Whirliebird

Don't believe everything you read... that story was around when my mother was a kid. Can you say "Urban Legend"? I knew you could :roll:

Um... this has nothing to do with online gaming? What was that kid doing again?? PLAYING AN ONLINE GAME?? Isn't that what we do when we play RS??? :shock: And isn't it possible that any player who does play RS may develop an unhealthy addiction to it? Get real! :wall: The whole point in me bringing up that article was that I hoped we all as players might read it and reflect upon our own lives and how much time we devote to these games... or did you completely and utterly miss the point? I'm thinking a yes answer is forthcoming!!!! You haven't heard me disagreeing with your assesment of the parents not keeping an eye on this kid's activities do you? Or of the fact that they may be bad parents? Not to mention that the kid undoubtedly had problems? Perhaps you might even be erroneously assuming that there was a "mental" problem versus an "addiction" and that may not be true? (yes, addictions fall into the general category of mental discrepancies when you're dealing with an individual that has a problem... but addictions are carefully and clearly defined on their own). In any case, none of that was ever an issue nor was it the point of my original topic. Besides... we don't even know the circumstances involving where the kid was at the time! For all we know, he was at a friend's house or with an incompetent grandparent due to their age! Your assumptions are dangerous... and I hope you know what happens when you start to assume something? You mean the Chinese kid "had" issues...? He's long dead and buried. The issue at hand was not who, what, when, where, why or how the kid took the drastic action that he did... again, the point was to acknowledge the incident and ponder on our own lives. At no point did I ever suggest that we as a group are addicts, have mental problems, are nerds with no lives or anything else... all I did was challenge us as a group to consider the possibilities! Gee, maybe I should go back and include a disclaimer? EXCUSE ME? EXCUSE ME??? Who are you to judge whether or not what I say has any meaning??? PULL YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR BACKSIDE YOU IGNORANT LITTLE SNOT! If you don't like what I have to say then stop reading, grow up and bite your foul tongue... and learn some manners not to mention respect for other people! People like you are why we have laws ensuring that I (along with the rest of the populace) has the right to freedom of speech in this country that I live... or perhaps you don't live in the USA? Perhaps you're into telling people what they can or cannot say? Perhaps you're into Communism and oppression? Get a life and crawl back into your hole :evil: I can't believe you had the gaul to even write that little gem of sheer ignorance... but then again, your head may be so far up your rear end that you don't even know how ignorant it was. I must be dealing with a mind of Junior High proportion!

Gee, someone has been playing "The Matrix" trilogy DVDs too many times... just kidding. Seriously though, the lack of adherence to and/or skill in seperating fact from fiction and the truth from the lies has been what has gotten mankind into nothing but trouble in all of recorded history. Why is it that discernment has fallen by the wayside? Unless the basic facts regarding our planet, our nation and our very lives remain constant, we'll be open to complete and utter corruption and even death. Want reality? Take a pin and poke yourself in the arm... guess what? If you break the skin, you'll bleed and that's reality. Fling yourself off the 13th floor of a building toward the street, you'll most likely be dead when you hit the concrete, that's reality. Fling yourself off the 20th floor or higher and I know your survival rate is zero... that's reality. Barring divine intervention of course :wink: Of course I'm firm in my opinion... I live by what I believe and know to be true based on my observations, experiments and education. Don't you? Or am I supposed to throw what I believe out the window just because someone else doesn't like it at any given time? Yes, I consider the statements, observations and comments of those I respect... or seek out for answers, coucil or advice but I also reject them if I know that what they state or propose is totally wrong. What's reality? If you believe in everything, you believe in nothing. Absolutely! Live life to the fullest and utilize all the talents that you have. Challenge yourself, push yourself and be willing to be held accountable for your actions. Do all that you can that's healthy... grow & experience those things that are out there in the world to do. After all, most people don't believe that we were put on the planet to merely die but instead were put here to live life... and to live it to the fullest. Considering suicide, some psychologists have suggested that suicide can be thought of as merely an ultimate escape sought by those who refuse to grow up and deal with reality... to deal with life itself. While this may be true to a certain degree, I believe that there are many reasons for suicide but the bottom line is that successful suicide attempts bring death. Obviously... but that's not the point. The point is that death in and of itself is reality and that is irregardless of whether or not you believe in an afterlife... therein lies the tradgedy... what could have been can be no more. What could have been a much longer life can never be lived. No matter what. While I think that it's odd that you thought the last line was funny (I didn't coin the phrase), I find it even more odd that you thought it was absurd. Without delving into the world of psychology, MHO is that everyone either deals with reality or they don't. The humorous denial phrase of "I deny your reality and substitute my own" will get a laugh out of me every time... but only because I know that the phrase in and of itself is worthless in spite of the fact that it's funny. So, you either live in reality or you don't... nobody can just make up whatever reality that they'd like at any given time. If you go outside in a blizzard with no clothes on, you'll soon be dead no matter what fantasy you're trying to live or believe in.

