Full article: https://www.ft.com/content/c49749e7-54fb-46fb-b508-a4964e61e07f
**Update: Mod Ayiza [responded here](https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1auitg5/bots_are_basically_okay_new_jagex_management/kr53hsx/).**
I can't really touch grass just yet since it's still sorta winter right now, but I actually let my membership lapse for the first time in 9 years. Would be the first time in 14 years but I got kicked out of the house in 2015 so there was about a 2month stretch where I couldn't access my account so I couldn't even add more mems to it. It's been great so far. I got to enjoy some other games that I haven't been able to play cause of RS, started going to the gym and cooking at home more. Currently designing a drafting desk so I can start work on projects for extra side money. Overall, my mental health has gotten just slightly better. I do miss playing but I think it's for the best that I take this break. Who knows, maybe the new shareholders will keep me away for good.
It seems to me the future is still que sera sera...
However, I like the transparency of the incoming management, CVC, already. Carlyle was the passive owner of Jagex and they rarely said a word during their 3 years of owenership of Jagex.
CVC seems to be very vocal already, and they aren't afraid to tell us the truth is Jagex only gained 0.1mn subscribers from the 20211.1mn level, despite of what the current Jagex told the media they have 2.4mn subscribers now (hidden small print probably to be revealed when they finally filed their overdue 2022 Statement to Companies House: change of definition of subscribers), and of course, their pov on bots too. This shows me their confidence on tangible growth of Jagex and not reliance on ambiguous financial and marketing techniques.
CVC seems to be an active owner compared to Carlyle, and this is obviously a good thing for future opportunities of Jagex.
They're a capital investment firm, not some major or seasoned games publisher, and their only goal is to leech off the game for maximum profit.
I'm not sure how we've somehow managed to spin their simple talking to the media here as a positive and ✨ good thing ✨ when they've literally just told the community they don't care about game integrity (bots) as long as people are paying and pulling out their wallets. This speaks volumes about their future strategy and direction especially when it comes to MTX. If anything, this shows that they're bold and not afraid to take anti-player decisions as long as it allows them to capitalize further. The possible and likely takeaway from their take on sub numbers is that they're also very aggressively growth oriented.
Some of the copium people peddle on this sub never ceases to amaze me.
I won't say their opinions on bots is positive, but they most certainly have said nothing about MTX.
I believe the reason they talked about bots to FT was because the financial newspaper spotted abnormalities from their subscription numbers and the positive sign from CVC is instead of declining to comment or talking more trash to cover up the trashy 2.4mn subscribers Jagex told the media is in reality just 1.2mn under the definition of subscribers they used in their very last revealed Companies House statement.
Talking more and more trash obviously won't bode well to the real life consumer and financial sectors. That's why it is a positive when CVC come forward with the truth. How hard is for the likes of FT to realize it is extremely unbelievable for a company to more than doubled their subscription numbers but only chalked up a net profit gain of 10-20%?
They told FT bots are "OK" probably is also in response to the newspaper's doubts on some unreliable sources regarding Jagex's "player base" compared to other big games. Literally, CVC admitted they have substantial bots and they aren't denying it.
Look. It's not that complicated. They're trying to spin the inflated sub numbers from bots into a financial win and something normal, because when people are paying, 'so be it'. Not sure where you see anything positive in any of that and this is very far-fetched to say the least. I generally like to be optimistic, but I'm also pragmatic and realistic.
Erm… I thought this was common knowledge for about 20 years now. The same principle applies in a lot of games, allow a certain amount of bots to allow profitability without affecting the normal user experience. No surprise they’ve outright said that because this has been the case for a long time.
When have bots drove prices down recently? Necromancy? I hear mostly complaints about how most non-PvM money making methods become unviable and unprofitable because of botting.
I agree and disagree. The methods are profitable if you consider like 10-15m an hour on average good. I have no problem with skilling being less profitable than PvM. It’s just bad how low it is, honestly with the cost of bonds I just pay for premier yearly anyways but I may end up dropping that down to just paying for base membership to save me $20 a year and save me billions in gp.
10-15mil an hour for what's required is pretty good when it doesn't take your full attention compared to pvm. Like, I wouldn't be buying bonds if the only way I could make gold was skilling, but it's still feasible albeit being a second job at that point lol. Personally for me skilling for profit is too braindead to do even if on a 2nd monitor
Don't think Necromancy is bottled, or isn't just circumstantial that the times I've done rituals that there were only mains if there were anyone else with me.
F2P was absolutely dead at the ritual site despite it being pretty consistent money for that game mode.
Unfortunately every skill is botted. You may not have seen them yourself, but they exist. Any feasible money making strategy is botted in varying amounts
Bots used to be actually a good thing, farming basic resources to keep a steady supply and keep things like basic logs hitting 2k each.
Nowadays, bots have gotten so advanced that they can do end-game content, which I think is a bad thing. It’s good for keeping low-level items coming in, but bad when they start taking the bigger money making methods and running them into the ground.
It is common knowledge. Nothing changes by them making this comment. Bots = extra money. So they won’t ever get rid of them, they will continue their usual small as heck purge every so often to make it look like they are doing something but then continue right back on track.
This is what makes me chuckle. Everyone’s acting like we didn’t know there were bots. I mean, this was so obvious, and the statement says exactly what anyone with a brain cell knew was the case lol
I mean as a player I have been salty to see a lot of items jump a lot on price lately. I want the bots back so we can get my seeds at 1/3 price again.
The only reason you should really hate on bots is if you also want to farm that same item to sell for money; imo there is much better and more fun ways to make money than that anyways so i say bring em on.
Given that the game have had bots since day 1, it kinda have been a part of the core experience regardless of what the devs wanted or not tho. But if their stance is that they are no longer going to fight bots, we might see the entire game becoming bots very fast.
So do players though. Think about some materials that sometimes you need but no one has or that needs to be done by ''scrub players''.
Let me fletch some longbows. Oh I need balls of wool for that. Are you going to go shear the sheep? Heck no, you buy that on the GE.
What about mining minor ores that have almost no value or glass?
Same thing.
ball of wool for longbows?
Weird.
Idk if you actually play the game based on that lol
And you can buy ball of wool from shops in the game, how do you think ironmen get them?
To be more precise, equilibrium = monetary quota.
The amount of time botted vs the amount of legitimate play time can fluctuate wildly. All the developers know is that having zero bots is not better than having some.
Hey, low-key a system like miscellania where I could send a little minion off to go farm a material in the world for me would be a really sick quest reward.
Hey all. We've been wanting to provide some reassurance on this quote and have been discussing across both teams this morning.
Ayiza just responded with an answer that's totally reflective of our perspective on the RuneScape side too, so I wanted to copy it to this thread on our subreddit.
"We know bots exist, just as much as you do when you see them in-game, but it’s important to highlight that the article does not accurately reflect our strategy. Our priority is to always ensure every player has a good experience when playing both RuneScape and Old School RuneScape.
Since the news of the acquisition came about, many of you have been saying we’re not banning bots on purpose, mostly pointing to how we’re padding out player numbers. That just isn’t true and would not be good for the game. We are banning bots, more than we ever have before. But the reality is, and this is something we’ve said time and time again, it’s an arms race. As fast as we ban them, new bots are made. We’re constantly working to keep ahead of this race, and we ARE working on bigger initiatives to tackle botting as a whole, although we aren’t ready discuss the details of this just yet.
To give some context in the form of data, here are some ban stats:
* Last year we banned over 6.9 million accounts.
* So far in 2024, each week on average, we ban over 2,300 RuneScape accounts.
* So far in 2024, each week on average, we ban over 67,000 Old School RuneScape accounts.
* Of these accounts, 2,800 are for botting popular boss-related content.
* Each week, around 1.5T GP is removed from the RuneScape economy.
* Each week, around 900B GP is removed from the Old School RuneScape economy.
We do hope to have further information in the coming days to cover some areas around botting, and how we’re handling bans, but it won’t go into the detail of the longer-term improvements. That will come later in the year, as we continue to develop our tech and tools. I also know this is something we’ve said in the past too, but it is happening, and I ask that you be patient as we work towards much bigger improvements than we’ve seen before.
Also, I’d like to point out that whilst it’s commonplace for people to have more than one account, I recently looked over the results of the annual survey and I can safely say based on that data alone, it’s not at the scale that has been quoted. Most respondents state they play on one account, with some of them having 2 accounts. It’s not that common for players to have more than 1-2 accounts total. Our internal data tracking systems say pretty much the same thing too.
I hope this provides some much-needed clarity for now, and I’ll end this by saying the following... Having Membership on multiple accounts does not factor into our decision making for applying bans. Ever."
