Tip.It Times - 6th March 2011

[Mrhouse]

To house: Why would you need a Jmod at every spot on all worlds at all times? One guy could hit several different worlds in an hour. Work him 8 hours a day for a week and he'll have hit multiple training spots on every world. The mere threat of your training spot being the one hit while you leave your bot on overnight would be an enormous tool of dissuasion. Perm ban AND you can't make a new members account without getting a new credit card? That's not something too many people would be willing to risk. It may not completely eliminate botting, but it would sure take a huge chunk out.

 

The problem with random events is that they are not nearly random enough. While they're called "random," they all have predictable patterns. They are essentially bots trying to trick bots, which will not and can never work. You can teach a bot a random because it's always the same puzzle. It's not "holy crap the traps in my inventory were moved around and given a different name and graphic," it's not "whoa where did that door go," it's "oh, the sandwich lady again. Time to check which thing she's asking for and identify the correct graphic." The human aspect is important because you can't teach a bot to learn an infinite number of potential changes, but a human is capable of inventing endless ways to break bots.

 

To your last point: ah, you're a bot sympathizer. That kind of explains a lot.

 

First paragraph: 8 hours a day is only a third of the day. His timing would also be predictable and people would learn not to bot around those times. It would do nothing.

 

Second Para: I think Captcha's prove otherwise. They don't work and they could say anything - given enough time (and bot makers have plenty of that) it can be overcome. (Again 'bots are always one step ahead' wouldn't be said if it wasn't true).

 

And to your last point: I've put in more time killing and breaking bots that you have, I promise you that. I have at least 3 other friends who have put in more time than me. Bot sympathizer is a stupid term. Is that your attempt at dismissing me? I don't outright form picket lines and don't e-rage every time I see someone bot therefore i'm a bot lover? Shame on you. I'm merely trying to show that the problem is not as easy and simple as you think, and any teenager with an internet connection doesn't have the experience or credibility to say Jagex isn't trying.

[green9090]

So don't do it at the same time every day. Wow, that was hard!

 

Wait, Captchas are controlled by humans?

 

If "And then we could go into all the positive effects of bots..." isn't bot sympathy, I'm not sure what is.

 

You've stopped making arguments, so this is more tedious than fun. Feel free to make a real point, but until then I won't be replying.

[Bini]

"The bots will always be one step ahead". I guess it is true after I've read those two articles. Looks like they are becoming like Activision and Call Of Duty. Trying to maximise their profits with every game they make no matter how "flashy" and completely [cabbage] story and glitched multiplayer it has, if the money rolls in they will make the same [cabbage] next year. Jagex is doing kind of the same, in my opinion. With updates such as DXPW and Wildy & Free Trade. I feel that the reason for not letting us vote 'No' in the referendum was that it was already decided that they would re-introduce Wildy and Free Trade, just wanted to build a hype around it with the referendum.

 

Yes, I am a sucker. I have played COD since the first one and RS since 02-03. I fell for Activision's jokes and Jagex's. I bought the two latest COD games and I did vote 'Yes' in the "referendum". I do not regret voting voting 'Yes'. I did want Wildy & Free Trade back what I fell for was the fact joke that Jagex had listened to us and really cared.... Nice prank, Jagex!

 

 

To house: Why would you need a Jmod at every spot on all worlds at all times? One guy could hit several different worlds in an hour. Work him 8 hours a day for a week and he'll have hit multiple training spots on every world. The mere threat of your training spot being the one hit while you leave your bot on overnight would be an enormous tool of dissuasion. Perm ban AND you can't make a new members account without getting a new credit card? That's not something too many people would be willing to risk. It may not completely eliminate botting, but it would sure take a huge chunk out.

 

The problem with random events is that they are not nearly random enough. While they're called "random," they all have predictable patterns. They are essentially bots trying to trick bots, which will not and can never work. You can teach a bot a random because it's always the same puzzle. It's not "holy crap the traps in my inventory were moved around and given a different name and graphic," it's not "whoa where did that door go," it's "oh, the sandwich lady again. Time to check which thing she's asking for and identify the correct graphic." The human aspect is important because you can't teach a bot to learn an infinite number of potential changes, but a human is capable of inventing endless ways to break bots.

