Lore

Re: I Don't Care. First, it's important to clarify between the two types of bots: There are players who run a macro to train a skill for them, and there are accounts that are run in bulk purely to farm gold for rwt. The former is merely unfair, and an insult to the rest of the players. The latter has an impact on the economy, and visibly hurts the game. The programs that run these just keep getting better. There comes a point where it's just not possible to distinguish a human player from a computer controlled one based solely on the input to the game. Random events can be done by a computer, and bots can even hold basic conversations. Not even that, but the people who run them nowadays are smart. Have a look at any website which sells the programs, there's a whole list of things to do to avoid detection such as logging out regularly, not running it overnight, never associating your IP address with accounts that have been caught botting, not linking from certain sites and forums to runescape.com (referrer url), etc. You don't have to be a genius to cover your tracks, you just have to apply a little common sense. It's become obvious that Jagex doesn't have a whiz-bang new system to identify bots, and even if they were working on one I highly doubt they could build one that worked effectively. There's an adage that you can't enforce technical solutions to social problems. To stop gold farming, Jagex has to make it economically unfeasible for the people doing it by either cutting their profit (by selling gold themselves at a similar price), or raising their expenses (by effectively banning the accounts collecting gold). As far as people who run macros on their account, we already have random events (which aren't working), and we already have mods (who can't do much) who can be seen through all the chat filters. The difference on an agility course, for example, between a bot running and a player who's watching a movie is fairly negligble. The only difference is that the player still has the capacity to respond to events, such as a JMod turning up. I think the solution to solving the bot problem lies with customer service. It takes a good amount of time to train a new account to the point where it can be used to gold farm (ie. 60 wc), and only macro can be run per computer. This leaves a window where the botting account can be identified and banned before it can generate a return. I know Jagex has, or could easily have, access to the kind of information you would need to identify possible botters - you'd look for exp gained over a period of time, exp gained in just one skill, the total ingame time of multiple accounts rotating on a single ip address, etc. All it would take is a team of a few people (staff) with privileges to suspend/ban accounts, who would investigate flagged accounts by actually interacting with them ingame. We've all noticed bots, the difference is that we can't force interaction to check - it could just be a silent player. You're looking at a cost of wages for possibly 2-3 more staff, for which you could remove botting almost entirely. If 90% of accounts were caught before they started generating a serious return, it becomes uneconomical for an organisation to create the accounts they need to farm gold from the game. It also helps that botters are generally cowards. They bot because the risk is low enough that they can convince themselves they'll get away with it. If you put the chance of getting caught right up, suddenly it becomes pretty hard to justify losing your whole account for a few levels.

Waheera, your comment about the direction of the times bugs me. Maybe assuming you have the right to pass judgement on a group of volunteers makes you feel powerful. Or maybe you truly care about the direction of the times. Either way, understand that it's insulting to hear that the products of our time and creativity are crap. Understand also, that as volunteers, the editorial team generally has no formal skills. I read alot. I don't study english, I couldn't define a preposition, and most days I'd probably mix up similies and metaphors. I edit by reading through, usually only once, and changing things to how I think it should read. Sometimes at 4am on Monday morning. Now you managed to pick up a couple of (what seem to me) trivial errors I missed. I'm sure they didn't actually destroy the reading experience as much as that last post implies. If they did, well.. you should probably get that OCD looked at. You seem like an intelligent guy. I'd be happy to hear what mistakes I missed in the second article. Try and remember for the future that it's not hard to let us know about them without insulting the Times crew.

I just did 90-99 thieving in one straight session, no sleep. So for now, I consider myself somewhat of an authority on pickpocketing. Thieving xp increases from about 190k/h to about 225k/h MAX, pickpocketing thugs from 90-99. I don't have exact figures below that, but I' think about 175k at 80. If you fail to knock him out, don't try to pickpocket him again. There's a small delay before combat starts when you're not stunned and can try to knock him out again. Repeat until he's on the floor. Done perfectly, you should never fail a pickpocket. Pickpockets stun you instantly. Pyramid Plunder maxes at about 230k exp/h. It requires about a fifth of the concentration however. It's faster and easier than blackjacking after 91. Looking directly north, one of the bandit houses begins to look like a hamburger box. Blackjacking after 91 is mostly for those that hate PP.

It has been fun. From Magic to Agility, I tried to be there . :^_^: For people who play as much as you and I, life without RS is so much more involved. So go have a ball at college, i'll see you round mate. So here's to us, one more toast, and then we'll pay the bill.

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." -Theodore Roosevelt Or in my own words, If you're not going to do a better job, use your words to say something constructive. OT- In regards to Master_Smither's article It constantly amazes me that people fall for such ridiculously stupid lures. Are these players predominantly younger kids, or is there at least some common factor at work here?

