Macros Uncovered!-The Article!

[Bladewing]

i thought this was tip.it, not misfortunes personal blog of whatever he wants to write but no one cares about

[CharlieBrown]

I leave this thread to you trollers and ranters who dont appreciate someones time. Just because you do not like the topic does not mean I dont? QQ more please!

 

I don't think YOU appreciate MY time.

WE sat through and read your, less than perfect (have to say that nice or i'm gonna be labeled as a big fat 12 year old monster hugging troll), article

So we gave you critiscim

You don't like said critiscim

It's now our fault because you worked so hard.

[BioIce]

So, Noble. You like reading things that reinforce your point of view on matters like botting, is that correct?

 

That's like enjoying a propaganda broadsheet. But to each their own, I suppose.

[IHasChicken]

I leave this thread to you trollers and ranters who dont appreciate someones time. Just because you do not like the topic does not mean I dont? QQ more please!

 

So everything in the world exists for your own self-serving purposes.

 

Cool.

[BioIce]

Let the boy retreat. His ego is bruised as it is. Mayhap he will take the time to properly write an article this time.

[PereGrin]

How long did it take you to "research" this? Took me about 20 mins of google and simple math to find all of it. Maybe you would get a better reception if you didn't write about something the Times has covered so repeatedly for the last year.

[RU_Insane]

What an excellent article. You clearly deserve a medal for your groundbreaking conclusions. You clearly spent an ample amount of time researching the issue and totally reached an original and thought-provoking conclusion.

[No_M0re]

Where di my post go?? :unsure:

 

Jus cos i said its not laziness to bot. You make botters sound realy evil people, there just standard teens who like partsof runescape but ahte the grind.

 

Can't understand that??

[Lose No Hope]

I'm pretty sure it was the part where you said you would bot to get 99s, which is AGAINST tif and jagex rules...

[LitterBug]

Will you leave the damn guy alone?

 

He was just writing an article and it may not have been the greatest piece of literature out there, he did spend time on it.

Wtf, is this? Last time I checked - this was tip.it forums, not some science journal.

 

Who the hell cares if there are no citations, no meaningful/deep/philosophical theories to be proven here?

The guy tried to spend some time and write an article, and if it doesn't deserve to be in the tip.it times, then it won't be.

Not everybody is an amazing writer, and I highly doubt that anybody would put in hours upon hours of research, gather up all this data, interpret it and then write/revise/rewrite this article.

 

He's just trying some things down on paper and that's not such a horrible thing.

 

Also, stop this bandwagon - you all are posting the same sarcastic flame and it's only amusing to read the first time.

[No_M0re]

I'm pretty sure it was the part where you said you would bot to get 99s, which is AGAINST tif and jagex rules...

 

lame, i would tho. not gunna, im not gonna pay money irl to get a 99 in a game..

[Lose No Hope]

I'm pretty sure it was the part where you said you would bot to get 99s, which is AGAINST tif and jagex rules...

 

lame, i would tho. not gunna, im not gonna pay money irl to get a 99 in a game..

Well there goes membership

[No_M0re]

I'm pretty sure it was the part where you said you would bot to get 99s, which is AGAINST tif and jagex rules...

 

lame, i would tho. not gunna, im not gonna pay money irl to get a 99 in a game..

Well there goes membership

 

Okie thats fine, ima go back to forums were people arn't such [kitties] about botting and are actually allowed to talk about what they think :shades:

[Bladewing]

don't think anyone here will miss you

[CharlieBrown]

don't think anyone here will miss you

 

I agree with this enlightening poster.

[Ts_Stormrage]

People here are somehow equating this to the ACTUAL Tip.it Times, but that's wrong... I even thought Bladewing was smart enough to know this, but evidence proves otherwise...

 

So let me start by saying that this article would not have been published as such, nor would it have been published for a while even if it WAS better written/cited/formulated but only due to the topic being covered in length and depth recently...

 

Misfortune shouldn't have put his article here as well as submit it as a Times article... This is just a forum post, but it could have been an article that had been scrutinized by the volunteers at the Editorial Panel... A missed opportunity if you ask me...