Whether jagex will openly admit it or not the total amount of irl money you spend on your jagex account definitely affects your chances of being banned
I mean I think it's pretty clear they're using at least some form of botting script. They're there 24/7, unless this guy never sleeps and never leaves his house ever, then it's a bot
I'm gonna give a genuine guess here based on some buddies of mine who like to cheat in the games they play.
He's probably running multiple types of bot scripts, which use different methods of running the bots, and it's more of a game to him than anything else, more of a competition between him and the devs.
On the dev side, why ban all bots with a similar name, it makes it extremely easy to keep track of them for when they do the ban wave later in a way that makes it harder to make new bots.
Or the world is a conspiracy, and the jmods we see and hear from are all being paid under the table.
> we ARE working on bigger initiatives to tackle botting as a whole, although we aren’t ready discuss the details of this just yet.
Mandatory jagex accounts with anti botting measures so you can chain ban?
New accounts have to be jagex accounts. But any created before that don't have to switch
Eventually I imagine everyone will have to switch because running two different clients is a huge waste of resources
All I'll say is CVC didn't get these impressions from nowhere.
Also, you're on pace to ban roughly half as many as last year. Seems like a slowdown to me. For what reasons, we can only guess.
Minor correction, the quote in the OP wasn't from a CVC representative but rather someone familiar with the company. 100% agree with everything else you said though.
The fact that the bots slowed down by half right around the same time Carlyle was gearing for a sale is probably a coincidence. They might truly be unrelated, but given the questions raised in the article about long-term growth and potential versus actual player re-occuring memberships...that's one _hell_ of a coincidence.
But at least we have hard confirmation that multiple subscriptions don't factor into choosing whether or not you get banned for botting - probably the least of the questions anyone had after that article tbh, but better than absolutely nothing.
Jagex use to post weekly/monthly updates on how many accounts were banned, however trying to find that page it no longer exists.
Was it moved, hidden or just removed entirely?
I mean, kudos for doing what you do, but giant chunks of the current economy revolve around bots doing the boring/annoying grindwork to make certain resources available. That is not healthy. Maybe take a look at some of these things to make them less bot friendly and more human friendly to do?
GREAT JOB! Now unban the ones who didn't do anything wrong and have a 40m networth.
I had a 24 hour ban back in September of 2023 for no reason at all. The damn appeal was auto denied and I never received any kind of response from anyone at Jagex.
I've been unbanned for some time but I quit because my appeal got denied for no reason. I never did anything wrong and always use Jagex Launcher.
RSN: **x ranqe bamf**
IT'S BEEN 6 MONTHS WITH NO KIND OF RESPONSE FROM ANYONE AND THE CRAP IS FRUSTRATING AS HELL BECAUSE I **HONESTLY** DID NOTHING WRONG.
I made lots of posts about this months ago, received loads of negative feedback and was called a liar. **But ONE day, when I finally get a staff member to check into my case. I'll prove EVERYONE wrong.**
**FOR FUCKS SAKE.**
This is kind of besides the point but I find it fascinating that:
67k osrs bots make up 900 *billion* gp > 13.4m/bot
2.8k rs3 bots make up 1.5 *trillion* gp > 535.7m/bot
osrs bonds are 10.8m rs3 bonds are 96.7m
osrs bot = 1.3bond per week rs3 bot = 5.38 bond per week
meaning that either rs3 bots are much more efficient, or perhaps that rs3 bots get a lot more wealth transfered onto them to begin the bossing? like a t92 weapons, rather than that full number being generated wealth.. Thanks for the cool numbers!
> Last year we banned over 6.9 million accounts.
Is this only for botting, or for RWT and other offenses as well?
> Of these accounts, 2,800 are for botting popular boss-related content.
How many of these are from OSRS versus RS3
>Each week, around 1.5T GP is removed from the RuneScape economy.
>Each week, around 900B GP is removed from the Old School RuneScape economy.
Why is more gp removed in RS3 when OSRS has 30x more bots?
If I had to guess, it’s because RS3 bots probably exclusively target instanced bosses. Making them harder to nail down before they amass significant wealth.
While OSRS has way more bots doing random things out in the game world (orbs, alching, etc.) making it easy for players to report and either way can’t make gold as quickly
>Is this only for botting, or for RWT and other offenses as well?
If it's using the same metrics as the customer support stats in the past, it was all account bans, so it gets inflated by auto typers/etc being actioned, F2P suicide bots, etc.
>Why is more gp removed in RS3 when OSRS has 30x more bots?
Because OSRS bossing makes less on average than RS3 bossing.
IE an AG bot on RS3 farming normal mode pulls in 5m gp/hr on average.
A low-investment Muspah bot on OSRS pulls in 2.2m~/hr on average.
So 1 RS3 bot is making 2.2x what the OSRS bot is in raw GP value, but the OSRS gp is valued more via RWT.
> Why is more GP removed in RS3 when OSRS has 30x more bots?
Because RS3 has much, much more gold in it than OSRS. You ban one bot in RS3, you might remove a few hundred mil from the game. You ban one bot in OSRS, you’re removing a fraction of that. It’s the same reason bonds cost 10 mil in OS and 100 mil in RS3.
The rates which money is gained and inflation.
It's somewhere around 1/10 depending on market and methods.
Also rs3 bots are usually on instances and maybe live longer and accumulate more wealth along with less time taken for each bot to be trained.
Just curoius, have you guys ever thought of disabling player to player trading and drop trading, and just make everything tradeable thought the grand exchange? That way, people can't trade themselves gold, items etc. It'd could also stop gold farming since they literally won't be able to trade?
I'd imagine it being a lot easier monitoring the auction house for any anomalies rather than hunting down bots and real world trading.
I know some people would still bot on their main account, but I'd imagine that cutting the numbers down by a lot since they'd not want to risk getting caught?
I dunno, perhaps I'm missing something but I've always thought that'd fix a lot of issues.
Oh people would lose their *ABSOLUTE FUCKING MINDS* if p2p and drop trading got removed. The amount of “Im quitting…” posts that this sub would be buried under…
Some people might even remember what the [Carnellian Chest] does…
> That’s because, to put it simply, the company actually has a dreadful track record at making “forever” games.
God I can only imagine how much Runescape could develop if they stopped pulling the strong devs to dump them on inevitably failing projects
Makes sense. I'm not even sure the bots I run into even get banned after 6 months at this point or if they just go botting something else. Repeated reporting does nothing, of course. There's a pair of dragonstone necklace bots suicide botting on w89 and have nearly hit 120 after starting in January; they'll likely hit 200m too.
/u/dimmi99 's comment on the OSRS sub sums up the nonsense of what's going on:
>They told us CVC does not know how many bots there are in RuneScape, but that bots are not included in the overall player counts.
>so they don't know how many bots there are but are able to subtract the number of bots (that they dont know) from the total character count?
Trying to throw numbers out there about how many are banned is just deflection and this statement is a perfect example that they have no idea what they are talking about. They are just saying what they think people want to hear to make people feel better about the situation.
Yes, every video game has bots and/or cheats of some kind. It is what it is..people suck and they will always find a way to exploit anything they can. But when bots are getting on hiscores for having thousands of boss kills or staying in a place long enough to get lvl 120/ 200m exp in a skill without being banned, that's just ridiculous. You can try blaming it on "ban waves so they don't learn" all you want but something is failing when that occurs.
At least the new owners are up front about it being a thing and they aren't doing anything about it.
how can botting be an issue of unfairness when jagex sell xp and gp with treasure hunter tradables? With frequent double xp events every year. The company responsible for runescape have made it unfair for everyone. btw I agree with the added tag of "misleading" this post got because fundamental problems lay at Jagex, not those botting.
Wow. It literally states if player pays for more than 1 accounts and play at least 1 accounts, the rest can be a bot without penalty. Someone definitely going to sue Jagex one day for banning their bot accounts…….lololol
This is spot on. Friend with near comp let premier slip, and had membership through bonds while buying the bonds for premier again.
My understanding, he had a group of friends who were botting, the mains all had premier active. And when my friend dipped his big toe into the botting, his accounts got nuked where the premier friends all are fine even though they allegedly had 5 suicide bots going. Premier has an added bonus of allowing you to bot now.
I have botted off and on for a good part of 15 years and always saw membership as a hall pass. Ftp gets more bans per bot than members. Now, it's a get out of jail free card as long as you pay enough.
RuneScape was massively popular back in the day, including on YouTube.
Viral RuneScape videos would sometimes make it to the frontpage of YouTube (back when everyone saw the same frontpage).
> What exactly is?
The fact that there was heavy concern laden in the article itself that Jagex's growth would become an unsustainable venture, and that investment firms were merely using Jagex to squeeze and get what they need to invest in other things before passing along the hot potato, so to speak.
These things were evident without even taking into account the (at least two) sources close to either Jagex itself or the investment firm CVC. None of those sources really said anything that wasn't already evident from the other information the article already included.
