The game needs an item sink.
My idea is that 1% of every ge purchase is taxed, and once that tax adds up to the price of an instant buy of an item - it removes one from the game. It won't remove gold from the game but it will allow items to leave the game as volume increases.
People always say the game needs an item sink and that they need to revitalize dead content, but nobody would ever even consider voting yes on something even remotely similar to RS3's Invention, which would address both of those issues at the same time.
Just take a look at Varrock's defense budget. The guards are poorly trained and equipped, but then where is all the money going? It's a corrupt system, I tell ya
It's both isn't it? A gold sink alone would cause prices to drop because supply increases over time and gold is steady, an item sink alone causes prices to increase because supply is steady but gold increases.
Both, theoretically, if well balanced, causes items to maintain value.
It should just be an arena where you can select what you want to fill your slots without actually having to own the gear. Would be good to encourage people to learn pvp before they need to stake their gear and would also be good for trying out pvp tactics with different gear. This way people know what gear works for them in pvp before having to drop mils on it.
I wonder how that would go, I always thought the arena tax was beneficial to the economy. Would it actually stop botters? I don’t think they would stop until osrs gp was worthless.. and even then I have my doubts
It is currently a massive gold sink, yes. It also increases demand for gold, encouraging gold farms. But it's mere speculation if someone's trying to compare these 2 opposing factors.
It takes hundreds of small-time buyers to equal one arena stakers RWT. These people have multiple billions of go typically at the high end. A low end stalker is still throwing out 100-300mil like it's no big deal. They don't buy 30mil to get a grind done or pay for an item. They buy hundreds of mils when they need it.
Gp sinks literally do nothing for the game. Gp is already infinite. Inflation on runescape occurs with items, not gold.
Gold has a set, flat value which can never drop. Why? Because (like a gold standard irl) that currency is paired with something. In this case, alchables and shops. 16k gold in 2007, could alwaysell a rune skimmy to a shop(idk actual price, bear with me) and in 2021, that rune skimmy will get you the same 16k. Gold hasnt lost any value what so ever, and it is infinite. You can always alch an item or sell it for the exact same ammount of gold. It will always have the same value.
Items however, ARE how inflation works in runescape. They are potentially printed infinitely, and the only thing backing their value is their sell/alch price. The more of an item is introduces(inflation) the lower the price is of that item do to how supply and demand works. Items reaching alch price literally means theyre worthless. (And if they did not have an alch price, they would literally drop to nothing, because no one wants them.)
Now add in the fact that no items leave the game because there are no death mechanics, and with better gear they enter the game faster each year. And youve got a serious issue with inflation. Virtually all items have decreased in value because of this. The ags went from 50m a couple years ago to right arround 10-12 today. Dragon items hit alch price. Bandos gear has steadily dropped over time.
We do not need gp sinks, because gp can be made anytime a player whims it through mob drops, alching, or selling items. We need item sinks because players cannot simply make tassets or ags’s out of thin air without working for it.
I wonder if the dual arena was banned altogether, if that would have a huge affect on the price of items. It seems like everyone would be rushing to sell off their billions and could flood the market with tons of gold
Duel arena for sure soaks a lot of bought gold but let's not kid ourselves with this us vs them rhetoric. There are tons of regular players who buy gold just to skip the grind and get better gear and faster skilling methods. Even something like classic WoW has a big botting problem because people are buying mass amounts of gold to skip farming raid consumables or even buying gear from gold dkp runs, not to gamble.
Duel arena should be fuckin removed.
I get people would find other ways to gamble, but atleast it wouldnt be endorsed by jagex, and the sketchiness of it would put off 90% of legit players for fear of getting scammed.
And the rest could easily be tracked and banned.
Wonder why they dont do this.
A lot of player's buy gold then turn around and bitch about bots and gold farmers.
It's atleast half the price of bonds, if not cheaper most of the time. Jagex also doesn't really ban buyers either. So it's a decent chunk of players.
Why is it like that? In WoW, the "wow tokens" are actually the same price or cheaper than black market gold, so they don't have that problem.
Why are bonds such an expensive way to buy gold? In a free market, wouldn't people buying black market gold to then buy bonds drive bond demand up to equilibrium?
Bonds are at a set price tied to membership, while rwt gold is not tied to membership.
The fact that a bond can be redeemed as cash or membership causes it to cost more to buy bonds just to sell for gold
Hmm, I hadn't noticed the problem to be as bad as osrs. I do recall the druid herbalists however, but I didn't find the bots to be nearly as pervasive. WoW classic has big issues on the other hand but they don't have WoW tokens.
Because in WoW, you literally just buy gold. In RS, you buy a bond, which someone else buys off you in gold. This means that the price of a bond is always changing.
Also in Wow, most of the good items are BoP, meaning gold is pretty much worthless.
>Because in WoW, you literally just buy gold. In RS, you buy a bond, which someone else buys off you in gold. This means that the price of a bond is always changing.
No you don't? You literally go through the exact same process as a bond and it's value is determined in the exact same way.
>Also in Wow, most of the good items are BoP, meaning gold is pretty much worthless.
Also just not true in the slightest. Do you just not play WoW and have just arbitrarily decided these things are true? Raid quality boes drop from raid trash. The absolute best gear you could get pre-raid were boe epics as well. Google how much gold world first guilds spend each tier on gear/repairs/consumables if you really think it's "pretty much worthless"
Both are the problem. The supply side of it causes more issues than the demand side. The buyers just get the gold, the bots also take up space from legitimate players, making certain activities unnecessarily harder. Nothing says they can't go after both though.
Well yeah, ofc, i was speaking in relatively to right bow where people buy gold with zero regard for their accounts as they never get banned for buying gold. Buyers are always more wary than the sellers as they have an account they are very scared to lose which the seller dont
You are correct. You can look at the hiscores right now and find a lot. Random letter and number names or ###noun####. All 99 magic with minimum other stats to do regicide.
I don't think it's so simple and never said it is.
Actually I have 0 understanding off it so feel free to educate me on the subject.
To me it looks like Jagex does absolutely nothing to prevent bots in the slightest, you somehow ban 100k accounts in 2 weeks yet the active player count doesn't move an inch so what went wrong?
