Tip.It Times - 29th May 2011

[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.

[Brondog]

Indeed this week's article was really good. Jagex is not working as hard as they could, but honestly, why trying so hard to close all bot networks?

I totally understand how extremely annoying it is to go to a hunting spot and see it fille with bots (I personally am having a really hard time lvling my new char, since it's not member yet and all hunting spots are crowded with bots), but they're really good for people that like to do the following:

power leveling (buying the raws for your favorite skills)

low lelvel hunting (as bots lvl up, they produce a lot of low lvl itens, which actually lowers the price so people like me can find them at reasonable prices)

they also increase the amount of gold available in market, so the high lvl itens that only honest players can get are sold for higher prices

FOOD! (it is well known that at very least 50% of all fishers are bots, and since I usually only use sharks when i go on a boss fight, i'm pretty happy that it's actually cheaper to find them thx to the bots)

 

Of course that for mining i would enjoy seeing them all dieing and stop stealing my darn coal spots, but life is not that good. there are always pros and contras, but since i'm cheap, i think i can live with it.

 

now, let's see what will people say about my comments... xD

[Kaida23]

I'm pretty sure the people who used to make some decent gp from fishing and woodcutting might disagree with you. :wink:

 

Also, if you're mining for xp you should stick to iron while you're F2P. It's much faster than coal. Once you're a member again, mine granite until you can get into the LRC.

[strilmus]

At this point, because of the botters (you can see them in the mining guild area) and what comes out of the LRC, mining coal is pretty much worthless to anybody who is trying to compete with the bots for it.

 

On the other hand, training smithing is cheaper, so perhaps you should look into that.

 

If prices are higher, to say that you're getting more gold compared to what you were getting before is a fallacy because you're still getting the same amount of purchasing power. It just raises the bar for everybody who can't compete with the bots and high level players.

[Dire_Wolf]

I looked through "I don't care" fast and just read the last pharagraph. And despite Rachyaya got a reputation that she is Jagex's toy it sure is a good article. So Kudos to you Rachyayaya :thumbsup:

[uath13]

I was going to try to write up another article for the times but was determined not to mention the botting situation in any way. It's gotten rehashed so many times it's ridiculous, yet time & time again it kept coming up in my drafts & I threw them away... :unsure:

 

I'm also to the point of simply giving up trying to do anything about them & just trying to ignore the annoyance. <_<

 

Maybe I'll get my article ready soon...?

[GamesDomainCastle]

Regarding "Forever Runescape"

 

Neat write up, I realize that the article is game-focused rather than player-nostalgic, but there are two player names and two websites I always think of when discussing RS-origins:

 

Everdred- First player to get 99 in a skill

 

Caramon/Tip.it: It was on the original Tip.it/runescape boards that the Gowers realized that they had introduced a new kingdom (Asgarnia) without ever naming the original one. When someone brought this up, Andrew asked for suggestions, eventually choosing "Misthalin," the suggestion from Caramon, an old-timey player and sometimes Mod on the boards. I wish there were archives of those old boards so people could see just how much influence this site had on the development of the game early on.

 

Gamesdomain Castle: Before runescape, Andrew made the "castle" for Gamesdomain.co.uk (before Yahoo bought the domain). A LOT of the original RS players migrated directly from the Castle, and a lot of the sprites and character designs in RSC can be seen in the older games in the castle (such as Crypt, for example).

[kamykazee]

During my research i also found out about Cyberwars on GamesDomain. Apparently not everyone migrated onto runescape. For the part relating to the first ever 99, that is actually mentioned in Part 3 as a DYK. I tried, however, to avoid naming specific players for several reasons, one being that perhaps they did not want to have their names appear. I focused on the game itself rather than individual players, although it is not less true that it is the players themselves who have influenced and shaped the game.

[rainbowbody]

This is a reply to "I Don't Care."

 

What I found interesting about the war on bots is that many players became bot vigilantes. They tend to have no real clue and spend much time harassing other players just in case they are a bot. One of my member accounts is a P Mod and the other is not. The P Mod does not get as much of the "testing" by such players, but the one that is not a mod often gets hassled. One of the worst spots that happened is any of the red chin trapping areas. That acct always has to put up with it. Also, calling people a bot seems to be the new pejorative to call other players, replacing noob for some.

 

Red chins have been quite overcrowded for a while, but yesterday I wanted to do that last push to 72 hunting with that acct by doing red chins. I was shocked to find the spot nearest the AKS ring to have only one player in it on the world I was on. So I went about getting my rocks and getting to 72. The other player eventually left. No one else came to share the spot. But there was this one guy who came with a butterfly net and started killing the chins with it. I figured it was another demented bot vigilante, but I razzed them about being an idiot who did not know the difference between a butterfly and a chin. They shortly seemed to exit the world. It is so tiring for honest players to be continually harassed by such vigilantes. It really hurts the game's longer term prospects.