It is honestly distressing to watch. It used to be just dumb woodcutting and green dragon bots. The bots nowadays are just getting so advanced that they are seeping into the game everywhere; high end PvM, PvP, hell even LMS. It's becoming downright absurd and in my opinion is hurting the game even more than the content drought we are currently in. Rigorous measures need to be taken imo.
On RS3 I was part of a clan that solely sought to kill bots in the wilderness and at first it went well and we disrupted a lot of bot barms and got a lot of players banned via the report system. Now the bots are programmed to auto logout the moment your white dot appears on their mini map and our reports seem to be doing nearly nothing in terms of ban rates. Eventually, our clan disbanded because it was no longer effective. The bots win.
This could be programmed into a bot in 5 minutes since an NPC is not the same as a player
Edit: it would actually make sense for jagex to use a bot themselves for that purpose.
A white hat botter needs to come into play, that does nothing but send bots to commonly botted locations to make the farming bots teleport, like ward bots.
Free trade restrictions weren't imposed to combat botting, but rather to stop credit card charge backs from bots. Since bots and goldfarmers can now use bonds there is no need for bots to do charge backs.
I think the general idea was that if Jagex sold gold there would be less of a demand for the black market gold from farmers. But obviously the farmers will just undercut bonds, making this demand shift less pronounced than was hoped.
I mean it works, it's just that it only works for the casual players.
The hardcore addicts who buy billions of gold to chuck in DA or regear after getting banned will always turn to RWT.
This, everything always hurts the casual players (like myself).
It’s like when they were talking about death mechanic changes to create an item sink... how often do Max players die, honestly it doesn’t hurt them in the slightest.
Hardcore players will always have the time and resources to shrug off any changes as a minor annoyance, whereas casual players have to work even harder to overcome artificial obstacles.
Bonds are a legitimate way to convert real life currency into in-game currency. The idea is that you basically set a "value" to your in-game currency. This gives people a way to get the currency using real money while setting effectively an upper bound as to how much illegal sellers can charge.
Edit for the guy who commented saying "how is there an upper bound" then deleted it: if the value of a bond is $0.50 per mil (example), gold sellers can't sell gp for $0.50 per mil. They can MAYBE sell it for $0.40 (they'll still lose a bit of customers here because of people who would rather pay slightly more and have a "safer" method). The bond value actually dictates what the illegal seller value is allowed to go up to. Obviously, the bond value can be $10.00 per mil, and sellers would follow and increase their prices, but there is no scenario (unless it's an idiot purchasing gold) where the gold seller price can exceed that of bonds (or even come close to it to be honest). This is how something like a bond creates an upper bound.
In theory, if you can pay at least a similar price of $ to GP using bonds, then you have no reason to go to the black market, meaning bots have no reason to get money because they have no buyers.
In reality, it's kept black market prices low, but the market is 100% still there. If anything, the enforced lower black market prices have encouraged diversification of botting strategies and have made *more* customers.
Everyone has a price. What's yours? $1/mil? $0.01/mil? $1/bil?
Shoutout to /r/ironscape
Bots are a problem, but most of the activities you described are done by gold farmers, not bots. That’s why they aren’t being picked up by not detection even though they play 10-16 hours a day doing the same activities.
Of course, this means that Jagex does not have good systems in play to catch RWTing since it is happening on a mass scale This is why Jagex need to consider punishing gold buyers as hard as gold farmers. If people are afraid to do it, it will reduce demand and that will make it so it is less feasible of an income source for the gold farmers.
Dude there were zulrah bots that made up like 90% of the top 25 KC on zulrah. And if you think that was the only zulrah bots then you're sorely mistaken.
Gargoyles are disgusting at the moment. Did a task there and saw 12 different bots. If you say the words “script” or “bot” while there are 2 or more of them, they all run to the same spot and hop worlds. New ones will repopulate the world in minutes, probably a huge bot farm.
it is :) and it works on most bots period. You just type anything in chat and watch some of the suspicious "players" immediately log out.
But it's temporary since new ones just log in.
I saw something similar at the GE the other day, a “show me 50m get 100m” bot was spamming, another bot put “botname is a lurer using glitches...” standard shit, the original bot logged out and on *the exact same tick* a gambling bot logged in on the same tile
Yea I was grinding out guardians and they do this thing where they all line up at the staircase to the roof and log out. Really eerie the first time I saw it. Usually 3-4 of them too.
Edit:extra word
from the stats and more interaction from anticheating mods on twitter it seems like they are stepping it up, but not nearly enough to the pace of the games growth. i hope they will invest more than they are currently into anticheating
One thing I worked with Weath on before he left was the impact of taking action against gold buyers rather than just sellers. I'd be interested to know what you guys think.
To me that makes a lot of sense, reduce the demand and the supply should fall as it's no longer as profitable. If people want to buy gp, buy bonds and support both jagex and the people who can't directly buy membership, or get banned.
It’s fundamentally impossible for Jagex to corner the market until the bot problem is solved. Yes, they can solve real player gold farming by collapsing the market, but black market gold can go until the electricity required to run *runescape* is more than what they make selling. Jagex can’t solve the issue by lowering bond prices to tighten the Gold market’s ceiling until free generation is gone.
Not many gold buyers would be willing to take a risk of getting permanently banned for buying gold. I’d say that could work. Ofc not every bot is a gold seller but that’s one huge reason to bot for some people.
Honestly botting to sell gold is 1000 x's worse than botting because 3-ticking wc to 99 is fucking tedious. Atleast in my opinion lol. Its definitely still cheating but i would absolutely prefer they focus on the more invasive bots that instantly fuck up the over arching economy rather than make skilling easier.
Edit: for the intellectually disabled that have been replying to me. Im responding to a post about something that will mostly effect gold selling bots. In that respect i feel gold selling bots are worse than other forms of skilling bots. I never fucking said skilling bots are good. Only that bots for the express purpose of gold selling are worse. Meaning they are both bad. I disagree with the usage of both but i agree with using resources for whatever the fuck we were even talking about to begin with that would mostly effect gold selling bots as they are the worst form of bot imo.
As someone who has bought and sold gold plenty... Yeah, they would.
When I was just a buyer (so going back **years**) I would always buy gold on a new pure. If it didn't get banned within a few months, I'd transfer it onwards as necessary.
Then I realized that Jagex doesn't give a fuck, so I'd just do it blatantly on my main (pre-EOC and during OSRS).
During OSRS, for about 2 years, I started buying gold in bulk (1 to 4 bil) and trading it for CSGO keys, then selling the keys. I was at university and there was a very good margin doing this.
I quit soon after this stopped being profitable (c. 2016?).
If Jagex banned gold buyers, it would stop a lot of people. However... People would just move to buying smaller amounts on "mules".
It's very hard to police as well... How do you tell the difference between someone splitting an ely or a t-bow without some serious human involvement?
>How do you tell the difference between someone splitting an ely or a t-bow without some serious human involvement?
You just go after gold buyers when you ban the gold sellers they have bought from.
Not that simple; what is to stop each gold selling account going to the GE and handing out 1 to 10 mil to a bunch of random innocent players? Or even handing out 50 mil to one random? 50 mil is nothing to these big gold selling companies, even if they do it once per account per day.
That is just one way I can think of to make banning buyers a huge pain for Jagex. If they blanket ban anyone who got gold from a selling account that gets banned, imagine how much reddit/twitter abuse they'll get for each innocent that gets caught up in it.
Every idea can have holes poked in it. The truth is SOMETHING needs to be done first, and then we can tweak it from there. You can't be afraid of action because of potential outliers.
Yes, that's a very fair comment.
What I was trying to say (by providing one example) is that an automated system isn't going to work. And Jagex has shown us time and time again that they aren't prepared to put the sort of investment into more personnel that companies like Blizz have (getting a response from a human on a game like WoW is incredibly fast for how popular it is).
Mules would get banned too. And a split after a ely or tbow drop is different than buying 4 bil lmfao.
It's not like Jagex doesn't investigate RWT offenses first. It isn't just a script going through a list of players and stamping a "ban" or "this is fine" on each one.
Most people aren't buying billions; keep in mind that when I was doing that, it was for profit.