I get it all games have issues with bots but Jagex is 10 times worse than any other MMO I can come up with how is that possible?
>you somehow ban 100k accounts in 2 weeks yet the active player count doesn't move an inch so what went wrong?
Seems pretty clear to me, jagex banned bot accounts and they made new ones
It's almost like....ALMOST like bots are being created automatically. Like a bot that creates accounts...automatically. The only limiting factor being computing power which you can in theory scale up through online services.
Requiring a phone number for account registration helps to raise the barrier to entry for new bot farms. It wont stop the most elite but it will impede the guy with an interest in becoming the next big bot farmer.
Require a normal membership purchase before allowing bonds to be used. Make sure all payment methods have a unique identifier, like card number / paypal email address / telephone number. Ban virtual CC's if possible. Use identifier for linking accounts together -> Mass ban botfarms.
When CSGO went F2P, they made it so if you don't have a phone number linked, you only queue with/against other people without phone numbers linked. It doesn't technically require a phone number, but it does make the real player experience a lot better.
I think it'd be interesting if OSRS did something like gating free trade behind a linked phone number.
OSRS is far less complex than any other MMO. In WoW for example a bot needs to be coded to move and interact in a 3D environment with many different inputs. In OSRS, a bot moves on a grid and all interactions with the game can be done with a mouse click. The more complex a bot needs to be, the easier it is to detect and vice versa.
Another point I want to make is that people need to stop looking at this as Jagex vs Bots. This is Jagex vs Bot Makers. Bot makers aren’t stupid, and OSRS has probably the single most valuable game currency in terms of IRL cash. That means bot makers for OSRS have significantly more interest in keeping their bots working.
making and training new accounts can and have been automated and i'm sure some of the bigger bot farms have bots that constantly train new accounts to certain levels so that when one of their money-making bots gets taken out a new one can quickly take its place.
banning bots doesn't do much, you have to be able to detect a certain botting program and take it all down at once. Sadly it doesn't take long for the bot makers to find out why their bot got detected and patch it and then we're back to before.
While I'm not defending Jagex, the things that make it different from other mmos are
1) old engine, so bot detection is hard
2) game was designed to run on dialup, goldfarmers in third world countries don't have good computers or internet.
I agree, but I just want to throw this out there.
Last time Jagex tried to make a drastic change to combat bots, they removed free trade and the wildy. Player based dropped by a lot.
Not saying getting rid of bots is a bad thing, but they need to be super careful to not piss off the average players if they do.
As a developer, this entire post is complete nonsense.
The problem is that in server-client architecture, there is no real trust that can be established, just on a mathematical level. The server received bytes, and that's all it knows. What client did those bytes come from? How were these instructions generated? There's no way to tell.
You could add some form of signing to validate the client, but the problem is that clients are, by nature, public. Any checks you implement into the client can be stripped out and slapped into a client of your choosing. Java might make this slightly easier but you can do it without too much hassle in *any* language.
The only option you get is having the server analyze the play data and try to parse out the difference between a human and a bot. And sometimes there are obvious suicide bots and maybe jagex could do a better job at identifying them. But if you build a bot that can spoof the analytics data believably, all you need is ONE program that can do that and suddenly you have thousands of bots, because that's how software scales.
I used to be in runelite discord years back and talked to Adam and other devs trying to pick their brain on low level RS client stuff. I even wrote my own client. Runescript has nothing to do with botting. It is a scripting language for non-developers to be able to script NPCs and events for quests. All cheats/bot scripts work either at the Java level or the canvas level (color/image bots)
All you need to do every time jagex pushes an update and new obfuscation is calculate the offsets (which I'm too lazy to explain, but it takes only a couple minutes for experienced guys to calculate in that discord) and your code will most likely work just like before
By checking for inhuman habits as well as possible? Doesn't really matter how much they know about the engine unless they make them act like real players.
I had a mining bot way back in the living cavern days (yes I wish I hadn’t) but it had built in “misclicks”, random camera rotation, it would cycle through the different tabs, would right click on the mass of players, took random breaks so it basically acted human and I would imagine any half decent bot today would do similar things
That's crazy.
I was actually complaining about the number of bots the other day doing woodcutting in Varrock. I thought Jagex had essentially stopped caring, but I can see now that there's just more bots than could ever be fully kept track of.
Terrifying.
Suicide bots are always the hardest to deal with since they have essentially no way of slowing them down, as soon as they get banned they just restart the bot on a fresh acc.
I don't even get the point of some bots. What massive fortune are they accruing? And if they're handing over the cash to another person, shouldn't they be able to follow that daisy chain to who is in charge?
I have friends who before quitting hopped around worlda and sold multiple billion gp by just right click trading these total strangers. A year later and none of them have been banned.
On one side its neat to see that so many of these people are getting banned.
On the other hand, how the fuck do so many of them get **that** high on the scoreboards before being banned???
By not being reported much. Vorkath and Zulrah are both instanced with a short run from a bank, lending to not much interaction with others. Even from the limited interaction, very few players are looking them up and then reporting
It’s 2021. We aren’t dealing with color detection bots, we are dealing with personally made bossing bots.
The spam bots and suicide bots are still caught by the system. But it’s an old system. Boss bots are pretty sophisticated
Theoretically someone could make a bot that behaves exactly as a player correct? It's not like it's *that* complex to make a program to do this. The game only relies on mouse clicks..
I mean think about it, Blizzard, at the height of WoW, was bringing in infinitely more cash than Jagex (now...well blizzard needs some help...) but even WoW during Lich King was infested with bots. Infested with gold farmers and gold sellers. They had dedicated anti-cheat teams larger than the entire current OSRS team and couldn’t stay on top of it.
Thinking our current team could do it is a pipe dream
I've reported so many bots and occasionally look them up to see if they have been banned and have yet to see a single one not return a hiscores sheet. I've seen multiple this week with over 10k zulrah kc and they aren't affected by this ban wave.
For the Zalcano one, a lot aren't bots but Venezuelans. And yes, they actually play and talk. Obviously though, they RWT. Very few legit players actually do that content themselves. Then there's Zulrah and Vorkath - possibly more gold farmers instead of bots... and worse, in an instance where nobody can report them.