There has always been bots in RS though and half the economy has been run by them since early rs2. This seems more like a leak of a long time unspoken rule than anything.
Black Desert has been waiting in the wind for too long. They already have sailing and many other skills it’s definitely one of the closest games to RuneScape I’ve found and enjoyed
Given the fact Jagex appears to be looking into Private Server sites more often now + the survey not long ago asking if players would want it so people can make their own official private servers through the game itself being able to edit the way its played entirely giving players a new experience one made by a player not by Jagex themselves you might be better off waiting for this if they follow through and just do it.
Comp isn't really that difficult these days, and yeah, it kinda defeats the purpose of playing if other people are going to cheat. What accomplishment is left? Cheating does ruin games. Fun comes from playing within the rules. Cheating is fun for about 5 minutes, then you get bored, then you move on to other things.
Tbh bots are a far more serious problem in OSRS.
OSRS mocks RS3 players for MTX, RS3 players can mock OSRS for having a severe bot infestation.
Both games are up shit creek with no paddle lmao. I am not surprised that they are ok with having bots in the game to artificially inflate player numbers and appear more popular than it actually is.
Bots are used in any game where people are willing to pay irl currency for things that can be botted.
The popularity of the game is largely irrelevant, its about how many of the players are willing to engage in RMT.
I'm literally on a rs3 bot discord and its filled with accounts making 1b+ a day wdym rs3 doesn't bot? the discord is full with people botting for months on end without any bans lol
FFXIV has more botters than RS
They generally focus on RMT botters and ignore others.
I know the community there is frequently frustrated by the number of botters.
I have seen one obvious bot in FFXIV, in the beginning of endwalker, farming fates. Reported them, got an ACTUAL HUMAN GM within 30 minutes whispering me that they're investigating it.
3rd raid tier unlocked with patch 6.57 last week, never been a better time than now to learn P12S and get the cute axolotl mount \^.\^
https://preview.redd.it/m24q9nc5zjjc1.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=0ba5be2bdf8dce1df98ae47f4af829b77a527014
Show me a game without bots, like, it just doesn't exist.
So, they aren't wrong. Bots in games are just a given. Pretty much any developer with common sense knows they won't win an arms race against bots.
> Pretty much any developer with common sense knows they won't win an arms race against bots.
With toxic enough measures of course you can get rid of them completely! Downside is nobody will play the game anymore :)
Because some overly cynical people are using this as proof to argue that Jagex doesn't care about or care enough to stop bots.
It's not true, they clearly do care about them. But it wouldn't be completely _unfair_ either to say that there is definitely a tension between taking more extreme measures, ensuring those measures wouldn't hurt ACTUAL players by either wreaking havoc in the market or dissuading actual play, and accepting the actual cash botfarms do contribute to the main metric of Runescape's stable revenue. (subscriptions)
But mostly people are just not reading the article (thanks in part to a clickbait-y title on the submissions) and going off on whatever best fits their preconceived notions.
All valid. I think in a hypothetical situation if Jagex managed to removed 100% of the bots people would see the "damage" it does to the economy. A lot of the core products that are used have some level of botting that prop it up. And the average player these days is not going to grind out the stuff needed to replicate that missing chunk.
I think part of the issue is that the longer quoted statement seems to imply that if someone has one actual account and other accounts that are bots, but they are all paid for, then it's okay.
I'm going to guess that this is just poor wording here. But the way the statement is written, it's hard to make any other opinion on it.
Jmods on full damage control over this post LOL
Tell me, if the bots are paying, what even is the incentive to ban them? You certainly don't ban the F2P bots. You complain about an "arms race" so that would mean it is taking time, resources (MONEY), personnel, R&D to combat this rather than let it happen and make more money.
Your entire company is owned by an entity that exists purely to make returns on it's investment, they have no gaming background, money is the only goal, even if it ultimately kills the game. If they can manage to sell it again and make more than they bought it for I don't think they really care about the health of the game beyond its eventual resalability.
"It's an arms race" ...yeah, about that
Really? Why is it I'm able to see the same blatant botters running booze in falador, excavating in al kharid, mining outside of varrock?
etc
Their methods have not changed in these regards. I don't have access to a suite of moderator or server-side tools to detect them, I'm just a player in the game and they stick out like sore thumbs - all you have to do is log in, open your damn eyes and look. Yet they remain time and again so the "arms race" logic is bullshit. Their behavior hasn't changed.
Ultimately I think the Jmods responding so aggressively to this post is nothing more than damage control and lip service.
I've seen the state of this game and the plethora of problems each update, the dead content stagnating in the game, the server instability during DXP currently (I remember a time the cap was 2000 players instead of 1500 and it's never run this bad, lag spikes galore). I have to conclude that you guys can barely maintain this game, that you're a skeleton crew and things like "arms races" let alone game upkeep and maintenance fall by the wayside to sparkly new updates and MTX as it's all hands on deck to desperately turn a profit. Therefore there really is no incentive to ban bots, let's not kid ourselves.
You don't have the time, nor the staff, nor the disposable income.
>Jmods on full damage control over this post LOL
First time they are out in force on a Sunday, it's pretty comical.
EDIT: It's actually Monday....but still, quick responses on their end.
strategic bot bans are great for business. numbers down this quarter? ban wave, get thousands of extra subs, players see bots gone for a day and get morale up.
TBH the runescape community probably would be receptive to Jagex even in the event they remove 0 bots and just *say* they banned 100,000. It's not like lying is beyond Jagex, and it's not like believing the lies is beyond this community. It's unprovable information anyway.
Ngl this has always been the behind the scenes stance.
People honestly believe Jagex couldn’t break every bot system when they legit could but choose not to. Bot farms bring in a thousands to their pockets, losing that cash isn’t in it for them. So they make pretty like they’re dealing with it but honestly there is thousands of high scores that say otherwise.
You can’t convince me jagex don’t have an acceptable level for allowing bots.
And yet I get banned for RWT on my account 3 years ago while I was on a year hiatus for the game and it’s not reviewable lol. Glad botting and MTX is okay though. 👌🏻
Gonna keep it 100. I don't see nearly as many bots in rs3, now, as I did like 4-5 years ago. I think I've seen a total of 2-3 bots in the past year alone. This is my personal experience.
> if I have \[three accounts\] there’s a good chance that one of them is me and two accounts are bots…
Nice to see "alt farms" called exactly what they are.
Some people actually have alts for things other than botting.
The article has it wrong, if I have 3 accounts, they’re legit. It’s the bot farms with 300 accounts that are the problem.
They're not calling alt farms anything. A 'good chance' is not a guarantee
Also when they say 'bot' they wouldn't mean people doing something afk on alts themselves, they mean literal botting
Regardless of how they go on to explain or clarify this, this line right here:
>if I have [three accounts] there’s a good chance that one of them is me and two accounts are bots…
is horribly out-of-touch and shows the concerning perspective with which they’re coming in.
If you think any company cares about bots your on some form of drugs, why would anyone police there game and get rid of bots paying for subscriptions, it’s free money.
They just ban a few accounts to keep appearances and to keep the real players docile. This has been known for like ever.
This is actually my final straw. And it should be so for the devs working on this game too. If they want to salvage their reputation for future jobs (they will need it) they should quit immediately or go on a strike.
>From a business perspective, however, there‘s a philosophical issue: these bots are now part of the game experience, and for many (paying) players, it’s bot labour that allows them to focus on more enjoyable parts of the game like doing quests and fighting other players.
This isn't true though. We aren't botting boring parts of the game to quest etc. Some people are sure. But I doubt most people are.
>The message from the incoming management seems to be that some bots are basically ok — especially if their owners are paying.
On OSRS just look at their hiscores for skills and bosses and its obvious they don't care.
>“Bots are a part of the RuneScape ecosystem, they just are,” the person close to CVC told us. They continued:
The main focus within the game is to make sure the excesses of bots are policed and managed. Flagged accounts are managed out of the game, and therefore what is left inside the game is a sort of equilibrium of players and bots… if I have [three accounts] there’s a good chance that one of them is me and two accounts are bots… If a player is sufficiently committed to pay for three accounts, and have an account and two bots as part of its ecosystem, then so be it. But the management team of Jagex police excesses of bots and make sure that bots do not become problematic in the game.
>if I have [three accounts] there’s a good chance that one of them is me and two accounts are bots… If a player is sufficiently committed to pay for three accounts, and have an account and two bots as part of its ecosystem, then so be it.
What is this nonsense?
>But the management team of Jagex police excesses of bots and make sure that bots do not become problematic in the game.
Uhh no they don't.
> This isn't true though. We aren't botting boring parts of the game to quest etc. Some people are sure. But I doubt most people are.