 

That said, the reactions here (mostly people demanding the 3 minutes it took to read the article back) pretty much prove why there are rules specific for the Times' article discussion threads are in place... All this borderline (I'm not stating which side of it) flaming is what deters people from actually giving proper critical feedback. Moreover it also deters newer people to these boards such as Misfortune from ever put in the effort in another shot at this...

 

This is a sad day for these forums if you ask me...

[n64jive]

Does the tip.it times have a tabloids section? I believe this would belong in it. Biased media? I think so. Also quoting without sources? And you're year salary assumptions are poor.

 

My background on the matter. I started playing runescape back in 2002. I played without botting up until the point I quit playing the game in 2007 (college). I'm currently a senior working towards a Bachelors in Computer Engineering. After 3 and 1/2 years of college and after going through some tough times with some personal relationships, I decided to come back to the gain as a means of getting my mind off things. Things had changed quite a bit.

 

My main had been banned (I deserved it, I gave it to my cousin to use as I no longer cared, and he had informed me that it was hacked from him. I recovered the account and found it to be banned for macroing). I began playing on one of my old pures(hardly, I spent very little time on it), however I became interested in the new macroing technology. With 3 and 1/2 years of Computer related education under my belt, I decided to learn more about these bots and how they worked.

 

I found a botting community, that shall not be named due to tip.its rules, and at the time I joined the forums, they were going through a developer crisis. One of their best developers wasn't happy with how things were ran, and he decided to start a different community with some other members of the original community (this may get confusing without names, but bear with me). Fortunately for this developer, he had a strong following, and about half the community followed him to his new botting community. He developed a new API, although a lot of it was similar to the old API. I assume he did this to make porting the new scripts a much simpler task.

 

Many members of the old community became enraged by this, and the two communities went to "war". A ddos war. For weeks you couldn't access either commutes website, and this was all shortly after free trade had came out. There was also a mass account hacking around here somewhere, and both communities pointed the finger at the other.

 

At this point, I really quit following it all, and went on with the rest of my life, playing runescape occasionally (school still required quite a bit of my time). I had learned about some of the cash that these developers made, and I knew I would likely enjoy it, however I passed on it as 1. School and my internship required a lot of my time. Time I wasn't sure if I would have for this new "Hobby". I'm not sure how things turned out for either community at this point, however I spent quite a bit of time in the IRC's of both. I can tell you one thing is certain, most of the developers stated they really didn't do it only for the money. It was a definite bonus, however they originally did it because they enjoyed it. I believe that applies to all faucets of life. Most of us don't go into our choice professions "only" for the money. It is key to our survival, however most of us like to do something we also enjoy.

 

TLDR: I feel like the OP article was biased and I feel like he may have even made up quite a bit of it. Also, I feel the assumption he made are poor as their is operating cost to these websites. There is multiple developers. The money is shared (although not equally) by many of the contributing members of the community.

[Stragomagus]

Tip.it Article, Macros Uncovered.

 

Hello tip.it, I am Misfortune and I have spent many days researching and informing myself on RuneScape Marcroing Software. To start off this Article I would first off like to say that I, nor Tip.it use, or endorse the use of these macros. All Jagex rules apply and this was done for learning and experimental purposes only. During the researching I never used or downloaded any macroing programs. To gather this information, I visited different websites that I found through google and talked to users of these programs.

 

I spent an ample amount of time viewing and talking on the websites and forums of these programs. When I first started browsing through certain forums my perspectives changed. Before I started this research I drew the conclusion that people using these programs must be plain stupid. This changed as I realized most people on these forums are very smart and intelligent humans. Macroing software is created using a Programming language called Java. If you do research on this language you will notice that it is very complex.

 

 

After spending some time talking to people I decided that I needed to talk to the developers of these programs. To my surprise the developer of one of the biggest and most used macro is a 17 year old kid who started learning Java during computer science in the 10th grade. I asked him one specific question about his reasoning. This question was "Why create a program such as this to cheat on a game"? His reply surprised me and opened up a whole new topic for me to look into. He said and I quote "I do it for the money." At that our conversation was ended and I continued on my search to find information.