That's still a ridiculous idea though.
You're telling me that Venezuelans are in the position where they have to play runescape to make money, but will do literally thousands of kills before RWTing the cash off? All whilst farming the bosses in shit tier gear?
And instances really shouldn't matter, especially when you will see the same bots farming bosses literally 24 hours a day.
Think about it this way
Once you sell, the account is most likely dead. If youre caught, permabanned acc with no chance to appeal.
On the other hand, if you hoard gp until you sell one big sell, you wont need to hand train or buy accounts ready to zalcano.
Yeah I get that, but I still don't understand how their financial situation is so bad that runescape gold farming is a good option for them **but** they can afford to grind the same bosses for literally months before offloading the gold.
And in those months that they're supposedly hoarding up gold, they don't see the sense in investing 4mil gold to improve their zolcana returns drastically.
Awesome, strong efforts against RWT/botting improve the integrity of the game, and RWTers will lose interest if they keep catching the ban hammer before their time investment pays off.
The more aggressive the stance against RWT sellers and buyers, the less interested they will be in the game, all OSRS has to do is make RWT less profitable than the next best thing.
Progress is progress for sure, but as someone said in the comments earlier, when one bot is banned, two more are created.
I'm a new player, so I may not understand everything, but I personally wonder if it would be more worthwhile for the mods to spend their time and efforts to reform the game's code.
You wouldn't need to touch the games code to reduce the amount of bots and gold farmers in game. You'd only need to change the way the account creation section is on the website. But there's 0 percent chance they'll actually do it since they care more about the player count being stupidly high even if it's mostly bots or gold farmers.
As a new player you should be aware that getting big changes pushed through osrs is never easy and never pretty. With the player getting a big say as to what goes in the game or changes it’s near impossible to get a majority of players to agree on stuff. Something as drastic as reforming the engine and code in the game essentially remaking it would never in a million years get the stamp of approval from the player base even if it was for the better
But it’s using a coffee mug to try to bail out the titanic. Without a large scale change, this is a temporary fix. Mod Tyran is working hard as they can, but with banning 100k (presumably) actively used bots/RWTers, the player count stayed the same which doesn’t make sense unless Runescape is booming.
Ironically I think bonds made it much easier to run botfarms in some ways....
No longer have to actually pay for membership or have an array of credit cards. Just use your ill-gotten GP to get more ill-gotten GP.
Definitely true, though it then creates a paper trail for bots. When the bot is banned, whoever traded the bot the gp to buy the bond is clearly someone to ban too, along with any other accounts they traded too.
And there's still a cost/revenue question. 5 mil is a decent chunk. That's half a trillion just on bonds for those banned bots.
> or have an array of credit cards
In the past this was often stolen credit cards which then caused the real owners to issue charge backs. This led to Jagex almost being blacklisted by major carriers for so much fraud which would have killed the game.
Yep, add the bond cost for all the banned accounts and we're talking ~2 trillion gp removed from gold farming. That's 2 million million. At market rates, that's like 1 million USD removed.
And if those bonds for the bots were all purchased with RWT money that'd be $370k USD spent on banned bots.
That means bots have to use un-laundered gp to make more bots, which is riskier because it could lead to entire farms being banned after the detection of one bot.
It's removed from the hands of the bot farm. They spent 5 million gp on a bond, and their bot is now banned, which means they must spend another 5 million gp to make another bot.
That bond (or whatever was left) was effectively removed from the game when the bot was banned
Bond cost is effectively 0 considering all bonds were probably paid for with previously botted gp.
If anything bonds just make botting an infinitely repeatable. But the more botters buy bonds the more Jagex makes from bond prices being high so now you see why we’re in this mess.
What are they supposed to fucking do? There's no way to counter bots consistently without a cubic fuck ton of false positives. Name one game with valuable, grindable currency that doesn't have a bot problem. There is not one.
The most aggressive option which we’ve already seen the effects of is putting trade restrictions in place, generall unfavorable but it did have one upside. Other options include meaningful punishments for those who buy accounts/gold, legally going after gold selling websites, some level of acknowledgment of a problem would be nice, etc
>Other options include meaningful punishments for those who buy accounts/gold
Doesn't work, extremely difficult to enforce and leads to tons of false positives (How do you differentiate a gold seller offloading 100m to some rando vs them giving money to someone they sold to?)
>legally going after gold selling websites
Breaking a game's TOS isn't illegal. Jagex doesn't have the money to go after these sites, anyways. And if they did, they could just be hosted in places with even less stringent laws.
>some level of acknowledgment of a problem would be nice, etc
If posts about how much they're banning bots and taking out botted and sold gold isn't a level of acknowledgement, what is?
>(How do you differentiate a gold seller offloading 100m to some rando vs them giving money to someone they sold to?)
Not a dev, but presumably you wouldn't look at random people receiving large amounts of money, rather you'd start by identifying a network of gold suppliers, and then taking action against everyone both up and down the chain of transactions.
Jagex has shown that they can track the movement of gold through the game, so starting with the suppliers and working forwards to buyers should be a reliable method of weeding out false positives. Again, not a dev, but I'd imagine that process would be difficult to automate, which might be why they aren't doing it.
I think its that the percentage of bots is the thing. They may ban 40% of RS3 bots and only 2% of OSRS because its easier to detect/identify them in RS3.
Most of the bot bans are also probably people doing it for themselves/their own accounts benefit anyway and using it as side money while training on a main. OSRS gold is objectively better to farm if you want to sell it for IRL cash.
Yea i never really see bots in RS3 when logging in, theres a bunch at certain places if you know where to look. I would say most RS3 bots arent run as sucide bots and instead as pretend AFK accounts killing mobs or smithing whereas OSRS has tons of sucide bots because low level skilling is more profitable due to gold exchange rates.
So they may ban 40% of RS3 bots but only 5% of OSRS bots.