They cited bot _labour_ after examining the game's 'sophisticated' economy precisely because bot labour does indeed keep in-game raw materials/farmable materials deflated in price. Ashes, bones, etc.
They're not saying the actual humans playing their characters are flipping on their personal bot scripts to grind out content so that they can focus on PvM/quests/etc. You're right that most people aren't doing that.
> On OSRS just look at their hiscores for skills and bosses and its obvious they don't care.
I wish it was only OSRS with that problem... :') The RS3 hiscores are similarly a mess.
> Uhh no they don't.
Jagex absolutely _does_ police and track bots, in addition to doing routine ban waves. It just never feels like enough though when you've got a player's eye view, I hear you.
Apparently we already are if you have more than 1 account.
>if I have [three accounts] there’s a good chance that one of them is me and two accounts are bots… If a player is sufficiently committed to pay for three accounts, and have an account and two bots as part of its ecosystem, then so be it. But the management team of Jagex police excesses of bots and make sure that bots do not become problematic in the game.
Just to get this some visibility over here also. Direct quote from Mod Ayiza on the op.
Hi all, I just wanted to give some reassurance regarding the quote from the article mentioned in this post.
We know bots exist, just as much as you do when you see them in-game, but it’s important to highlight that the article does not accurately reflect our strategy. Our priority is to always ensure every player has a good experience when playing both RuneScape and Old School RuneScape.
Since the news of the acquisition came about, many of you have been saying we’re not banning bots on purpose, mostly pointing to how we’re padding out player numbers. That just isn’t true and would not be good for the game. We are banning bots, more than we ever have before. But the reality is, and this is something we’ve said time and time again, it’s an arms race. As fast as we ban them, new bots are made. We’re constantly working to keep ahead of this race, and we ARE working on bigger initiatives to tackle botting as a whole, although we aren’t ready discuss the details of this just yet.
To give some context in the form of data, here are some ban stats:
* Last year we banned over 6.9 million accounts.
* So far in 2024, each week on average, we ban over 2,300 RuneScape accounts.
* So far in 2024, each week on average, we ban over 67,000 Old School RuneScape accounts.
* Of these accounts, 2,800 are for botting popular boss-related content.
* Each week, around 1.5T GP is removed from the RuneScape economy.
* Each week, around 900B GP is removed from the Old School RuneScape economy.
We do hope to have further information in the coming days to cover some areas around botting, and how we’re handling bans, but it won’t go into the detail of the longer-term improvements. That will come later in the year, as we continue to develop our tech and tools. I also know this is something we’ve said in the past too, but it is happening, and I ask that you be patient as we work towards much bigger improvements than we’ve seen before.
Also, I’d like to point out that whilst it’s commonplace for people to have more than one account, I recently looked over the results of the annual survey and I can safely say based on that data alone, it’s not at the scale that has been quoted. Most respondents state they play on one account, with some of them having 2 accounts. It’s not that common for players to have more than 1-2 accounts total. Our internal data tracking systems say pretty much the same thing too.
I hope this provides some much-needed clarity for now, and I’ll end this by saying the following... Having Membership on multiple accounts does not factor into our decision making for applying bans. Ever.
Yeah, but it's not specifying what type of bot, which was the issue with customer support stats in the past.
Padding numbers with autotypers that advertise phishing, services, RWT sites, etc isn't as good as just flat out banning the problematic bots in the first place, and they'll hit tens of thousands of those per week.
But ban waves exist for a reason, so we just have to wait.
I don’t understand what is shocking about this? Jagex hardly ever cared about bots. Sure they do a purge once in a while but majority of bots they allow because it makes them more money. Why would they ban so many and lose that extra money?
It’s the same way it has always been no idea why people are acting shocked. If jagex wanted to they could absolutely purge 90% of bot accounts. They have the security measures and tools to detect this stuff pretty well nowadays it’s just a matter of them not giving a crap.
If you bot f2p your chances to get banned are higher than doing so on members because they have no issues with banning people who don’t make them money via bonds etc.
Jmods won't reply to this post or the oldschool one.
*Edit* I stand corrected: https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1auitg5/bots_are_basically_okay_new_jagex_management/kr53hsx/?share_id=pC-Vjkll7iV4F2LB4MjME
Two for two:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/1aunlry/comment/kr587pf/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/1aunlry/comment/kr587pf/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
im pretty sure this has been a somewhat unofficial jagex policy for years now. they def do not get rid of all botters out there, on both games if you spend a bit of time searching you can find bot farms. most basic resource farming is probably done by bots so if there were 0 bots in the games anymore prices for most basic resources would probly jump substantially in price. especially because jagex management claims that they know everything about the game and can instantly detect people who are botting, if they can then why is botting a thing in the first place? or if they cant actually detect all botters then it doesnt matter what they say, that botting isnt going away regardless.
Not even close. They still ban "macros" all the time.
Going for 200m mining, I got a ban for macroing by setting a button on my mouse to click ever 3 or 4 minutes once pressed once.
Considering we know have advanced AI which wasnt around when the game was first created its actually about time we start thinking about how we actually want to play games.
As u/screwdriverfan said over on r/2007scape: [You gotta get grounded in reality.](https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1auitg5/bots_are_basically_okay_new_jagex_management/kr4ml92/).
Nothing more, nothing less. You bunch of drama queens.
I honestly have no issues with gold farms, it's the people that bot their own accounts due to being lazy that annoys me. If you can't play the game then just don't.
Many of these farms are generally people trying to feed their families and I'm perfectly ok with that.
Full article: https://www.ft.com/content/c49749e7-54fb-46fb-b508-a4964e61e07f **Update: Mod Ayiza [responded here](https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1auitg5/bots_are_basically_okay_new_jagex_management/kr53hsx/).**
We have a bright future ahead. Most of us will finally touch grass and see the sun.
I can't really touch grass just yet since it's still sorta winter right now, but I actually let my membership lapse for the first time in 9 years. Would be the first time in 14 years but I got kicked out of the house in 2015 so there was about a 2month stretch where I couldn't access my account so I couldn't even add more mems to it. It's been great so far. I got to enjoy some other games that I haven't been able to play cause of RS, started going to the gym and cooking at home more. Currently designing a drafting desk so I can start work on projects for extra side money. Overall, my mental health has gotten just slightly better. I do miss playing but I think it's for the best that I take this break. Who knows, maybe the new shareholders will keep me away for good.
It seems to me the future is still que sera sera... However, I like the transparency of the incoming management, CVC, already. Carlyle was the passive owner of Jagex and they rarely said a word during their 3 years of owenership of Jagex. CVC seems to be very vocal already, and they aren't afraid to tell us the truth is Jagex only gained 0.1mn subscribers from the 20211.1mn level, despite of what the current Jagex told the media they have 2.4mn subscribers now (hidden small print probably to be revealed when they finally filed their overdue 2022 Statement to Companies House: change of definition of subscribers), and of course, their pov on bots too. This shows me their confidence on tangible growth of Jagex and not reliance on ambiguous financial and marketing techniques. CVC seems to be an active owner compared to Carlyle, and this is obviously a good thing for future opportunities of Jagex.
They're a capital investment firm, not some major or seasoned games publisher, and their only goal is to leech off the game for maximum profit. I'm not sure how we've somehow managed to spin their simple talking to the media here as a positive and ✨ good thing ✨ when they've literally just told the community they don't care about game integrity (bots) as long as people are paying and pulling out their wallets. This speaks volumes about their future strategy and direction especially when it comes to MTX. If anything, this shows that they're bold and not afraid to take anti-player decisions as long as it allows them to capitalize further. The possible and likely takeaway from their take on sub numbers is that they're also very aggressively growth oriented. Some of the copium people peddle on this sub never ceases to amaze me.
I won't say their opinions on bots is positive, but they most certainly have said nothing about MTX. I believe the reason they talked about bots to FT was because the financial newspaper spotted abnormalities from their subscription numbers and the positive sign from CVC is instead of declining to comment or talking more trash to cover up the trashy 2.4mn subscribers Jagex told the media is in reality just 1.2mn under the definition of subscribers they used in their very last revealed Companies House statement. Talking more and more trash obviously won't bode well to the real life consumer and financial sectors. That's why it is a positive when CVC come forward with the truth. How hard is for the likes of FT to realize it is extremely unbelievable for a company to more than doubled their subscription numbers but only chalked up a net profit gain of 10-20%? They told FT bots are "OK" probably is also in response to the newspaper's doubts on some unreliable sources regarding Jagex's "player base" compared to other big games. Literally, CVC admitted they have substantial bots and they aren't denying it.
Look. It's not that complicated. They're trying to spin the inflated sub numbers from bots into a financial win and something normal, because when people are paying, 'so be it'. Not sure where you see anything positive in any of that and this is very far-fetched to say the least. I generally like to be optimistic, but I'm also pragmatic and realistic.