Well... I don't know one way or the other about them specifically... but if that's true, they sure must have accomodating parents :roll: Even so, that's only 1 person out of the top 5000 & for the math impared, that's .0002% of the top 5K. I won't even bother to smirk at this comment... anyone who knows anything about OS's & programming knows that NOBODY knows all there is to know... NOBODY. I've been at it since 1980 (started on the ancient 8-bit systems... anyone remember those?!?) and while I may be considered an "expert" by most people that I know & work with, I know the sheer ignorance in suggesting that I or anyone else knows close to everything... by the way, you could say that I know "a lot" too :P Obviously, either you yourself know little beyond knowing how to set up and use pre-programmed software on your system (whatever that may be) or your "friend" has you fooled into believing that they are closer to the almighty than the rest of us... and now let us progress back toward the original subject which was the seriousness of gaming addiction and suicide. Oddly enough, I forgot to mention that in the original article, the death apparently occured at the tail end of 2004... almost 1 1/2 years ago. I remember this striking me as odd at first... until I remembered that we're dealing with a story about someone in Communist China. That figures... government censorship at play with the news media I bet :evil:

Not necessarily... you insinuated that you did more than you did not by your wording... still it's more directly my fault for assuming that you had played on the original RS without being more concrete with the facts. My bad, my bad. It doesn't really matter whether or not someone plays 3 months or 5 years and 3 months though... addiction is addiction. Gee, wouldn't a regular chat room be a far better choice for yakking than being on RS?!? JMHO. If all you are doing is yakking, thanks for doing nothing but soaking up RS bandwidth to yak and not play... Grrrr :shock: Well, not to get another whole thread started on that issue... yes, I've already read a lot of the other topics regarding Zezima, N0valyfe, TheOldNite and a slew of other players who seemingly spend 24 hours a day playing RS... but I think the difference between the top 1000 to 5000 ranked players and the rest of us is probably more often due to the fact that they have been playing the majority of the time RS has been available to the public... which means they have been going at it for around 5 to 5 1/2 years now (IIRC). If I continue to play up to 5 years from the time I started, I will easily peg out all my skills at all 99s too. Geez, any sensible yet hardcore player that spends 6 hours a day playing can go from level 1 to almost all level 99's in 3 1/2 to 4 years in my estimation so lets not assume that all the top players do is play for 12 to 16 hours a day. I could, just as an example, easily take a new F2P character from a noob fresh off Tutorial Island to all 33's in a measily 3 days... and all 60's in 3-4 months. After that, it starts getting tougher to level up in a hurry. As has been noted elsewhere in the forums, a huge amount of cash also vastly decreases the time that it takes to level up some of the skills... so if some of the top players sold some PHATs or other rares along the way after the prices skyrocketed, they could have easily went from level 50 to level 99 in many skills very, very quickly. The Crafting skill would be an example of that... all it takes is a great big pile of hides and the devotion to sew them all up into armor. I think that it's sometimes easy to pick on someone who plays a lot... even more if they admit it. The thing to consider though is their situation in life. What I mean is that maybe they play that much not only because they freely can... but also maybe because their life situation dictates that they either don't lead what we often refer to as a more "normal" life or they're limited in some way and that allows them to play that much. Two examples I'll share of two real life people that I met online: A) I know someone who is bedridden because they are essentially a quadrapelegic. They have some feeling in their hands but cannot lift their arms and thay can barely move their head around more than their hands. So, all they do is read, watch programming on the monitors and be online. Online games for them is a great freedom... and they happen to play RS a lot since they cannot literally get out of bed! & B) I met a guy on RS that sits for 12 hours a day/4 days a week as a guard in a high security building (meaning it contains very valuable and secret items, yes... he works for a government). So, what does he do all that time? When he doesn't actually have to be checking anything, doing inventory or some other job related function, he reads books, watches movies & shows on the satellite TV, does the same thing on the tape & DVD players, plays RS along with many other online games and does other stuff online like surf, research his family tree and do his e-mail. He cannot leave the building... but doesn't have much interaction with anyone else either because of what he does. More or less, he gets paid to be a pseudo prisoner while "guarding" stuff. Some might laugh say that he also gets paid to read, surf the web, watch stuff and play games too while kicking back but it isn't quite that simple. If something happens, he's also responsible for his partners, the building and everything in it and he also packs a firearm which means he'll be required to shoot to kill if it comes to that. So, while he's responsible, it's easy for him to play RS for up to maybe 10 hours a day while he's at work! Think about it though before you hope for a job like that... it's really easy to be bored out of your skull according to him.... and you cannot leave or go outside once you get there until the next shift shows up! I also have an RS friend who told me that he knows another player that's just totally rich... so all they do is sit around doing whatever all day long... including play tons of RS. While I wouldn't consider playing RS to be a worthwhile life pursuit, if I was totally rich and would never have to work, I might spend more time playing too :P Yes, I understand what you mean... but what you are suggesting is highly unlikely to happen these days and most people who have account problems on RS do NOT have problems such as this. The majority unwittingly either get their password spotted by someone around them, give away their password to an outside person or website because they are stupid enough to believe that they'll get something or be leveled up (or made a member... yeah good one sucker!) or because they download software that acts as a logger, trojan or worm. Again, that's because they are stupid! No apologies from me here in my harshness... if you do those things, you deserve to lose your account and have a full blown meltdown of your PC :shock: Anyway, I'd love to see your friends try to "hack" me :twisted: That would be a shame if you did... and it would be a shame for anyone to suicide it over RS :cry: Still, it's your life so do as you choose to do... but weigh your options carefully 8-)

If you've "lived" for RS for 5 years.... you are long past the point of needing help :roll: Your statement in and of itself strongly suggests that you've done little but play RS this whole time... no, there's nothing wrong with playing RS on and off for 5 years but you did say "killed the last 5 years of your life" which to me seriously means that you need to get off RS for quite a while and unplug! Log off, take a few steps back and evaluate your life man.... that was what I would hope that you would do after reading the articles :wink: You would quit a game that you like that much because you got "hacked"?? No offense but that is one of the lamest things I've ever heard. Don't let someone stop you from doing something that you enjoy because they would choose to steal something from you like your items or cash. You still have your character... and that's worth a lot! To me, my stats are worth far more than my "stuff". Yes, I am saying that anyone's millions (or even billions) and all their rares including the PHATs (even 500 PHATs) don't mean jack to me. Everyone seems to forget that PHAT's were FREE back in the day when they came out and it literally took nothing to attain them... as I understand it, you could be a level 1 nooblet or a level 126er and get them all the same other than having to be online while they were available. In fact, I suspect that if Jagex knew what was going to happen with them and the money involved, they would have made them untradeable to keep the money situation out of it just like they did with future items. After all, aren't all they are now nothing more than some sort of status symbol? Isn't flaunting one the same as boasting about having more money than someone else? As far as I'm concerned, you can take your money and cram it where the sun doesn't shine if you're going to be a stuck up pig!! No, that doesn't mean I instantly despise people who wear them, saw one earlier today in fact, but if I hear someone bragging about it, I will not hesitate to call tham a total snob :x As for stats... I will, however, be far more impressed by the time that you spent training... there is no denying the time put into 99's as long as cheating wasn't involved in attaining them. Just be careful of that real world addiction thing while you attain those 99's though! As for getting "hacked", just make sure that nobody (and I mean NOBODY!) can ever learn your password because they find it written down somewhere and make sure that it isn't easily guessed either. I cannot count the number of times someone has claimed that they got "hacked" when what really happened is that someone else around them at school or a so called "friend" that came over to their house literally saw their password firsthand because it was written down somewhere... or because they saw it get typed into the computer. Or because someone guessed the first person's password based on what the "friend" knew about that person. IOW's, do NOT use the password of "Detroit" if you are a huge Detroit Pistons fan and all of your friends know it! DUH!!! The translation on my speel is that you should make your password a kind of "code" with letters and numbers that cannot be guessed by anyone for any reason... and never, ever