 

 

From what this developer said, I decided to research more about what he meant and the black-market of RuneScape. I looked at some statistics for this bot and was surprised to see the truth behind his words. There are many different bots which are available for purchase starting at around 7-8 USD. Considering that there are 60,000 people who purchase AT LEAST one of these bots per year, this developer would be making close to 500,000 USD per year! That is 10 times what the average american citizen makes! This made me want to take my research one step further to examine the black market.

 

Since the first few years of RuneScape's existence there has been groups of people who sell items or gold in game for money. These people use macro programs to collect massive amount of money and items in-game then sell it on the "black market". The Black Market is a group of people who run different websites and sell items, gold, and accounts for real money. These people are real-world trading which happens to be against the RuneScape rules. I was wondering what the point of selling items on this "Black Market" was. I QUICKLY found my answer. By using these macros, large sums of gold can be made very fast. People who do this are usually called Gold Farmers. There whole point is to sell RuneScape gold to players so they can get that party hat or bandos they wanted. Sadly, this is AGAINST THE RULES. That concludes my research on the black market so I continued with collecting information about these macro programs, this time from users themselves.

 

I went around a found a normal user who has been using these programs for nearly a year. I asked several questions which I will share with you as well as the users response. I first asked " Why do you macro?" His reply was "I macro because RuneScape is time consuming and getting those 99's feels so good!" I was curious how something that you earn by cheating could feel good so I asked him, "Why not earn these 99's yourself so you can feel a sense of accomplishment?" His reply "I do earn them somewhat myself, I just use these programs while I am sleeping or at school when I do not have time for RuneScape."

 

I was intrigued by how all of these people are so calm and proud of their accomplishments that they cheated to get. Thus, I conclude my research by saying that these people use macros out of laziness and greediness.

 

 

Thanks for reading,

Misfortune

 

I know you aren't going to like this, but beings as you are calling this research and that you are asserting some things as fact citations are needed in this article. I also need to mention that the actual research clearly shows that very little time was actually put into said "research." After saying this let me rip this to shreds.

 

First and foremost, there is a very clear difference between "Macros" and "Botting software". Macros are, at their very essence, nothing more than a set of keystrokes set to go off at the press of a button. What does this mean? Well, suppose that you wished to click and open one file while opening another in the same instant, this would be where a macro comes in. This brings us to botting software, which at its very essence is the automation of a task, and this is where people without the knowledge of computer programming get lost.

 

Here is a clear example of keystroke macros(have fun trying to learn to use it):

http://www.autohotkey.com/

 

However, due to tip.it's rules, I cannot post botting software on this forum.

 

-*Please pm me the botting sites that you went to so as I can further read up on your sources.

 

Second, you can make macroing and botting software using any programming language. Java itself, though, is not as complex as many of it's counterparts in the list below, but to a non-programmer I will give you this point.

 

Here is a list of programming languages to peruse:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages

 

This is a side-note, but this bot-scriptor must have had a really good computer science program in his high-school to have been able to delve so deeply into it at such a young-age. I'm also going to say right now that money alone would not provide enough motivation to learn a programming language due to their general complexity.

 

Citing your source for this figure on how much they make from this botting software would actually be a good thing. Also, simple calculations do not take into account those that cancel their credit cards, renege on the agreed upon price, taxes, among other things. However, such a simple calculation would be useful for the buying and selling of raw goods. Taking a statistics class would also be beneficial.

 

Try to avoid redundancy in your article by eliminating the repeating of "it is against the rules of Runescape."

 

For the final sentence you have not established a correlation pertaining to "laziness and greediness".

[Crossed_Body]

Q.Q I thought this forum would not be full of trolls

[Golvellius]

All this borderline (I'm not stating which side of it) flaming is what deters people from actually giving proper critical feedback. Moreover it also deters newer people to these boards such as Misfortune from ever put in the effort in another shot at this...

 

This is a sad day for these forums if you ask me...

It's been sad since the efficiency clowns moved in about a year ago.

There ain't much they won't flame with their superiority complex.

 

don't think anyone here will miss you

When you going? I'll throw you a party. :thumbup:

[essiw]

Just like others said, it doesn't add something most people didn't already knew, except for the amount of money they get. You see them as trolls but they all say the same thing, you need to get better at writing articles. Not the way you use your words, but what is behind the article, what did you want to tell us with this article, put more details in it and go deeper, search for things most people don't know yet.