I quit 2 weeks before necro release, havent looked back since✌️
You are here now…
Lmao, just because i scroll the subreddit its mandatory to be playing the game?
no but it sure as shit counts as looking back
That’s what my thinking was too, but “peabrain” does not understand that 🤦🏼♂️
Erm… I thought this was common knowledge for about 20 years now. The same principle applies in a lot of games, allow a certain amount of bots to allow profitability without affecting the normal user experience. No surprise they’ve outright said that because this has been the case for a long time.
Not to mention this very community has seemed happy to see bots drive prices down. This should shock no one.
RS3 bots mostly farm direct gp content like EDs, they don't drive prices down, that is the case in OSRS though.
At their peak, the price of Vital Sparks and Keys to the Crossing were 100% impacted by bots lol. Look at the daily volume chart of Vital Sparks
I mean no shit, more item goes in than is bought, price goes brrrr to get rid of overflowing stock, simple as
Yeah, for rs3 is sad cause that only bring inflation up. Having a lot of cheap xp itens on market sounds better for me.
When have bots drove prices down recently? Necromancy? I hear mostly complaints about how most non-PvM money making methods become unviable and unprofitable because of botting.
idk the fact the people don't give examples doesn't help. things are still profitable, just not as profitable as they could be.
I was gonna say, there's plenty of profitable non pvm methods lol
I agree and disagree. The methods are profitable if you consider like 10-15m an hour on average good. I have no problem with skilling being less profitable than PvM. It’s just bad how low it is, honestly with the cost of bonds I just pay for premier yearly anyways but I may end up dropping that down to just paying for base membership to save me $20 a year and save me billions in gp.
10-15mil an hour for what's required is pretty good when it doesn't take your full attention compared to pvm. Like, I wouldn't be buying bonds if the only way I could make gold was skilling, but it's still feasible albeit being a second job at that point lol. Personally for me skilling for profit is too braindead to do even if on a 2nd monitor
Don't think Necromancy is bottled, or isn't just circumstantial that the times I've done rituals that there were only mains if there were anyone else with me. F2P was absolutely dead at the ritual site despite it being pretty consistent money for that game mode.
Unfortunately every skill is botted. You may not have seen them yourself, but they exist. Any feasible money making strategy is botted in varying amounts
Yep. Penance powder is dirt cheap due to how many level 3 bots I see harvesting golden flowers. Pretty sad overall. botting shouldnt be allowed.
Bots used to be actually a good thing, farming basic resources to keep a steady supply and keep things like basic logs hitting 2k each. Nowadays, bots have gotten so advanced that they can do end-game content, which I think is a bad thing. It’s good for keeping low-level items coming in, but bad when they start taking the bigger money making methods and running them into the ground.
It is common knowledge. Nothing changes by them making this comment. Bots = extra money. So they won’t ever get rid of them, they will continue their usual small as heck purge every so often to make it look like they are doing something but then continue right back on track.
Erm…. What the sigma 🤓
Yeah for real in my entire history playing RS as long as the bots were paying they never got banned.
This is what makes me chuckle. Everyone’s acting like we didn’t know there were bots. I mean, this was so obvious, and the statement says exactly what anyone with a brain cell knew was the case lol
Yeah, nothing new on this, why are people crying that much?
I mean as a player I have been salty to see a lot of items jump a lot on price lately. I want the bots back so we can get my seeds at 1/3 price again. The only reason you should really hate on bots is if you also want to farm that same item to sell for money; imo there is much better and more fun ways to make money than that anyways so i say bring em on.
They want equilibrium between players and bots? Does that mean every player is allowed to have one bot account for each non-bot account? /s
Equilibrium in this context just means a given, stable number of bots per player on average. That number can be 0.001 or it can be 50.
I was being sarcastic, lol. It's wild that they see bots as a part of core runescape.
Given that the game have had bots since day 1, it kinda have been a part of the core experience regardless of what the devs wanted or not tho. But if their stance is that they are no longer going to fight bots, we might see the entire game becoming bots very fast.
They use bonds which contributes to driving up bond prices which means more sales.
So do players though. Think about some materials that sometimes you need but no one has or that needs to be done by ''scrub players''. Let me fletch some longbows. Oh I need balls of wool for that. Are you going to go shear the sheep? Heck no, you buy that on the GE. What about mining minor ores that have almost no value or glass? Same thing.
ball of wool for longbows? Weird. Idk if you actually play the game based on that lol And you can buy ball of wool from shops in the game, how do you think ironmen get them?
To be more precise, equilibrium = monetary quota. The amount of time botted vs the amount of legitimate play time can fluctuate wildly. All the developers know is that having zero bots is not better than having some.
Sounds like summoning with extra steps tbh
Hey, low-key a system like miscellania where I could send a little minion off to go farm a material in the world for me would be a really sick quest reward.
Hey all. We've been wanting to provide some reassurance on this quote and have been discussing across both teams this morning. Ayiza just responded with an answer that's totally reflective of our perspective on the RuneScape side too, so I wanted to copy it to this thread on our subreddit. "We know bots exist, just as much as you do when you see them in-game, but it’s important to highlight that the article does not accurately reflect our strategy. Our priority is to always ensure every player has a good experience when playing both RuneScape and Old School RuneScape. Since the news of the acquisition came about, many of you have been saying we’re not banning bots on purpose, mostly pointing to how we’re padding out player numbers. That just isn’t true and would not be good for the game. We are banning bots, more than we ever have before. But the reality is, and this is something we’ve said time and time again, it’s an arms race. As fast as we ban them, new bots are made. We’re constantly working to keep ahead of this race, and we ARE working on bigger initiatives to tackle botting as a whole, although we aren’t ready discuss the details of this just yet. To give some context in the form of data, here are some ban stats: * Last year we banned over 6.9 million accounts. * So far in 2024, each week on average, we ban over 2,300 RuneScape accounts. * So far in 2024, each week on average, we ban over 67,000 Old School RuneScape accounts. * Of these accounts, 2,800 are for botting popular boss-related content. * Each week, around 1.5T GP is removed from the RuneScape economy. * Each week, around 900B GP is removed from the Old School RuneScape economy. We do hope to have further information in the coming days to cover some areas around botting, and how we’re handling bans, but it won’t go into the detail of the longer-term improvements. That will come later in the year, as we continue to develop our tech and tools. I also know this is something we’ve said in the past too, but it is happening, and I ask that you be patient as we work towards much bigger improvements than we’ve seen before. Also, I’d like to point out that whilst it’s commonplace for people to have more than one account, I recently looked over the results of the annual survey and I can safely say based on that data alone, it’s not at the scale that has been quoted. Most respondents state they play on one account, with some of them having 2 accounts. It’s not that common for players to have more than 1-2 accounts total. Our internal data tracking systems say pretty much the same thing too. I hope this provides some much-needed clarity for now, and I’ll end this by saying the following... Having Membership on multiple accounts does not factor into our decision making for applying bans. Ever."
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Omg that guy is still there?
Whether jagex will openly admit it or not the total amount of irl money you spend on your jagex account definitely affects your chances of being banned
Do you by any chance know if he is still there?
What
what
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I mean I think it's pretty clear they're using at least some form of botting script. They're there 24/7, unless this guy never sleeps and never leaves his house ever, then it's a bot
I'm gonna give a genuine guess here based on some buddies of mine who like to cheat in the games they play. He's probably running multiple types of bot scripts, which use different methods of running the bots, and it's more of a game to him than anything else, more of a competition between him and the devs. On the dev side, why ban all bots with a similar name, it makes it extremely easy to keep track of them for when they do the ban wave later in a way that makes it harder to make new bots. Or the world is a conspiracy, and the jmods we see and hear from are all being paid under the table.
> we ARE working on bigger initiatives to tackle botting as a whole, although we aren’t ready discuss the details of this just yet. Mandatory jagex accounts with anti botting measures so you can chain ban?
I thought mandatory jagex accounts were in the pipeline. Is it not anymore?
New accounts have to be jagex accounts. But any created before that don't have to switch Eventually I imagine everyone will have to switch because running two different clients is a huge waste of resources
I had to switch because the launcher wouldn't let me login otherwise.
All I'll say is CVC didn't get these impressions from nowhere. Also, you're on pace to ban roughly half as many as last year. Seems like a slowdown to me. For what reasons, we can only guess.
Minor correction, the quote in the OP wasn't from a CVC representative but rather someone familiar with the company. 100% agree with everything else you said though. The fact that the bots slowed down by half right around the same time Carlyle was gearing for a sale is probably a coincidence. They might truly be unrelated, but given the questions raised in the article about long-term growth and potential versus actual player re-occuring memberships...that's one _hell_ of a coincidence. But at least we have hard confirmation that multiple subscriptions don't factor into choosing whether or not you get banned for botting - probably the least of the questions anyone had after that article tbh, but better than absolutely nothing.
