comment on the issues and it felt like it was ignored. At least these people say the truth.
I feel like this is what old management did as well. They just never commented on it.
So basically you can run a few bots as long as you pay for membership on them all?
As AI prevails this is going to be a very real fact, they already have a hard enough time detecting bots now. Just imagine a perfectly trained AI that uses the mouse and keyboard in the exact way a human does.
Osrs is a botfest. More bots then actual real users. Everyone knows. Profit for jagex since they pay for membership so they let it be.
I mean fine but can you guys at least go bot the shit out of blood shards please the rent is too damn high
Pretty sure MatK said the same on a Sae Bae podcast I watched the other night. If they removed the bots the cost of everything would skyrocket he explained and asked if people even really wanted to pick flax, better leaving it to the bots.
I don't see this to be a problem. It's good that other methods besides pvming is profitable.
If we don't like this, Jagex can always just put resources no one wants to do on pvm loot tables.
Well Zulrah drops thousands of them, no need to pick them
This is why I've chosen to take a break from osrs for almost 6 months now, I genuinely want the game to get better, but to me at least part of what motivates me to log in most days is knowing the game has a future, the fact that people have made countless bot posts, with thousands of up votes with little to no communication from jagex is concerning to say the least, at this point I feel like I'm being punished for not botting, for not buying gold, for trying to play the game legitimately, I still will chose not to use these services, but it hurts knowing thousands of people do every day and a large majority just keep getting away with it
Can Jagex make a statement with how much we're allowed to bot, and how many accounts we need not to get banned?
Lmao holy shit this acquisition is going to be the death of osrs. I’m glad I took a break about a year ago and haven’t looked back, cause it’s bad. Osrs going to be sailing and bots for the next iteration
TBH this is something echoed by MatK as well. I think his opinion on it is a bit of a hot take, personally, but I see where he's coming from as far as an (in-game) 'economic' standpoint.
I think thats just cope, they just cant deal with the bots
Wow so we can have one bot each and its all G?
Looks like botting is back on the menu
So this is an unnamed source which is interesting in that it's not the actual management coming out with this which would be very different. Maybe it's an intentional leak. But even that seems hard to believe. Will some people create a new subscription off this, sure. But its a really divisive stance to leak. So most likely this is a rogue leak at CVC and maybe not the company stance or maybe its both and probably the latter.
Some kid got a job there showing them the 1m+ he made off this game and then got them to buy it is my favorite headcannon even before this dropped.
Y’all acting like this hasn’t been how it has always been.
Always has been. There is some notorious criminal shit happening around this game it can't be more obvious.
So 67% of player base is bots?
well thats great news for me!
i won't be reupping my membership!
This is the only real way for Jagex to take more steps to crack down on bots.
I feel like we are in the middle of a massive bot rise. Just look at the prices of chaos and death runes on the grand exchange. Their values have plummeted something like 40% in the last 3 weeks.
https://prices.runescape.wiki/osrs/item/562
https://prices.runescape.wiki/osrs/item/560
Their graphs perfectly match each other. This seems like the effect of hundreds if not thousands or more bots dumping runes from drops on the exchange.
This is what we have been saying all along. They don't ban bots because they pay the subscription cost like the rest of us.
It's a shame because they fuck up the economy, and ruin good content like the revs and wildy bosses.
Link to article:
https://www.ft.com/content/c49749e7-54fb-46fb-b508-a4964e61e07f
Mod Ayiza's response:
https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1auitg5/bots_are_basically_okay_new_jagex_management/kr53hsx/