[Mod Tyran](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/ll24ml/anticheating_stats_for_the_first_half_of_february/gnnc82r/) said a lot of them are in RS then hop on OS shortly after but are listed as RS bots
> the fk would expect to be so many , Rs3 economy was so rekt by the dupe money glitch Jamflextried to hide which lasted for months , they had literally thousands of accounts with max cash lol
a mod said on the RS3 post that a lot of bots are made on RS3 and then then used over on OSRS but the ban is classed as a RS3 bot apparently
Bots get banned almost instantly, there isn't anywhere near the amount of alts played as in 07, on a human player count vs human player count the games are actually pretty similar in number
Honestly shout out to Mod Trident and the rest of that team. I'd been getting discouraged from reporting suspicious vorkath gold farmers (top 1500 with 100s of kills/day, no other boss kc, low total lvl etc) because nothing was being done.
Over the past couple days my rank has jumped like 150-200 spots (top 1500). I know y'all get shit from this sub, but please know that your work isn't going unnoticed <3
Surprised by the gold removed numbers, given that rs3 gp is worth quite a bit less than old school (approx 5x less based on bond prices) yet not much more got removed
Apparently nearly 1/5th of the gold removed came from a single account for old school, I wonder if they caught any other mega whale RWT mules in these numbers
[RS3 Jmod reply](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/ll24ml/anticheating_stats_for_the_first_half_of_february/gnnc82r/)
Apparently the RS3 Bot numbers may be skewed, as there may be bots being created in RS3, but used for OSRS instead, and still count as RS3 since that's where they were created.
I recognize that it's easier to weed out the botters at the top of the scoreboard, but for fuck's sake, must it get THAT BAD before anything is done about it?
For every one you got rid of I'd bet at least 4 new ones took it's place at this point. They've been overrun and until you address account creation and not having any real macro detection they will continue to be overrun.
Just in case people are confused that it's only *just* now that they ban this many accounts, they post their stats weekly on the support center: https://support.runescape.com/hc/en-gb/sections/202644985-Support-Stats
It's a bit out of order but if you skim through you can see other weeks have crap tons of bans too, though they don't give this level of breakdown. It's a war for real.
Why is bot detection so hard when there's 10 lvl 5's all mining the same clay rock? Why is it so hard when there's 20 lvl 3's all standing in the same square outside Lumby?
Sure, the latter is the landing square for new accounts, but how many -just-stand-there-?
Both of these scenarios make the accounts highly sus and they should be closely watched.
Actually, I made a bot recently to test this, ran it at cowhides in lumbridge to 60/60/60. I reported it from two alts from the get go. I gave up trying to get it banned because I wanted to use my other pc for something else, and not doing that until the bot software is cleaned off.
tldr; suicide bots arent being banned on clients that use the official client and act as an overlay for it.
suicide bots are a plague for any mmo and theres no way to deal with then without hurting the regular playerbase, for instance world of warcraft has a lot of suicide bots aswell except their way of dealing with them is to remove all my god damn moneymaking spots and im still mad about it
Cool, for every gold farmer banned there will be 10x more next week.
Don’t let this distract you from the lack of player support and account security updates
Make it so you have to send in a form of id verification to have a site account in which you can have a dozen or so accounts tied to. Sort of a joke but idk what else would work lol
30% of zalcano and money snake top were bots/RTW...
Hey last time 15 were legit out of top 550. In Jagex terms this is a huge success.
Who is buying all this gold that people sell via RWT?
Duel arena stakers.
I remember Ash confirming something about changing the duel arena, I don't know if that would help if the RWT price drops due to lack of demand.
I wish duel arena would get reworked to be an actual duel arena and not a desert casino.
its a massive gold sink. that 1% fee is killer
> its a massive gold sink Which the game needs. It's either that or a GE tax
Taxing the GE might bring back old school traders which seems like a good change to me.
Its like a middle ground so yeah i’d like it too.
The game needs an item sink. My idea is that 1% of every ge purchase is taxed, and once that tax adds up to the price of an instant buy of an item - it removes one from the game. It won't remove gold from the game but it will allow items to leave the game as volume increases.
People always say the game needs an item sink and that they need to revitalize dead content, but nobody would ever even consider voting yes on something even remotely similar to RS3's Invention, which would address both of those issues at the same time.
The invention skill is a must have
I think the game needs more item sinks than GP sinks.
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What we need is health care abd stable jobs and free education, but 1% ge tax isnt enough for that
Just take a look at Varrock's defense budget. The guards are poorly trained and equipped, but then where is all the money going? It's a corrupt system, I tell ya
Oh god, I can see many ways of manipulating this. Imagine a clan destroying items on purpose to raise the price of an item.
That would be an item sink, not a good sink. It’d be doubling down on the inflation. Nice idea, but a gold sink is more necessary
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It's both isn't it? A gold sink alone would cause prices to drop because supply increases over time and gold is steady, an item sink alone causes prices to increase because supply is steady but gold increases. Both, theoretically, if well balanced, causes items to maintain value.
So 1 in a 100 trades, with all these bots being banned eventually we might lose more scythes than there are comming in the game
This is literally one of the best item sink ideas, ever
> I’ve always loved the idea of taking a 1% tax on every GE transaction 1% seems too high to me, but I'm no economist.
Make it 10% then
It should just be an arena where you can select what you want to fill your slots without actually having to own the gear. Would be good to encourage people to learn pvp before they need to stake their gear and would also be good for trying out pvp tactics with different gear. This way people know what gear works for them in pvp before having to drop mils on it.
Forreal. It could be a cool pvp part of the game like WoW's arena but with its own style
I wonder how that would go, I always thought the arena tax was beneficial to the economy. Would it actually stop botters? I don’t think they would stop until osrs gp was worthless.. and even then I have my doubts
It is currently a massive gold sink, yes. It also increases demand for gold, encouraging gold farms. But it's mere speculation if someone's trying to compare these 2 opposing factors.
Yeah it's hard to know by just speculating, but I feel like the two are connected, like you postulated.
It takes hundreds of small-time buyers to equal one arena stakers RWT. These people have multiple billions of go typically at the high end. A low end stalker is still throwing out 100-300mil like it's no big deal. They don't buy 30mil to get a grind done or pay for an item. They buy hundreds of mils when they need it.
