Botting in Runescape

[ilovecuttingyews]

Actually took a stroll around f2p today while doing easter event - hilarious number of bots and but sad that nobody even care about bots anymore - even with the right click report option. some sights

-lvl 100s along with a train of lvl 3 s botting coal at mining guild

-chicken bot farms

-oh willows these hilarious trees that only bots chop now

-spam bots at ge selling gold...still

-no one giving a damn about bots

didnt you quit a year ago and still post every update about how shitty rs is now? If im not confusing you with someone else

Nope, that's him. Funny how he bashes the bad community, but is himself refusing to leave it, or even make it better.

 

@pal2002

People care about bots, and do what they can to get rid of them. The problem is that Jagex's system is set up to minimize false positives, which gives rise to a lot of bots slipping through the cracks. I understand this, even though I know it means more bots in RS. I personally spend over half an hour a day reporting bots. That may not seem like much, but that can number well into the hundreds. That's aside from the countless spambots I mute sitting at the GE while doing other things like studying. I know I'm not studying efficiently when I am logged on RS as well, but I do it for the community. So don't you dare say that no one cares.

[Arceus]

Actually took a stroll around f2p today while doing easter event - hilarious number of bots and but sad that nobody even care about bots anymore - even with the right click report option. some sights

-lvl 100s along with a train of lvl 3 s botting coal at mining guild

-chicken bot farms

-oh willows these hilarious trees that only bots chop now

-spam bots at ge selling gold...still

-no one giving a damn about bots

 

I still chop willows!

 

On a more serious note, I do still care about the botting issue. Despite it being utterly pointless I report all of the spammers I see, and the ones that send me private messages. One time I went to every free world and reported all of them at the Grand Exchange.

 

Why is it pointless? Because even if Jagex trusts my opinion (which ought to be decent considering my track record by now), someone has to review the report and rubberstamp it. And by the time that happens, most likely a pmod will have muted the bot or submitted a higher-priority report anyway.

 

But I never stopped trying.

[n64jive]

I feel like "It's not within the spirit of the game" is no longer a valid argument. The more appropriate argument would be "It's not within the spirit of the game AND Jagex can not profit from it"...:See SoF

[Vancouver]

Nothing Jagex can do....they can patch things and make it bot free for the first 2-3 weeks then it goes back to normal.

[pal2002]

I don't believe that for a second and never will, especially considering how stupidly easy is it to find hoardes of bots around the game these days. Jagex can always do something but they'd much prefer to do nothing at all these days.

In fact, I can't even remember the last time I've seen any banning (even temp) at all for months now.

[timmmmm83]

I don't believe that for a second and never will, especially considering how stupidly easy is it to find hoardes of bots around the game these days.

You play again?

[Platinum_Myr]

@Pal: In order to substantiate the claim that Jagex has the ability to destroy/remove bots you need to show a method. Just because you wish something to be so does not make it possible. I believe there is no permanent bot solution that doesn't also catch players, because fundamentally a bot *could* be written which acts enough like a player that the detection methods would result in false positives.

 

I do believe there are ways Jagex can make bot programming more difficult, but this doesn't mean they can "win the war." Banning is not effective because the majority of bots are not run on "real" characters, thus banning results in a new bot created faster than the moderators could ban them.

[pal2002]

Simple solution from me- how about actually banning some botters ffs.

 

Don't give me the botters can just make new acct crap now...most botters these days are actually not on throwaways and p2p. P2p bots cost money. You ban them fast enough, and the botters would literally be losing membership money to pay a banned bot.

 

There are also probably hundreds to thousands better thought out suggestions given in these past 40 pages and littered all around rsof. But is jagex gonna implement any? I have no hope that jagex even give a crap.

[SHADOW STALKER]

I'd like to say the reason bots are a huge problem is because Jagex* attempted to disallow bots to log in and follow a desired task was to pretty much to scan the computer while the games loads so the person can log in. But people and get a computer protection, that will not allow a scan to happen. Jagex* scan to see if their is a program up that would effect the player's gaming (helped or unassisted) it does nothing but that to see if a program while runescape* is up will control a bot. Does not go through any computer files and takes data it's pure purpose is to just scan to find the Bot program. Hopes that helps some people understand what the (bot nuke) was suppose to be.