 

To your last point: ah, you're a bot sympathizer. That kind of explains a lot.

 

A Jmod could do that and they used to do it but in less extent then what you are suggesting. Banning the botters accounts won't really help, some will just create new accounts. Blocking their credit cards wouldn't be such a good idea either as some botters will resort to credit card fraud which will get Jagex in trouble.

[Mrhouse]

So don't do it at the same time every day. Wow, that was hard!

 

Wait, Captchas are controlled by humans?

 

If "And then we could go into all the positive effects of bots..." isn't bot sympathy, I'm not sure what is.

 

You've stopped making arguments, so this is more tedious than fun. Feel free to make a real point, but until then I won't be replying.

 

What a great job that man would have! One day your up at 7 am fighting bots till 3pm and the next day its 11pm to 7am! Hope he doesn't ever get tired and is the most flexible person on earth, otherwise he might mistake lots of legit players for bots!

 

????

 

Again bot sympathy is a stupid term to use. I recognize they are and always be a part of this game. I don't like it - but nothing can be done. I can also put the good with the bad. Some of their effects ARE positive to the game, You know it too. I like your prayer level, how much did it cost yah? 2-3 hundred million? How much do you think it would have cost you without bots farming those bones? I'm sure if presented with the two options you'd take the 200m~ price.

 

"I'm merely trying to show that the problem is not as easy and simple as you think, and any teenager with an internet connection doesn't have the experience or credibility to say Jagex isn't trying."

 

Remember me saying that? That's what I'm doing. Not making harebrained theory's into how I alone can stop the bot problem when every MMORPG company in existence has failed.

[Daavorian]

MrHouse, you're being somewhat condescending and have clearly lost the actual point of his proposal in your inexplicable fury. Your grudge with him seems to stem from some deep dissatisfaction with something. If you weren't determined to be incredibly snarky and try and shut him down, maybe you'd think for one minute and answer your own questions. You mentioned him being flexible? Well how about you randomly put members of community management, or anyone who wants to, to do this for an hour or two? Maybe have longer shifts, maybe don't have them sometimes. As long as they're unpredictable they work. And Jagex seems to have a constant enough staff presence to be able strike on random days for a few hours at random times.

 

Hell, as long as they slowly released a toolkit to the Mods that was constantly undergoing development (maybe a tool a week or something after the initial release) they could wreak pretty serious havoc in some of the more crowded worlds. And you wouldn't even have to ban, you might well just be able to kill some of the bots in carefully advertised strikes (imagine the bandits suddenly start advertising they will be using magic).

 

The only way that I can honestly excuse your downright close-mindedness, is if you actually know enough about Java to convincingly state that it is not sufficiently dynamic to allow for such strikes.

[michel555555]

first article- Cheating servers would never work. If jagex sells gold themselves then rwt sites will just lower their own prices. When jagex lowers the price to much then no one would buy gold from jagex because the rwt servers would be full. All the high level content that people bought would be full and there would be no point to doing them. Those accounts would then go back to rwt sites to get gold for normal servers where there is less competition. and everything goes back to normal.

 

second article- The cash could be being diverted to refilling their reserve money that was lost from mechscape. Jagex could not be lieing that it won't have an effect on rs but they just want to replensh their cash reserves incase of another emergancy. Another thing was left out was that jagex was also recently sued and they had to divert cash for that.

[Mrhouse]

MrHouse, you're being somewhat condescending and have clearly lost the actual point of his proposal in your inexplicable fury. Your grudge with him seems to stem from some deep dissatisfaction with something. If you weren't determined to be incredibly snarky and try and shut him down, maybe you'd think for one minute and answer your own questions. You mentioned him being flexible? Well how about you randomly put members of community management, or anyone who wants to, to do this for an hour or two? Maybe have longer shifts, maybe don't have them sometimes. As long as they're unpredictable they work. And Jagex seems to have a constant enough staff presence to be able strike on random days for a few hours at random times.