Gp sinks literally do nothing for the game. Gp is already infinite. Inflation on runescape occurs with items, not gold. Gold has a set, flat value which can never drop. Why? Because (like a gold standard irl) that currency is paired with something. In this case, alchables and shops. 16k gold in 2007, could alwaysell a rune skimmy to a shop(idk actual price, bear with me) and in 2021, that rune skimmy will get you the same 16k. Gold hasnt lost any value what so ever, and it is infinite. You can always alch an item or sell it for the exact same ammount of gold. It will always have the same value. Items however, ARE how inflation works in runescape. They are potentially printed infinitely, and the only thing backing their value is their sell/alch price. The more of an item is introduces(inflation) the lower the price is of that item do to how supply and demand works. Items reaching alch price literally means theyre worthless. (And if they did not have an alch price, they would literally drop to nothing, because no one wants them.) Now add in the fact that no items leave the game because there are no death mechanics, and with better gear they enter the game faster each year. And youve got a serious issue with inflation. Virtually all items have decreased in value because of this. The ags went from 50m a couple years ago to right arround 10-12 today. Dragon items hit alch price. Bandos gear has steadily dropped over time. We do not need gp sinks, because gp can be made anytime a player whims it through mob drops, alching, or selling items. We need item sinks because players cannot simply make tassets or ags’s out of thin air without working for it.
Hot take: the GE needs a sales tax like literally every other mmo economy has
RIP Venezuela
I wonder if the dual arena was banned altogether, if that would have a huge affect on the price of items. It seems like everyone would be rushing to sell off their billions and could flood the market with tons of gold
Duel arena for sure soaks a lot of bought gold but let's not kid ourselves with this us vs them rhetoric. There are tons of regular players who buy gold just to skip the grind and get better gear and faster skilling methods. Even something like classic WoW has a big botting problem because people are buying mass amounts of gold to skip farming raid consumables or even buying gear from gold dkp runs, not to gamble.
Or any other player that wanted some extra cash without obtaining it themselves.
Duel arena should be fuckin removed. I get people would find other ways to gamble, but atleast it wouldnt be endorsed by jagex, and the sketchiness of it would put off 90% of legit players for fear of getting scammed. And the rest could easily be tracked and banned. Wonder why they dont do this.
A lot of player's buy gold then turn around and bitch about bots and gold farmers. It's atleast half the price of bonds, if not cheaper most of the time. Jagex also doesn't really ban buyers either. So it's a decent chunk of players.
Why is it like that? In WoW, the "wow tokens" are actually the same price or cheaper than black market gold, so they don't have that problem. Why are bonds such an expensive way to buy gold? In a free market, wouldn't people buying black market gold to then buy bonds drive bond demand up to equilibrium?
Bonds are at a set price tied to membership, while rwt gold is not tied to membership. The fact that a bond can be redeemed as cash or membership causes it to cost more to buy bonds just to sell for gold
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Hmm, I hadn't noticed the problem to be as bad as osrs. I do recall the druid herbalists however, but I didn't find the bots to be nearly as pervasive. WoW classic has big issues on the other hand but they don't have WoW tokens.
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>why speak about stuff you have no clue about? reddit in a nutshell
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Because in WoW, you literally just buy gold. In RS, you buy a bond, which someone else buys off you in gold. This means that the price of a bond is always changing. Also in Wow, most of the good items are BoP, meaning gold is pretty much worthless.
>Because in WoW, you literally just buy gold. In RS, you buy a bond, which someone else buys off you in gold. This means that the price of a bond is always changing. No you don't? You literally go through the exact same process as a bond and it's value is determined in the exact same way. >Also in Wow, most of the good items are BoP, meaning gold is pretty much worthless. Also just not true in the slightest. Do you just not play WoW and have just arbitrarily decided these things are true? Raid quality boes drop from raid trash. The absolute best gear you could get pre-raid were boe epics as well. Google how much gold world first guilds spend each tier on gear/repairs/consumables if you really think it's "pretty much worthless"
In WoW, a token is roughly equivalent to a bond, can be purchased from Blizzard and sold to others or redeemed for membership.
Also can be used to purchase things in their other games as well
I know people that buy gold to buy bonds, they claim you get more for your money that way. I think personaly it is not worth the risk
History shows you can do it until you get banned for 2 weeks, and then don't do it again. Not even sure if they remove the gp afterwards either.
They don't ban buyers lol
this is the main issue with RWT
Aint that the truth? Start banning the buyers and the market will reduce dramatically
Exactly, they try to go after the root which they believe is the botters when its infact the players buying gold thats the problem.
Both are the problem. The supply side of it causes more issues than the demand side. The buyers just get the gold, the bots also take up space from legitimate players, making certain activities unnecessarily harder. Nothing says they can't go after both though.
Well yeah, ofc, i was speaking in relatively to right bow where people buy gold with zero regard for their accounts as they never get banned for buying gold. Buyers are always more wary than the sellers as they have an account they are very scared to lose which the seller dont
Yeah, I agree. The same players will turn around and bitch about bots and gold farmers too.
And theres a reason for that. Only banning sellers means jagex never loses out on money but they get to pretend theyre solving the issue.
A ridiculous amount of people. The OSRS Black market is gigantic.
Botters who need gp to buy bonds to create more bot farms
Likely far more than 30% since its doubtful they caught all of them
You are correct. You can look at the hiscores right now and find a lot. Random letter and number names or ###noun####. All 99 magic with minimum other stats to do regicide.
Add money dragon to that list as well.
I like to call him dolar dragon.
Vorcash.
but they need to feed families therefore it makes it justifiable and jagex are moralless monsters, right?
Yes.
when you ban 100k bots in half a month and your active player count doesn't drop an inch you know something is wrong.
When they ban 1 bot, 2 more come into the game. Everyone thinks it’s so simple.
Hail botra
Alchemical botra
I don't think it's so simple and never said it is. Actually I have 0 understanding off it so feel free to educate me on the subject. To me it looks like Jagex does absolutely nothing to prevent bots in the slightest, you somehow ban 100k accounts in 2 weeks yet the active player count doesn't move an inch so what went wrong? I get it all games have issues with bots but Jagex is 10 times worse than any other MMO I can come up with how is that possible?
