Alphanos

Haha, I can agree with that. Just thinking about the kind of data structures you'd need to use for decision-making.... it'd be a pain for sure. Edit: Hmm, I guess it's getting late. Sorry for the double-post, I had meant to add the above as an edit to my previous post. However, now that the post is here I don't see an option to delete it.

I'm not necessarily saying you're wrong, but the resulting game wouldn't be Runescape. Maybe Stellar Dawn will be more like this... I suppose only time will tell.

They are people. So? :rolleyes: Not like they're contributing their lives to society. Why the [bleep] should we care? Considering they've been reduced to working in a sweatshop, they're probably just trying to stay alive. I don't see how you can refuse to acknowledge them as people just because of that. Reduced is the problem. Going to school, getting decent grades, listening to parents, helping others, volunteering to work part time or any of that would of at least put that person in a better position than working at a lousy sweatshop. I wouldn't acknowledge them as the same as the people who is working hard and making good money because that wouldn't be fair. I find that any people, who gives in a little effort can succeed and ATLEAST make a decent living. Also, sorry about my last post if it sounded a little harsh. I was not in the brightest mood that time. I'm pretty sure they were talking about sweatshops in third-world countries. Your argument is quite western-centric.

But, the difference is those are man hours devoted to making game content. It's not like jagex made dungeoneering with anti-botting in mind. They made dungeoneering with the mindset of making something really fun. The antibotting just came naturally, as a result. Sure, it cost a lot of man hours. but the point is it didn't cost the extra man hours they wouldn't have spent anyways. This is an excellent point. However, is there a way to apply such an idea to stop existing bots, or is this mainly a way to reduce/slow botting for newly-created areas/skills?

It'd be a set of tools. Bots would adapt, but with sufficiently many tools, the player could also adapt. Like I said, Cwars barricades could work. Not all bots would know how to walk around it. Flowers already exist, and work on hunter bots Perhaps a bucket of paint, to forcibly recolor an object (yew tree, etc). an ID scrambler (no idea how that would work, or if it would work, but ppl are talking about it :P) perhaps a tool that could spawn a a lvl 6 smuggler (would be bad for skiller pures) fake resources that punish players if they try to harvest them that's a few ideas. Honestly I haven't thought about it too hard. I especially like the paint idea, even just because it could be entertaining for emergent gameplay purposes. I'm not sure how effective it would be against bots, but it'd be fun. At first I liked the mugger-spawning idea, but most of the bots I've seen have enough combat levels to fight them off =/. On the other hand, I commonly stay in the 1500+ worlds, so maybe level 3 bots are still a lot more common than I realize. Unfortunately, I'm certain that it takes far fewer man-hours to write a bot for dungeoneering than it did for Jagex to develop it. So long as bot-writers have monetary incentive to update their bots, it will be a losing battle for Jagex to try to break them by sheer volume of content. However, the idea of creating a small new random event every month or so sounded promising, again so long as it's possible to prevent the bots from realizing they've been taken to an unfamiliar place, which could cause them to log out. Of course, perhaps the bigger problem is that once players catch bots via these types of methods, Jagex doesn't seem to do much about it. Players might use such techniques to stop a few bots for a few hours, but unless some update in the reporting system helps Jagex to distinguish effort-driven bot-catching reports from all the drivel where players report each other for not responding to everything they say, it's effectiveness will be limited. This is why I was originally focused on way to catch/stop bots centrally, but perhaps a player-driven system could work if some form of abuse-report-filtering could be devised...?

I figured it would get them stuck in a sense; having them trying to right click nothing for a long enough period of time to make it obvious to jagex's systems that theyre botting. Yes, this. If (a *big* if) it were possible to overcome the colour detection issue, and the issue of an easily-accessible internal variable distinguishing "fake" from real monsters, there would be a lot of potential with this idea. However, I think these two issues might be insurmountable. Griefing could be a real problem for sure. However, what types of additional tools are you thinking of? Maybe there are ones which will foil bots, but have minimum griefing potential. Something like - this type of tool can only be used within a certain radius area once every 30 minutes, or something like that, so that it could foil bots, but be easily dealt with by real players. The trouble would be determining how to prevent bots from easily adapting...