I'm on IRC whenever I'm on Rs. Our clan communicates primarily in #Tal_Shiar on netgamers, and i try to join tipit whenever I remember. It's usually completely dead though, which is a little sad. With the exception of screenshots, Runescript kinda has an "Anything you can do, I can do better" thing going on with swiftkit, or at least I see it that way. Rs client, mirc, itunes, and a web browser all fit nicely onto a single screen - and you can use resizeable windows.

Has it really been that long.. :-(

These are really good, keep it up =D> Is that the monocle from the new quest though?

That reminds me, why do we assume the MULTI SITE steel war has to be on one server?

Lol, so did I. My first pet was a black sheep called.. Blacky. <3: This racism stuff is getting as bad as religion topics. Shear a black sheep and the skin is the same colour as a white sheep's.

(I probably shouldn't double post, but it's a different topic and avoids a wall of text) MSSW has gotten too big for Runescape. The first and second wars were great fun, the third got competitive, and the fourth really wasn't that great. In all honestly, this could be blamed on NS. It was primarily his efforts which led Tipit to respond so forcefully. The stakes were raised, and no-one responded. Now they're so high it just wouldn't work anymore. The only single fansite who would challenge the turnout we had last year is RSC, and they've gone and gotten their panties in a knot. MSSW became about the honour of a fansite, it's now an all or nothing concept. I've seen a Tipit vs. Other fansites suggestion, and I've also seen a Tipit vs. Rsof sugestion. Should we ever get the chance, I'd like to see Fansites vs. RSOF, advertised to the point of an announcement runescape.com - let's do things properly peeps. I won't say any more about the social circumstances, we all know what's going on. The issue here is technical. Tipit pulled over a thousand people to MSSW4. RSC could probably do the same thing, as well as various combinations of the remaining fansites. An advertised event on RSOF would easily pull 1-2 thousand. The player limit on a server is 2000. This is designed to be spread out over the whole world of runescape. Take world 1 GE for example. Jagex has already stated that this absolutely hammers even their high end servers. To facilitate a new MSSW of the proportions people are talking about, you'd need the capacity to have 6000+ people in the same place. That's 6000 clients all needing information on the closest few hundred others. Not only would the server give out, but that creates some rather large bandwidth problems at the server end. Working within the 2000 player limit, I don't see how you can have a participating player base fairly distributed amongst fansites.

Firstly I just want to say I have a large amount of respect for you Das. I don't think I've ever talked to you, but you write well and you're not a cabbage, which is good enough for me. While most of what you just wrote is technically correct, I think you're missing a few of the factors here. This isn't all just about MSSW, it's largely because PKM and TSA have a history (at one point a large portion of their members came over to TSA). This isn't the only argument with PKM that has resulted in a stupid amount of angry text. Things also tend to get out of hand because NS (Nightshade/Ts Stormrage) has a tendency to write without modesty. While it doesn't come over as being very diplomatic, I've known the guy for over three years now, and he doesn't do it because he's up himself, he's just proud of his achievements. tl;dr - The argument tends to inflame because the subtext is personal. NS has been accused alot of promoting Tal Shiar, and he tends to respond to this with something along the lines of "I'm proud of my clan". From Tipit's perspective, these accusations are completely fair, but from where I sit I think Tipit has a slightly clouded view. Ts_Stormrage is synonymous with TSA. Virtually the entire signature is Tal Shiar oriented, as well as the avatar being the distinctive Tal Shiar logo. On top of this, the account is highly visible as the author of many Times articles, thought out forum posts, and regular-ish DYK's (I'd venture thousands of people are familiar with "brought to you by the Tal Shiar Alliance"). The distinctive logo is also seen around tipit in the signatures of many of our clan members signatures. Take the MSSW4 guide for example. When they open a topic, the reader sees the author name Ts Stormrage, avatar, and signature, and naturally associates all the following text with TSA. The actual content doesn't continually reference tsa, it's just that the context creates an association. I believe if the same guide was posted under a generic account name ('mssw_management' or something) that all of the fuss over that particular issue would have been avoided. Not to say that we don't advertise at all, but I'd ask that you make a distinction between advertising and seeing the name/logo. It's probably semantics, but to me they're not the same thing. tl;dr - The promoing isn't all NS, TSA just has good branding. *I've tried to be as objective as I can as a clan member. Everything written here is my opinion as a tif member. I'm not defending NS blindly because I'm a TSA member, and I haven't spoken to him between discovering the thread and posting this. * Sorry this isn't very well written, I rewrote it after killing the window. I write better as I think, not from memory.

9/10 Still second on the ml ;) ( <3: )