NukeMarine

Ok -- I LOL'd IRL ... :lol: But, here's a question for you (or anyone else who wants to answer it) -- at what level will you accept Clusterflutterer to be a "success"? Only if it manages to eliminate 98% of all bots AND these accounts and all correlated accounts are permanently banned? Are you willing to accept less and just appreciate the effort? :unsure: Right now, Jagex says that the changes will stop 98% of the current bots. Now, assuming they're honest after the fact, that should mean around 100,000 bots active at any one time. Again, I assume that's the number of bots messed up after each update only this time they stay messed up. If it's not near 100k, then I'd consider it a failure. Now, how they treat those that they've identified is another tale. I don't mind rollbacks cause it does the same as banning and starting a new character for most. That's assuming they're just botting for levels and not gold farming for RWT.

Compare cheats to burglars, you don't have to have a perfect lock on your door, just a better one than your neighbors have :-) Not the best comparison. Remember, your neighbors house has to have something worth taking (idiots paying money for gp or bot programs) in addition to having weak locks. Remind me again why idiots are paying $500 for 1 billion gp currency for a game where people moaned about a price raise from $5 to $6 a month? I get botting for levels and gathering, but actually paying 10x what a five year subscription would cost? Sorry, not getting it.

We'll find out soon, but any guesses what all will happen within the first few days? 1. Mass banning of previously botted F2P accounts, and any that had heavy trading with those accounts 2. Mass roll backs of many members (some bans) for botting and RWT. 3. Lots and lots of people realizing their 9 year old cousin botted on their main account over the summer while they were away helping the orphans in Africa. Expect lots of threads pointing out this injustice. 4. PhD level of anti- anti-bot programming commencing as thousands if not millions of dollars in revenue is at stake. 5. Major price increases due to removal of many botted items, gps, and collected rares from the game due to rollbacks and banning. Granted, I'm skeptical as MMG freaking lied about Jagex being able to handle the bots. Now, if the upcoming changes only allow for botting on the interface level (color recognition, mouse positioning/clicking, etc.) then that's great. That type of botting cannot be stopped outside of using similar methods such as the anti-spam that reduced the input to at least the level of human ability and speed. If the bot programs can still interact with the code, then yeah, complete failure due to the hype created.

Finally got my account back. Anyway, yes, this would be a great moneysink. Too bad bots bring in insane amount of GP causing constant inflation. Big reason I don't think Jagex should have a set price on 10 minutes since that price will mean something entirely different 1 to 2 years from now. Somebody else mentioned on another forum that using other items from various minigames as payment could also be a good idea (castle war tickets, temple trekking coins, soul wars clay, etc.). Seems reasonable in that you're trading what represents effort in the game.

Lol. <-- clicky. That's been posted on another thread. Though funny, there's some flaws in trying to claim the first password is simpler than the second. It's assuming people only add the number at the end, don't use a familiar, but not so simple number (friend's phone number's last four), don't capitalize more than on character, don't use shift on a number set, etc. All that said, he is right that most people depend on one unusual word with slight modification that can be accounted for in many password cracks. On topic: Remind me, who here is stupid enough to claim publicly on an open forum that they attempted to access another person's account without their consent? I'm not the most educated of persons, but something tells me that that's probably an illegal act in both the US and Great Britain.

In response to the second article. I'll be honest, if there were a magical way to re-do RS's combat and experience system to account for the ability of the current system to handle the data, I'd be all for it. Problem is, we know the game has tons of legacy issues that just cannot be fixed. Imagine if the HP skill was 4xp for every point of damage you healed with food or potions. In fact, you'd need a higher HP in order to be allowed to eat higher level food. Or DEF where you gained xp by avoiding getting hit based in part on your opponents chance of hitting you and it's max damage. Or Magic skill that's split in two so there combat magic skill (Wizardry) and non-combat magic skill (Mage). Remove rares, revamp weapon and armor creation to take more time but offer more xp. Remove the alchemy spell. Remove the protect prayers or seriously downgrade them. All can be considered legit ideas, but cannot be used unless Jagex did the suicidal idea of setting everyone back at zero. Yeah, people can laugh at the RS system, but you have to be honest that the game has it's hands tied in part being a 10 year old legacy game. Hell, it can't even release new sets of servers with updated game mechanics that only allow new accounts and don't interact with older servers. Why? Well, it'd basically have to program and test essentially two new games. There's merit in creating separate servers allowing only new member accounts, but it'd still have to be the same game. Although, what if Jagex created new servers with updated game mechanics that allowed only new member accounts (or membership allowed you to create a new account on those servers). Maybe there'd be financial merit in that idea.