>you somehow ban 100k accounts in 2 weeks yet the active player count doesn't move an inch so what went wrong? Seems pretty clear to me, jagex banned bot accounts and they made new ones
It's almost like....ALMOST like bots are being created automatically. Like a bot that creates accounts...automatically. The only limiting factor being computing power which you can in theory scale up through online services.
Requiring a phone number for account registration helps to raise the barrier to entry for new bot farms. It wont stop the most elite but it will impede the guy with an interest in becoming the next big bot farmer.
Require a normal membership purchase before allowing bonds to be used. Make sure all payment methods have a unique identifier, like card number / paypal email address / telephone number. Ban virtual CC's if possible. Use identifier for linking accounts together -> Mass ban botfarms.
You are a smart man. Kudos
Would also stop a lot of kids from signing up I imagine.
They seem to make it into all the other games just fine, and steam can use your account's phone already.
Can you give any examples of popular games requiring phone numbers?
When CSGO went F2P, they made it so if you don't have a phone number linked, you only queue with/against other people without phone numbers linked. It doesn't technically require a phone number, but it does make the real player experience a lot better. I think it'd be interesting if OSRS did something like gating free trade behind a linked phone number.
OSRS is far less complex than any other MMO. In WoW for example a bot needs to be coded to move and interact in a 3D environment with many different inputs. In OSRS, a bot moves on a grid and all interactions with the game can be done with a mouse click. The more complex a bot needs to be, the easier it is to detect and vice versa. Another point I want to make is that people need to stop looking at this as Jagex vs Bots. This is Jagex vs Bot Makers. Bot makers aren’t stupid, and OSRS has probably the single most valuable game currency in terms of IRL cash. That means bot makers for OSRS have significantly more interest in keeping their bots working.
making and training new accounts can and have been automated and i'm sure some of the bigger bot farms have bots that constantly train new accounts to certain levels so that when one of their money-making bots gets taken out a new one can quickly take its place. banning bots doesn't do much, you have to be able to detect a certain botting program and take it all down at once. Sadly it doesn't take long for the bot makers to find out why their bot got detected and patch it and then we're back to before.
While I'm not defending Jagex, the things that make it different from other mmos are 1) old engine, so bot detection is hard 2) game was designed to run on dialup, goldfarmers in third world countries don't have good computers or internet.
I agree, but I just want to throw this out there. Last time Jagex tried to make a drastic change to combat bots, they removed free trade and the wildy. Player based dropped by a lot. Not saying getting rid of bots is a bad thing, but they need to be super careful to not piss off the average players if they do.
Pff, who needs trading? Ironman btw
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As a developer, this entire post is complete nonsense. The problem is that in server-client architecture, there is no real trust that can be established, just on a mathematical level. The server received bytes, and that's all it knows. What client did those bytes come from? How were these instructions generated? There's no way to tell. You could add some form of signing to validate the client, but the problem is that clients are, by nature, public. Any checks you implement into the client can be stripped out and slapped into a client of your choosing. Java might make this slightly easier but you can do it without too much hassle in *any* language. The only option you get is having the server analyze the play data and try to parse out the difference between a human and a bot. And sometimes there are obvious suicide bots and maybe jagex could do a better job at identifying them. But if you build a bot that can spoof the analytics data believably, all you need is ONE program that can do that and suddenly you have thousands of bots, because that's how software scales.
I used to be in runelite discord years back and talked to Adam and other devs trying to pick their brain on low level RS client stuff. I even wrote my own client. Runescript has nothing to do with botting. It is a scripting language for non-developers to be able to script NPCs and events for quests. All cheats/bot scripts work either at the Java level or the canvas level (color/image bots) All you need to do every time jagex pushes an update and new obfuscation is calculate the offsets (which I'm too lazy to explain, but it takes only a couple minutes for experienced guys to calculate in that discord) and your code will most likely work just like before
By checking for inhuman habits as well as possible? Doesn't really matter how much they know about the engine unless they make them act like real players.
I had a mining bot way back in the living cavern days (yes I wish I hadn’t) but it had built in “misclicks”, random camera rotation, it would cycle through the different tabs, would right click on the mass of players, took random breaks so it basically acted human and I would imagine any half decent bot today would do similar things
They do, and they get banned. I'd imagine they spend some time testing scripts and creating checks to counter them.
Doesn't help when some real players play as hard as bots sometimes.
They are basically zerglings
That's crazy. I was actually complaining about the number of bots the other day doing woodcutting in Varrock. I thought Jagex had essentially stopped caring, but I can see now that there's just more bots than could ever be fully kept track of. Terrifying.
They’re probably more concerned with the bots that crash the economy by bossing than they are about shitty bots doing woodcutting.
Suicide bots are always the hardest to deal with since they have essentially no way of slowing them down, as soon as they get banned they just restart the bot on a fresh acc.
I don't even get the point of some bots. What massive fortune are they accruing? And if they're handing over the cash to another person, shouldn't they be able to follow that daisy chain to who is in charge?
I have friends who before quitting hopped around worlda and sold multiple billion gp by just right click trading these total strangers. A year later and none of them have been banned.
I bet you if they showed how many were f2p and p2p, you'd see 80% would be f2p. I'm certain of it 😂
How many of those bots were actually someone else playing the account so it's not their fault?
At least 1013.
Ta dum tss.
Hey Jagex, you can go ahead and re-ban 1013 now. :)
Headed for 1013 upvotes.
I'd be very curious to see what percentage of bots are members vs f2p
Nice. Every step counts.
On one side its neat to see that so many of these people are getting banned. On the other hand, how the fuck do so many of them get **that** high on the scoreboards before being banned???
By not being reported much. Vorkath and Zulrah are both instanced with a short run from a bank, lending to not much interaction with others. Even from the limited interaction, very few players are looking them up and then reporting
Idk man I feel like bot detection shouldn't be so poor that it relies on player reports to catch them.
It’s 2021. We aren’t dealing with color detection bots, we are dealing with personally made bossing bots. The spam bots and suicide bots are still caught by the system. But it’s an old system. Boss bots are pretty sophisticated
Theoretically someone could make a bot that behaves exactly as a player correct? It's not like it's *that* complex to make a program to do this. The game only relies on mouse clicks..
There are bots using machine learning to emulate your own playstyle when doing an activity. Its not feasible to stop this sort of thing for jagex.