use that same code for any other game, forum, website or anything else. Also make sure that you set your recovery questions and bank PIN. If you follow my advice, you will NOT lose your account, find anything mysteriously missing or get "hacked"... man I hate that word! Not only is it totally overused, it's also wrongly used and it's such a lame excuse for the general stupidity of people! :evil: If your devotion to any game is so great that it causes you distress for more than about 5 minutes, you are probably overly focused on RS and/or you might be an addict and you should STOP PLAYING THE GAME! Yes, it's normal to be PO'd if you lose an expensive or rare item... but the game is still just a GAME! Get angry, shrug it off and move on. Log out for a while or a day if you need to and focus on real life stuff. (Now back off the soapbox!) :D

I don't know if anyone spotted this yet... or if there's another thread covering this story but I thought I'd post it as a sort-of reality check in case there isn't. While I don't know if this acceptable or not, I going to post the link to the Yahoo story because I think that reading the story would be wise for everyone: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060512/ap_ ... ne_suicide I know how it works... and I 've done it myself many times... played online games or video/computer games until my eyeballs were fried. From 3:00 in the afternoon on Friday until sun up the next day... so I know how addicting games can be... and I while I've never considered myself to have a problem or be a total "addict", I also know that there are addicts out there in the world and that they do have a "problem". People blow grades in school, lose jobs, get into trouble with their parents, etc-etc-etc simply because they cannot regulate their impulses to play games. Sometimes worse things happen... yes, blowing a grade or losing an afterschool job can be bad but there is far worse: divorce, child neglect, spousal abuse and even death. If the story is true as it was posted on the news wires (where Yahoo picked it up), someone killed themself because of a game. Let me repeat that: SOMEONE DIED BECAUSE OF A GAME. I'll put it another way to provoke some thought as well as for emphasis: SOMEONE KILLED THEMSELF BECAUSE OF A TOTALLY MEANINGLESS, STUPID AND MORE OR LESS POINTLESS GAME! Sure, games are fun to play... playing with your friends can be a blast. The unity of team play or the victory of one on one combat can be sweet... sure, games can even improve hand/eye co-ordination and can even help you get smarter by making you problem solve (IOW's "think" & use your skills to reason & process thoughts) but at the end of the day, we don't actually NEED games to do that and there are far more effective ways to improve your skills other than to play games. There are also far more effective ways to whoop it up with your friends while making real life bonds that will last forever. And aside from the few positive aspects of game playing or the minor detriments such as developing calouses & carpal tunnel syndrome, there is also the mental aspect of game playing.... which can lead to an addiction that can be very, VERY unhealthy and this is where the trouble starts. So, do yourself a favor and read the article. Think about your own life and how much time you spend playing games. Be realistic about it and consider whether or not your game time is crowding out other, far more important aspects of life. Consider whether or not you are leading a well rounded and healthy life... a life that includes a lot of time spent with your family and friends. A life that includes many other activities such as sports, maybe a job, some educational opportunities, religious activities, time spent volunteering your life to help people out like at a library, food bank or homeless shelter. Think about your hobbies or the lack thereof... especially if you ceased all other activities since you started playing games online. What's the bottom line here? Many of us spend way too much time online... and not enough time pursuing things that are far, far more important in life and that which will have a far greater impact on our lives. After all, if your game playing leads you to believe that there is nothing else in life as important as the game itself then your life is worth less than the game... and that's sad because the game is truly meaningless in comparison to life. Not to steal a catchphrase.... but I'll say it anyway: choose life. Read a book, goto church, make new friends, ask a girl out on a date. Pitch woo then get married and have 2.5 fat, yet cute as a button little babies. Live life... don't throw it away. Don't be a fool and let a game consume you to such an extent that you pitch yourself off a balcony to your death because you "think" you have nothing left to live for or simply because you have failed to differentiate between what is real and what is not. A game is not reality... it's fantasy... and while it's healthy and OK to have fantasies, don't live the fantasy or live FOR the fantasy. Stay grounded in reality... and to sign off for now, I'll sign off with this. It has been said before and I'll say it again: the best fantasy is reality!