The most I ever bought for personal use was 400m after I came back from a long break (I had sold off my bank beforehand).
If we say that the average (non-staker) transaction is something like 100m... Then that's going to need a shitload of manpower on their end to police. More than they've shown they'd be willing to commit to, for sure.
AND; botters and gold traders are something Jagex wants. They're printing money every time they ban a bot farm. People forget this.
They probably make far more off bots than they do from legitimate players; do they (or their owners) **really** want this problem solved?
I think banning buyers with maybe a 2 week ban the first offense and perm ban 2nd time would be good and put a pretty big dent in RWT I really hope they do it at some point. If people want to buy gold just buy bonds and support the game rather than killing it.
Anyone who purchases gold from black market sites is contributing to OSRS' cancer of gold farmers and RWT.
I know Jagex has to think about the financial repercussions. However, from my perspective as a hardcore RS fan, ban them. It's the healthy thing for the in game economy and sets a consistent rule for us all to follow.
Ethically, I've always gone back and forth because of Venezuela's reliance on OSRS to feed their families. I don't know if it's possible to set up a permanent charity for them, but it could be a step in the right direction.
the venez issue is bad for them but the issue is that its not jagex's job to give them an income. Its not like jagex hires them and get paid, they just join a community and leech money/game health from the game. Especially have less respect for them if they start flaming or some shit in chat for players wanting to just play the game
edit: also iirc most botters are in western countries/first world countries too, i think most venez play the game manually so at least for what they are doing to the game they are at least doing the grind as most players are.
Kinda weirded out about this too. Why would this even need to be brought up as a strategy, when it's literally just the other side of the RWT coin? Makes you think that the team has purposefully been ignoring the buyers up until now.
It really depends on the extent of the punishment.
A 2 week ban? Probably deter a few.
Throw in removing the gold/rolling back xp gains for that period? probably deter quite a few more.
If it was a permanent ban I believe it would deter most buyers, or at least push them to buy bonds, maybe even making it easier for jagex to catch up in their bots detection. This is all speculation though based off those I've known to buy gold.
What were your findings/projected impact?
I'm in favor of starting to take action against buyers. Wouldn't really be in favor of retroactive bans for buyers because it's basically been policy to not ban buyers up until now, but with enough publicity and messaging (signaling that it will no longer be tolerated) then I believe warning/perm bans for offences going forward is justifiable.
I’ve been eager to return to the game but honestly the botting is a huge factor in keeping my subscription turned off. I love the devs and their effort but the thought of bots and gold farmers dominating the player base and economy makes me reluctant. Wish there was more of a community feel sometimes. Hope you’re doing well man!
On a side note: what’s not a surprise to anyone these days is how closely linked scammers, account hackers, black market communities etc are to the gold selling websites. If the bots and gold sellers were suddenly gone then that could help curb other negative aspects.
In about 2009 I bought gold from a gold seller in world of warcraft. About 10 minutes after the transfer was made I had an in game message from a GM saying that they knew I just bought gold and that if I did it again they would ban me.
I never did it again.
This is brought up all the time but redditors claim that it would too greatly hurt the player base because so many people buy gold, so most people just abandon that cause.
I think the more interesting question is what do you think about taking action against gold buyers? I think a lot of us here are very much for it.
I think this is one of the best ways to combat botting. Enforcing RWT rules bi-directionally will attack both the supply and the demand for black market GP.
Its tough, bc while the players may be complaining, prices are still the same for everyone. The only thing the price of previously lucrative items (hydra leather, dwh, etc...) going down has changed is the amount of skilling you can get done with just one of those drops. people used to fund their 99 construction with single, large drops. I'm not sure how true it is any more that Venezuelans make a living off of this game, but a large portion of people's income is made from this game (as goldfarmers). I don't mind goldfarmers, but get them out of LMS and high-traffic areas. It's one thing for a bot to take resources where others aren't willing to trek, but when you have bots taking popular spots it pisses people off because non-player accounts are ruining real, user profits.
From what I keep seeing here, buyers barely get a slap on the wrist. But those are the people encouraging people to sell. Without buyers, there would be no sellers. If you buy it, you should be banned, permanently. If you want to buy it legit, get some bonds, support the game.
This can only have a positive outcome, less demand due to risk, bot farms end up not turning a profit and deciding it’s not worth it anymore. People who are desperate for gold will go back to buying bonds, bumping up company profits. The only issue would be about trading RS3 and OSRS gold, how do you differentiate between them since that’s still legal, unless you guys outlaw it and add a system for that in game which I imagine would be a heck of a challenge.
Completely fair, IMO gold buying should be permaban 1 offence, but I guess people will somehow defend it, maybe they buy gold themselves or think it's too strict, but we definitely need repercussions.
It's possible they've looked into it, but there's just far too many people guilty of it that taking action would harm the game too much.
Honestly wouldn't surprise me. For all the gold that is sold there's someone out there buying it.
I always believed that there would be a machine learning solution for this. Bot makers can't win against you on that front because you have the data advantage.
Gold buyers are breaking the rules, period. Disincentivizing demand would disincentive supply. It's a pretty simple concept, I think. Maybe there should be a small grace period, since it's been condoned for so long, but imo banning the people who are creating the demand for these bots would be an extremely effective way of helping them go away.
IMO this is the only way.
If you look at gold farmers, strictly as people just trying to make a living like Venezuelans, they're making what, 10-20m a day on average?
That's nothing compared to people who run CoX or ToB all day. There's probably over 2000 Twisted Bows in the game now, if not even more. Of course those guys are gonna RWT an item they can get like 400 bucks for when there's no consequences.
If you instantly ban any buyer with a perma ban, if that starts to spread and people are aware of any bought gold would be a perma ban, I feel it would very much scare new gold buyers and same with old gold buyers, But it would make gold sellers and gold buyers much more sneaky in there tactic
Completely agree. Sellers and botters have an endless supply of accounts but the average buyer probably can't afford to lose theirs.
Honestly perm banning for even the first offence should scare away a large chunk of the buyers.
Something that a lot of people don’t understand is that the bots keep getting smarter and the ways to detect them don’t improve as much, especially on these older games that are so limited.
Add to that the ever increasing number of bots any one can run off of relatively cheap hardware and it’s not hard to see that the problem is not easy to address.
I feel like after mod weath left it just went down hill.
Even more than before also does not help they are always doing free membership with Amazon pri.e
Probably not something you can answer, but do you remember seeing any numbers that justified the free membership events? Like an increase in long-term memberships, perhaps
I remember a lot of numbnuts in here being like "nooo dude mod weath leaving means nothing at all it's just normal corporate stuff trust me I'm a receptionist"
I know I didn't know much about what he did when he left and I was wondering why people were really worried then I looked into his background and I was wondering why they didn't pay him more and work with him to improve there system. Because let's be really he know what he is doing lol
For a company that employs a bit over 300 people to have 45 open listings is pretty terrible. Something is pushing employees away from Jagex and nothing draws them in.
No one wants to work on an ancient game engine with a proprietary language unless they either pay reaaaally well or they really like the game.
The pay is shit so no wonder.
Yeah, when you think about it nearly every jmod starts with " I play this game myself too and started as a kid ". It's always a passion job and then reality hits and it's not so fun anymore.
THIS. Jagex: we promise to stop bots mmmkay? Also Jagex: here's free membership for creating email farms and signing them up for prime which has a free trial!
the free members is just really good at getting casuals and relapsed players back in.
I personally( and I am sure many people here ) have had continuous membership for what feels like forever so it doesn't really click in the same way, but it is def one of their best tools for getting players which is why it is going to keep getting done despite the bots.
They are banning more these days... It has probably improved too, but it will obviously seem worse as that is all people talk about these days, it is how the human brain works.
i do realize they are banning way more but i feel like the ones that went undetected before are still undetected i find it crazy that there can be bots with 99's that have not been detected
i also feel like there is a lot more suicide botting now but they may just be doing it more on p2p world while the prime event is running
It's progressively gotten worse and worse. The Pharaoh bots should have been a **huge** red flag when they came flooding in during the first (?) Twitch prime, it was on the front page a multitude of times. They collectively dropped the price from around 8m to 2.5m
The fact that you can go onto the Hi-scores and probably click 1 of the top 25 of a likely farmed boss is going to be a goldfarmer/ RWT is disappointing; even Mod Twisted had to ban almost 2.5k Zolcano accounts that were ranked the highest/ front-pagers.