 

Hell, as long as they slowly released a toolkit to the Mods that was constantly undergoing development (maybe a tool a week or something after the initial release) they could wreak pretty serious havoc in some of the more crowded worlds. And you wouldn't even have to ban, you might well just be able to kill some of the bots in carefully advertised strikes (imagine the bandits suddenly start advertising they will be using magic).

 

The only way that I can honestly excuse your downright close-mindedness, is if you actually know enough about Java to convincingly state that it is not sufficiently dynamic to allow for such strikes.

 

My 'inexplicable fury'? Amimad? Cause I didn't realize it. Yeah I am trying to shut him down - he SHOULD be shutdown.

 

"I'm merely trying to show that the problem is not as easy and simple as you think, and any teenager with an internet connection doesn't have the experience or credibility to say Jagex isn't trying."

 

Should I make that my signature or something? Generating hate for Jagex because you think you have the solution is STUPID. It's seems almost everybody has their own 5 minute Uber-solution that jagex with its 400 something employee's never thought of.

 

Here is the simple version: You are unable to fix the botting problem. Your ideas are worthless and unable to do anything other than get laughed at by the botting community. Don't call Jagex lazy because you *think* you found the answer while sitting on the john.

[green9090]

Last I checked, changing a rope to a portal short-circuited thousands of bots. If you're going to claim my solution is unworkable, you're going to have to explain why all of those bots coincidentally stopped working at the same time as something in the game changed randomly if the two events had nothing to do with each other.

[Mrhouse]

Last I checked, changing a rope to a portal short-circuited thousands of bots. If you're going to claim my solution is unworkable, you're going to have to explain why all of those bots coincidentally stopped working at the same time as something in the game changed randomly if the two events had nothing to do with each other.

 

I already went over that...Thanks for reading my posts...

[green9090]

All I can find is you idiotically asserting that bot-makers will just update their bots to be able to respond to any possible random change in the game, which is a level of AI that the government would be very interested in paying people for if it existed.

[Mrhouse]

All I can find is you idiotically asserting that bot-makers will just update their bots to be able to respond to any possible random change in the game, which is a level of AI that the government would be very interested in paying people for if it existed.

 

The guy who thinks IP bans are a successful form of punishment thinks my ideas are idiotic. :ohnoes:

 

In theory; possibly. In practice; unlikely.

 

And even if this is successful whats to stop gold farmers from taking their place? Moving things won't work on them

 

Inb4chinaoutlawedgoldfarming

 

 

My link

[iiLy]

All I can find is you idiotically asserting that bot-makers will just update their bots to be able to respond to any possible random change in the game, which is a level of AI that the government would be very interested in paying people for if it existed.

It takes a lot of time to change a script, especially in a bot that can solve randoms, have 3 random switches per day and you will see a difference in how many bots are online if there are any at all. And by the way the more likely reason that bots are not being shut down on RS is because a noticeable percentage of rs players are most likely bots and banning people that use bots would be very detrimental to the revenue rates of Jagex.

 

Bots are beatable, look at WoW, a much more popular game with more people on it that will pay money to get bots, why aren't there as many or more bots on that? It's simple, because the script is more complicated and not every 16 year old amateur backyard programmer can make a bot. If Jagex dropped the Java script and opted for a more complicated, non browser script then botting would be ended for the majority due to the fact that only some very capable amateur programmers can create bots for games with a more complex script (lets face it, how many legitimate college educated programmers make bots for a complex scripts for online video games)

 

The thing is that Jagex

 

1. Has been and most likely always will be a browser game

2. Jagex wants to make as much money as possible

 

In the end you have to square with the fact that Jagex will not get rid of bots, not because it cant but because it is bad for business, more complex scripts require more capable programmers, more staff and more updates (AKA more money spent to keep the game afloat). Additionally the loss of revenue from P2P Bots and banned users would drop the amount of money that Jagex makes every quarter.

[Sir_Squab]

Frankly, I gotta agree with the whole concept of "if lots of MMOs have trouble with bots, I don't think a random teenager on the internet knows how to fix it" pretty much sums up my views.