Dark Dude, Great idea, ban the bots. We don't need anymore discussion after that. Except there's one problem, we've got 16 pages of discussion talking about all the problems associated not just with finding bots to ban, but also keeping them off. Bot detection - gets harder with every passing day IP Ban - useless Proprietary client - ruins the very thing that makes RS successful CAPTCHA - By passed using a group of people that solve remotely for bots Random Events - Actually easier for bots to solve (requires frequent updates to be really effective) Game altering - Requires frequent reboots, usually patched within hours. Now let's talk about the ideas of altering player habits. What's the difference with bot activity between F2P and P2P? I assume it's worse on F2P. What is the bot activity like on 1000+ and 1500+ servers? I assume there's less bots than on other servers. How about bot activity in areas that have higher skill total, quest or activity requirements. I assume these areas are less botted. What is bot activity like with changes to account creation? I assume more bots are created now. None of these things STOP BOTS in and of themselves. I agree that even in a skill total 2000 world you'd have somebody botting. However, it reduces or removes the really annoying Gold Farming bots leaving us just with players that leveled a high character and now doesn't want to grind his time away. I'd rather have the later cause at least there you have a player that cares about his or her account. So yes, please, give an idea that won't be shredded to hell and back that's guarenteed to reduce bots without affecting normal players. By reduced, we're talking as much if not more than a mixture of: Lengthy account creation process, limited time per account on f2p, structured time use per account per month for p2p, more extensive activity/skill total/qp prerequisites on all actions.

If it reduced botting on the servers changed, then it does reduce botting. If the "Beta phase" passes and it turns out such servers are viable it could be expanded to more or even all the servers. What you're saying though is "Hey Jagex, we know that botters are ruining the game and there's a statistically proven method that drastically reduces the common bot, but don't do that cause it'll affect the way a small subset of users play the game". You just said it works. You don't like it cause the increase rental price is not related to an increase in cost of operation. But, you do agree that Jagex spends time and resources "combatting" bots, right? Well, here's something that works against how bots play. Does a small subset of real players get affected? Yes, but read above. If you're a guy that can afford 300 a month on a game, I think it's safe to say you can afford $24 a month. That's assuming such players don't pay money in RWT, which oddly has not been brought up. There are many, many players paying EXTRA MONEY for RS item, yet something tells me they'll yell the loudest on price rises on RS. Here you're right. Group mentality is weird. Anyone that's read the book Freakonomics can see all the examples where the perceived is much different than the reality. Kind of like how a restaurant buffet can save money if they used smaller plates and cups. Yes, people could still eat all they want, but the mentality is just get a plateful which in turn meant less food is used. As for your breakdown of rollovers, players still have to pay membership that month to use it. Granted, it could be there are no rollovers. I just threw that out there as it's a way to stop the "gotta use it all or lose it" mentality people have.

So you call the idea ridiculous, but offer no valid reasons why that is so? Seems odd, but let's take what you said on its merits. First, this would be on certain servers, not on all of them so actually every argument is moot. Second, people that choose to have low or no combat levels (pures and skillers) are not being catered to in this game, nor have been for years. Trotting them out do not help your argument. They could still play, but are limited at the high end of things to do is all. Thirdly, charging people more that use the service more is not 'punishing' them. Trust me, make a cab wait for 10 minutes and make another wait for 30 minutes. You'll find making a cab wait longer (ie utilize it's service) will give you a higher charge. Anyway, YES, 3 hours a day is easily doable. So is 6 hours and 10 hours and 16 hours and even 24 hours in a day. However, if you want to use more of the service then be prepared to pay more. As pointed out above, people do this all the time with cell phones and internet providers. Now will this cost customers? Yes. Will it cost so much as to be economically disastrous? No. Jagex can easily tell what percentage of its accounts play 100+ or 200+ hours per month. It can also tell when accounts that are indicative of bots and gauge their hours per month. For that, it's easy to tell if there's immediate benefits to either or both ideas.