I just re-read this thread, and until you started trolling him, his only posts on *this* thread were directly related to the technical merits of various ideas. He's contributing usefully. Please cease your efforts to prevent him from doing so. I'm a programmer, but not a bot-writer. So I have heard bits and pieces of, and understand the general concept of, Runescape objects having ID numbers, etc. I was seeking for those more knowledgeable about the specifics of Runescape coding to provide whatever details might help us in bot-stopping. As an example, from general knowledge each Java object will have various internal variables that describe and distinguish it from other objects. In Runescape, one of these is obviously an ID number of some kind. I assume that this is some type of object-type ID number, rather than an instance-specific number. I.E. such that all green dragons would have the same ID. There would then be other variables storing other data. For example, we know from playing that most dragons seem to have several possible different appearances, with slight colour shifts, etc. Each green dragon object would also have some variable indicating which graphical style of dragon it is, so that the Runescape client knows how to display it. A potential problem with invisible monsters is that the client would need some way of knowing which monsters are invisible, and should not be displayed, in order for them to actually be invisible. However, my understanding based on talk of bots reading ID numbers is that they have access to these internal variables, so they would therefore also be able to tell which monsters have the "invisible" flag toggled. I was thinking about, but have not yet come to any solution to, how to have a monster with an identical client-side memory structure, but which clearly behaves differently - such as being invisible.... As for colour detection, it's relatively easy to write some code that can read the colour of on-screen pixels (this is not specific to Runescape, just general coding). If you already had pre-existing code digging into the Runescape internals to know where on-screen an object is, pulling up the colour data for that screen position doesn't sound so tough.

I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be mean, but you're not making a lot of sense. Suppose for the sake of argument that you're right about Xie being connected to bot writers (which we have little to no actual evidence for). Even if that's true, useful contributions to a thread about how to stop bots can only be a good thing. If he was really trying to "sabotage" our ideas, it would become obvious fairly quickly when others knowledgeable about bots contradicted him. Regarding Jagex mods, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they can run around invisible, but couldn't they just as easily be logged into the game in an area you're not at...? As a programmer, I doubt that adding colour detection would be nearly as hard as you're making it out to be. However, even if it knocked out some bots for a week or two, it would require a lot of man-hours on Jagex's part to develop something that would only work for such a short time. Mainly the goal here is something that clearly offers a high benefit per man-hour of coding/testing work on Jagex's part. If it's something that will only work for a week or two, it should knock out *all* bots, and/or require almost no work at all on Jagex's part.

That could easily be worked around by adding limited colour detection to current bcel or reflection bots lol its funny he says this because he has like 2 posts, joined like 30 min ago and knows a suspicious amount about bots. Ill let you guys decide where he stands as far as botting goes though. No trolling please. His point is that even though colour detection may not be a practical primary method of running a bot, adding a minor colour detection routine seems to easily foil the use of invisible monsters. Those algorithms took hundreds of millions (even billions) of dollars and many many years to develop. I don't think Jagex's pockets are that deep nor do they have that amount of talent to develop something that works that well. You're talking about things like SSL, RSA encryption, etc. These are complex mathematical algorithms that no person nor computer can easily solve. We're looking for something entirely different - something which is easy for a person to solve, yet very hard for a computer to solve. It's a fundamentally different problem; not one that requires hundreds of millions in computational science research.

This idea sounds potentially quite promising. The real trick is how to make the server-sent data for these monsters/items identical to the "real" ones, so that the bots cannot tell them apart, yet ensure that they don't actually show up on the player's screen or attack them. I'll definitely give this some further thought, but if anyone has further ideas on this please speak up... Edit: Hmm, additionally how to prevent colour/screen detection from foiling this, as noted below.... I understand what you're saying, but I for one would be happy with a bot-foiling method that lasts a mere 2-7 years :D.