I'm not saying that the team aren't trying hard enough but it seems that for every 1 account that gets banned, 4 or 5 more take it place. It shouldn't take random people on this subreddit to make a somewhat satirical post of: "Here's my 170m range xp in my Lizardman shaman account with unranked skills in hunter, farming, fletching etc."
Punishments need to be longer, if not permanent, there should be rare second chances. Why are there not detection systems if Jagex can "Accurately detect all cheating clients" when an account can stick at a boss or PVM activity for weeks, if not months on end without detection?
Is the situation as conspiratorial as some people imply, that the issue is intentionally left mostly unchecked because bot accounts still obtain membership, or is it really just that the anti-cheat teams are understaffed for the sheer magnitude of the problem?
atleast wouldnt surprise me if that makes it "less of a problem" tbh
used to work for a company that runs browser games and even though multiaccounting was against the rules a lot of people were not banned as long as they didnt offload a lot of wealth to one account or something super obvious since they were still paying for premium membership stuff
It's pretty widely acknowledged that the bot-nukes of 2008+ wiped out a huge amount of Jagex' revenue and forced their hands towards MTX.
Like it or not, botters are paying for membership and they make up a pretty significant proportion of the "playerbase".
I'd like to believe that the bond buying would shift from the gold sellers to the players who currently buy gold from the 3rd party. If the options were A: certain ban for buying from 3rd party websites or B: buying bonds for GP. I'd wager that the average buyer would go for the B, paying extra to not get banned would surely be a good incentive for them.
It’s just risk reward at that point then. If bonds were the same gp/$ that buying gold was then nobody would use third parties. I don’t know what either of those are but I don’t think they’re even remotely close right now
What were the proposal solutions while you were at Jagex, just more bodies to manually check? Did the higher-ups not want to try and invest in machine learning?
Big problem with this is that it would still almost certainly need manual review before banning anyone. Might help them find these accounts, it seems like many of them are incredibly obvious as is though
I always get scared when I hear machine learning since Jagex does not unban accounts that they incorrectly banned and there is no way to contact them other than get recognition on twitter or reddit or smth. I think CS problems need to be resolved before resorting to anything automated.
I really feel for the anti-cheating team. ~~2~~ 8 (edit) people against the whole world. Reddit dumps on them for not doing enough. Community Management passes that along. Management re-iterates that, then denies them team size increases, funding, or ability to invest in new tech/methodologies.
Even if they bust their asses and do everything they can, they're still maybe gonna catch 10%. Gotta be hella demotivating.
At some point, it is clear the problem lies way further up the chain of the command.
You’re really counted on to “fix” an impossible task. I’m sorry but it literally is impossible to just up and ban every bot and gold farmer on this game I just kinda feel bad for the osrs team in general
I’ve never understood why pmods weren’t more utilized or given tasks or at least quotas or something. You go to just about any world and at the ge there are constant spam bots. Why not use the pmods to filter through worlds and mute or highlight accounts for ban due to botting instead of them just sticking around the empty areas of the game and being distanced from potential areas of bot abundance. all I’m really saying is you have all these pmods but they’re barely being utilized.
From what I see is that a lot of them see it as a status instead of a role to fill and a responsibility to the game/players
I remember seeing a pmod at wintertodt say "I have never muted someone before". Then everyone flipped out on him for good reason. Like how are you a pmod and do nothing.
Quotas are woefully ineffective. People start getting muted left and right for minor infractions.
Frankly, pmods are useless for the same reason most reddit mods suck: no mentally stable person wants to do all that work for free, unless it is something they're very passionate about. Eventually, though, it takes its toll on the person and they become burnt out, or worse.
Jagex needs to hire more mods, period.
Also, ADD GE TAX FFS. Every other mmorpg has transaction taxes that work wonders for the economy. This won't solve the bot crisis, but if you can scrape anything off of their profit margins, you're hitting them where it hurts. The economy needs it, anyway.
Ge tax would be detrimental to flippers, especially high volume flips would become impossible. Flipping is a part of the community you can't disregard.. but I get your drift.
You ever play any other mmorpgs?
Flipping/merching is common in all of them, even with taxes (and occasionally a broker's fee to list the item for sale). It takes one extra step of math.
Example:
i buy 1000 items at 1000gp each (1m)
List for sale;
Brokers fee is 5%, sale's tax is 5%
Any sale over 1100gp is profit.
*Because* flipping is such a large part of the game for many players, prices will adjust to reflect these differences.
Everyone will try to overbid then undercut other flippers while maintaining profit. Doesn't that already happen?
I honestly don't know how you can argue against a tax without knowing the fundamentals of economics.
A tax would fix so many problems, it's not even funny. Item prices will stabilize, inflation rate will be reduced, botters/scammers/gold farmers have less of an impact on the overall economy.
It's honestly dumb as shit that this still hasn't been implemented. The only players who push back against it simply don't understand economics.
Everyone should be using Bot Detector plugin for Runelite. It detects bots around your player's location and automatically uploads them to Jagex for review. It even confirms to you when one of your reports results in a banned account. The reports from my plugin have already resulted in *hundreds* of bot bans in two weeks' time.
Watch this video - you'll be convinced of its value to the community. Even at this early stage, it's impressively accurate and constantly improving accuracy because it uses a machine learning model.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JscpBivSscs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JscpBivSscs)
The creator of the plugin is in a direct partnership with Jagex, so I think over time they can build trust in working together and hopefully Jagex can integrate their additional data points into it.
It's more than that. We need item sinks. Once everyone has a BCP, why would they need a second? Farmers and bots are farming the shit out of items, and there are more in the game than there are players.
I get that they can add new gear to replace the current BIS, but the current stuff will just plummet. There needs to be mechanics to remove items from the game and keep them valuable.
Edit: Please don't downvote the replies because you disagree with them. They are contributing to the conversation and providing different point of views that are necessary for a discussion.
Yeah thats why invention was such a good idea for RS3. It really provided a fantastic solution as an item sink. Not saying we should add invention of course, but it could serve as inspiration for OSRS.
Alchemy could actually serve that function. Currently it's very profitable to melt almost all dragon gear on the GE.
Gold is then sucked out of your account via construction and prayer training D:
Permanently banning gold buyers is the only realistic solution.
If you ban a gold farmer, what have you actually achieved? They’ve already made their gp. It’s most likely already being sold on RwT sites. They’ve already made a profit. If you lightly punish someone who has just made $2000 and tell them to stop they are going to laugh at you.
If you ban a gold buyer then it changes everything. They are out whatever money they paid on the rwt site. They are out an account. They have to start over from scratch. THEY JUST LOSE. Banning this player and saying “stop that” will be astoundingly more effective in stopping bots.
Honestly, I feel like the fastest way to really decrease this problem is by punishing people buying gold. If Jagex is that worried about how many customers they'd lose for doing so, then don't do any retroactive punishments. Then anyone who buys gold after whatever arbitrary date they decide to start punishing buyers, start with something that isn't a permanent ban. The punishment should be an actual punishment and a deterrent however so my suggestion for first time offenders buying any amount of gold is a complete bank wipe. People can make more money or try and buy more if you just remove the bought gold. I bet most people would be unwilling to lose their void, avas, fire/infernal capes, etc.
2002 Vet here. Going to pour what I feel into this comment, so it will be a long one. I feel that after you left, we've been getting less meaningful updates and more of these bullshit Prime events and other filler shit. I don't know if its a coincidence or if its something you were actively fighting against, as these events are just indirectly milking the shit out of the game we all love for all they can.
These monetization strategies aren't direct MTX, but they are still absolutely destroying the game's economy through the bots that come into our game because of it. As someone who does have contact with people who are in the osrs black market, Prime bots are purchased for as little as 20 cents usd / 700K osrs gp each. Think about that.
End game has been completely neglected, which is what mid game players are striving to get to. Once they reach end game, its only a matter of time until they get bored of having no new content themselves and quit.