[n64jive]

I'd like to say the reason bots are a huge problem is because Jagex* attempted to disallow bots to log in and follow a desired task was to pretty much to scan the computer while the games loads so the person can log in. But people and get a computer protection, that will not allow a scan to happen. Jagex* scan to see if their is a program up that would effect the player's gaming (helped or unassisted) it does nothing but that to see if a program while runescape* is up will control a bot. Does not go through any computer files and takes data it's pure purpose is to just scan to find the Bot program. Hopes that helps some people understand what the (bot nuke) was suppose to be.

 

Even if Jagex's client could scan running processes (which it doesn't), running your JVM in a sandbox would isolate it from the rest of your machine. It would be pretty easy to circumvent.

[Lose No Hope]

There are also probably hundreds to thousands better thought out suggestions given in these past 40 pages and littered all around rsof. But is jagex gonna implement any? I have no hope that jagex even give a crap.

So they did the bot nuke for giggles?

[pal2002]

There are also probably hundreds to thousands better thought out suggestions given in these past 40 pages and littered all around rsof. But is jagex gonna implement any? I have no hope that jagex even give a crap.

So they did the bot nuke for giggles?

For PR really - by nuke you'd imagine they would have banned all the known botters - but in fact they banned almost no one.

I think all they wanted was the stop the bots (and their entire forum and every other rs forum filling up with bot complaints) for a little while. They have no intention of actually stopping cheaters in their tracks, they'd lose money. And money is more important to Jagex than being an ethical company these days.

[Jonanananas]

There are also probably hundreds to thousands better thought out suggestions given in these past 40 pages and littered all around rsof. But is jagex gonna implement any? I have no hope that jagex even give a crap.

So they did the bot nuke for giggles?

For PR really - by nuke you'd imagine they would have banned all the known botters - but in fact they banned almost no one.

I think all they wanted was the stop the bots (and their entire forum and every other rs forum filling up with bot complaints) for a little while. They have no intention of actually stopping cheaters in their tracks, they'd lose money. And money is more important to Jagex than being an ethical company these days.

 

Considering a big part of those bots are goldfarming bots anyway, bans are mostly useless. Technical changes work far better. And they did lose a lot of bot customers through the bot nuke, but they still did it. Optimus will also be around in a few weeks. The simple fact is that Jagex has no way of securely eradicating all botters. If they had, they would, I'm sure of it.

[Platinum_Myr]

Gold costs what? 60c a million now? That means you need 10million gold to get 6 dollars. Also keep in mind that the botters could perform charge backs if they are banned within the timeframe. They might not get away with it, but it would be mud in the legal system and cost Jagex money to fight it.

 

There are bots in P2P, but there are also plenty of bots in F2P also.

 

You seem to think that it would be "easy" to pay someone to sit in game at areas and just ban botters. First of all, you don't want false positives. Second of all that job would be horrendously boring. How long before they get tired and make mistakes. How much do you have to pay them? I don't know that many people who would want to make a living sitting in an online game clicking the ban hammer all day.

[Arceus]

Come on now. It's not that hard to identify spambots at the Grand Exchange, and getting rid of those would be a first step. And people do worse jobs than sit around and ban people.

[n64jive]

Here is an idea: Hire chinese gold farmer to sit around and ban gold farmers...The problem will eventually get rid of itself.

 

(Kids, that's not how big business works)...

[Derckert82]

Bots are definitely a real pain in the...well, you know. At any rate, There are many tedious jobs in the world. Many of which are deal with tasks such as asssembly line manufacturing and the like. I'm sure that "bot-hunting" would not be too overly difficult to deal with since there are so many different types. Having several people assigned to identify the bot programs and then a few others that use that information to find the bots in the different worlds would still keep things interesting. Especially if they rotate who do the reserch and who does the thumping.

 

I'm no expect on macros by any means. My programming skills are ancient (over 20 years ago *cough*). Never really did anything with macros outside of an excel spreadsheet. That being said, I'm sure that there must be ways to change things in the programming of Runescape that can be done behind the scenes to aid in isolating bots. I have confidence in Jagex's ability to eliminate bots. I have less confidence in their desire to actually do it.

 

I go to what many others have said..."MONEY". It's all about the cost. The cost for operations is high. Especially on the technical side. Programmers and the such are a high demand career field. Even more so if you have hacker-like abilities. It's not publicized that way, but the best people to hire to do battle with hackers and program manipulators are the very people who do it. Sounds ironic, but it's the truth. Then there is the consideration of additional costs to either hire additional personnel or reduced effectiveness of personnel in other areas who would have to take a percentage of their time to dedicate to the area of bot control. I'm sure Jagex has done several cost analysis studies to determine whether any of these options or others are worth the effort. They may be better off doing what they did not that long ago and collect known data that is provided by the public and then make a mass sweep of bots. It would last for a short time while new bot programs are designed and implemented, but at least it would show a symbolic gesture to the users of the game that Jagex is at least watching with some limited interest what is happening with the game.