It's true that up until now, updates designed to catch bots seem to have been solved by the bot-writers relatively quickly. The main goal here isn't to catch every possible bot instantly, but to come up with methods that will never catch humans players, but will in some unavoidable situations catch botters at least some of the time. An idea for a random which would be unsolvable by a computer would be nice, but it seems like these days even captchas are getting solved by algorithms. This is a very hard problem - Jagex has many smart people who have worked on this for a long time and haven't solved it yet. Maybe in the end we will conclude that there's no solution, and we've been too hard on them. But I think it's a bit too early to give up already.

Interesting; could you please elaborate as to how this would be used to distinguish bots from live players? As with the current set of random events, the bot writers would simply solve all of the new ones - unless we can brainstorm ideas that can be solved by people, but not computers. Adding a new random events every few weeks could do a lot of good, so long as it's possible to prevent bots from detecting that they are in an unexpected location, which could cause them to just logout until the bot is updated. These types of changes can catch bots for a short period of time, but what we're ideally seeking is a change that couldn't be coded around, so that it would permanently detect bots. Jagex has apparently already decided that changes which only catch some bots for short time periods aren't worth the man-hours invested in writing the change. [/hide] I think - ultimately, this is going to be a unrealizable goal. For starters, it's going to be a bajillion times harder trying to make the game such that there is definitely no way to bypass security or whatever fail safes jagex has set up. What we should be aiming at should be a way to detecting some of these botters banned/suspended. A.) There are a bunch of mods (the golden crowned) ones running around Jagex. Often, I see them walk around and there would be bots around but I don't see them actually trying to do anything. If they took the time, they could actually scout out some especially bot heavy places and try to talk to them. Clearly if it's a place which requires clicking i.e chopping yews, mining, etc - you can just ask them a few questions and see if they respond. If they don't flag them at first, and then try this again in the future (kind of like backtracking and checking up on people who may be "offenders"). If they're caught like this multiple times - they should be banned. B.) There should be some auto banning system - I've seen bots fail and the botter just stand there/try to do somethings over and over. If theres somebody clicking one space or relogging in and out every 10 minutes for a couple of hours - flag their accounts. Then check their accounts for suspicious activity via whatever logs Jagex has. C.) Make sure people can't play 24 hours a day for like multiple days straight. The 6 hour thing was a step towards the right direction but I'm sure it's not hard to program a bot to just relog in after that set amount of time. Say if somebody plays for 72 hours straight without a break then I think it's pretty safe to assume that they're botting. A) Unfortunately, Jagex will never be able to field enough manpower to manually track down and eliminate enough bots to make any difference. There are almost certainly tens of thousands of bots running on Runescape at most times. Additionally, you run into situations where legitimate players may not notice even a Jagex mod talking to them. What if that player is cutting yews or LRC mining while watching a movie, and just clicks even few minutes to bank? B) This seems potentially promising. If we can identify specific ways that bots break, this might be able to be expanded into a permanently useful rule system. C) This, unfortunately, will do little good. We know that there are real players who, rightly or wrongly, play 16+ hours a day on a regular basis. The best that could really be accomplished here is to change things so that bots can only run 18 or so hours a day before needing to "sleep", and then continue running for 18+ hours the next day, and the next...

The point is, due to the way Runescape's Java-based client works, any bot detection methods implemented in the Runescape code are provided in full to bot-writers just by logging on. In order for any bot-detection method to work better than the existing randoms, it has to be a method that you could describe in exquisite detail to a bot-writer, yet they would be unable to solve. If anyone wants to come up with a server-only bot detection method, one that would not be downloaded by players as part of the client code, it would need to perform its detection entirely based upon player action messages sent to the server - no new displays, prompts, or anything the player would ever see or interact with could be different.

They already change id's I only have a general idea of this ID-based system. Can anyone explain in more detail how it works, how the bots use it, and what Jagex changes?