This adds on to the idea above about having skill total and quest point requirements for all activities in RS. I'd like to repeat the idea offered earlier about charging accounts more if they use more game time. The average player is not affected. Those that like to play more hours should have no problem paying extra for the additional hours. Now, there's over 700 hours in the average month. For the average person they're sleeping 1/3rd of that time and having to do other things besides play RS (yes, there are rare major exceptions). I think it's fair that Jagex allows a membership fee or F2P time per month as 100 hours (this can be grandfathered for existing f2p accounts). The next 100 hours of gameplay that month can be purchased for $6. However, the next 100 hours (300 hours for the month) will cost $12. The 100 hours after that cost $24. So, if someone, for some reason, played that individual account for 700 hours they'd rent that last 100 hours for $192 or $384 total for the whole month. Obviously any account being played for 700 hours in a month is being botted or has multiple players. However, it's not too uncommon for some players to play 300 hours in a month, but that would only cost them $24 for 300 hours. Any unused hours (except the first 100 membership hours) would be rolled over to the next month. Obviously, a gold farmer would not pay such a price as it's easier and cheaper to create a bunch of accounts and only use them 100 hours each. Problem though is if the skill total/quest point idea gets implemented. Now the gold farmer is limited how fast he can level all these small accounts. Your UBER player that likes to spend 300+ hours on the game can make the choice of leveling multiple accounts or stick to his one high level account. Something tells me a player this addicted to the game will pay the extra price (albeit complaining very loudly). Both these ideas implemented (skill total/qp and time costs per month) would seriously hurt gold botting and normal botting efforts. It plays against the one thing bots can do that players cannot - give many hours of effort a month to the game. Might be a great thing to implement if Jagex ever created Servers that are economically cut-off from normal RS servers (only accounts created those servers can be played on those servers.)

Saw an interesting thread on RSOF. On it the player was suggesting requiring every skilled spot to have not only a skill level, but a skill total level requirement. He even thought some mini-game areas could have quest level requirements. Thinking about it, this seemed like an interesting idea. A targeted version of skill total worlds if you will. Technically, it's not anti-bot, but it works against your common gold farmers. Anyway, what would botting and general player activity be on servers that required every skill level checked activity above 30 to also require x20 skill total (x10 on f2p) and x2 quest points (n/a on f2p)? Ex: Wielding a weapon that requires 60 atk also requires 120 QP and 1200 Skill total. Chopping down a level 75 tree also requires 150 QP and 1500 skill total. Wearing a level 99 helm would required. Even certain monsters, activities and mini-games could have a "interaction level" requirement. So something like sorceress garden could require 80 QP and 800 skill total while killing dragons might require 100 QP and 1000 skill total. Again, it doesn't stop botting, but it does add a time investment that deters most gold farmers. What's nice is it makes such servers still accessible to everybody, but limits activities on those servers that put in their time somehow (either legally or illegally). Seems easy to program and can be applied to more servers since it's not exclusionary.