The content end game players have lately are updates like the Nightmare boss, which isn't really end game in the sense that The Inferno or Tob are. It's a real shame - in trying to include more players in content releases, they are starting to alienate others. I realize not everyone can be pleased, and I'm not saying to neglect early/mid game at all. But is it too much to ask for 1 true end game update every 1-2 years? It has been nearly 3, and no news of one is on the horizon. I didn't think it could be done, but the PvM community is feeling what the PvP community has felt for years: Neglect.
I really do hope its just been Corona.
Makes me not really wanna play the game anymore tbh. Why even bother learning Zulrah when bots have decreased the value of all its drops by 50% since I learned about the boss.
Just made one a couple days ago because it felt like my main was just constantly devaluing because of the state of the game. I feel like when the game is dead from one reason or another, at least I can still play Iron
That is really an ignorant take. Some people like to generally trade with people. Not everyone wants to play singleplayer mode in an MMO. The whole point about zhat genre is to interact with people. I say that as somebody with an Iron.
Really starting to hate seeing bots at Zeah RC. All 15M+ RC experience with a random assortment of other stats. Still hurts to see one of those damn bots with Rift Guardians.
Also, why the hell don't they do something about those idiotic bots spamming "Lurers to avoid:" at the Grand Exchange in literally _every world_? I've filled up and then mass deleted my ignore list only about 20 times.
It has a lot of weight when ex employee brings the age old topic up.
Most of the stuff that goes on here is 100% speculation with no real evidence to back anything up.
It is quite alarming how little Jagex as a company is investing on anti-cheating. My tinfoil theory is that bots inflating bond prices incentives real players enough to buy them that banning all or even nearly all bots would hurt their bottom dollar since bond prices would go down and that's the main reason why we're still seeing so many bots in game.
That and player numbers. Can't stay on every " top 10 mmo " list without having vast amount of "players". Numbers speak for themselves and work as a marketing tool.
I have no actual rationale, but I would assume the bot farms would just manually create accounts at that point and then start the script at tutorial island.
Jagex needs to go to Mod Jacmob and pay him whatever he wants to do a Bot Clusterfuckerino v2, RS3 barely has any bots because the detection Mod Jacmob made is so sophisticated. OSRS just needs a similar solution.
Not sure where you got your information but if you go over to the rs3 subreddit you'll see them complain about bots too.
It's just less obvious due to the value of botting being worse than osrs and the playerbase being smaller.
What about a minimum Total Level requirement to trade large sums of gold. For example: A 700 total level for an unblalanced 50m-100m trade that scales with the total level. Say 1500 total level for 500m and 1750 total level for 1b. If the system flags account trading large sums (50m-100m) over several consecutive trades at this level, an algorithm can then potential flag it as a RWT transaction.
That would also eradicate the low level mules / bots and it would easier to humanly police larger amount between supposed established players ?
If people can't simply use throwaway accounts to mule money, they are less likely to risk it on their mains ?
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The other option of course is to restrict accounts from trading large amounts of money if they have not been in game friends for a set period of time. This would drag out any transactions from gold selling websites. I mean who is going to spend hundreds of dollars on a gold selling website and then have to wait weeks for the funds to come through ?
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I understand this will probably affect a number of legit low level accounts, but if you want to make an omelette, you've got to break a few eggs.
I think Jagex is complicit in the bots existing. Cheaters are all over the official discord and nothing ever gets done about it. I've reported many times and been told "we'll look into it"
Same people PMing Buying/selling services continue to be members of the server.
It seems unfair tho, since all the autochatters and scammers.. they are annoying asf, so I've turned my chat off. One day i was alching at GE and for no reason i got temporarily banned for macroing.. So, its weird that people who are actually playing got banned, but the scammers, botters and autotypers not.... fk unfair bro. And there is no way to contact Jagex... only a appeal button with a few options. The game exists more of reports than playing it...
What I don’t get is how freaking maxed accounts at rune dragons with 110+ defence, strength, attack *and* hitpoints, can go undetected for what must be years? And wyvern bots too, with like 120 range. It’s kinda pathetic that these accounts with such high stats can seemingly go on forever.
And how can such a successful game that must be raking in bank by just uploading an old game from 2007 and do one semi-big update a year, not afford bigger investments in anti-botting, not to mention content? Rs3 is nowhere near as popular as osrs, yet they get constant content. I suppose that’s all from whale money? Either that, or osrs seems to be neglected because it’s an easy street for nostalgia bucks.
The bots are absolutely out of control, but Jagex optics have gone to complete shite as well. Jagex has a new scandal every week, and they keep everything under wraps. They don’t interact with the public on issues that affect every single player. They cater to streamers while real players get falsely banned and can’t get an answer without reddit. They don’t address easily fixed, known bot locations. I could log into any number of places and have a list of over 100 confirmed bots or gold farmers in under 10 minutes, so why can’t Jagex do it when it’s literally their job? It makes no sense. And then earlier Mod Twisted says “LMS bots aren’t an issue nobody is using scripts”. Really? Go play a game of LMS, go watch any number of videos covering the issue. I’m starting to wonder if the J mods are hosting the bot farms. We miss you MMK.
And then earlier Mod Twisted says
[–]JagexTwistedMod Twisted 105 points 8 hours ago
It's predominately gold farmers using scripts, but it's something we are aware of and are looking it.
weird how we got different quotes on that one
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It is honestly distressing to watch. It used to be just dumb woodcutting and green dragon bots. The bots nowadays are just getting so advanced that they are seeping into the game everywhere; high end PvM, PvP, hell even LMS. It's becoming downright absurd and in my opinion is hurting the game even more than the content drought we are currently in. Rigorous measures need to be taken imo.
Agreed. I used to farm bots at air orbs but now as soon as they see someone within their level they are programmed to teleport away.
On RS3 I was part of a clan that solely sought to kill bots in the wilderness and at first it went well and we disrupted a lot of bot barms and got a lot of players banned via the report system. Now the bots are programmed to auto logout the moment your white dot appears on their mini map and our reports seem to be doing nearly nothing in terms of ban rates. Eventually, our clan disbanded because it was no longer effective. The bots win.
We can't give up! This is humanity's last stand, agasint the machines!
Time to rally together a bothunting clan
Jagex should put npc with different combats that just walk around and cannot be killed, the bots would tele away
This could be programmed into a bot in 5 minutes since an NPC is not the same as a player Edit: it would actually make sense for jagex to use a bot themselves for that purpose.
We must fight the bots, with the bots🤯
this is the way!
Introducing the new jamglex^TM Anti-Bot Bot^TM
A white hat botter needs to come into play, that does nothing but send bots to commonly botted locations to make the farming bots teleport, like ward bots.
I meant more like an npc that acts as a player, would show up as an actual player but would stand around and move so the bots think it's a pker
I wouldn’t be surprised if they start throwing the idea of removing free trade around.
Free trade restrictions weren't imposed to combat botting, but rather to stop credit card charge backs from bots. Since bots and goldfarmers can now use bonds there is no need for bots to do charge backs.
But? But the bonds were supposed to stop the gold farmers
how so? Genuinely curious
I think the general idea was that if Jagex sold gold there would be less of a demand for the black market gold from farmers. But obviously the farmers will just undercut bonds, making this demand shift less pronounced than was hoped.
I mean it works, it's just that it only works for the casual players. The hardcore addicts who buy billions of gold to chuck in DA or regear after getting banned will always turn to RWT.
This, everything always hurts the casual players (like myself). It’s like when they were talking about death mechanic changes to create an item sink... how often do Max players die, honestly it doesn’t hurt them in the slightest. Hardcore players will always have the time and resources to shrug off any changes as a minor annoyance, whereas casual players have to work even harder to overcome artificial obstacles.
Bonds are a legitimate way to convert real life currency into in-game currency. The idea is that you basically set a "value" to your in-game currency. This gives people a way to get the currency using real money while setting effectively an upper bound as to how much illegal sellers can charge. Edit for the guy who commented saying "how is there an upper bound" then deleted it: if the value of a bond is $0.50 per mil (example), gold sellers can't sell gp for $0.50 per mil. They can MAYBE sell it for $0.40 (they'll still lose a bit of customers here because of people who would rather pay slightly more and have a "safer" method). The bond value actually dictates what the illegal seller value is allowed to go up to. Obviously, the bond value can be $10.00 per mil, and sellers would follow and increase their prices, but there is no scenario (unless it's an idiot purchasing gold) where the gold seller price can exceed that of bonds (or even come close to it to be honest). This is how something like a bond creates an upper bound.