 

Problem is, the people who make bots adapt too. If you were a bot maker, would you give up if the landscape was always changing, or would you try to figure out some way to deal with it? You'd probably figure out some way to deal with it and, frankly, soon enough I'd expect the bot maker to succeed.

 

You can win the battle against bots with small lil victories like messing with terrain, but at the end of the days the botters will probably win.

 

All I can find is you idiotically asserting that bot-makers will just update their bots to be able to respond to any possible random change in the game, which is a level of AI that the government would be very interested in paying people for if it existed.

 

Thing is, they can only change the game so much before suddenly players get annoyed at it. And all the botters have to do is keep up with the J Mods anyways.

 

Again, I agree with his sentiment - what makes you think you know some magical solution that will stop bots that have eluded a crap ton of MMOs?

[green9090]

What's to stop real people taking the place of bots? Um... nothing, that's kind of the point. RWT is a separate issue from botting, you've gone entirely off point.

 

If an RWTer has to pay a room full of people what he used to be able to use a computer to do for him, that's a big step forward in making the game better. Your argument is, if it doesn't eliminate RWT, eliminating botting is pointless? Okay.

 

You keep coming back to this IP ban idea- I mentioned three kinds of bans. Account ban, credit card ban, and IP ban. Obviously IP ban is the least effective, but why the hell not? At best you nail some idiot who can't change his IP, at worst you do nothing. The big one is the credit card ban, because it's a pretty big annoyance having to get a brand new card every time you get caught for botting. You can't tell me you don't think that would be effective.

[langer]

oops double post.

[langer]

One of the most common argument of the bot sympathizers is to laugh at legitimate players whinning about degraded achievement. Putting botters in a separate server and banning them from the highscores would make the legitimate players happy and Jagex would keep their precious subscriptions.

[Mrhouse]

If an RWTer has to pay a room full of people what he used to be able to use a computer to do for him, that's a big step forward in making the game better. Your argument is, if it doesn't eliminate RWT, eliminating botting is pointless? Okay.

 

 

Bear with me here. I'm going somewhere with this.

 

Why do you want bots gone?

[green9090]

To the "but but other MMOs have bots too!" argument- I'm not aware of any major MMOs with Jagex's considerable budget who both a) take a firm stance against botting, and b) have nearly as bad a bot problem as RS. I'd love to hear a counter-example.

[green9090]

If an RWTer has to pay a room full of people what he used to be able to use a computer to do for him, that's a big step forward in making the game better. Your argument is, if it doesn't eliminate RWT, eliminating botting is pointless? Okay.

 

 

Bear with me here. I'm going somewhere with this.

 

Why do you want bots gone?

Off point. JAGEX wants bots gone, or so they say. My point is that they don't; not enough to put any effort into eliminating them. My point is that Jagex is saying whatever it takes to keep players happy while doing whatever they can to maximize profit in the short term.

 

Jagex doesn't want bots gone, and I'm presenting proof.

[langer]

@ Ring world, I understand the unlocking part... but tell me that someone getting 20M RC xp is doing that to unlock stuff?

[Zaaps1]

Weren't they developing a "cheat" server for RSC?

[Sylpheed]

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the wildy wall yet. One small change like that [bleep]ed up hundreds if not thousands of bots for at least a week after the change. If you ask me, terrain changes are one of the most effective things Jagex can do.

[langer]

Nope I understand there are lazy players who wish to show off their large e-peen without wanting to do the work to earn it, I chose to ignore those players because they will exist in every game as well - even casual games like Angry birds on Iphones have people that mod their games to get ridiculous high scores because they want to show off.

 

That's mainly why I promote separate servers for players caught cheating and a ban from the highscores. That way you get legit players showing off their legit achivement and cheaters having access to all the game except legit servers and highscores. This will also be a deterrent to any players that thinks about going over to the dark side.

[Mrhouse]

If an RWTer has to pay a room full of people what he used to be able to use a computer to do for him, that's a big step forward in making the game better. Your argument is, if it doesn't eliminate RWT, eliminating botting is pointless? Okay.