The Elven Crystalic Nursery mini-game. Using concepts for creating a Spirit Bow suggested earlier, it's easy to create an "Elvish Crystallic Nursery" who's sole purpose is to supply the Elves with Crystal Weapons and Armor. In this multi-player minigame are Six farming plots in different areas of the Nursery, and a HUD saying the number of attacking species (gnomes, trolls, dagannoths, dwarves, etc.). Of course, you can also look around to see what's attacking. It's the player's job to use his skills to create powerful bows, weapons and armor for the Elves to fight off the enemies. The unique thing is you're using crystal seeds for this process and must guide the growth to create the necessary piece of equipment. Players get better bonuses and experience when they produce items that help against the strongest enemy currently attacking (either a weapon good against the defensive armor of the species, or an armor good against the enemy's attack). This should be strong enough bonus to deter making only one type of item for the experience alone. Process to CHANT items involve burying the seed, using prayer and agility for musical lyre and chanting dance to create a stage of growth. At each of the seed's 10 growth stages, players attack parts of the crystal tree with magic, range or melee to encourage crystal armor or weapons to form. They then use smithing, fletching or crafting to remove spurs and imperfections to further encourage the correct growth and form of the crystal. This can be fun, as player's can be guided at each stage to narrow down what type of item they're creating. After guiding, the player then does the chanting and lyre dance for the next stage of growth. For fun, there can be a method to create Spirit Bows or Spirit Arrows on a faster scale in this game (Spirit tree spot, Phoenix spot, Spinning Wheel) to supply the army. As this involves Combat skills, Farming, Crafting, Fletching, and Smithing in the Elvish lands, this is a HIGH LEVEL mini-game. You'll need 70 to 99 in multiple skills to be of use in this. The higher level the skills, the more powerful weapons and armors that can be created (more experience and bonuses). There are 7 levels of items: 70, 75, 80, 85, 90, 95, 99. Each level means you have that skill level in all skills needed to make that weapon or armor Example: A level 75 crystal bow (dagger) needs 75 skills in farming, prayer, agility, range and fletching (attack, strength, smithing). A level 90 crystal bow (arbalist?) would need 90 in farming, prayer, agility, range, and fletching (attack, strength, smithing). As there's a bonus based on the type of species attacking, that encourages players to shift what they're making. Players get experience based on what skills they use to guide the creation of the item. This can be modified based on how beneficial at the moment the potential final product can be. In addition, there's the bonus points that can be built up. These can be traded in for abilities to create Crystal Items in two special farming plots. Growing tradeable Crystal Items: It'll take at least 1 day per item. Just like the mini-game, there are 10 stages of growth (once every 2 hours). At each stage, you guide it toward the final product. These do not get diseased, merely stop at it's current stage until you encourage the next stage. These can be powerful level 80 items where fully charged would be like level 85 or 90 weapons. Even degraded, these items are tradeable. However, to "recharge" items that have not become a seed, players will need to "plant" the armor or weapon back into their farming plot. It then acts as if it's at the stage as it's current charge (so a level 7 bow will become a stage 7 tree that's in the process of becoming a bow). This offers enormous benefits to skilling players as their services will be needed constantly. Most players will always want multiple fully charged items to have the best attack/defense abilities. This of course will need to be balanced by making the initial seed difficult to get in addition to requiring powerful weapons/spells and high level skills to create these. One suggestion is that chaotic weapons are only non-elvish weapons that can affect growth on player owned farming plots (if too excessive, make it gravite but using them degrades the items).

You know, I was just submitting my old ideas. However, in the process of writing about the Spirit Bow, I wondered if it could be made more mini-game like. Thinking more on that, I thought why not a mini-game where you're growing and chanting weapons and armor for an Elvish army. Ended up just creating an idea for an entire minigame for people with skills from 70 to 99 with bonus awards that allow players to grow their own tradeable crystal armor and weapons. Even had a simple method for players recharging degraded items themselves. I know it won't get picked by Jagex as an idea, but I thought it was cool how easy it is to think of useful minigames with big impacts in the actual game. Of course easy ideas don't mean easy to program or implement, but what can you do.

Not totally agreeing with the business tactics debate. If that were really the case, then I'd buy them not rapidly stopping the member bots (just stat wiping them), but what's the financial incentive of not fully busting the f2p bots? About the 2D image generated from 3D models, maybe you misunderstood what I was talking about. Here's a version I was thinking about: 3D Photo CAPTCHA. The reason you don't release the models just makes it more difficult to compare a newly generated image. Now, it's probably a great idea to hire a team of guys and gals that make a hobby/living off of breaking anti-bot methods. Don't know if they do that, but it's possible.

That "High Level Suggestions" was great thread. It was well moderated, had great ideas and discussions about them. Plus, the ideas actually were being used in game. I mean, God Wars Dungeon was inspired directly by my suggestion in that thread so it's easy to see why I'm still excited about it even now. That said, this "Mail in an Idea" is a slap in the face to what that thread and the suggestions forum is supposed to be doing. Yeah, we all make fun of the official forums, but a well moderated one that's willing to cut the chaff (DUEL SWORDS, BEST IDEA EVAAAA!!!) actually will give you better choice of content to finally open up for a vote. In addition, you get a decent discussion that can help build the idea's strengths and cut down on the flaws. So, a high level non-combat related update? Oh hell, that's easy. For Slayer, there are six creature types that can only be "killed" using your skills and related tools (Golem - mining, Ent - woodcutting, Shark - fishing, Tanglethorn - farming) but these things attack back and weaken your skill level. For Hunter, many of the "non-humanoid, non-boss" creatures of runescape (rock crab, unicorn, red spider, rat, dragon) now have a method of being "caught" with the hunter skill leaving a carcass that can be harvested using crafting for parts. High levels can hunt higher level creatures such as dragon. For agility, magic and thieving (say, 90 in all three) there's a new "blink" ability, where if cast you select the location (not on the mini-map, but on play screen) you want to blink to. So long as there's a path to get to it (uh oh, how good is Jagex's path finding on this?) within 20 seconds then you can teleport to that location. Not revolutionary, but should be fun. Probably has a 1 minute cool down. Oh, and my favorite: Using a crystal axe (70atk, 70 wc, 50 agil to wield), cut down the spirit tree (90 woodcutting) to get a spirit log. Using a crystal knife, carve the log into a Spirit Bow (90 Fletching). Dig up the spirit tree (90 farming) to get the spirit roots you can spin into spirit string (90 crafting). Use string with bow for spirit bow. If you don't dig up the tree, it'll regrow in one hour for you to get another log (crystal axe degrades one level doing this). Fletch those into 15 spirit shafts (degrades the crystal knife one level). Sing expired spirit seeds (used for letya teleport) into arrow tips (need 90 magic and prayer) in addition to phoenix feathers to complete it. All intermediate steps are untradeble products but the spirit bow and spirit arrow are tradeable. Useful weapon that teleblocks on successful attacks. Special attack reduces prayer or something else useful. Should be on par with chaotics so likely an 80 range, 80 agility and 80 prayer to wield.