TY... but I wish that it were that easy. I mean to slaughter autoers :-) I think that the main problem is most players either don't care or they don't realize what's going on. As I'm a member player and an experienced one, I realize that the problem of macroing on members worlds isn't even close to being as bad as it is in free play so member players naturally pay far less attention to it since it doesn't directly affect them nearly as much as it does free players (with economics, 100% but with game action far less... maybe 0-10%). At least that's my current opinion... but my opinion might change as time goes by. Unfortunately though, for the newer or newest players be they F2P or P2P... if the lightbulb actually came on and those new players understood what they were seeing was real life CHEATING and they had a full understanding of what was/is going on when it comes to autoers, they might be more willing to do something. I know that I would have been more fired up when I was a newb player if I realized that I was playing RS with characters who were being run by programs rather than by actual people. It also would have explained a lot too!!! I'll go more into that in the next paragraph. For me, from when I was first a newb player... the problem was understanding what the term "macroing" even meant and even now to this day I don't have the opinion that Jagex used to provide any information in the way of what macroing really was or of the problems that it created when I first started playing. Yes, they have much more information on the main Runescape page now but it would be far better IMHO if they actually provided a nice video sample of an autoer in action for every player that goes through Tutorial Island and included a section on how to recognize an autoer and what to do about it. It would be best if they showed you how and most importantly WHY the autoer was detrimental to them as a player too! After all, when someone realizes that they got ripped off or WILL get ripped off, they tend to get really fired up and demand action... and the smart players all agree that autoers screw up the game for the rest of us even if they don't agree that autoers should be banned from the game. That doesn't sound right? Think of it this way: some players will say that they realize that autoers alter the game... but they don't believe that autoers should be against the rules. In other words, they think that all players should be able to use them if they want to. Even so, since Jagex makes it very clear that macroing is illegal, ALL players should be aware of it, be able to recognize it and do something about it. As I stated above, I wish it were easier to do something... and I can think of a few things as Jagex probably has. Unfortunately though, those "things" have other side effects that most players would probably not want to deal with, including me. So, the solutions fall back to player mods and Jagex staff which means "live" banning should be done which is what I first came up with as being a reasonable solution. After all, if you're really playing the game and you're really at the keyboard, you should never have a problem with having a short discussion with a Jagex staffer or player mod to prove that you aren't cheating if & when you get challenged. If you don't answer the questions accurately or promptly, your character is permanently banned on the spot... and yes, I know that I'll probably get thought of as being a Nazi for saying that but before you yap off, try to think of another reasonable solution. After all, I PAY MONEY to be a member and get all the additional stuff Runescape the game has to offer thus I don't want a bunch of low life cheaters screwing it up for me. If you get caught macroing, you deserve to lose your account. PERIOD! Yes, I know RS has random events to get autoers caught or "hung up" so they cannot continue... but IMNSHO the random events are simply not an effective deterrent and Jagex doesn't take action nearly as fast as I'd like. As I mentioned in my other rant, the current philosophy seems to be that Jagex is taking a reactive role... meaning that they know there's a problem but they only institute measures in an attempt to correct the problem well after the occurances have taken place. This does nothing to prevent cheaters from cheating since they know that they'll get away with it for a long time... far more than long enough to make it worth cheating! A proactive role would be simply to make the game 100% unappealing to cheaters in the first place since they know they won't get 5 feet before they get shot... err, banned. "Live" challenges would take care of the autoer problem immediately IF Jagex had enough people to handle the task... and I think that this is why you don't see Jagex staff running around frequently in the game 24 hours a day. I think that they run their offices more in a 9 to 5 fashion even if they actually do have a real employee "monitoring" things even late at night... but even if that's true, there aren't that many Jagex staffers assigned to the sole task of making real life checks. I liken a realistic proactive philosophy to running a prison: you can build walls around a prison but unless you put guards with guns on top of those walls with orders to shoot, you will soon have a ton of prisoners tunneling under, busting through or otherwise climbing the walls. That's why prisoners simply will not pack their bed frames outside into the exercise yard and stack them up high enough to reach the top of the wall. If they did... they would get shot before they got more than a few bed frames off the ground. Funny you should bring that up... The Great Escape has got to be the greatest war movie in history (top 3 for sure!) and it's based on a true story just like it states in the opening sequence. I actually have it full length & unedited on tape and that movie is still totally enjoyable & cracks me up even though I've watched it too many times to count. Here's a tip: if you ever meet a girl who likes The Great Escape and Army of Darkness, think about marrying here ASAP! Well, there's another driveby rant by me! See ya!!