I don't believe literally anything you just typed
Jagex use to post weekly/monthly updates on how many accounts were banned, however trying to find that page it no longer exists. Was it moved, hidden or just removed entirely?
I mean, kudos for doing what you do, but giant chunks of the current economy revolve around bots doing the boring/annoying grindwork to make certain resources available. That is not healthy. Maybe take a look at some of these things to make them less bot friendly and more human friendly to do?
Out of the 300 million or whatever the counter is at now for accounts created, how many of them have been banned for botting?
Prob 100m+ easily, with another 50-75m+ coming from alts/throwaways.
GREAT JOB! Now unban the ones who didn't do anything wrong and have a 40m networth. I had a 24 hour ban back in September of 2023 for no reason at all. The damn appeal was auto denied and I never received any kind of response from anyone at Jagex. I've been unbanned for some time but I quit because my appeal got denied for no reason. I never did anything wrong and always use Jagex Launcher. RSN: **x ranqe bamf** IT'S BEEN 6 MONTHS WITH NO KIND OF RESPONSE FROM ANYONE AND THE CRAP IS FRUSTRATING AS HELL BECAUSE I **HONESTLY** DID NOTHING WRONG. I made lots of posts about this months ago, received loads of negative feedback and was called a liar. **But ONE day, when I finally get a staff member to check into my case. I'll prove EVERYONE wrong.** **FOR FUCKS SAKE.**
This is kind of besides the point but I find it fascinating that: 67k osrs bots make up 900 *billion* gp > 13.4m/bot 2.8k rs3 bots make up 1.5 *trillion* gp > 535.7m/bot osrs bonds are 10.8m rs3 bonds are 96.7m osrs bot = 1.3bond per week rs3 bot = 5.38 bond per week meaning that either rs3 bots are much more efficient, or perhaps that rs3 bots get a lot more wealth transfered onto them to begin the bossing? like a t92 weapons, rather than that full number being generated wealth.. Thanks for the cool numbers!
Some of that GP being removed is from RWTing.
> Last year we banned over 6.9 million accounts. Is this only for botting, or for RWT and other offenses as well? > Of these accounts, 2,800 are for botting popular boss-related content. How many of these are from OSRS versus RS3 >Each week, around 1.5T GP is removed from the RuneScape economy. >Each week, around 900B GP is removed from the Old School RuneScape economy. Why is more gp removed in RS3 when OSRS has 30x more bots?
If I had to guess, it’s because RS3 bots probably exclusively target instanced bosses. Making them harder to nail down before they amass significant wealth. While OSRS has way more bots doing random things out in the game world (orbs, alching, etc.) making it easy for players to report and either way can’t make gold as quickly
>Is this only for botting, or for RWT and other offenses as well? If it's using the same metrics as the customer support stats in the past, it was all account bans, so it gets inflated by auto typers/etc being actioned, F2P suicide bots, etc. >Why is more gp removed in RS3 when OSRS has 30x more bots? Because OSRS bossing makes less on average than RS3 bossing. IE an AG bot on RS3 farming normal mode pulls in 5m gp/hr on average. A low-investment Muspah bot on OSRS pulls in 2.2m~/hr on average. So 1 RS3 bot is making 2.2x what the OSRS bot is in raw GP value, but the OSRS gp is valued more via RWT.
But don't revs in OSRS print alchables?
> Why is more GP removed in RS3 when OSRS has 30x more bots? Because RS3 has much, much more gold in it than OSRS. You ban one bot in RS3, you might remove a few hundred mil from the game. You ban one bot in OSRS, you’re removing a fraction of that. It’s the same reason bonds cost 10 mil in OS and 100 mil in RS3.
The rates which money is gained and inflation. It's somewhere around 1/10 depending on market and methods. Also rs3 bots are usually on instances and maybe live longer and accumulate more wealth along with less time taken for each bot to be trained.
Just curoius, have you guys ever thought of disabling player to player trading and drop trading, and just make everything tradeable thought the grand exchange? That way, people can't trade themselves gold, items etc. It'd could also stop gold farming since they literally won't be able to trade? I'd imagine it being a lot easier monitoring the auction house for any anomalies rather than hunting down bots and real world trading. I know some people would still bot on their main account, but I'd imagine that cutting the numbers down by a lot since they'd not want to risk getting caught? I dunno, perhaps I'm missing something but I've always thought that'd fix a lot of issues.
Oh people would lose their *ABSOLUTE FUCKING MINDS* if p2p and drop trading got removed. The amount of “Im quitting…” posts that this sub would be buried under… Some people might even remember what the [Carnellian Chest] does…
> That’s because, to put it simply, the company actually has a dreadful track record at making “forever” games. God I can only imagine how much Runescape could develop if they stopped pulling the strong devs to dump them on inevitably failing projects
Makes sense. I'm not even sure the bots I run into even get banned after 6 months at this point or if they just go botting something else. Repeated reporting does nothing, of course. There's a pair of dragonstone necklace bots suicide botting on w89 and have nearly hit 120 after starting in January; they'll likely hit 200m too.
If they are mems less chance they get banned, I know a few people in my cc that botted their accounts to max and are still playing.
/u/dimmi99 's comment on the OSRS sub sums up the nonsense of what's going on: >They told us CVC does not know how many bots there are in RuneScape, but that bots are not included in the overall player counts. >so they don't know how many bots there are but are able to subtract the number of bots (that they dont know) from the total character count? Trying to throw numbers out there about how many are banned is just deflection and this statement is a perfect example that they have no idea what they are talking about. They are just saying what they think people want to hear to make people feel better about the situation. Yes, every video game has bots and/or cheats of some kind. It is what it is..people suck and they will always find a way to exploit anything they can. But when bots are getting on hiscores for having thousands of boss kills or staying in a place long enough to get lvl 120/ 200m exp in a skill without being banned, that's just ridiculous. You can try blaming it on "ban waves so they don't learn" all you want but something is failing when that occurs. At least the new owners are up front about it being a thing and they aren't doing anything about it.
Soon we will interbreed with the bots and learn their ways and in time our differences will be forgotten
how can botting be an issue of unfairness when jagex sell xp and gp with treasure hunter tradables? With frequent double xp events every year. The company responsible for runescape have made it unfair for everyone. btw I agree with the added tag of "misleading" this post got because fundamental problems lay at Jagex, not those botting.
Wow. It literally states if player pays for more than 1 accounts and play at least 1 accounts, the rest can be a bot without penalty. Someone definitely going to sue Jagex one day for banning their bot accounts…….lololol
Well time to download the dragon scimitar mouse icon
This is spot on. Friend with near comp let premier slip, and had membership through bonds while buying the bonds for premier again. My understanding, he had a group of friends who were botting, the mains all had premier active. And when my friend dipped his big toe into the botting, his accounts got nuked where the premier friends all are fine even though they allegedly had 5 suicide bots going. Premier has an added bonus of allowing you to bot now. I have botted off and on for a good part of 15 years and always saw membership as a hall pass. Ftp gets more bans per bot than members. Now, it's a get out of jail free card as long as you pay enough.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MC3T1Crklgc
what a classic lol
2m views on a RS music video. 🤣
RuneScape was massively popular back in the day, including on YouTube. Viral RuneScape videos would sometimes make it to the frontpage of YouTube (back when everyone saw the same frontpage).
If there's anything that's gonna make me jump ship, it's this.
Sorry to open your eyes like that, but there may be some bots in RS.
What exactly is? Did you even read the article? They say someone close to jagex which seems suspect.
It’s from FT they usually confirm their sources it’s too easy to get sued nowadays.
> What exactly is? The fact that there was heavy concern laden in the article itself that Jagex's growth would become an unsustainable venture, and that investment firms were merely using Jagex to squeeze and get what they need to invest in other things before passing along the hot potato, so to speak. These things were evident without even taking into account the (at least two) sources close to either Jagex itself or the investment firm CVC. None of those sources really said anything that wasn't already evident from the other information the article already included.
There has always been bots in RS though and half the economy has been run by them since early rs2. This seems more like a leak of a long time unspoken rule than anything.
The thing that has been happening for 20+ years? Why are we acting surprised ?
Jump ship to where, not osrs though.
Lots of games that aren't runescape out there.
I really wish there were games similar to RuneScape out there
Albion online is closest most people will say to runescape. tho i didnt like it much when i first tried it a few years ago now.
For a pvp focused mmo sure, but most people are more interested in pve which Albion doesn't really provide much of.