That's a given. If there's a system set up where people can remotely answer captchas AND answer it quickly enough then there is no counteraction if all you're requiring is correct answer. RS can make this difficult as the answers don't have to be only alpha-numeric (answer to select could be a heart or sword or something else). That'll limit participation in such programs pretty much to only RS players. The question then is does such a system allow such a fast turnaround that it's hard to distinguish it from a player sitting in front of the computer? In not, Jagex just has the accounts that answer to slow to keep getting more and more tests. If the turnaround is fast, well, at the very least you've taken 30 to 60 seconds out of a living person's day. Anyway, based on what Stev's claiming, the best bet is getting hundreds if not thousands of 2d images that were randomly generated using unrealeased 3d models. Each image can have dozens of questions. It shouldn't be too difficult to constantly generate and update the captcha with new images and questions as it's done automatically.

Well, that plays on what Stev says about them being able to get the models and id's just from the game code without needing to even get a random to program around it. So you have a model of all lock and key types which makes matching up models child's play. Fairly sure that's how most of the 'match this character with that character' get botted with ease. However, I'm talking about matching human language with a game layout. If I say "guy swinging the sword", and you see 3 characters with long hair and what appears to be dresses and feminine features while another has beard, short hair, and pants. Ok, what a "man waving a long knife" or a "fellow with a pointy weapon"? There's quite a few words that point out a definite character. Yeah, bots are really good at playing RS if they know it. That they can interpret the game beyond the visual level makes them even more efficient. They just suck at figuring out something new which means manual changes by the programmers to adapt. The hard part is programming or creating a method that can create something new that confuses bots but not players that can't easily be turned into an algorithm within hours of release. Even better, it's something new that updates on a constant basis. Anyway, I'm for an invasive bot captcha that happens frequently for new or unsponsored accounts (not random events, but actually methods meant to find out "are you a bot or not"). As time goes on, positively passing these tests means you're tested less and less. Actually failing the test means you have a penalty time out and encourages more frequent tests. Oh, and make these part of the account creation process.