youd be amazed of what they are capable of First time poster here so please have patience whilst I rant.... and yes, this will be a nice long rant! I too have become increasingly frustrated with autoers... from auto miners to auto cutters. In fact, as of late I have found that I can log onto Runescape at any time of the day or night and find at least one autoer in action in 2 minutes or less... and I normally can find more than one autoer in that same spot. Now that is truly sad for those of us who are actually playing the game!!! If you know what to look for and pay attention, you'll start spotting them all over the place. Ugh! OK, it's funny how earlier in this thread ess was used as an example... and I'll comment on ess now since it's a convenient place to start. Yes, it's true that autoers have little influence on my ability to mine ess. After all, the ess just doesn't up and disappear on me like a tree does until it respawns... but it does influence the ess prices at the bank. While I personally would not recommend selling ess, plenty of players do and when they have to compete with people that use auto miners to gain ess, they LOSE MONEY when they go to sell it and that's simply unacceptable. How so? For the brain dead, it's because when the market gets flooded with a product, the prices fall. The concept is supply & demand and I think that all of us who are at least 16 years old or older grasp that concept fairly easily. A good example was with the Sharks... Kudo's to whoever it was that used it. Bottom line here? Autoers affect ALL of the players on RS either directly or indirectly and it doesn't matter whether or not it's in the free world or on P2P. While I don't know how every last person feels on the issue, most people I've talked to are in agreement with me: those players should be drug into the town square, be strapped upside down onto a lamp post and be flogged good and hard while bare assed! And yes, I mean IRL too!! Now, getting back to reality, let's say we are NOT talking about ess... but are instead going to focus on Coal, Iron ores or logs like Willows or Yews. Autoers going after these resources do consume what I'm trying to get and that really pizzes me off! Why should I have to fight 9 auto cutters in the hopes of gaining some Yew logs? Why should I have to waste my time?? The short answer is that I shouldn't... E-V-E-R! So when I go over to Rimmington to the 4 Yews or to the 3 Yews above the Varrock Palace and find anywhere from 3 to 10 auto cutters on any given night after 9:00 PM EST, I begin to wonder why I should even bother to play... after all, it seems sometimes as if I'm the only one NOT cheating! Why is it that I never see any Jagex mods (or even player mods) cruising around busting heads and taking names?? It's not like the autoers can hide! It's not like they are making any real effort to not get caught??? Just how bad has it been? Well, I have found auto miners in the Mining Guild and also even found 2 MEMBERS that were using an auto miner to boot! While I won't name the names, I do know that one was banned (gone from the hiscores table, never to return and that was a fairly healthy account too!) and the other account has been seemingly locked for over 30 days now because they haven't gained 1 single experience point starting 24 hours after I managed to get a player mod to go take a look and send a priority report on their sorry cheating carcass! Gee, I wonder if they'll get permanently banned... or get their account back some day. Hmmm, only time will tell but I hope they get the big shaftola! By the way, thanx for the free Rune pickaxe head SUCKER! More on that later... but to sum up, autoers to me are a serious problem and I hope that Jagex takes a more proactive role in defeating them rather than what I see to be a reactive role. My opinion is that Jagex mods should roam freely and instantly ban blatant cheaters on the spot... but I do realize that there can be limitations here. Maybe they do and I just haven't spotted any yet??? Anyway, since I have become increasingly PO'd & disgusted, and just to see how serious the problem of autoing was... I conducted my own experiment for about 4 weeks. One of the things I did was to go find out where the main concentrations of autoers were... and my initial suspicions were corrrect. They focus on the highest priced items like Yews or the super quick and easy items like ess. Essentially, they are like a pack of roaches making a beeline from a crack in the curb on the corner sewer grate to a dropped sandwich at the midway point in the alley. Well, what did I do? Aside from fully investigating each character as much as possible to determine whether or not someone was actually playing before I reported them for macroing, I charted the names of all the autoers I spotted, I charted what they were doing at the time I spotted them and I charted the date I found them along with their levels as registered on the hiscores table. Then, I checked back every single day to see what the progress of each autoer was... and recorded this information on my master chart. I also made further attempts to contact perceived cheaters and compared the names of the cheaters across my chart... and some of the things I discovered were startling! More on that later... So... the short of what the results are so far of my grand experiment? It looks like it takes in the range of 3 days to 2 weeks for an autoer to get banned. How do I know they get banned? Simple: they disappear from the hiscores table for no apparent reason and I never see them again... so logically I can conclude they got zapped by Jagex and rightfully so. What's my chart look like for the total of all reported autoers? While I almost hate to admit it, it does look