Sona

Busy with real life. Can anyone post what the clothes look like? :unsure:

This is unexpected, and rather impressive. Though I doubt Jacmob was secretly working undercover for Jagex. What is probable was Jagex sat down with him and made him an offer he couldn't possibly refuse - :rolleyes: No, really. Jagex don't have the resources to sue all the botters, but they sure as heck have the resources to sue him. Were I in the same boat, I think I'd probably take the deal too.

Hm. Does the new quest have anything to do with previous storylines, or does it seem like something new completely?

No. Classical MMOs either have established end-game (WoW, L2, Dark Age of Camelot), completely determined by player interactions and player community (EVE), is Guild Wars, or operates on a instanced-persistent model (League of Legends, World of Tanks). Or it's got a specific premise that's its main draw - City of Heroes is a good example of a game that's still going pretty strong due to its strong roleplaying community. The former makes the end-game accessible early in minor forms and offers a lot of "incentives" to grind to end game. The second basically determines what is end-game. Guild Wars is sort of unique in that it's basically a single player game and everything else is either for PVP or is for cosmetics, and the last two games can be played in bursts, making it feel like an actual game. I don't need to comment on League of Legends or Tanks - my best friend swears by tanks because he plays a little scouting tank. He goes in and dies and waits for ten minutes while the round is over. During the wait time he works on his engineering assignments. (For the record, you could use other tanks and play other rounds - so it's not like you're waiting for long. Each round lasts for ten minutes max) ... Basically the first time I've seen a game actively contribute to productivity. League of Legends is a party game for me. I never play it without at least two or three people I know in real life. Needless to say, I find it enjoyable. RS is what I do when I have ten-twenty minutes between classes, really. I pop in, farm a plant or kill a demon or something and then log back out. I have all the requirements for the quests anyways, which is what I'm really interested in. Some of RS's writing is surprisingly good. :P

Oh. My bad. Read your name as Biyaunte the first time and it sort of stuck. :blink:

Biyaunte, we don't know. Our best bet is to wait and see - there really hasn't been many MMO precedents. This is one of the few instances where a company has stood out and said, "alright, bots are a problem. Let's see what we can do to fix it." That, in itself, is impressive. What remains to see is to see how hard the botting companies push back. There are websites who are stating that they'll be back in business within the end of the week. Whether that's also propaganda ... Well, you decide.

*Perks up at fixing grind* Fixing grind will draw in new players and those who are still grinding. It'll piss off older players who did have to somehow kill 392348234 chickens like Cyrisus. Unless they put in some sort of achievement for older players who grinded before the EXP got fixed - but then, you'll have to deal with a permanent divide in the player base that cannot possibly be well in any way, shape, or form.

Yup. I know the music industry does this quite frequently - I've had to advise a number of my residents about similar situations. But it takes one arrogant kid to go "I ain't payin" for this to become a nightmare for the company in question. At least with movies and music there is an actual copyright involved. The only thing I could possibly see Jagex having a leg to stand on is the line But it'll be rather difficult to prove that in court. Furthermore, it'll be awfully, awfully hard to prove that Bot Doe #9823145 is the ONE responsible. Given the U.S. Court's reliance on precedence and how they've already failed twice... The thing that bugs me is not that they're willing to give second chance to botters, but rather the fact that by doing such a thing, Jagex has exposed their weakness. The botters may be right about this: their game IS propped up by people who bot, whether or not Jagex likes to admit it. Removing bots may be an excellent re-start, but Jagex has to now compete with all the other F2P and mobile games out there. At this point I'm not sure who's digging who's grave.

They probably got the e-mails by forcing Paypal or something to hand e-mail addresses over. I'm not sure how effective threatening legal action works on players, considering that they've had a history of failing such cases in the first place. I mean, what are they going to do? Spend lawyer fees on every single one of 'em? :rolleyes: And DMCA is on copyright infringement. I don't see bots recreating anything that would be infringing upon copyright. Hell, that's the reason why they lost that first case in the first place.

Someone want to pass the popcorn? Mhm. While the responses by the Jagex mods were very similar to their primary userbase, I do believe Jagex have a reason to gloat this time. However, pride before downfall. It's way too early to be celebrating victory. Notice how about 100k active players are basically gone? The bot programers will be fighting back harder than ever. As for MMG's comment... it could be the case, but I suspect the reality is that they've only recently came up with this whole idea. Unless Jagex was truly, laughably blind, half of your population botting away IS significant enough to warrant instant attention, and not just after free trade. Though, I will note that an eight month turnabout rate isn't bad in the MMO industry - it took SONY years to figure out something was wrong. Either way, going onto those forums make my head hurt. I'll be remaining cautiously optimistic.