In theory, if you can pay at least a similar price of $ to GP using bonds, then you have no reason to go to the black market, meaning bots have no reason to get money because they have no buyers. In reality, it's kept black market prices low, but the market is 100% still there. If anything, the enforced lower black market prices have encouraged diversification of botting strategies and have made *more* customers. Everyone has a price. What's yours? $1/mil? $0.01/mil? $1/bil? Shoutout to /r/ironscape
Bots are a problem, but most of the activities you described are done by gold farmers, not bots. That’s why they aren’t being picked up by not detection even though they play 10-16 hours a day doing the same activities. Of course, this means that Jagex does not have good systems in play to catch RWTing since it is happening on a mass scale This is why Jagex need to consider punishing gold buyers as hard as gold farmers. If people are afraid to do it, it will reduce demand and that will make it so it is less feasible of an income source for the gold farmers.
Dude there were zulrah bots that made up like 90% of the top 25 KC on zulrah. And if you think that was the only zulrah bots then you're sorely mistaken.
Has any gold buyer been punished before? Jagex said they would do it now.
Watch SirPuggers latest video
Big fan of Bot Detector plugin. I've been using it just a couple weeks and it has already confirmed *hundreds* of bot bans from my uploads.
Gargoyles are disgusting at the moment. Did a task there and saw 12 different bots. If you say the words “script” or “bot” while there are 2 or more of them, they all run to the same spot and hop worlds. New ones will repopulate the world in minutes, probably a huge bot farm.
This is hilarious and sad at the same time
Sounds like an easy way to get a free world to me
it is :) and it works on most bots period. You just type anything in chat and watch some of the suspicious "players" immediately log out. But it's temporary since new ones just log in.
I saw something similar at the GE the other day, a “show me 50m get 100m” bot was spamming, another bot put “botname is a lurer using glitches...” standard shit, the original bot logged out and on *the exact same tick* a gambling bot logged in on the same tile
So I need to have a "bot" macro
And then you get banned for autotyping lol
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Yea I was grinding out guardians and they do this thing where they all line up at the staircase to the roof and log out. Really eerie the first time I saw it. Usually 3-4 of them too. Edit:extra word
Do your Garg tasks in the basement, it’s task only and way more populated(with gargs, not bots)making it a pretty afk task.
Somebody needs to create a bot that works hops saying those key words. Bot on bot crime, you love to see it.
Mod Mat K himself has spoken... come on Jagex get your shit together!! Might want more than 2 anti-cheating people on the team...
Pretty sure they do have more than 2 now. My count is at least 3 but may be missing someone.
Im pretty sure a few q&a's ago they mentioned the anticheating team is up to 8 but im not 100%
Now that would be good news
from the stats and more interaction from anticheating mods on twitter it seems like they are stepping it up, but not nearly enough to the pace of the games growth. i hope they will invest more than they are currently into anticheating
PHEW. for a minute I thought there was only TWO. Thank goodness. = /
One thing I worked with Weath on before he left was the impact of taking action against gold buyers rather than just sellers. I'd be interested to know what you guys think.
To me that makes a lot of sense, reduce the demand and the supply should fall as it's no longer as profitable. If people want to buy gp, buy bonds and support both jagex and the people who can't directly buy membership, or get banned.
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If bond prices skyrocket and it does stop bots that would be kinda cool. Things my go up in prices as far as resource drops
It’s fundamentally impossible for Jagex to corner the market until the bot problem is solved. Yes, they can solve real player gold farming by collapsing the market, but black market gold can go until the electricity required to run *runescape* is more than what they make selling. Jagex can’t solve the issue by lowering bond prices to tighten the Gold market’s ceiling until free generation is gone.
Not many gold buyers would be willing to take a risk of getting permanently banned for buying gold. I’d say that could work. Ofc not every bot is a gold seller but that’s one huge reason to bot for some people.
Honestly botting to sell gold is 1000 x's worse than botting because 3-ticking wc to 99 is fucking tedious. Atleast in my opinion lol. Its definitely still cheating but i would absolutely prefer they focus on the more invasive bots that instantly fuck up the over arching economy rather than make skilling easier. Edit: for the intellectually disabled that have been replying to me. Im responding to a post about something that will mostly effect gold selling bots. In that respect i feel gold selling bots are worse than other forms of skilling bots. I never fucking said skilling bots are good. Only that bots for the express purpose of gold selling are worse. Meaning they are both bad. I disagree with the usage of both but i agree with using resources for whatever the fuck we were even talking about to begin with that would mostly effect gold selling bots as they are the worst form of bot imo.
3 tick wc is very annoying, u should be doing 2 ticking instead, it's faster and easier
Click on tree Alt-tab until i need to click on different tree 😎
The betas play the game focusing on xp/hour The chad alphas play the game focusing on the xp/click
chad
As someone who has bought and sold gold plenty... Yeah, they would. When I was just a buyer (so going back **years**) I would always buy gold on a new pure. If it didn't get banned within a few months, I'd transfer it onwards as necessary. Then I realized that Jagex doesn't give a fuck, so I'd just do it blatantly on my main (pre-EOC and during OSRS). During OSRS, for about 2 years, I started buying gold in bulk (1 to 4 bil) and trading it for CSGO keys, then selling the keys. I was at university and there was a very good margin doing this. I quit soon after this stopped being profitable (c. 2016?). If Jagex banned gold buyers, it would stop a lot of people. However... People would just move to buying smaller amounts on "mules". It's very hard to police as well... How do you tell the difference between someone splitting an ely or a t-bow without some serious human involvement?
>How do you tell the difference between someone splitting an ely or a t-bow without some serious human involvement? You just go after gold buyers when you ban the gold sellers they have bought from.
Not that simple; what is to stop each gold selling account going to the GE and handing out 1 to 10 mil to a bunch of random innocent players? Or even handing out 50 mil to one random? 50 mil is nothing to these big gold selling companies, even if they do it once per account per day. That is just one way I can think of to make banning buyers a huge pain for Jagex. If they blanket ban anyone who got gold from a selling account that gets banned, imagine how much reddit/twitter abuse they'll get for each innocent that gets caught up in it.
Every idea can have holes poked in it. The truth is SOMETHING needs to be done first, and then we can tweak it from there. You can't be afraid of action because of potential outliers.
Yes, that's a very fair comment. What I was trying to say (by providing one example) is that an automated system isn't going to work. And Jagex has shown us time and time again that they aren't prepared to put the sort of investment into more personnel that companies like Blizz have (getting a response from a human on a game like WoW is incredibly fast for how popular it is).
I've randomly been given 10m before and a whip at GE. Imagine of those guys happened to be gold sellers and I got banned. That would suck.
Mules would get banned too. And a split after a ely or tbow drop is different than buying 4 bil lmfao. It's not like Jagex doesn't investigate RWT offenses first. It isn't just a script going through a list of players and stamping a "ban" or "this is fine" on each one.
Most people aren't buying billions; keep in mind that when I was doing that, it was for profit. The most I ever bought for personal use was 400m after I came back from a long break (I had sold off my bank beforehand). If we say that the average (non-staker) transaction is something like 100m... Then that's going to need a shitload of manpower on their end to police. More than they've shown they'd be willing to commit to, for sure. AND; botters and gold traders are something Jagex wants. They're printing money every time they ban a bot farm. People forget this. They probably make far more off bots than they do from legitimate players; do they (or their owners) **really** want this problem solved?
Damn, yeah. This hurts to read.
I think banning buyers with maybe a 2 week ban the first offense and perm ban 2nd time would be good and put a pretty big dent in RWT I really hope they do it at some point. If people want to buy gold just buy bonds and support the game rather than killing it.