Though is actually mentioning the amount of money they get from it not encouraging rule breaking? As it is encouraging people to do the same thing for that amount of money.

[Lose No Hope]

People here are somehow equating this to the ACTUAL Tip.it Times, but that's wrong... I even thought Bladewing was smart enough to know this, but evidence proves otherwise...

 

So let me start by saying that this article would not have been published as such, nor would it have been published for a while even if it WAS better written/cited/formulated but only due to the topic being covered in length and depth recently...

 

Misfortune shouldn't have put his article here as well as submit it as a Times article... This is just a forum post, but it could have been an article that had been scrutinized by the volunteers at the Editorial Panel... A missed opportunity if you ask me...

Exactly. We would have collaborated on it for a while before even thinking about publishing it as a guest article.

 

Misfortune, you put yourself in a hole by posting this in the Gen. Discussions. We obviously won't be able to do anything with this now that you posted it.

 

Also, when trying to use a lot of facts, or any facts for that matter, no sources=no credibility.

[BioIce]

Will you leave the damn guy alone?

 

He was just writing an article and it may not have been the greatest piece of literature out there, he did spend time on it.

Wtf, is this? Last time I checked - this was tip.it forums, not some science journal.

 

Who the hell cares if there are no citations, no meaningful/deep/philosophical theories to be proven here?

The guy tried to spend some time and write an article, and if it doesn't deserve to be in the tip.it times, then it won't be.

Not everybody is an amazing writer, and I highly doubt that anybody would put in hours upon hours of research, gather up all this data, interpret it and then write/revise/rewrite this article.

 

He's just trying some things down on paper and that's not such a horrible thing.

 

Also, stop this bandwagon - you all are posting the same sarcastic flame and it's only amusing to read the first time.

 

He supposedly researched his subject. I damn well expect there to be evidence of this research, preferably presented in blunt layman's terms for those who can't understand words with more than one syllable. If he wants to keep stating the obvious, fine by me - but don't expect rainbows and unicorns from everybody if they start critiquing it.

 

From my own recent experience I've bumped into at least three clans that have a predominant number of botters and it's always for the same reason that they bot: too much grinding. It can be argued that they haven't any patience, that it's a MMORPG so what the hell were they expecting when they signed up, but they've the mindset of, "we are here to play and have fun. Why should we waste time doing something boring when we could be having fun?"

 

They bot to their desired levels to get access or an advantage in what they think is the actual content of the game - monster hunting/slayer, quests, certain minigames - because the grind outmasses the content. A lot of 'em are returning players from the free trade era. There were a few who wanted to find out how to sell gold for IRL cash in order to maintain membership but they were in the minority, and it was either frowned upon or snapped up by scammers.

[Racheya]

Can I just ask people not to bring the Times into this? While it was sent to us as a guest article, once it was posted up here it meant we couldn't release it as an article anyway.

 

Just keep things civil. Whether or not you like the OP's post is NO excuse for bad behaviour. I'm watching this thread now.

[RSBDavid]

This was a interesting read. I would've asked more questions such as "How much real life money have you made using macros?" or "How many accounts do you macro at a time?", or even "Could you provide a screenshot of your gold selling payouts?". Due to the nature of the article, there is no way to provide sources for some of the information on this forum site.

 

Macroing software is created using a Programming language called Java. If you do research on this language you will notice that it is very complex.

 

Not all bots are created using Java, although a good portion are. There are still a few C++ based paid bots out there. Most of the free bots use Java.

 

 

I did some research of my own awhile back. A commonly known free site contains about 300+ paid scripts, which range anywhere from 1.99 - 19.99. It looks as if roughly 100,000 scripts have been purchased in the past few years.

 

A lot of hardcore botters run 3-15 macros at a time though a VPS or their personal computers, or even a combination of the two. One person stated he made more money selling gold in Runescape as his brother did working 35 hours+ a week at McDonald's making a little about 7.25 an hour. The only difference is he didn't do hardly anything but check his bots through an iPhone, which was supported by his gold buyers.