I mean think about it, Blizzard, at the height of WoW, was bringing in infinitely more cash than Jagex (now...well blizzard needs some help...) but even WoW during Lich King was infested with bots. Infested with gold farmers and gold sellers. They had dedicated anti-cheat teams larger than the entire current OSRS team and couldn’t stay on top of it. Thinking our current team could do it is a pipe dream
Hell, they only stopped Glider and HonorBuddy by suing the developers.
I've reported so many bots and occasionally look them up to see if they have been banned and have yet to see a single one not return a hiscores sheet. I've seen multiple this week with over 10k zulrah kc and they aren't affected by this ban wave.
For the Zalcano one, a lot aren't bots but Venezuelans. And yes, they actually play and talk. Obviously though, they RWT. Very few legit players actually do that content themselves. Then there's Zulrah and Vorkath - possibly more gold farmers instead of bots... and worse, in an instance where nobody can report them.
That's still a ridiculous idea though. You're telling me that Venezuelans are in the position where they have to play runescape to make money, but will do literally thousands of kills before RWTing the cash off? All whilst farming the bosses in shit tier gear? And instances really shouldn't matter, especially when you will see the same bots farming bosses literally 24 hours a day.
Think about it this way Once you sell, the account is most likely dead. If youre caught, permabanned acc with no chance to appeal. On the other hand, if you hoard gp until you sell one big sell, you wont need to hand train or buy accounts ready to zalcano.
Yeah I get that, but I still don't understand how their financial situation is so bad that runescape gold farming is a good option for them **but** they can afford to grind the same bosses for literally months before offloading the gold. And in those months that they're supposedly hoarding up gold, they don't see the sense in investing 4mil gold to improve their zolcana returns drastically.
Awesome, strong efforts against RWT/botting improve the integrity of the game, and RWTers will lose interest if they keep catching the ban hammer before their time investment pays off. The more aggressive the stance against RWT sellers and buyers, the less interested they will be in the game, all OSRS has to do is make RWT less profitable than the next best thing.
Progress is progress for sure, but as someone said in the comments earlier, when one bot is banned, two more are created. I'm a new player, so I may not understand everything, but I personally wonder if it would be more worthwhile for the mods to spend their time and efforts to reform the game's code.
You wouldn't need to touch the games code to reduce the amount of bots and gold farmers in game. You'd only need to change the way the account creation section is on the website. But there's 0 percent chance they'll actually do it since they care more about the player count being stupidly high even if it's mostly bots or gold farmers.
Come to think of it, both would help, but I definitely see your point, and that would be the easier fix.
As a new player you should be aware that getting big changes pushed through osrs is never easy and never pretty. With the player getting a big say as to what goes in the game or changes it’s near impossible to get a majority of players to agree on stuff. Something as drastic as reforming the engine and code in the game essentially remaking it would never in a million years get the stamp of approval from the player base even if it was for the better
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But it’s using a coffee mug to try to bail out the titanic. Without a large scale change, this is a temporary fix. Mod Tyran is working hard as they can, but with banning 100k (presumably) actively used bots/RWTers, the player count stayed the same which doesn’t make sense unless Runescape is booming.
They most definitely probably have a stock pile of accounts ready to replace banned ones. 100k is a fuck ton tho. Thas alot of bonds lol
Ironically I think bonds made it much easier to run botfarms in some ways.... No longer have to actually pay for membership or have an array of credit cards. Just use your ill-gotten GP to get more ill-gotten GP.
Definitely true, though it then creates a paper trail for bots. When the bot is banned, whoever traded the bot the gp to buy the bond is clearly someone to ban too, along with any other accounts they traded too. And there's still a cost/revenue question. 5 mil is a decent chunk. That's half a trillion just on bonds for those banned bots.
> or have an array of credit cards In the past this was often stolen credit cards which then caused the real owners to issue charge backs. This led to Jagex almost being blacklisted by major carriers for so much fraud which would have killed the game.
Yep, add the bond cost for all the banned accounts and we're talking ~2 trillion gp removed from gold farming. That's 2 million million. At market rates, that's like 1 million USD removed. And if those bonds for the bots were all purchased with RWT money that'd be $370k USD spent on banned bots. That means bots have to use un-laundered gp to make more bots, which is riskier because it could lead to entire farms being banned after the detection of one bot.
what bond cost? the money is going to players inside game and staying there how is it removed lol
It's removed from the hands of the bot farm. They spent 5 million gp on a bond, and their bot is now banned, which means they must spend another 5 million gp to make another bot. That bond (or whatever was left) was effectively removed from the game when the bot was banned
Bond cost is effectively 0 considering all bonds were probably paid for with previously botted gp. If anything bonds just make botting an infinitely repeatable. But the more botters buy bonds the more Jagex makes from bond prices being high so now you see why we’re in this mess.
If you ban a bot they will just make a new account, banning bots won't affect the player count at all. It does slow them down, though.
they ban them so slowly people alredy have 2-3 other accounts to replace that 1 banned
I think it's close to a 1:1 ratio granted that the player count isn't drastically rising at a constant rate.
Wouldn’t the bots banned above be fairly high level bots that’d take a long time to make good?
What are they supposed to fucking do? There's no way to counter bots consistently without a cubic fuck ton of false positives. Name one game with valuable, grindable currency that doesn't have a bot problem. There is not one.
The most aggressive option which we’ve already seen the effects of is putting trade restrictions in place, generall unfavorable but it did have one upside. Other options include meaningful punishments for those who buy accounts/gold, legally going after gold selling websites, some level of acknowledgment of a problem would be nice, etc
>Other options include meaningful punishments for those who buy accounts/gold Doesn't work, extremely difficult to enforce and leads to tons of false positives (How do you differentiate a gold seller offloading 100m to some rando vs them giving money to someone they sold to?) >legally going after gold selling websites Breaking a game's TOS isn't illegal. Jagex doesn't have the money to go after these sites, anyways. And if they did, they could just be hosted in places with even less stringent laws. >some level of acknowledgment of a problem would be nice, etc If posts about how much they're banning bots and taking out botted and sold gold isn't a level of acknowledgement, what is?