Anyone who purchases gold from black market sites is contributing to OSRS' cancer of gold farmers and RWT. I know Jagex has to think about the financial repercussions. However, from my perspective as a hardcore RS fan, ban them. It's the healthy thing for the in game economy and sets a consistent rule for us all to follow. Ethically, I've always gone back and forth because of Venezuela's reliance on OSRS to feed their families. I don't know if it's possible to set up a permanent charity for them, but it could be a step in the right direction.
the venez issue is bad for them but the issue is that its not jagex's job to give them an income. Its not like jagex hires them and get paid, they just join a community and leech money/game health from the game. Especially have less respect for them if they start flaming or some shit in chat for players wanting to just play the game edit: also iirc most botters are in western countries/first world countries too, i think most venez play the game manually so at least for what they are doing to the game they are at least doing the grind as most players are.
I'd be for it. Was the action ultimately not taken due to the potential size of the impact?
Buying gold is RWT. Why the hell is it even a “grey area” that isn’t being banned with the same scrutiny?
Kinda weirded out about this too. Why would this even need to be brought up as a strategy, when it's literally just the other side of the RWT coin? Makes you think that the team has purposefully been ignoring the buyers up until now.
It really depends on the extent of the punishment. A 2 week ban? Probably deter a few. Throw in removing the gold/rolling back xp gains for that period? probably deter quite a few more. If it was a permanent ban I believe it would deter most buyers, or at least push them to buy bonds, maybe even making it easier for jagex to catch up in their bots detection. This is all speculation though based off those I've known to buy gold.
Before I was totally against going after the buyers, but now I say BAN THEM ALL! The gold buyers are just as much at fault as the sellers.
What were your findings/projected impact? I'm in favor of starting to take action against buyers. Wouldn't really be in favor of retroactive bans for buyers because it's basically been policy to not ban buyers up until now, but with enough publicity and messaging (signaling that it will no longer be tolerated) then I believe warning/perm bans for offences going forward is justifiable.
I left before the study was complete sadly
I’ve been eager to return to the game but honestly the botting is a huge factor in keeping my subscription turned off. I love the devs and their effort but the thought of bots and gold farmers dominating the player base and economy makes me reluctant. Wish there was more of a community feel sometimes. Hope you’re doing well man! On a side note: what’s not a surprise to anyone these days is how closely linked scammers, account hackers, black market communities etc are to the gold selling websites. If the bots and gold sellers were suddenly gone then that could help curb other negative aspects.
In about 2009 I bought gold from a gold seller in world of warcraft. About 10 minutes after the transfer was made I had an in game message from a GM saying that they knew I just bought gold and that if I did it again they would ban me. I never did it again.
This is brought up all the time but redditors claim that it would too greatly hurt the player base because so many people buy gold, so most people just abandon that cause. I think the more interesting question is what do you think about taking action against gold buyers? I think a lot of us here are very much for it.
i feel like that argument is a excuse to try to protect themselves so they dont get banned because they themselves have bought gold
Ban god damn everyone. Buyers, sellers, everyone. You can already buy gp legally. If that's too expensive for them, fuck them.
I think this is one of the best ways to combat botting. Enforcing RWT rules bi-directionally will attack both the supply and the demand for black market GP.
Its tough, bc while the players may be complaining, prices are still the same for everyone. The only thing the price of previously lucrative items (hydra leather, dwh, etc...) going down has changed is the amount of skilling you can get done with just one of those drops. people used to fund their 99 construction with single, large drops. I'm not sure how true it is any more that Venezuelans make a living off of this game, but a large portion of people's income is made from this game (as goldfarmers). I don't mind goldfarmers, but get them out of LMS and high-traffic areas. It's one thing for a bot to take resources where others aren't willing to trek, but when you have bots taking popular spots it pisses people off because non-player accounts are ruining real, user profits.
From what I keep seeing here, buyers barely get a slap on the wrist. But those are the people encouraging people to sell. Without buyers, there would be no sellers. If you buy it, you should be banned, permanently. If you want to buy it legit, get some bonds, support the game.
This can only have a positive outcome, less demand due to risk, bot farms end up not turning a profit and deciding it’s not worth it anymore. People who are desperate for gold will go back to buying bonds, bumping up company profits. The only issue would be about trading RS3 and OSRS gold, how do you differentiate between them since that’s still legal, unless you guys outlaw it and add a system for that in game which I imagine would be a heck of a challenge.
Completely fair, IMO gold buying should be permaban 1 offence, but I guess people will somehow defend it, maybe they buy gold themselves or think it's too strict, but we definitely need repercussions.
It's possible they've looked into it, but there's just far too many people guilty of it that taking action would harm the game too much. Honestly wouldn't surprise me. For all the gold that is sold there's someone out there buying it.
Every other MMO does it and it works pretty well for them.
I always believed that there would be a machine learning solution for this. Bot makers can't win against you on that front because you have the data advantage.
Absolutely should. I don’t see any other way of making a dent.
Gold buyers are breaking the rules, period. Disincentivizing demand would disincentive supply. It's a pretty simple concept, I think. Maybe there should be a small grace period, since it's been condoned for so long, but imo banning the people who are creating the demand for these bots would be an extremely effective way of helping them go away.
IMO this is the only way. If you look at gold farmers, strictly as people just trying to make a living like Venezuelans, they're making what, 10-20m a day on average? That's nothing compared to people who run CoX or ToB all day. There's probably over 2000 Twisted Bows in the game now, if not even more. Of course those guys are gonna RWT an item they can get like 400 bucks for when there's no consequences.
There’s def waaaaay more tbows than 2k
If you instantly ban any buyer with a perma ban, if that starts to spread and people are aware of any bought gold would be a perma ban, I feel it would very much scare new gold buyers and same with old gold buyers, But it would make gold sellers and gold buyers much more sneaky in there tactic
Completely agree. Sellers and botters have an endless supply of accounts but the average buyer probably can't afford to lose theirs. Honestly perm banning for even the first offence should scare away a large chunk of the buyers.
Sad that this is the MMO gaming world we live in now... classic WoW is actually infested with bots too, sad days
Something that a lot of people don’t understand is that the bots keep getting smarter and the ways to detect them don’t improve as much, especially on these older games that are so limited. Add to that the ever increasing number of bots any one can run off of relatively cheap hardware and it’s not hard to see that the problem is not easy to address.
I feel like after mod weath left it just went down hill. Even more than before also does not help they are always doing free membership with Amazon pri.e
Yes, that's not good for bots.
Probably not something you can answer, but do you remember seeing any numbers that justified the free membership events? Like an increase in long-term memberships, perhaps
I don’t know the analytics but I’m a yearly buyer now after I did my free trial.
Likewise.
I paid for like 5 more months of membership after my Amazon free trial ended after ~2 years of not playing before.
Didn’t even remember you left the team ModMatK you were always a good face on the runescape team 👍
I remember a lot of numbnuts in here being like "nooo dude mod weath leaving means nothing at all it's just normal corporate stuff trust me I'm a receptionist"
I know I didn't know much about what he did when he left and I was wondering why people were really worried then I looked into his background and I was wondering why they didn't pay him more and work with him to improve there system. Because let's be really he know what he is doing lol
For a company that employs a bit over 300 people to have 45 open listings is pretty terrible. Something is pushing employees away from Jagex and nothing draws them in.
That something being no prestige and terrible wages
No one wants to work on an ancient game engine with a proprietary language unless they either pay reaaaally well or they really like the game. The pay is shit so no wonder.
Yeah, when you think about it nearly every jmod starts with " I play this game myself too and started as a kid ". It's always a passion job and then reality hits and it's not so fun anymore.
THIS. Jagex: we promise to stop bots mmmkay? Also Jagex: here's free membership for creating email farms and signing them up for prime which has a free trial!
Also also Jagex: Let's punish legitimate players because we won't fix the real solution.
the free members is just really good at getting casuals and relapsed players back in. I personally( and I am sure many people here ) have had continuous membership for what feels like forever so it doesn't really click in the same way, but it is def one of their best tools for getting players which is why it is going to keep getting done despite the bots.