[n64jive]

Bots are definitely a real pain in the...well, you know. At any rate, There are many tedious jobs in the world. Many of which are deal with tasks such as asssembly line manufacturing and the like. I'm sure that "bot-hunting" would not be too overly difficult to deal with since there are so many different types. Having several people assigned to identify the bot programs and then a few others that use that information to find the bots in the different worlds would still keep things interesting. Especially if they rotate who do the reserch and who does the thumping.

 

I'm no expect on macros by any means. My programming skills are ancient (over 20 years ago *cough*). Never really did anything with macros outside of an excel spreadsheet. That being said, I'm sure that there must be ways to change things in the programming of Runescape that can be done behind the scenes to aid in isolating bots. I have confidence in Jagex's ability to eliminate bots. I have less confidence in their desire to actually do it.

 

I go to what many others have said..."MONEY". It's all about the cost. The cost for operations is high. Especially on the technical side. Programmers and the such are a high demand career field. Even more so if you have hacker-like abilities. It's not publicized that way, but the best people to hire to do battle with hackers and program manipulators are the very people who do it. Sounds ironic, but it's the truth. Then there is the consideration of additional costs to either hire additional personnel or reduced effectiveness of personnel in other areas who would have to take a percentage of their time to dedicate to the area of bot control. I'm sure Jagex has done several cost analysis studies to determine whether any of these options or others are worth the effort. They may be better off doing what they did not that long ago and collect known data that is provided by the public and then make a mass sweep of bots. It would last for a short time while new bot programs are designed and implemented, but at least it would show a symbolic gesture to the users of the game that Jagex is at least watching with some limited interest what is happening with the game.

 

1. Banning bots is inefficient. Even if they paid people to ban them, it wouldn't make much of a dent, and it's not cost effective.

2. Comparing excel macro's to the bots of today is like comparing a hatchet to a chainsaw. These bots interface directly with the client.

3. Programmers are not sought after for their "hacker-like" abilities, but rather their ability to...program. I was hired as software/hardware engineer because A) I received good grades in college from a prestigious university with a bachelors in computer engineering...B) I am a hard worker, I show up to work on time, and I get shit done in a pretty efficient/timely manner...C) See other skills that land you a job (organizational skills, communication skills, ability to work on a team...etc.)

 

Jagex's bot nuke was fixed by Jacmob within a month, and I have heard that another botting site has recently fixed it and is up and running. I'm sure "optimus" is real and will once again break the bots for who knows how long, but the fact is, the only way(that has been effective so far) to break the bots is to make creative changes to the client that require a complete overhaul of the bot interfaces.

 

The bigger fact of the matter is that runescape is a game...a game aimed at 13-20 year olds...and in that genre, you will have people finding ways to cheat. I'm not saying that Jagex should lie down and take it, but if you have a strong hatred for bots, the sooner you understand that their existence is inevitable, the better off you'll be.

[Platinum_Myr]

Programming isn't magical. And the number of people it would take to effectively police worlds is massive. Jagex doesn't have that kind of staff. I agree catching spam bots should be monitored by someone. But you need more than one person per world to catch every bot.

 

They removed the bots, and they did it legit. Their entire client changed to make it difficult. But it isn't a magic solution. You can't wave a technowand and say "bots be gone". That isn't reality.

[Jonanananas]

"Catching" spam bots is entirely useless. A pmod would walk into the ge, mute the spambots - 5 minutes later they were there again. Jagex can't magically do that better either. A good automatic muting system is really the only good way to tackle this.

[999134]

manual banning green dragon bots might work though... I mean it takes time to get stats to kill dragons

Same for hunt and frost dragon bots.

[Jonanananas]

manual banning green dragon bots might work though... I mean it takes time to get stats to kill dragons

Same for hunt and frost dragon bots.

 

It works better than with spambots, but again, let's assume the bot runs 10h per day - how long is it really going to take him to get those stats? Not that long really. I'm pretty sure banning is still by far the inferior method. Especially since with banning you have to be really sure it's a bot to avoid false positives - where with technical measures, you can be sure not to catch anyone innocent.