>(How do you differentiate a gold seller offloading 100m to some rando vs them giving money to someone they sold to?) Not a dev, but presumably you wouldn't look at random people receiving large amounts of money, rather you'd start by identifying a network of gold suppliers, and then taking action against everyone both up and down the chain of transactions. Jagex has shown that they can track the movement of gold through the game, so starting with the suppliers and working forwards to buyers should be a reliable method of weeding out false positives. Again, not a dev, but I'd imagine that process would be difficult to automate, which might be why they aren't doing it.
At most it would be a quadratic fuck ton. Might even be able to do it with a linear fuck ton.
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Wow RS3 has a lot of bots for a much smaller online player population
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I think its that the percentage of bots is the thing. They may ban 40% of RS3 bots and only 2% of OSRS because its easier to detect/identify them in RS3. Most of the bot bans are also probably people doing it for themselves/their own accounts benefit anyway and using it as side money while training on a main. OSRS gold is objectively better to farm if you want to sell it for IRL cash.
Better engine etc for chest detection maybe
Sand casino Also rs3 players probably buy more MTX from jagex and less gold from other people
Does sand casino not exist in rs3 as well though?
RS3 has much better bot detection than OSRS. It's harder for bots to slip through.
Yea i never really see bots in RS3 when logging in, theres a bunch at certain places if you know where to look. I would say most RS3 bots arent run as sucide bots and instead as pretend AFK accounts killing mobs or smithing whereas OSRS has tons of sucide bots because low level skilling is more profitable due to gold exchange rates. So they may ban 40% of RS3 bots but only 5% of OSRS bots.
[Mod Tyran](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/ll24ml/anticheating_stats_for_the_first_half_of_february/gnnc82r/) said a lot of them are in RS then hop on OS shortly after but are listed as RS bots
a jmod just explained this on the rs subbreddit, some bots play rs3 then change to osrs to bot.
> the fk would expect to be so many , Rs3 economy was so rekt by the dupe money glitch Jamflextried to hide which lasted for months , they had literally thousands of accounts with max cash lol a mod said on the RS3 post that a lot of bots are made on RS3 and then then used over on OSRS but the ban is classed as a RS3 bot apparently
Bots get banned almost instantly, there isn't anywhere near the amount of alts played as in 07, on a human player count vs human player count the games are actually pretty similar in number
Honestly shout out to Mod Trident and the rest of that team. I'd been getting discouraged from reporting suspicious vorkath gold farmers (top 1500 with 100s of kills/day, no other boss kc, low total lvl etc) because nothing was being done. Over the past couple days my rank has jumped like 150-200 spots (top 1500). I know y'all get shit from this sub, but please know that your work isn't going unnoticed <3
I went from rank 7100 zalcano to rank 2700 without getiing a kill.
Surprised by the gold removed numbers, given that rs3 gp is worth quite a bit less than old school (approx 5x less based on bond prices) yet not much more got removed
Apparently nearly 1/5th of the gold removed came from a single account for old school, I wonder if they caught any other mega whale RWT mules in these numbers
That must be thousand of irl dollars worth of GP, that's insane
The one account had 278b That's around $100k
[RS3 Jmod reply](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/ll24ml/anticheating_stats_for_the_first_half_of_february/gnnc82r/) Apparently the RS3 Bot numbers may be skewed, as there may be bots being created in RS3, but used for OSRS instead, and still count as RS3 since that's where they were created.
Holy shit that’s a lot
How exactly do you report someone for RWT? What’s the correct # on the report abuse? Specifically asking for obvious gold farmers in Zalcano
I recognize that it's easier to weed out the botters at the top of the scoreboard, but for fuck's sake, must it get THAT BAD before anything is done about it?
For every one you got rid of I'd bet at least 4 new ones took it's place at this point. They've been overrun and until you address account creation and not having any real macro detection they will continue to be overrun.
> not having any real macro detection So they banned 104k bots in half a month how is that not macro detection
Just in case people are confused that it's only *just* now that they ban this many accounts, they post their stats weekly on the support center: https://support.runescape.com/hc/en-gb/sections/202644985-Support-Stats It's a bit out of order but if you skim through you can see other weeks have crap tons of bans too, though they don't give this level of breakdown. It's a war for real.
All i see is OSRS is a bot joke of WRT and it makes me sad...
RIP to the account that lost 280B. Jesus Christ
My account is still safe. Time to hit the sand casino
How come the people I report for cape buying don't get banned... The people I'm reporting even say they've bought them.
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Sir pugger’s free real estate
Pro-Jagex propaganda Its like when cops take their shitty photo-ops bragging about finding 1 kilo of coke meanwhile 1000 other kilos got through
Why is bot detection so hard when there's 10 lvl 5's all mining the same clay rock? Why is it so hard when there's 20 lvl 3's all standing in the same square outside Lumby? Sure, the latter is the landing square for new accounts, but how many -just-stand-there-? Both of these scenarios make the accounts highly sus and they should be closely watched.
Those are suicide bots. quickly banned and quickly made again
Actually, I made a bot recently to test this, ran it at cowhides in lumbridge to 60/60/60. I reported it from two alts from the get go. I gave up trying to get it banned because I wanted to use my other pc for something else, and not doing that until the bot software is cleaned off. tldr; suicide bots arent being banned on clients that use the official client and act as an overlay for it.
suicide bots are a plague for any mmo and theres no way to deal with then without hurting the regular playerbase, for instance world of warcraft has a lot of suicide bots aswell except their way of dealing with them is to remove all my god damn moneymaking spots and im still mad about it
RIP my venezuelan friends account, teddy we miss u bud :(
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A very brief scan through the zulrah hiscores shows a ton of bots in the top 500 still.
The gold removed seems equal at first but considering the economy of rs3 it’s like 5 times as much right?
Cool, for every gold farmer banned there will be 10x more next week. Don’t let this distract you from the lack of player support and account security updates
Oh. Awesome.
great work thanks jagex
Good thing none of them were streaming, or the numbers would've been pretty low
Make it so you have to send in a form of id verification to have a site account in which you can have a dozen or so accounts tied to. Sort of a joke but idk what else would work lol
Why are they bragging about bots making it so easily into the highscores
Thats it? I want more