Really? What use will it be to take a screen shot when the 3d models with the letters are rotating in and out of view in addition to having to individually enter letters on a pad similar to the bank pin set up? Of course a human can solve it, and many OCR programs can decode standard CAPTCHAS now. But tell me a program that can reasonably get that info I describe to the real world captcha solvers? Bot clients can retrieve any and all data from RuneScape. They could retrieve the 3d model, the texture used on it, and the question. There's no software for it yet (because it doesn't exist obviously), but all it'd take is a few bot developers to get a few randoms and there'd be a anti-random for that in a heart-beat. :). Dozens of models wouldn't help much either. You can download and view every model used on RuneScape, without getting the random, through various readily available softwares. Again, there are two methods. First is a 2d image that's generated from a random 3d design. That's the type that can't be defeated by a program as you cannot tell me some program can recognize every possible angle of rotation on a human that can be in the middle of performing any possible action holding any possible combation of items. Such things are easily solved by humans since they can tell the letter on the chest of the guy sitting down, the number on the open mouthed dragon's wing plus 5 and the letter on the cape of the human holding an axe. That these images can be randomly generated means no program's going to reasonably defeat and will be quickly discovered unless all models are solved with 100% accuracy (otherwise, you just stop using the model that gets bombarded with correct answers while other models in it's group are wrong. Yeah, you got CAPTCHA solving services as mentioned in this thread, but thanks to the needed time (snapshot, send for solve, received solve, repeat for next question) you quickly identify such methods. Now, the other type where you have models that are moving/rotating defeat CAPTCHA solving services (unless they send videos). However, that's open to the problems you mention where you have models, skins and likely actions identified by programs. Still, you're trying to account for questions that can have enormous variance. Even then, you're stuck with the same problem that unless you solve each question and model with 100% accuracy, you basically are telling the company when one of the models of it's CAPTCHA is getting compromised. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of possiibilities. Yeah, you can know all the models, all the emotes, all the actions, all the clothing and weapons, all the hair. Thing is, there can be dozens if not hundreds of form questions that then are populated with these variances. This isn't I get you're a great programmer, but I think you're overstating what bots can do in this part. However, let me ask: The "answers" are basically all letters and numbers and common symbols (about 50 characters if we stick to capital letters). The character model is just the human model. The skins, each with a possible "answer" on it, are individually applied to either leg, either arm, chest, and head in addition to being mapped on various weapons, shields, capes. The models can do any activity a normal character can do. There can be upto four different models on screen with their relative position being obvious. How many multi-part form questions can you think of based on that (along the lines of "What is the symbol is on the shield of the person behind the man swinging a sword?"). You then have the option of generating a new scene for each question requiring three correct answers in a row within 10 questions else you get a 10 minute time out to limit seeing too many questions at once. Knowing all the variables that have to be accounted, how long would it take to create a 100% accurate bot that won't reveal itself by taking too long to solve the problem?

Really? What use will it be to take a screen shot when the 3d models with the letters are rotating in and out of view in addition to having to individually enter letters on a pad similar to the bank pin set up? Of course a human can solve it, and many OCR programs can decode standard CAPTCHAS now. But tell me a program that can reasonably get that info I describe to the real world captcha solvers? Think about it, you see a rotating Dragon, Human and Dog. Dragon with letters (Q's on the head, D's on the wing, X's on the legs, P's on the body, M's on the tail). Human with similar letters (including shield and sword and cape). Even the dog has letters. The letters come in and out of view as the figures are rotating. A bank pin interface comes up and ask for the letter on the dog's leg. Next, the letters on the models change (or even the models themselves) and it ask for the letter on the human's cape. Finally another skin or model change up and it asks for the letter on the Human's head. Nothing is asked about the dragon. Jagex would have dozens of models to call up. It only needs to be able to randomly map letters onto the skin, and randomly apply it to distinct body parts of the models. Since these models can be animated such as doing emotes in case of humans, that makes it even more difficult to CAPTCHA solve as the question could be "What's the letter on the cape of the waving human" or "What's the letter on the leg of the clapping human". Sorry, but NO ANTI-CAPTCHA program can figure such things out. Even sending screen shots do nothing as first off rotating figures means letters may or may not be in view, plus animated emotes will not be obvious unless you record at least 4 seconds of screen time. Oh, and since you get three inputs based on responses to 3 or 4 models, Jagex can further tell if one model has been corrupted by anti-captcha programs cause you get lots positive responses to one model vice incorrect guesses on the other two or three means it can automatically retire that model. Now, none of this stops sweat shop labor directly playing the game. My guess is a "worker" is alerted to a stopped bot and he'll offer his human brain to solve the issue. However, even that must have a definite time lag that could be an idicator someone is botting. With a smart algorythm that determines that real players solve such captchas fast eventually getting tested every 10 hours of gameplay while botted with human back-up accountssolve slower can start lagging down botted accounts with captchas every 10 minutes.