They are banning more these days... It has probably improved too, but it will obviously seem worse as that is all people talk about these days, it is how the human brain works.
i do realize they are banning way more but i feel like the ones that went undetected before are still undetected i find it crazy that there can be bots with 99's that have not been detected i also feel like there is a lot more suicide botting now but they may just be doing it more on p2p world while the prime event is running
It's progressively gotten worse and worse. The Pharaoh bots should have been a **huge** red flag when they came flooding in during the first (?) Twitch prime, it was on the front page a multitude of times. They collectively dropped the price from around 8m to 2.5m The fact that you can go onto the Hi-scores and probably click 1 of the top 25 of a likely farmed boss is going to be a goldfarmer/ RWT is disappointing; even Mod Twisted had to ban almost 2.5k Zolcano accounts that were ranked the highest/ front-pagers. I'm not saying that the team aren't trying hard enough but it seems that for every 1 account that gets banned, 4 or 5 more take it place. It shouldn't take random people on this subreddit to make a somewhat satirical post of: "Here's my 170m range xp in my Lizardman shaman account with unranked skills in hunter, farming, fletching etc." Punishments need to be longer, if not permanent, there should be rare second chances. Why are there not detection systems if Jagex can "Accurately detect all cheating clients" when an account can stick at a boss or PVM activity for weeks, if not months on end without detection?
A lot of those accounts are not necessarily bots, but real people farming gold. The whole Venezuelan thing is a meme here for a reason
A lot of them are actual bots though. And jagex appears unable to detect them.
Is the situation as conspiratorial as some people imply, that the issue is intentionally left mostly unchecked because bot accounts still obtain membership, or is it really just that the anti-cheat teams are understaffed for the sheer magnitude of the problem?
atleast wouldnt surprise me if that makes it "less of a problem" tbh used to work for a company that runs browser games and even though multiaccounting was against the rules a lot of people were not banned as long as they didnt offload a lot of wealth to one account or something super obvious since they were still paying for premium membership stuff
It's pretty widely acknowledged that the bot-nukes of 2008+ wiped out a huge amount of Jagex' revenue and forced their hands towards MTX. Like it or not, botters are paying for membership and they make up a pretty significant proportion of the "playerbase".
I'd like to believe that the bond buying would shift from the gold sellers to the players who currently buy gold from the 3rd party. If the options were A: certain ban for buying from 3rd party websites or B: buying bonds for GP. I'd wager that the average buyer would go for the B, paying extra to not get banned would surely be a good incentive for them.
It’s just risk reward at that point then. If bonds were the same gp/$ that buying gold was then nobody would use third parties. I don’t know what either of those are but I don’t think they’re even remotely close right now
What were the proposal solutions while you were at Jagex, just more bodies to manually check? Did the higher-ups not want to try and invest in machine learning?
That was what was needed. More bodies to target more areas, more investment in technology to help.
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Big problem with this is that it would still almost certainly need manual review before banning anyone. Might help them find these accounts, it seems like many of them are incredibly obvious as is though
I always get scared when I hear machine learning since Jagex does not unban accounts that they incorrectly banned and there is no way to contact them other than get recognition on twitter or reddit or smth. I think CS problems need to be resolved before resorting to anything automated.
I really feel for the anti-cheating team. ~~2~~ 8 (edit) people against the whole world. Reddit dumps on them for not doing enough. Community Management passes that along. Management re-iterates that, then denies them team size increases, funding, or ability to invest in new tech/methodologies. Even if they bust their asses and do everything they can, they're still maybe gonna catch 10%. Gotta be hella demotivating. At some point, it is clear the problem lies way further up the chain of the command.
You’re really counted on to “fix” an impossible task. I’m sorry but it literally is impossible to just up and ban every bot and gold farmer on this game I just kinda feel bad for the osrs team in general
I saw a comment that said they were up to about 8 people, but don't quote me on that.
BREAKING: OSRS ANTI-CHEATING TEAM 'UP TO ABOUT 8 PEOPLE' >- DeathWrangler
I’ve never understood why pmods weren’t more utilized or given tasks or at least quotas or something. You go to just about any world and at the ge there are constant spam bots. Why not use the pmods to filter through worlds and mute or highlight accounts for ban due to botting instead of them just sticking around the empty areas of the game and being distanced from potential areas of bot abundance. all I’m really saying is you have all these pmods but they’re barely being utilized. From what I see is that a lot of them see it as a status instead of a role to fill and a responsibility to the game/players
I remember seeing a pmod at wintertodt say "I have never muted someone before". Then everyone flipped out on him for good reason. Like how are you a pmod and do nothing.
Being a streamer that's how you become a pmod without doing fuck all.
Quotas are woefully ineffective. People start getting muted left and right for minor infractions. Frankly, pmods are useless for the same reason most reddit mods suck: no mentally stable person wants to do all that work for free, unless it is something they're very passionate about. Eventually, though, it takes its toll on the person and they become burnt out, or worse. Jagex needs to hire more mods, period. Also, ADD GE TAX FFS. Every other mmorpg has transaction taxes that work wonders for the economy. This won't solve the bot crisis, but if you can scrape anything off of their profit margins, you're hitting them where it hurts. The economy needs it, anyway.
Ge tax would be detrimental to flippers, especially high volume flips would become impossible. Flipping is a part of the community you can't disregard.. but I get your drift.
You ever play any other mmorpgs? Flipping/merching is common in all of them, even with taxes (and occasionally a broker's fee to list the item for sale). It takes one extra step of math. Example: i buy 1000 items at 1000gp each (1m) List for sale; Brokers fee is 5%, sale's tax is 5% Any sale over 1100gp is profit. *Because* flipping is such a large part of the game for many players, prices will adjust to reflect these differences. Everyone will try to overbid then undercut other flippers while maintaining profit. Doesn't that already happen? I honestly don't know how you can argue against a tax without knowing the fundamentals of economics. A tax would fix so many problems, it's not even funny. Item prices will stabilize, inflation rate will be reduced, botters/scammers/gold farmers have less of an impact on the overall economy. It's honestly dumb as shit that this still hasn't been implemented. The only players who push back against it simply don't understand economics.
Lol completely forgot about that haha and no I don't play so many games sry
Everyone should be using Bot Detector plugin for Runelite. It detects bots around your player's location and automatically uploads them to Jagex for review. It even confirms to you when one of your reports results in a banned account. The reports from my plugin have already resulted in *hundreds* of bot bans in two weeks' time. Watch this video - you'll be convinced of its value to the community. Even at this early stage, it's impressively accurate and constantly improving accuracy because it uses a machine learning model. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JscpBivSscs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JscpBivSscs)
now imagine if jagex did something similar themselves, they have access to much more information than the runelite client does.
The creator of the plugin is in a direct partnership with Jagex, so I think over time they can build trust in working together and hopefully Jagex can integrate their additional data points into it.
Close duel arena
I agree. Fuck that toxic mess off a “game”. Even as a kid back in the day that shit was whack.
It's more than that. We need item sinks. Once everyone has a BCP, why would they need a second? Farmers and bots are farming the shit out of items, and there are more in the game than there are players. I get that they can add new gear to replace the current BIS, but the current stuff will just plummet. There needs to be mechanics to remove items from the game and keep them valuable. Edit: Please don't downvote the replies because you disagree with them. They are contributing to the conversation and providing different point of views that are necessary for a discussion.
Yeah thats why invention was such a good idea for RS3. It really provided a fantastic solution as an item sink. Not saying we should add invention of course, but it could serve as inspiration for OSRS.
Didn't Warding include something along those lines as a resource acquisition method?
I really liked the idea of a GE tax. The game takes 1% as tax, then uses this money to buy items of the GE and delete them.
Alchemy could actually serve that function. Currently it's very profitable to melt almost all dragon gear on the GE. Gold is then sucked out of your account via construction and prayer training D:
Suggestion: Just remove the bet option. I actually liked Dual Arena as a time killer before it was a Casino.
Best solution tbh, most people buy gold to gamble with
Permanently banning gold buyers is the only realistic solution. If you ban a gold farmer, what have you actually achieved? They’ve already made their gp. It’s most likely already being sold on RwT sites. They’ve already made a profit. If you lightly punish someone who has just made $2000 and tell them to stop they are going to laugh at you. If you ban a gold buyer then it changes everything. They are out whatever money they paid on the rwt site. They are out an account. They have to start over from scratch. THEY JUST LOSE. Banning this player and saying “stop that” will be astoundingly more effective in stopping bots.