like at least 95% of those cheaters I report will get banned (the only reason I don't have solid numbers is because I'm still tracking a few autoers that I reported at the end of the time frame I alloted for my experiment). After another 1-2 weeks, I should have the final results tallied though! What's the bottom line in regards to my experiment? While I often found the same autoers going at it night after night (sometimes for upwards of every night for 2 weeks straight or 24 hours nonstop from Friday night to Sunday night!) it does look like they get hit by that great big Jagex lightning bolt from the sky in the end. Thus I can conclude that reporting DOES ACTUALLY WORK! It just seems to be a painfully slow process for an autoer to get his/her just desserts served up iceberg cold by Jagex. Just as an addendum, I did actually manage to get a player mod involved ONE TIME for the mass of auto cutters I found at the Willows in Draynor Village on night... and they zipped off priority reports to Jagex on the spot (a great big tip-o-the cap goes out to Mr. Sns for actually giving a flying rip enough to transfer worlds to do something... all the other player mods could care less... and all you guys SUCK! THANKS FOR NOTHING!!!). On that one occassion, all the autoers got zinged in 24-48 hours max. Woo-hoo! Naturally, during the course of my "experiment" I reported all the autoers I could find and I found that I made a similar "sweep" every night in a familiar pattern looking for them. Things I noticed in regards to autoers: - most autoers are level 3 or 4 but sometimes are levels 5 or 6. There are exceptions though... one of the members I caught autoing in the Mining Guild was level 92 so keep your eyes open! - most autoers have garbage names like asdfgg or qwerasd or tadtadtad. - going one step further, it seems that some cheaters that use autoers are either really brazen or are totally stupid. How so? By using names like I Autoed1, I Autoed2, I Autoed3, etc (those were real autoers I reported by the way). Or they gang together names like Weng001, Weng002, Weng003 and so on all the way up to Weng400. As you might have guessed, they'll also use all those autoers all at the same time and often all on the same world too! Duh!! How could I NOT NOTICE that activity especially when the swarm of autoers is doing nothing but going back and forth between the East Varrock Bank and the ess mine on World 33??? Gee, maybe people have similar names? Well sure... sometimes. But not in the situation like I just described nor when any of them fail to ever answer any attempt at communication by me and they follow the typical actions of auto miners. Here's a great example: on Monday morning, March 20th (yesterday), I just sat back and counted all the autoers going by from Aubrey's Rune Shop.... out of approximately 60-70 people mining ess, I counted aproximately 50 autoers. Now THAT'S BAD!!!! How accurate was I? I would bet good money that I was accurate to +/- 3 or 4 players so in the worst case for me, that's still 46 to 47 autoers out of 63 to 68 players total on the average. - most autoers all look like the most basic character you make on Tutorial Island. It's a male with no hair and the basic Green colored pants & top. There are exceptions to this too though. - Most autoers have no weapons although some will wield either a pickaxe, a wood cutting axe or the lame Bronze sword. Again, there are exceptions... I spotted one posing as a wood cutting mage complete with a Staff of Water and an Anti-Dragon Shield. It was a level 10 character complete with the Blue wiz outfit & hat (yes, it really was an autoer!). - most autoer noobs wear no armor... although you occasionally spot one with a basic wooden shield and/or a helm on its head. - some of the programs running autoers have got to be the most basic, crappy programs available. They barely get the job done and a lot of the autoers will get nailed by random events or NPC's quite easily. They either get Soprano'd, teleported or just stand there like a moron because their tool is busted. - While the above is often true, it also seems that some of the programs are rather crafty! While they seem to follow basic repetitive patterns to the bank and back & forth to the ores and/or trees, they will often start and stop for legthy amounts of time (obviously, this is to avoid detection) and they can easily deal with random events including the Sandwich Lady and lost pickaxe heads/axe heads as well as NPC's in the local area! In fact, I'm convinced that as of earlier today, the only really effective random event is the newest one with the graveyard & Leo the lazy undertaker! What else can they do? The will log on & off at random times and they will even switch back and forth between worlds too! I know what you may be thinking here... no, those aren't really autoers... but I'll tell you that you're dead wrong. I've followed a bunch of them around from place to place and from world to world on numerous occasions as did some of my RS friends. All of us are convinced they were autoers just like we thought and the proof came when they got banned. - most autoers only have one developed discipline... be it mining, wood cutting or fishing. You'll see it when you search the hiscores by using their name. - some autoers will actually "talk"... but what they say is actually only pre-programmed stuff and they do it at random intervals or when you try to "trade" with them. While at first glance or by basic appearance thses "smart" autoers seem "normal" further investigation reveals that they aren't. After all, an autoer cannot carry on a normal conversation with you ESPECIALLY if you do it while private messaging them so that's a dead giveaway. - almost all autoers just have that