strilmus

I think in most games like this the account is technically the property of the game company. This is just another consequence of the whole "internet isn't regulated by anybody" deal.

Oh, hey, I wrote a throwaway article just like the second one, but I deleted it after I submitted it because we're not allowed to advocate botting out of sarcastic frustration. Good thing you wrote about it too, saves me the time of rewriting it. A few notes: Jagex doesn't really read their bot report logs if they don't actually notice them when they're first sent in. People DID care about opposing them, but Jagex hasn't held their end of the bargain up. There's no trust left. Yeah, that'd be new. They've never done anything like that before, and if they did, nobody actually noticed, or quit en masse, or rioted for a week. EDIT: See, even that guy up there thinks it's a "generic article" about bots. At this point people can't tell the difference anymore. There's nothing to care about now.

If the bot busting teams are supposed to be noticeable, wouldn't that make it really easy for botters to just change worlds?

I thought forcing the right click was a measure implemented to prevent lower leveled players from rushing into a fight with a monster they couldn't handle, which was then kind of useless after a while since gear meant more than level at a certain point and became an overall inconvenience since most of the time if you're close enough to something you shouldn't be fighting to select it, you would be within aggro range anyway and it wouldn't stop you from getting slammed. Claiming it's now a "right" for high level characters to not put up with a flawed system makes as much sense as saying that it takes skill to rapid fire bolt crafting. and people complain when I make stuff up Overall I think it's dumb that the first thing needs to stay around JUST BECAUSE it was a holdover from before we had many factors determining our survivability, and the second because we have to clutch to bolt crafting instead of say, some kind of other fletching activity we could do that isn't also linked to inconvenience. although I will complain if broad bolt prices shift downward right after I bought the ability to make them, lol

That being said, a large part of botting implies that a bot would be better suited for the task than a human....if they made it so a human's abilities were played up and it weren't so reliant on the "grind", it wouldn't be as useful to bot.

As much as I understand that there are groups with separate goals in mind, it can't possibly be that hard to throw a post up on the RSOF that you're going to designate an unofficial "loafing" world for this kind of thing (hell, there might be one right now), go there, and not bother anybody at all. I mean, because it's not even like the GOP or SC groups, nobody can storm in and try to troll your activity because none of it actually matters either way. You wouldn't have to set up a clan chat or do any of those organizational types of things at all if you're planning to do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING anyway. No meticulous planning ever went into slacking off. Hell, if anything, since you guys aren't even actually trying to play, a second group could just come in and farm tickets off of your unmoving butts. Overall it would be pretty easy to find people willing to not do anything, and people willing to farm tickets from people who don't do anything. I'm just surprised that in all the time you spent doing nothing, you never thought about any kind of alternate solution that wouldn't annoy the hell out of your teammates, regardless of any kind of actual or imagined damage being done or how much you just didn't care about it, while being convenient for everybody. Oh, and I think the numerous amounts of reports occurring from these incidents are probably annoying the hell out of the people who have to sort through them, so, hey, maybe there is something wrong happening here.

At the very least it's lazier than dropping all those granite bricks.

Let's try to steer away from spamville, kthxbai. I'm sticking by my belief that bots are symptomatic of a system which has neglected to make content that is both fun AND rewarding and/or refuses to change their system beyond a few cosmetic tweaks to EXISTING infrastructure in fear that they would appear to be inconsistent when all they are showing us is that they can't make a difference when they need to. The way they handle things, after releasing any kind of content, they always leave it alone afterwards, except for the occasional single set of tweaks (which usually makes things slightly worse), and then forge ahead without any kind of further quality control post release. Jagex is always working off of some kind of patchwork knowledge of what actually goes on in their game because of it and nobody learns a thing worth a damn. A year or so later, they admit that they need to change it, but by then, NOBODY CARES and everybody complains that they spend too much time on these fixes that seem unnecessary at that point since everybody else assumed they were supposed to move on and never took another glance at it again. Meanwhile, we hear complaints of people being constantly bored, yet there's so many years' worth of content that goes wasted because nobody wants to use it! I still don't understand why it would be so bad if our fun content was more rewarding than our stupid mindnumbing content which nobody actually ENJOYS doing, because there was only a few days worth of effort spent into making it so that you can stand at an ugly tree that looks like the fifty trees next to it and bang your head against it for hours, yet we have all these other areas with so much programming going into them that they thought would be convenient for the people playing there, and all this fancy graphical retooling that makes it a unique place to visit, and nobody's there because YOU WON'T GET ANYTHING OF WORTH FROM SPENDING ANY TIME THERE. WHAT WAS WRONG WITH BEING A PEST CONTROL PRODUCT? At least there were actual goals, strategy, teamwork, and fighting monsters that were endangering lives, and always being on the edge of danger and so on, even if there wasn't a risk of actually dying (let's face it that's not really a risk anymore). If anything, their experiences were probably more meaningful than those of a "slayer" that uses his immense knowledge of dangerous beasts to...do exactly the same thing as he was doing before, but with a piece of "special equipment" he happens to be carrying at the time. And then he clicks on the monster and beats it to death without any superficially imposed penalties. Scintillating. Do you know why people make fun of this game despite the fact that there are so many things in it that we can study and appreciate? Why most people are ashamed to even discuss it in chat or admit that they play it? It's because they don't actually see that stuff! All they see is a bunch of morons stuck in the stone age doing incredibly boring things so that they can make more money. All of the fancy content, with the interesting things, hardly anybody touches that stuff. Let's all go run back and forth between a bank and the feeding pen like zoo animals. wait, this isn't the rants board, my bad Anyway, my point is that people consider that to be the work of a bot rather than anything capable of independent thought