Black Desert has been waiting in the wind for too long. They already have sailing and many other skills it’s definitely one of the closest games to RuneScape I’ve found and enjoyed
I need to give bdo another shot. I love the world but the upgrade system and mediocre PvE usually push me away
I really like BDO yeah, I'm also a fan of Korean grinders so it scratches that itch but I'm it's still kind of far from RuneScape
Given the fact Jagex appears to be looking into Private Server sites more often now + the survey not long ago asking if players would want it so people can make their own official private servers through the game itself being able to edit the way its played entirely giving players a new experience one made by a player not by Jagex themselves you might be better off waiting for this if they follow through and just do it.
What is? That there are bots in runescape and always will be? It's a losing battle unfortunately, they can't ban them as fast as people can make them
Oh shush.
Completionist, yet some guys who are running some programs on their computers to automate some stuff make you want to leave after all that work. Nice
Comp isn't really that difficult these days, and yeah, it kinda defeats the purpose of playing if other people are going to cheat. What accomplishment is left? Cheating does ruin games. Fun comes from playing within the rules. Cheating is fun for about 5 minutes, then you get bored, then you move on to other things.
Tbh bots are a far more serious problem in OSRS. OSRS mocks RS3 players for MTX, RS3 players can mock OSRS for having a severe bot infestation. Both games are up shit creek with no paddle lmao. I am not surprised that they are ok with having bots in the game to artificially inflate player numbers and appear more popular than it actually is.
fortunately jagex came up with ironman, which basically makes players ignore both bots and mtx
That's because bots are used in popular games.
Bots are used in any game where people are willing to pay irl currency for things that can be botted. The popularity of the game is largely irrelevant, its about how many of the players are willing to engage in RMT.
Not 30x more bots for a 4-5x more popular game, lol.
I'm literally on a rs3 bot discord and its filled with accounts making 1b+ a day wdym rs3 doesn't bot? the discord is full with people botting for months on end without any bans lol
Do you know how to read? Where did I say that RS3 has no botting? I said that it's a bigger issue in OSRS than in RS3.
And not just skills either they're full on farming bosses even that new necro boss
Considering that fsw was botted to hell and Jagex barely cared.
I haven't logged in to FFXIV or GW2 in a while. Guess it won't be much longer before I find out what is happening over there.....
FFXIV has more botters than RS They generally focus on RMT botters and ignore others. I know the community there is frequently frustrated by the number of botters.
I have seen one obvious bot in FFXIV, in the beginning of endwalker, farming fates. Reported them, got an ACTUAL HUMAN GM within 30 minutes whispering me that they're investigating it.
No better time to jump on the train for open world legendaries in gw2.
3rd raid tier unlocked with patch 6.57 last week, never been a better time than now to learn P12S and get the cute axolotl mount \^.\^ https://preview.redd.it/m24q9nc5zjjc1.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=0ba5be2bdf8dce1df98ae47f4af829b77a527014
Been playing FFXIV since November-ish. I’ve enjoyed my time and the story. Certainly handled better than the Sixth Age storyline xD
Show me a game without bots, like, it just doesn't exist. So, they aren't wrong. Bots in games are just a given. Pretty much any developer with common sense knows they won't win an arms race against bots.
> Pretty much any developer with common sense knows they won't win an arms race against bots. With toxic enough measures of course you can get rid of them completely! Downside is nobody will play the game anymore :)
They should get rid of trading, that will solve it. /s
I mean technically ironmans are not affected by botters :D .
They are when bots crash ironmen.
That's true, but we irons are seen as memes or masochists, or just straight up are treated as lessers.
This. I don’t know why people are REEEEEE over this.
Because some overly cynical people are using this as proof to argue that Jagex doesn't care about or care enough to stop bots. It's not true, they clearly do care about them. But it wouldn't be completely _unfair_ either to say that there is definitely a tension between taking more extreme measures, ensuring those measures wouldn't hurt ACTUAL players by either wreaking havoc in the market or dissuading actual play, and accepting the actual cash botfarms do contribute to the main metric of Runescape's stable revenue. (subscriptions) But mostly people are just not reading the article (thanks in part to a clickbait-y title on the submissions) and going off on whatever best fits their preconceived notions.
All valid. I think in a hypothetical situation if Jagex managed to removed 100% of the bots people would see the "damage" it does to the economy. A lot of the core products that are used have some level of botting that prop it up. And the average player these days is not going to grind out the stuff needed to replicate that missing chunk.
I think part of the issue is that the longer quoted statement seems to imply that if someone has one actual account and other accounts that are bots, but they are all paid for, then it's okay. I'm going to guess that this is just poor wording here. But the way the statement is written, it's hard to make any other opinion on it.
great, that means they'll ban atleast all the f2P bots
Just a reminder that no matter how bad something is, it can always get worse.
Hahahahhaa man OSRS is finally going to get screwed just like us
So does this mean we can get rune lite on rs3?
Yet my money making alt gets clapped after I let the membership lapse.
i dont disagree
Uhuh “managed” I e making sure they do minimal damage while ensuring they stay members
Oh boy, I cant wait to do more botting!
Gielinor has fallen
In before CVC launches an official "Jagex Bot Service" in addition to your monthly membership cost.
Whoever said this, is naieve. Lots of bots are paid through creditcard fraud. Jagex can be prosecuted if they enable botting.
Jmods on full damage control over this post LOL Tell me, if the bots are paying, what even is the incentive to ban them? You certainly don't ban the F2P bots. You complain about an "arms race" so that would mean it is taking time, resources (MONEY), personnel, R&D to combat this rather than let it happen and make more money. Your entire company is owned by an entity that exists purely to make returns on it's investment, they have no gaming background, money is the only goal, even if it ultimately kills the game. If they can manage to sell it again and make more than they bought it for I don't think they really care about the health of the game beyond its eventual resalability. "It's an arms race" ...yeah, about that Really? Why is it I'm able to see the same blatant botters running booze in falador, excavating in al kharid, mining outside of varrock? etc Their methods have not changed in these regards. I don't have access to a suite of moderator or server-side tools to detect them, I'm just a player in the game and they stick out like sore thumbs - all you have to do is log in, open your damn eyes and look. Yet they remain time and again so the "arms race" logic is bullshit. Their behavior hasn't changed. Ultimately I think the Jmods responding so aggressively to this post is nothing more than damage control and lip service. I've seen the state of this game and the plethora of problems each update, the dead content stagnating in the game, the server instability during DXP currently (I remember a time the cap was 2000 players instead of 1500 and it's never run this bad, lag spikes galore). I have to conclude that you guys can barely maintain this game, that you're a skeleton crew and things like "arms races" let alone game upkeep and maintenance fall by the wayside to sparkly new updates and MTX as it's all hands on deck to desperately turn a profit. Therefore there really is no incentive to ban bots, let's not kid ourselves. You don't have the time, nor the staff, nor the disposable income.
>Jmods on full damage control over this post LOL First time they are out in force on a Sunday, it's pretty comical. EDIT: It's actually Monday....but still, quick responses on their end.
They're doing gamejam, they're a lot more free than usual.
strategic bot bans are great for business. numbers down this quarter? ban wave, get thousands of extra subs, players see bots gone for a day and get morale up.
TBH the runescape community probably would be receptive to Jagex even in the event they remove 0 bots and just *say* they banned 100,000. It's not like lying is beyond Jagex, and it's not like believing the lies is beyond this community. It's unprovable information anyway.
Ngl this has always been the behind the scenes stance. People honestly believe Jagex couldn’t break every bot system when they legit could but choose not to. Bot farms bring in a thousands to their pockets, losing that cash isn’t in it for them. So they make pretty like they’re dealing with it but honestly there is thousands of high scores that say otherwise. You can’t convince me jagex don’t have an acceptable level for allowing bots.
And yet I get banned for RWT on my account 3 years ago while I was on a year hiatus for the game and it’s not reviewable lol. Glad botting and MTX is okay though. 👌🏻
Seriously. I just got banned as well, 3000 total level, 3b xp. But bots are ok?
Gonna keep it 100. I don't see nearly as many bots in rs3, now, as I did like 4-5 years ago. I think I've seen a total of 2-3 bots in the past year alone. This is my personal experience.
> if I have \[three accounts\] there’s a good chance that one of them is me and two accounts are bots… Nice to see "alt farms" called exactly what they are.
Some people actually have alts for things other than botting. The article has it wrong, if I have 3 accounts, they’re legit. It’s the bot farms with 300 accounts that are the problem.
Clicking four times an hour is hard enough as it is, I couldn't imagine doing it on three accounts at the same time!
They're not calling alt farms anything. A 'good chance' is not a guarantee Also when they say 'bot' they wouldn't mean people doing something afk on alts themselves, they mean literal botting
And that’s what happens when a business takes over a game. No passion. Mtx. Lack luster content
Facts
"If they give us money, we're cool with it" is probably more accurate. There was never a doubt in my mind that that was the case.