 

 

Bear with me here. I'm going somewhere with this.

 

Why do you want bots gone?

Off point. JAGEX wants bots gone, or so they say. My point is that they don't; not enough to put any effort into eliminating them. My point is that Jagex is saying whatever it takes to keep players happy while doing whatever they can to maximize profit in the short term.

 

Jagex doesn't want bots gone, and I'm presenting proof.

 

Guess you missed the part where i said 'i'm going somewhere with this.'. No matter I don't think i really believed you would do anything other than skim and deflect.

 

And isn't that they way company's work? Keep customers happy and make money? Why should Jagex be held to a standard greater than any others.

 

They have tried to remove bots, they have wasted a ton of money and time trying. They gave up and settled. They SHOULD have given up. They can't win and no matter how much you may think differently its true. Bot makers enjoy what they do and they WANT jagex to fight them. Your 'moving things around' idea will only motivate them and make them try even harder to beat it (Which they will). Then not only does Jagex still have a bot problem, they have to escalate it and do something even more drastic.

 

Why the [bleep] am I explaining this? IT HAPPENED ~3 YEARS AGO.

[uath13]

Getting rid of bots would be easy if Jagex would shell out the staff for it. Jmod goes ingame, changes something small (moving a ladder, removing the ability to click on a resource, etc) at a common botting spot to make bots malfunction, and bans them all. Anyone banned in this way would be permanently gone from the game with no chance of coming back, IP banned, and credit card banned. Do that a couple times a day on a random server at a random spot, and botting will decline heavily as players realize that, oh hey, I'm not willing to risk never being able to play again to raise my stats a little.

 

But that would require Jagex ACTUALLY caring about botting rather than pretending to because it's what the players want to hear. They haven't gone even the slightest step toward what they could do to combat botting, so don't believe their lipservice.

 

None of the above would change anything. And any credibility you had on the subject disappeared as soon as you suggested IP bans. Anyone with any knowledge on the subject knows that don't work.

 

Did you actually put any thought in that plan? I'm betting you didn't.

 

Heres what happens:

 

Jagex hires a buttload of new staffers which cost money. So Jagex either takes money from development of the game or increases subscription costs. Both negatively impacr the players and a game as a whole. Botters and rwter's dont hurt me or most players but these changes certainly would.

 

People still bot; they bot on weekends or at night and don't get caught. And moving things are only effective now because they happen so rarely. Did you miss the thousand times Jagex has said bots stay one step ahead? Same situation. Mods move objects around - bot makers get more active in updating their scripts or make multiple scripts/options to solve the issue.

 

And then you realize moving things around wouldn't work for most bots anyways. Fighters/hunters/fishers/alchers and anything like them would be totally unaffected.

 

It's easy to say Jagex doesn't care until you realize just how much time/effort goes into fighting them that turns out to be futile anyways.

Wait, a buttload of staff? Because my plan involves one guy at a time. One extra staff in charge of actively identifying and punishing bots, instead of programmers fighting the futile programming war of making bots to catch bots.

 

I also think you've misunderstood my idea somewhat. The game changes wouldn't be predictable. It would be a case of something in the game suddenly, temporarily, and randomly changing and requiring different input to do the desired action. Bots are TERRIBLE at adaptability, and humans are great about it. Put a door in front of a human that wasn't there before, and they open it. Do the same to a bot and it flips out. You cannot program a bot to be able to identify and adapt to obstacles the same way a human can, you can only prepare it for situations that already exist. Once a bot is broken, its cover is blown, and it's pretty clear that it is in fact a bot to any humans watching.

 

Fighters/fishers/hunters are absolutely susceptible to this. Alchers, sure, maybe not because they could be hiding anywhere, but alchers are one of the less invasive types of bots. The big problem with botting is resource hogging, and resource hogging means there's a specific place one can look to find the bots. If you can see the bots and can change the game around them, you CAN break them.

 

Heck, I'll take the job for a modest salary. Pay me enough to make up for leaving my main job & I'll play & bot bust 16 hrs a day.