If this were metagame discussion, I could call you on that claim and ask you to itemize every activity in hours. However, we'll have to settle for not believing you. Anyway, like the champions challenge that it requires for completion, you really don't get anything more out of finishing the requirements, so it's not as if you HAVE to do it. I mean, with or without that reward, you still probably wouldn't have done a bunch of those activities anyway. Overall it's like a true veteran's cape that you have to earn, in which you shouldn't rush the goals, but just let them come to you over the course of play.

In the back of my head a couple days ago, I was like, "I hope they prevent the use of the emote for a one minute span between each go, since the emote's gonna be really big and annoying" probably should have mentioned that earlier

Hopefully doing all that other stuff for the completionist cape will be beyond the grasp of somebody that didn't actually do anything to get to 99. actually holding on to the completionist cape looks like it would be annoying, though I mean, imagine if you had a new quest come out with an associated task that took a long while to complete. How will they handle that kind of thing?

You need it for the trimmed version. QFC: 17-18-582-62744520 good thing I got that conquest rank back when it was easier have fun cannoning all those black knights in the dungeon (oh, and that poh statue, but that's just a small detail amirite)

If you're going to base the enjoyment of your own experiences on how much other people don't care about them, you're not going to last very long on this planet. I'm still confused as to why they needed to make both that cape and a veteran cape

Pff, if you've already got all that, chimp ices should be a drop in the bucket at that point

I also liked that the game just dumped you out of a random closet of a house on an island, with no apparent explanation of how you got there, or memories of your life up to that point, as if you were torn fully grown from another world to serve a vague purpose. That is a story that has gone unexplored although there are bits and pieces that only bring even more questions.

On a similar note, remember when we weren't all reminiscing about the "good ol days" and just played the game and had fun doing stupid stuff and enjoyed it I don't think Jagex ever left those days and still operate under the impression that they are in the same years before the rwt crisis

I guess what I'm trying to say is that we can't stop people from saying dumb things if they're not explicitly trolling in the first place, and that even if it happens often, it isn't something that you react to by tearing down a large chunk of the forums in a hellstorm of fury. That goes for all sides of the matter. The stereotypical childish pker was just an example of high levels not being directly correlated to being able to behave in public but not representative of the entire high level community, so I was dismissing the separation of the group from the whole as a viable answer to resolving the issue if those users were still present. If you wanted to stop them from entering the discussion, once again the whole vetting thing comes up and it's kind of impractical anyway unless your goal was just to have a small group of people tossing the same ideas around at each other with a high point of entry blocking everybody else. As for the guides I wasn't even talking about that, but even if the site does own the guides on a technicality, I do not feel that the site has the moral right to hold onto them against the creator's will unless they were specifically submitted to tip.it as official guides, rather than this informal setting where they are just being displayed for mutual benefit In any case I would appreciate it if you could take my statements with a large grain of salt if I have to keep talking about the matter on the grounds of not understanding anything ever. As much as it sounds even dumber to try, it feels like some of the more common problems arise when we regard other people as being beyond conversation with each other.