autoer "method" about the way that they play... think of it as being their manerisms much like humans have. Follow some around for a while and you'll see what I mean! I call it the autoer "search mode"... they just look a little off kilter and kinda lost in the way that they move around. - some autoers are smart enough to totally avoid "attacking" NPC's like a golem, a wizard, a highwayman, etc. While they run far enough away to keep from being chased, they know exactly when it's safe to return and how to get back ASAP to the goods. - some are smart enough to retrieve tossed axe heads or even goto the bank to get new ones. Believe it or not, autoers can even be smart enough to go visit "Bob" in Lumby to get axes!!!! No way! OH YES WAY and I'm not the only player who has witnessed this phenomenon either! Naturally, as I alluded to above, there are exceptions to my observations so keep your eyes open... you never know what'll happen in RS with autoers and improved technology will only make it that much harder to keep cheaters out of online games in the future. Geez, Honda already has robots that can walk, jump, skip, climb and even jump rope so who knows how long it will be before some knucklehead teaches one to play games like RS and have semi-intelligent conversations with the other players while doing so! The bottom line for me is that either all players can "cheat" and it's an acceptable practice OR no players can cheat.... because the playing field must be level for all players no matter what! The funny thing to some people that I know on RS is that they've noticed I've become increasing aggressive against cheaters... one of my best online friends jokingly started calling me "Chuck" after Charles Bronson the late actor who starred in the Death Wish films as a vigilante... but to me it really isn't funny on the whole. While my hatred of autoers may be readily apparent... and while I appreciate the humor involved, I'm no match for the massive amount of autoers out there on each and every world so the more people that actively report, the better off we all are. It is in your best interest to report autoers... trust me. Well, to finsih up my novella on autoers, etc... I will share something that I've discovered that may make you all really happy. Do you want to know how to get pickaxe heads and axe heads that fly off the handles of autoers? You do? Great! Here's what you do... make sure that you have at least one log and a tinderbox with you and make sure the log is a type of which you can easily light on fire. I recommend having from 2-4. Now, as you cut logs or mine ores near an autoer, make sure that you stay in "run" mode. You pay super close attention to the screen and as soon as you see the head fly off the handle of an autoer, estimate where the head will land (the farther away from the autoer the better!) then INSTANTLY run to that spot and lay down a log and light it on fire! IF... and I mean IF you are quick enough getting to the exact spot where the heads lands and in lighting the fire, the autoer will not be able to get the head that it lost. How does that work? Well, from what I know, the autoer programs are based a lot on color recognition. So, after the autoer recognizes that a random event has occured and that the random event is the one where the head has flown off the handle, it will go into "search mode" to locate the head so it can go and get it. Yes, the smarter autoers will go retrieve the heads and put them back onto the handles then re-wield them! REALLY!! But... BUT... when you build a fire on the spot where the head is, the fire masks the head from the locator thus the autoer cannot "see" the head laying on the ground. All you have to do is wait about 20 seconds for the head to appear then you simply pick it up! Blammo... you might be scoring Rune heads! How well does this work? Here's an example: remember a few paragraphs above where I wrote that Mr. Sns came to visit me in Draynor Village one night to check out the pack of autoers there? Well, I showed him the 6 axe heads that I had collected in the previous one and a half to 2 hours of willow cutting! Unfortunately for me, none of those axe heads were Rune but in that same week, I had scored over a dozen Rune heads by hanging out cutting Yews with the auto cutters in Rimmington. Now that rocks!! So... what happens to an autoer after it cannot find the head? Well, some of them wander around aimlessly for a bit trying to locate the head. It's kind of like watching a chicken after you chop it's head off.... it's slightly amusing. Some of them will then realize that the head is gone thus goto the bank to get another one and go back to cutting. Other autoers are too stupid to do anything like secure another axe so they just go back to the nearest tree and try to cut it with the handle which obviously doesn't work. Others just stand there until they get logged out for inactivity or they just stand there all confused. If they're in the right spot, an NPC will lay into them which is even more amusing since they'll run away and return repeatedly trying to cut more logs without success. Sometimes they get zapped by the froggie princess, the Sandwich Lady (AKA: The Sandwich Noob) or another random event of that nature. Sometimes they can handle it, other times the cannot so they get teleported, turned into a frog or whatever. When they die... guess what happens? Bad news, they almost always return... all the way from Lumbridge. What does that tell you about autoers? It tells me that they don't give up so never should you give up in your attempts to eradicate this scourge of Runescape! Peace and good vibes to all my fellow RS players... and as was quoted, you really would be amazed at what an autoer is capable of!!