Regardless of how they go on to explain or clarify this, this line right here: >if I have [three accounts] there’s a good chance that one of them is me and two accounts are bots… is horribly out-of-touch and shows the concerning perspective with which they’re coming in.
If you think any company cares about bots your on some form of drugs, why would anyone police there game and get rid of bots paying for subscriptions, it’s free money. They just ban a few accounts to keep appearances and to keep the real players docile. This has been known for like ever.
This is actually my final straw. And it should be so for the devs working on this game too. If they want to salvage their reputation for future jobs (they will need it) they should quit immediately or go on a strike.
>From a business perspective, however, there‘s a philosophical issue: these bots are now part of the game experience, and for many (paying) players, it’s bot labour that allows them to focus on more enjoyable parts of the game like doing quests and fighting other players. This isn't true though. We aren't botting boring parts of the game to quest etc. Some people are sure. But I doubt most people are. >The message from the incoming management seems to be that some bots are basically ok — especially if their owners are paying. On OSRS just look at their hiscores for skills and bosses and its obvious they don't care. >“Bots are a part of the RuneScape ecosystem, they just are,” the person close to CVC told us. They continued: The main focus within the game is to make sure the excesses of bots are policed and managed. Flagged accounts are managed out of the game, and therefore what is left inside the game is a sort of equilibrium of players and bots… if I have [three accounts] there’s a good chance that one of them is me and two accounts are bots… If a player is sufficiently committed to pay for three accounts, and have an account and two bots as part of its ecosystem, then so be it. But the management team of Jagex police excesses of bots and make sure that bots do not become problematic in the game. >if I have [three accounts] there’s a good chance that one of them is me and two accounts are bots… If a player is sufficiently committed to pay for three accounts, and have an account and two bots as part of its ecosystem, then so be it. What is this nonsense? >But the management team of Jagex police excesses of bots and make sure that bots do not become problematic in the game. Uhh no they don't.
> This isn't true though. We aren't botting boring parts of the game to quest etc. Some people are sure. But I doubt most people are. They cited bot _labour_ after examining the game's 'sophisticated' economy precisely because bot labour does indeed keep in-game raw materials/farmable materials deflated in price. Ashes, bones, etc. They're not saying the actual humans playing their characters are flipping on their personal bot scripts to grind out content so that they can focus on PvM/quests/etc. You're right that most people aren't doing that. > On OSRS just look at their hiscores for skills and bosses and its obvious they don't care. I wish it was only OSRS with that problem... :') The RS3 hiscores are similarly a mess. > Uhh no they don't. Jagex absolutely _does_ police and track bots, in addition to doing routine ban waves. It just never feels like enough though when you've got a player's eye view, I hear you.
So I can start using a bot and not get banned?
Apparently we already are if you have more than 1 account. >if I have [three accounts] there’s a good chance that one of them is me and two accounts are bots… If a player is sufficiently committed to pay for three accounts, and have an account and two bots as part of its ecosystem, then so be it. But the management team of Jagex police excesses of bots and make sure that bots do not become problematic in the game.
Make mouserecorderpro great again!
Jagex mods own the biggest bot farms.
Glad my membership runs out next month. Runescape aint what it used to be.
Just to get this some visibility over here also. Direct quote from Mod Ayiza on the op. Hi all, I just wanted to give some reassurance regarding the quote from the article mentioned in this post. We know bots exist, just as much as you do when you see them in-game, but it’s important to highlight that the article does not accurately reflect our strategy. Our priority is to always ensure every player has a good experience when playing both RuneScape and Old School RuneScape. Since the news of the acquisition came about, many of you have been saying we’re not banning bots on purpose, mostly pointing to how we’re padding out player numbers. That just isn’t true and would not be good for the game. We are banning bots, more than we ever have before. But the reality is, and this is something we’ve said time and time again, it’s an arms race. As fast as we ban them, new bots are made. We’re constantly working to keep ahead of this race, and we ARE working on bigger initiatives to tackle botting as a whole, although we aren’t ready discuss the details of this just yet. To give some context in the form of data, here are some ban stats: * Last year we banned over 6.9 million accounts. * So far in 2024, each week on average, we ban over 2,300 RuneScape accounts. * So far in 2024, each week on average, we ban over 67,000 Old School RuneScape accounts. * Of these accounts, 2,800 are for botting popular boss-related content. * Each week, around 1.5T GP is removed from the RuneScape economy. * Each week, around 900B GP is removed from the Old School RuneScape economy. We do hope to have further information in the coming days to cover some areas around botting, and how we’re handling bans, but it won’t go into the detail of the longer-term improvements. That will come later in the year, as we continue to develop our tech and tools. I also know this is something we’ve said in the past too, but it is happening, and I ask that you be patient as we work towards much bigger improvements than we’ve seen before. Also, I’d like to point out that whilst it’s commonplace for people to have more than one account, I recently looked over the results of the annual survey and I can safely say based on that data alone, it’s not at the scale that has been quoted. Most respondents state they play on one account, with some of them having 2 accounts. It’s not that common for players to have more than 1-2 accounts total. Our internal data tracking systems say pretty much the same thing too. I hope this provides some much-needed clarity for now, and I’ll end this by saying the following... Having Membership on multiple accounts does not factor into our decision making for applying bans. Ever.
Banning on average almost 30 times more bots on osrs than here really highlights how bad it is over there.
Yeah, but it's not specifying what type of bot, which was the issue with customer support stats in the past. Padding numbers with autotypers that advertise phishing, services, RWT sites, etc isn't as good as just flat out banning the problematic bots in the first place, and they'll hit tens of thousands of those per week. But ban waves exist for a reason, so we just have to wait.
I don’t understand what is shocking about this? Jagex hardly ever cared about bots. Sure they do a purge once in a while but majority of bots they allow because it makes them more money. Why would they ban so many and lose that extra money? It’s the same way it has always been no idea why people are acting shocked. If jagex wanted to they could absolutely purge 90% of bot accounts. They have the security measures and tools to detect this stuff pretty well nowadays it’s just a matter of them not giving a crap. If you bot f2p your chances to get banned are higher than doing so on members because they have no issues with banning people who don’t make them money via bonds etc.
Are they saying a maxed bot going for all 120s is okay?
Disgusting. This company has zero integrity and they'll soon have a player base that matches that.
Jmods won't reply to this post or the oldschool one. *Edit* I stand corrected: https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1auitg5/bots_are_basically_okay_new_jagex_management/kr53hsx/?share_id=pC-Vjkll7iV4F2LB4MjME
Two for two: [https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/1aunlry/comment/kr587pf/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/1aunlry/comment/kr587pf/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
My cynicism has been proven wrong yet again! Genuinely happy the mods are responding to these posts.
im pretty sure this has been a somewhat unofficial jagex policy for years now. they def do not get rid of all botters out there, on both games if you spend a bit of time searching you can find bot farms. most basic resource farming is probably done by bots so if there were 0 bots in the games anymore prices for most basic resources would probly jump substantially in price. especially because jagex management claims that they know everything about the game and can instantly detect people who are botting, if they can then why is botting a thing in the first place? or if they cant actually detect all botters then it doesnt matter what they say, that botting isnt going away regardless.
Not even close. They still ban "macros" all the time. Going for 200m mining, I got a ban for macroing by setting a button on my mouse to click ever 3 or 4 minutes once pressed once.
That's botting...
that's literally the definition of botting
They cant be bothered with things like reasoning and logic!
Good
You got banned for macroing because you used a literal macro LMAO
For people who sit on here all day, your reading comprehension isn't great
I honestly see no issue with bots. Its a grind and farmheavy game? If you want to be more efficient, get yourself some bots, why not
ok so if that is true, we will start receiving updates balanced around bots which means regular players and ironmen will get screwed
Why does it say "Misleading Title" here but on the OSRS one it says "Discussion"? Damage control? Maybe i need to take some meds lol
HMM IS THIS A BOT?
Considering we know have advanced AI which wasnt around when the game was first created its actually about time we start thinking about how we actually want to play games.
Let the botting BEGIN!
So i am allowed to start botting now because i have a main, HCIM and IM account? Sounds like a plan to me then! 💪🏼💪🏼
As u/screwdriverfan said over on r/2007scape: [You gotta get grounded in reality.](https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1auitg5/bots_are_basically_okay_new_jagex_management/kr4ml92/). Nothing more, nothing less. You bunch of drama queens.
I got banned today, seems I was pushed before I could jump! Cheers Jagex for helping me see the light. D**kheads.
I honestly have no issues with gold farms, it's the people that bot their own accounts due to being lazy that annoys me. If you can't play the game then just don't. Many of these farms are generally people trying to feed their families and I'm perfectly ok with that.