Interesting; could you please elaborate as to how this would be used to distinguish bots from live players? As with the current set of random events, the bot writers would simply solve all of the new ones - unless we can brainstorm ideas that can be solved by people, but not computers. Adding a new random events every few weeks could do a lot of good, so long as it's possible to prevent bots from detecting that they are in an unexpected location, which could cause them to just logout until the bot is updated. These types of changes can catch bots for a short period of time, but what we're ideally seeking is a change that couldn't be coded around, so that it would permanently detect bots. Jagex has apparently already decided that changes which only catch some bots for short time periods aren't worth the man-hours invested in writing the change.

This is one of the most commonly suggested methods; the trouble is that it only works against poorly-written bots. It would be fairly easy to add some randomness into a bot's click patterns using a random number generator so that i.e. it clicks different parts of its target, pauses for different numbers of ticks, and even misclicks some of the time.

I see a lot of posts where people talk about how Jagex's bot-detecting algorithms are poor, and need improvement. I think people don't realize how inherently difficult this is. One of the most important principles of computer software is that in order to write an algorithm instructing the computer how to do something, you must first be able to clearly understand how a person could perform the same task (although probably slower). For example, if you want a computer to be able to sort numbers, you must be able to sort numbers yourself first. Then you can translate the human method of performing the task into computer terms, and potentially optimize it from there. So the focus of the thread is this: what methods or techniques would you, as a person, use to detect bots? If we actually can think of methods meeting certain criteria, I'm sure Jagex would be interested. Your method must meet the following requirements: 1) The method must never indicate that a human player is a bot. Even players with strong language barriers, those who are AFK, or those who are frankly really stupid. In other words, no false positives. 2) The method must be an unavoidable barrier for bot-writers. In other words, a software developer writing a bot must be able to read and completely understand your described method, but be unable to write software which can pass your test. No details of how the method works can be hidden from the opposition - this is due to the nature of the Runescape Java client. The method may detect only specific types of bots, but should catch as many bots in that scenario as possible. For example, a method which only catches one currently-existing chin-hunting bot, but which is obviously avoided by other chin-hunting bots, is not suitable. 3) The method must not involve any extensive creation or deletion of in-game wealth. The following additional goals should be met if at all possible: 1) Methods which kill players should be avoided. 2) Methods which unduly annoy players, such as long delays, taking their items and banking them or placing them a short distance away, etc, should be avoided. If other requirements that I have missed arise in discussion, I reserve the right to amend the above rules to account for things I didn't think of while writing this. This thread differs from the other thread about catching bots in the following way: rather than focusing on methods players can use to probably catch some bots some of the time, the goal here is to come up with permanent, unbreakable bot-detecting rules that Jagex could potentially use to solve the problem on a wide scale. If we really want them to improve their algorithms, let's see what we can come up with.

Just for starters, even if Chessy had wanted to liquidate her Santas, logistically speaking it would be a bit of a pain. With 80+ billion worth in santas, she'd run into the max cash limit 40 times or so trying to sell them. I know she could convert the cash to spirit shard packs or something, but when you're talking about converting 80+ billion that's actually a lot of clicking.

What I'm most curious about is whether Jagex noticed this drop rate change on their own, or due to player complaints. If due to complaints, does that mean there could be other drastic drop increases/decreases throughout the game that Jagex didn't intend, but which nobody has noticed yet...?