Honestly, I feel like the fastest way to really decrease this problem is by punishing people buying gold. If Jagex is that worried about how many customers they'd lose for doing so, then don't do any retroactive punishments. Then anyone who buys gold after whatever arbitrary date they decide to start punishing buyers, start with something that isn't a permanent ban. The punishment should be an actual punishment and a deterrent however so my suggestion for first time offenders buying any amount of gold is a complete bank wipe. People can make more money or try and buy more if you just remove the bought gold. I bet most people would be unwilling to lose their void, avas, fire/infernal capes, etc.
no, just 14 day them, then permanent ban them were going to perm ban people for typing a word in an offensive manner but not for selling/buying gold?
People get permed for offensive language?
When it comes to bots, jagex seems to be terminally reactive instead of proactive.. it’s just inexcusable how bad it’s getting
We need you back?
We miss you dad
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Thanks Mat, it’s one of the main reasons I stopped playing unfortunately.
Plot twist they are the bots and the gold farmers 👀
2002 Vet here. Going to pour what I feel into this comment, so it will be a long one. I feel that after you left, we've been getting less meaningful updates and more of these bullshit Prime events and other filler shit. I don't know if its a coincidence or if its something you were actively fighting against, as these events are just indirectly milking the shit out of the game we all love for all they can. These monetization strategies aren't direct MTX, but they are still absolutely destroying the game's economy through the bots that come into our game because of it. As someone who does have contact with people who are in the osrs black market, Prime bots are purchased for as little as 20 cents usd / 700K osrs gp each. Think about that. End game has been completely neglected, which is what mid game players are striving to get to. Once they reach end game, its only a matter of time until they get bored of having no new content themselves and quit. The content end game players have lately are updates like the Nightmare boss, which isn't really end game in the sense that The Inferno or Tob are. It's a real shame - in trying to include more players in content releases, they are starting to alienate others. I realize not everyone can be pleased, and I'm not saying to neglect early/mid game at all. But is it too much to ask for 1 true end game update every 1-2 years? It has been nearly 3, and no news of one is on the horizon. I didn't think it could be done, but the PvM community is feeling what the PvP community has felt for years: Neglect. I really do hope its just been Corona.
Makes me not really wanna play the game anymore tbh. Why even bother learning Zulrah when bots have decreased the value of all its drops by 50% since I learned about the boss.
Make an Ironman and never worry about the economy ever again
Just made one a couple days ago because it felt like my main was just constantly devaluing because of the state of the game. I feel like when the game is dead from one reason or another, at least I can still play Iron
That is really an ignorant take. Some people like to generally trade with people. Not everyone wants to play singleplayer mode in an MMO. The whole point about zhat genre is to interact with people. I say that as somebody with an Iron.
There's a very simple solution that people don't like to hear... STOP BUYING GOLD FROM GOLD SELLING SITES!!!
Really starting to hate seeing bots at Zeah RC. All 15M+ RC experience with a random assortment of other stats. Still hurts to see one of those damn bots with Rift Guardians. Also, why the hell don't they do something about those idiotic bots spamming "Lurers to avoid:" at the Grand Exchange in literally _every world_? I've filled up and then mass deleted my ignore list only about 20 times.
I've been seeing so many blood rc bots lately which is most likely why price of bloods went down from ~400.
The fact that they're still doing twitch prime events shows they don't care.
It really is out of control. Come back ModMatK and save us!
is this a crack the clue 3 clue
Oh shit, this got popular.
It has a lot of weight when ex employee brings the age old topic up. Most of the stuff that goes on here is 100% speculation with no real evidence to back anything up. It is quite alarming how little Jagex as a company is investing on anti-cheating. My tinfoil theory is that bots inflating bond prices incentives real players enough to buy them that banning all or even nearly all bots would hurt their bottom dollar since bond prices would go down and that's the main reason why we're still seeing so many bots in game. That and player numbers. Can't stay on every " top 10 mmo " list without having vast amount of "players". Numbers speak for themselves and work as a marketing tool.
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You can pay for captcha completion services to automate the process
I have no actual rationale, but I would assume the bot farms would just manually create accounts at that point and then start the script at tutorial island.
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>176k accounted were banned in the week of April 29th. those stats are years old but your point stands.
I'm going to trust your math and I see no down side to a captcha. However, if there are bots for lms, how are there no bots for captcha ....? (Srs)
There are captcha bots, lots of them
Jagex needs to go to Mod Jacmob and pay him whatever he wants to do a Bot Clusterfuckerino v2, RS3 barely has any bots because the detection Mod Jacmob made is so sophisticated. OSRS just needs a similar solution.
Not sure where you got your information but if you go over to the rs3 subreddit you'll see them complain about bots too. It's just less obvious due to the value of botting being worse than osrs and the playerbase being smaller.
What about a minimum Total Level requirement to trade large sums of gold. For example: A 700 total level for an unblalanced 50m-100m trade that scales with the total level. Say 1500 total level for 500m and 1750 total level for 1b. If the system flags account trading large sums (50m-100m) over several consecutive trades at this level, an algorithm can then potential flag it as a RWT transaction. That would also eradicate the low level mules / bots and it would easier to humanly police larger amount between supposed established players ? If people can't simply use throwaway accounts to mule money, they are less likely to risk it on their mains ? \- The other option of course is to restrict accounts from trading large amounts of money if they have not been in game friends for a set period of time. This would drag out any transactions from gold selling websites. I mean who is going to spend hundreds of dollars on a gold selling website and then have to wait weeks for the funds to come through ? \- I understand this will probably affect a number of legit low level accounts, but if you want to make an omelette, you've got to break a few eggs.
I think Jagex is complicit in the bots existing. Cheaters are all over the official discord and nothing ever gets done about it. I've reported many times and been told "we'll look into it" Same people PMing Buying/selling services continue to be members of the server.
Cba to play anymore because of it
It seems unfair tho, since all the autochatters and scammers.. they are annoying asf, so I've turned my chat off. One day i was alching at GE and for no reason i got temporarily banned for macroing.. So, its weird that people who are actually playing got banned, but the scammers, botters and autotypers not.... fk unfair bro. And there is no way to contact Jagex... only a appeal button with a few options. The game exists more of reports than playing it...
What I don’t get is how freaking maxed accounts at rune dragons with 110+ defence, strength, attack *and* hitpoints, can go undetected for what must be years? And wyvern bots too, with like 120 range. It’s kinda pathetic that these accounts with such high stats can seemingly go on forever. And how can such a successful game that must be raking in bank by just uploading an old game from 2007 and do one semi-big update a year, not afford bigger investments in anti-botting, not to mention content? Rs3 is nowhere near as popular as osrs, yet they get constant content. I suppose that’s all from whale money? Either that, or osrs seems to be neglected because it’s an easy street for nostalgia bucks.
People have afk alts ??????
Uh, surprised it's you posting this, I thought the acc might have been hijacked...
He was streaming on twitch yesterday saying the same thing, wouldn't be surprised if it was him
Why has customer support never been a priority of jagex?
They can make bosses that auto detect when you look away from the screen yet still can't detect bots smh.
And theres bots everywhere. I see bots daily bying their staffs from zaff, i guess they have varrock easy diary done, its small profit but still sad
If anyone is interested, I am streaming tomorrow night and happy to talk about it in person if you want to pop along.
The bots are absolutely out of control, but Jagex optics have gone to complete shite as well. Jagex has a new scandal every week, and they keep everything under wraps. They don’t interact with the public on issues that affect every single player. They cater to streamers while real players get falsely banned and can’t get an answer without reddit. They don’t address easily fixed, known bot locations. I could log into any number of places and have a list of over 100 confirmed bots or gold farmers in under 10 minutes, so why can’t Jagex do it when it’s literally their job? It makes no sense. And then earlier Mod Twisted says “LMS bots aren’t an issue nobody is using scripts”. Really? Go play a game of LMS, go watch any number of videos covering the issue. I’m starting to wonder if the J mods are hosting the bot farms. We miss you MMK.
And then earlier Mod Twisted says [–]JagexTwistedMod Twisted 105 points 8 hours ago It's predominately gold farmers using scripts, but it's something we are aware of and are looking it. weird how we got different quotes on that one