There's a rumor going around that Triple Zeal won't be happening because the bots got around it. Can anyone confirm if this is true?

We will not know how much damage this did to bots until at least tomorrow. Soon, we'll know if it's truly a PR move or really something that'll affect the game in the long run. Either way, the game goes on.

Checked out dragons between classes. There are hordes of people in d shirts, granite platebodies, whips, and etc. But I think that might be due to this newfangled 3x slayer EXP thing that's going on. :mellow:

I think what Biyaunte is saying is that you gained experience - 138k in mining, for instance, and thus, you went up your ranks. How many of those are due to your gains and are due to bot bannings would then be questionable. I mean, not to doubt your claims, but the increases in your mining rank corresponds to your EXP gain pretty well...

The majority of Runescape players have invested far too much into the game to consider quitting. I would contend that the top-down nature of the player community means that even if this measure fails, Jagex wouldn't lose that much money. In other words, those who would've quit quit a long time ago, leaving only the casuals and the hardcores to the game. I don't think it's bread and circuses - it is likely that it'll become a push and shove match. One is a company of ~300 with a (somewhat) decent financial backing. The other side ... hell, I don't even know how much money goes around exchanged in RWT. I'm going to guess it's substantial. In either case, if Clutterflutter or whatever the thing's called is doing what I *think* it's supposed to do, it'll make both common forms of bots substantially harder for the average scripter to work. Worth mentioning that two of the guys here was debating the concept heavily in the botting thread already, and I suspect strongly it has something to do with scrambling IDs based on the Direct Play server they've gotten recently. Either way, I expect it to be a (good, but functionally) temporary solution. Someone said it best, though. So long as there is demand for bots, bots won't be stopped. To solve the problem, Jagex needs to make the game more interactive - like that interview with a botter Grimy_bunyip posted somewhere a few days ago.

Look at it this way. It can't be a disaster. If they fail, nothing would have changed with the exception of a PR hit. If they succeed, on the other hand...

I was under the impression that the majority of bots in existence work off of reflection, which is reading data from the Runescape client. So this should hit them pretty hard.

If it becomes too difficult for the bot makers to overcome, though, bot makers will probably stop trying and move onto other games. I'm more interested in the banning. If they curb incoming flow and then smash the bots already present (citing that 1.5 million banned, most of which I guess is going to be f2p), then that will be a pretty decent way to start off the game again.

Tank game is popular outside of English-speaking countries. It's especially popular in Russia for whatever reason. >_>

Well, it's the first time in the lifetime of Runescape that they've actually tried to solve the problem from a programming perspective. Their optimism, however, is a bit discerning. It suggests that they're either overconfident - never a good thing - or that they really have something up their sleeves. I sincerely hope it's not the former. Nothing is infallible.

Something I've wondered about: What'll happen to the guys right now who are handling anti-bot mechanics if Jagex actually came up with something useful? If bots are effectively removed, doesn't this mean they're now out of a job? ... Wouldn't be in their best interests to do a half-hearted job, enough to prevent them from getting fired but not enough to eliminate the issue, ensuing that they'll have job security in the future?

Sometimes I'm not sure if your suggestions are serious. I don't think risk of perma-character death is going to be well received by any MMO community, and Runescape never really advertised itself as a "hardcore" type of game. To run something like this would be business suicide.

Biyaunte, there may be one move Jagex's trying to do, and that's moving towards manual banning. There are only 76k players with 85 dungeoneering or above, after all. A substantial reduction in legit players may make it easier for them to sort out bots. Though increasing the instances seem to be counterintuitive if they're trying to get more people to be active in reporting bots. I've judged college CX and LD rounds. Can I judge? :rolleyes: You may wish to explain your jargon to the average reader if you're really looking for people to read your posts. If solvency is towards the harms of bots, then status quo had no solvency to begin with. However, net harm in the end is greater due to implementation of aff policy (bots back within days, difficult for legit players to obtain bones), so I'm extremely tempted to vote neg.

Just tried it earlier. The bone piles appear to randomly spawn in different areas. I couldn't telegrab them, though I've heard reports of others being able to. The thing is, bones are a consumable good. So long as the demand doesn't go down they'll remain profitable for players. What Jagex may have anticipated is the supply of frost dragon bones going down, driving the prices up and resulting in the same gold/hour. What they may not anticipate is that if they made it too difficult to obtain prices will not be driven up due to lack of adequate demand, resulting in a net loss for players overall. Bots are well, functionally timeless. They do not suffer from biological constraints. The long term effects can only be seen in the future.

Some people are claiming that it's reflecting the amount of damage in which you're doing/would have done. If that's the case, then I think it may be Jagex's attempts to simply slow down the rate of frost dragon killing.