This guide has been incredibly helpful in getting me started on Herblore Habitat. Since Hunter is one of my two skills below 80, I've been wanting to level it up. Assuming I get the top tonight to match my legs, I plan to test a few other hunter combos that I haven't seen listed. Currently listed: Mono-Common: 80 k/hr Mono-Carrion: 85 k/hr Amphibious-Common: 90 k/hr Igneous-Carrion: 150 k/hr Mono-Draconic: 85-160 k/hr Draconic-Common: 120-180 k/hr I'll want to test out the methods involving draconics, since they appear highly variable. I'd also like to test Mono-Carrion since the differences between it and Igneous-Carrion seem unusual. I'm also interested in the possibilities of: Cannibal-Carrion Aquatic-Cannibal-Carrion Draconic-Amphibious-Common Edit: I now see that the other combos I was wondering about are actually impossible, since i.e. Cannibal and Carrion Jadinkos replace each other. I'll still test mono-carrion, igneous-carrion, and draconic-common once I can, so that I can contribute some XP figures. Edit 2: I've completed my first test run of igneous-carrion at level 78 hunter. I used arctic bears, scentless potions, and zamorak's favour potions, along with full witchdoctor clothing, all at the little alcove north of the vine crossing. Since I was below 80 hunter I was only able to use 4 traps. In 55 minutes I caught 107 igneous jadinkos and 115 carrion jadinkos, putting the XP rate at 125k/hr. I was expecting to get somewhat lower than the 150k/hr figure due to using 4 traps and having a slightly lower hunter level. This also resolves my confusion over the mono-carrion vs. igneous-carrion methods. In the guide, the igneous-carrion method lists far more carrion than igneous catches, which led me to question the benefit of adding the lower-levelled igneous. I assume at this point that the vastly differing ratios to my test are due to differences in the length of the test period. Having caught nearly equal amounts of each, I can see it would be impossible to get anywhere near the same experience with mono-carrion. I'll finish getting to 80 on igneous-carrion, then test draconic-common. Edit 3: Did an 84 minute three-bear igneous-carrion run to reach 80, same conditions as above. 237 igneous catches and 125 carrion catches; the catch rates between the two really seem to vary wildy. This works out to 136 k/hr. For both runs then, using levels 78-80 hunter with four traps, my average rate was 133.5 k/hr. Edit 4: I did an 84 minute trip for draconic-common this time. As before, this was done using full witchdoctor robes, 3 arctic bears, scentless and zamorak's favour potions. This time, unlike the previous trips, I was able to use 5 traps, so the results are not directly comparable to the above recorded trips in terms of experience per hour. Most of the trip was at hunter level 80, but I levelled to 81 near the end. I caught 327 draconic jadinkos and 96 common jadinkos during this time, which works out to an average of 233.6 draconic catches per hour, 68.6 common catches per hour, and 161,288 experience per hour. This confirms that draconic jadinkos are the best training option available as soon as you reach level 80 hunter, since this rate is at least as good as the igneous-carrion rates. During this trip, I also received 6 erzille seeds, 6 argway seeds, 5 ugune seeds, 4 shengo seeds, and 3 samaden seeds. I received but discarded a single bush seed and several vine flower seeds. I notice that in the main guide, the catch counts of draconic and common are essentially flipped from what I found, resulting in correspondingly lower experience per hour. I believe that spot selection plays a large role here. I used a spot which I observed high-level hunters using both in videos, and in-game. This spot has several draconic spawns next to it, but fewer common jadinkos nearby: Hopefully this will help others to achieve the best experience rates while training. Note: I have rarely had need to post images on forums, so I just uploaded my screenshot to the first Google result. If there's anything unreliable about where I uploaded this image to, etc, please let me know.

I'd like it if for one April Fools' day, they release some big unbelieveable update, with the joke being that it's real, not a fake :D. Maybe a first-person graphics option or something.

The perpetrator(s) are emphasizing this terminology because they've realized that Jagex intends to pursue criminal charges. Their hope is that because they didn't actually break into the victim's computer, or install unwanted software on it, they might be able to avoid prosecution under laws that make hacking a crime. Basically they've realized that although they thought only the victim would suffer any consequences, some are now headed their way, and they're in over their head(s)....

So, wait, is Runescape being cabbage considered good or bad? The Gowers might say Runescape is cabbage. Anybody remember Brassica Prime?

The two items serve an identical functional role. If you're trying to ask which looks better, I chose the Bonesack. It's fairly unique for the cape slot and has lots of potential uses. Someone mentioned using it as part of a Santa outfit; I've personally used it as part of a Cooking/Chef's outfit, since I think it looks a little bit like the Cooking skill's symbol.

For once I'm happy to see MMG go back on his word :thumbup: I don't think this has any bearing on recent postings/events. Note the date from 2009. This is from way back when Jagex had talked about releasing "cheat" servers in a separate system, with the idea that this would reduce botting/etc in normal Runescape. As the answer shows, they ended up deciding against doing it.