[Naraku893]

Lol who gets banned anymore really Jagex wants you to keep paying

[Derckert82]

Bots are definitely a real pain in the...well, you know. At any rate, There are many tedious jobs in the world. Many of which are deal with tasks such as asssembly line manufacturing and the like. I'm sure that "bot-hunting" would not be too overly difficult to deal with since there are so many different types. Having several people assigned to identify the bot programs and then a few others that use that information to find the bots in the different worlds would still keep things interesting. Especially if they rotate who do the reserch and who does the thumping.

 

I'm no expect on macros by any means. My programming skills are ancient (over 20 years ago *cough*). Never really did anything with macros outside of an excel spreadsheet. That being said, I'm sure that there must be ways to change things in the programming of Runescape that can be done behind the scenes to aid in isolating bots. I have confidence in Jagex's ability to eliminate bots. I have less confidence in their desire to actually do it.

 

I go to what many others have said..."MONEY". It's all about the cost. The cost for operations is high. Especially on the technical side. Programmers and the such are a high demand career field. Even more so if you have hacker-like abilities. It's not publicized that way, but the best people to hire to do battle with hackers and program manipulators are the very people who do it. Sounds ironic, but it's the truth. Then there is the consideration of additional costs to either hire additional personnel or reduced effectiveness of personnel in other areas who would have to take a percentage of their time to dedicate to the area of bot control. I'm sure Jagex has done several cost analysis studies to determine whether any of these options or others are worth the effort. They may be better off doing what they did not that long ago and collect known data that is provided by the public and then make a mass sweep of bots. It would last for a short time while new bot programs are designed and implemented, but at least it would show a symbolic gesture to the users of the game that Jagex is at least watching with some limited interest what is happening with the game.

 

1. Banning bots is inefficient. Even if they paid people to ban them, it wouldn't make much of a dent, and it's not cost effective.

2. Comparing excel macro's to the bots of today is like comparing a hatchet to a chainsaw. These bots interface directly with the client.

3. Programmers are not sought after for their "hacker-like" abilities, but rather their ability to...program. I was hired as software/hardware engineer because A) I received good grades in college from a prestigious university with a bachelors in computer engineering...B) I am a hard worker, I show up to work on time, and I get shit done in a pretty efficient/timely manner...C) See other skills that land you a job (organizational skills, communication skills, ability to work on a team...etc.)

 

Jagex's bot nuke was fixed by Jacmob within a month, and I have heard that another botting site has recently fixed it and is up and running. I'm sure "optimus" is real and will once again break the bots for who knows how long, but the fact is, the only way(that has been effective so far) to break the bots is to make creative changes to the client that require a complete overhaul of the bot interfaces.

 

The bigger fact of the matter is that runescape is a game...a game aimed at 13-20 year olds...and in that genre, you will have people finding ways to cheat. I'm not saying that Jagex should lie down and take it, but if you have a strong hatred for bots, the sooner you understand that their existence is inevitable, the better off you'll be.

 

1. I said as much. I said that Jagex has probably put some effort into determining whether or not it's worth it and that it probably wasn't.

2. I kinda said that too. I said my skills were ancient. My first programming language was FORTRAN 4. Ever hear of keypunch cards?

3. I know for a fact that there are organizations (especially the government) that look for hackers and pay them extra to work for them instead of against them. You are correct that programmers are not sought for their hacker abilities. I didn't say that. I said that people with hacker-like abilities are sought after. I don't know any hackers, but I can't imagine a hacker not knowing how programming works before becoming one. I have a lot of respect for programmers. I studied several FORTRAN languages, Pascal, Cobalt, Basic, gobasic, basic-basic, C, and machine language. Programming languages were changing and evolving so fast that I couldn't keep up and just dropped it because C+ and C++ came out. I didn't see an end to the revolving door in programming. I decided to stay in electronics.

 

At any rate, I find the bots a nuisance and an annoyance more than anything. It becomes difficult to train and to have fun sometimes because of them. I am not running around my living room pulling my hair out like a teen who just had two too many energy drinks. I'm a father with six kids who's been around long enough to just sigh and roll my eyes at the inconvenience they provide me (bots, that is, lol). The kids are a different story, especially now with some in college, *sigh*.

 

Like I said, in the end, Jagex is at least making an attempt at trying to control the insanity even if it is just a little bit. Anything is better than nothing.

[Saradomin_Mage]

"Catching" spam bots is entirely useless. A pmod would walk into the ge, mute the spambots - 5 minutes later they were there again. Jagex can't magically do that better either. A good automatic muting system is really the only good way to tackle this.

I thought they implemented a system to automatically mute spambots. Wonder what happened to that or how it got broken.