If you like, we could have all submitting users write up a properly written article with cited sources which would be then reviewed by a group of highly qualified players before the post is allowed to be displayed. Or we can just continue to converse the way we could be with some level of civility accompanied by pieces of actual evidence that can be understood by most of the community. On some level, common experience makes conversation easier, but on the other end, if you just wanted to have a consortium of high level players, we could just make a subforum which only allows registered high level users to post, but geez, how would we even regulate that kind of thing without getting too complicated again What even qualifies a user as high leveled? You'll get at least ten different opinions. How do we know that these players will handle themselves maturely? There are a lot of high level players who haven't learned a thing about communicating with other people besides hitting them in the face with a dragon claw while spraying a stream of gibberish at them. So...what's your take? EDIT: Unrelated note, but if you really expect stuff like the Times to be relevant to your interests, maybe....just maybe, you might consider starting to write for them, to let other people know that they can take that kind of initiative since they're part of the community too. If you hate the articles that much, do something about it.

Well, unlike Runescape, it's a lot easier to patch a bot on the fly.

Because its better then getting banned on a whim because say a mod doesnt like you. This offers at least some protection You do know that mods themselves don't have the ability to ban....it's up to an administrator to review each case as it comes and deal with it themselves. Even before then, there is a large pile of regulatory work to sift through before it happens, and if any of you have felt that rushed decisions were made, we have failed yall in that regard. But understand that due process takes time, and since none of us are actually professionally paid to handle these things, many times collaboration on issues is tough because we're not on at the same time, and decisions are left to just a handful of people. Even then, it's pretty much impossible for even paid mods to solve every possible problem. In any case there were in fact mistakes made but I don't think it is fair to drag the entire mod team into this... All moderators on all message boards more or less have the same amount of power. It is the ability to to handle the responsibility of such that keeps things sane, rather than just merely limiting it. Mods are put through a bunch of training before they let them loose, so for the most part we have done what we can for them, and if they have performed to standard before this incident, then you could hardly expect us to be able to predict when such a huge blunder occurs. As of now, if you left that kind of responsibility to everybody, you'd be increasing the chances of it being misused, instead of what you think would be an ideal world. In addition to that, it seems like a lot of users prefer to post joke images instead of actually report posts... Also, the time it would take to resolve incidents would be extended, and it would require more regulation, and every time something goes wrong (perhaps something like this), it would be doubled minimum! I doubt Jagex would even bother with a site that disorganized and unpredictable (as much as that would be hypocritical, of course :wink: ). I imagine that many users must enjoy both complaining about how there isn't enough being done about trolls, yet at the same time when something like this happens it is simply too far. Lord knows I try to look into what I can, but every day it is always another borderline case and there's the decision to either remove them from sight and risk backlash from people who accuse of censorship, or to just let their posts linger in the public view and be told that it was a mistake to let other people see it. While we deal with this, the problem continues on display, and we have the option of either locking it for review, or pulling it away for review, or letting it fester like an open sore, and as you can see, none of those options did anything for the situation in hindsight. If you had issues with us BEFORE the incident, we always say "if you have any questions feel free to PM any of us" and I'm always pulling out the rulebook when I hand out warnings and such so that I have the grounds for it, but nobody ever actually tries talking to us or anything except to perhaps throw more insults. It sounds dumb and pony-ish but please share your feelings if you need to! EDIT: did somebody say discussing bans in public? I suppose we could have some sort of ban log for notable offenders but that's just me talking and I don't know if anybody actually wants that I think it would alienate some people and drive them to further raeg

Okay, I know I haven't read most of the thread and all the records and I have to go to class in a minute, but the last time I didn't look at the boards in a time span greater than 24 hours due to rl work, THE PREVIOUS EVENTS HAPPENED and had I been more vigilant I could have at least helped! So bear with me if I'm way off base with this. On the record here, I want to say that the mods/admins have been discussing this at length before the situation even occurred, so most of them aren't out of touch with what is happening. On the other hand, we tend to keep discussion like this private for the exact same reasons why everything got out of hand. It doesn't help to freak out and make rash decisions before fully evaluating the consequences... So let it be a lesson to everybody that if the discussion isn't going anywhere, just take a deep breath, and try to remember what the goal is here, and that we, at least in some small part, are trying to work together to make the best of this community.

There's a link for that info on the bottom of every issue. - send neato article - get response about it - wait an indeterminate amount of time - go "wha, when did I write that" when it actually gets published Yall should consider submitting if you want to prove that your biased argument could be explained better than hers.

Yeah, no way that wasn't gonna happen. I wonder if some of the larger clans' names got scooped by trolls....

Maybe we should have some sort of bot ban leaderboard.

All tacticians consider these kinds of things at least once, but I believe at least some people think, "Why the hell would I bother to cheat in rs anyway?" It is on the whole, somewhat shortsighted if you actually enjoy and play this game, rather than see it as a way to gain more money. That being said, if you don't enjoy playing rs, why are you playing rs?