CAPTCHA is circumventable. I'm more inclined to say bring back the old 'aggressive' randoms - river troll, tree ent, drunk dwarf etc. Really? So no bot has a "IF damage occuring THEN teleport home" coded anywhere in it? Sorry, aggressive randoms affected normal players much to often to be beneficial. As for CAPTCHA, I think RS can improve on them as they have a 3d option. Basically, have five to eight 3d shapes that are randomly placed, rotating and slightly moving. On the skin of the shapes are the individual CAPTCHA letters. After that, an interface like the Bank Pin pops up where you have to tap in the letters in order (maybe eight buttons). Even better, they could just use 3d models of dragons, man, furniture, cat, boats, trees, etc in random posing and shading with letters mapped on the skin of various body parts then converted to a 2d image (removing model id's). It then ask for specific letters (back of the human, left wing of the eagle, branch of the tree,, shield of the demon) . Now, I'm not up on anti-CAPTCHA, but that sounds beyond the abilities of any program to solve but fairly simple to implement. Yes, CAPTCHAS can be overcome if you never change the patterns. However, Jagex should easily to be able to call upon it's enormous model library and the fact everyone is in a 3d interface to design a nigh impossible bot anti-bot tool. Then, like others say, you implement this device so that accounts stop being tested slowly over time. It can even alleviate annoyances to new accounts by older players by letting older accounts sponsor newer accounts (tested less often though obviously all connected accounts will then be at risk if any attempt to bot).

Well, since it's fairly divided on like/don't like I guess the next question is: How much should one pay for 10 minutes of effort? 10k gp 25k gp 50k gp 100k gp 250k gp 500k gp I think I'll add this to the poll.

It's getting positive and negative responses because there are positive and negative aspects to the idea. That's why there's value in discussing it. First, it's nothing like microtransactions. It's still using ingame resources in the form of currency. If that makes it microtransaction, then construction is nothing but a big microtransaction skill. Second, since I brought up construction, this helps make it similar to construction. If you're rich, you can pay for better material and level faster. Otherwise, you can go for slower but less expensive methods. The game has been played that way for nigh on a decade. I'm not sure if you're up on real world economy but it works that way too. You could walk from New York to LA. Take a bicycle. Take a motorcycle. Take a car. Take a train. Take a plane. All the methods get you to LA, just that the faster and more convenient methods cost more and more. How much money and how much time you can spare dictates your choice in the matter. Thirdly, it does not devalue other's work. It puts a price on what one hour of work should be. Now, granted, bots have devalued work on this game a large amount. However, if there were no bots, how much would the average player charge for a large amount of flax or bowstring or pure essence or running that essence? Now answer the question since there are bots and we're dealing with something that not botted as much such as the Citadel. We might be talking about 1m to 2m gp for each hour (150k to 300k for every 10 minutes of resources). So, how much is an hour of your ingame time worth doing click intensive activities?

I would guess the clan leaders can set if they want such options available. They seem to have pretty much all control on other aspects anyway.

This or something similar is what I was thinking. Now, I have not done citadels and don't plan on it. With that, I don't know how long it takes for early and later plots to gather resources. However, it makes sense to tie cost with both the time it takes to gather the resources and the skill levels required for that plot. The time it takes can even take the player's skill levels into account so that the lower you are in the skills the more it costs assuming lower skills take longer. In addition, Jagex should not make this a constant price, as it should adjust based on GP per hour (either profit or cost) associated with a certain skill for that plot over time. Now, how to make Clan Citadels useful or more useful is a different issue. If Jagex is wise, it'll listen to the user base on those points. I'm more interested in the gathering process and the current limitations of it. Last point: I think there are three types of players that can be catered to when it comes to gathering resources. *Players that like to work - These guys are already covered. *GP gatherers - These guys are talked about in this topic with paying for the resources. *Players that don't like to work, but are wiling to hire others - They have the skills, but not the desire to grind out resource gathering. I think these types can be catered to by letting them either pay for resources, or let them skill assist others to gather resources for them. Say Player A is rich and lazy and Player B is poor but willing to work. Player B just finished gathering her resources for the week but would still like to work. Player A would like Player B to gather Player A's resources for him. Player A "assists" Player B, so now all resources gathered by Player B is attached to Player A (Player A must stay logged in and do nothing but chat like usual). Player A may even pay Player B for her efforts.

Well, to be fair, a clan is still limited by the number of players in their clan. It's not just about being rich. Second, they are rich so it's likely they can pay workers so this can cut out the middle man and act as a nice money sink. Your second point I agree with, but Jagex probably doesn't want the Citadel to be a skilling hub. Again, that just helps skillers. Not everyone in the game skills as the game offers many things to do. Again, this could be an area where both benefit. Your third point I'll also agree with. However, it only applies to skillers or people willing to spend time. There are other types of players that prefer financial rewards for their time. Those types are likely to want to pay.