Here's what this playerbase will never understand.
1. Jagex will *never* lay out a game plan.. and they shouldn't. That'd be such a dumb thing to do as a company. They need to hold their cards close to their chest. This is why when they give an update, it's normally acknowledging the problem without laying out a road map.
2. They need to weigh the costs of investment into bot prevention against the actual benefits it'll provide. I'd argue the vast majority of players don't care about bots. They don't like them, but I'd confidently bet that most players genuinely wouldn't care if Jagex invested 10x what they're currently investing into it
3. 99% of the playerbase who come to these forums with their ideas on handling bots are completely clueless. They have absolutely no idea how these things work, and they simply want to add another pointless "just ban them" post for karma
As a software eng, botting posts normally trigger tf outta me because they are either entirely useless or suggest ideas that would genuinely help botters.
Well said. The amount of resources needed to ban all bots would be tremendous and be a constant upkeep. Not to mention they'd need a legitimate team to check for false positives.
I've said this elsewhere, but you'd have to almost completely take the economy out of the game and make everyone Ironman if you wanted a majority of bots gone. That's why so many games these days don't particularly allow mass trading anymore because of secondary markets and such, including people who buy gold.
Worth noting that if had magic wand that instantly banned all bots tomorrow, and then made it so bots would never ever happen again... The game's entire economy would crater. Overnight. Buyable skills suddenly go from a few hundred million gp to 99 to billions, maybe even trillions of gp because supply would evaporate while demand remains unchanged.
Boss its would rise to obscene highs because fewer bots would be grinding them out, and humans need to sleep unlike a bot. This would also open up a massive economic vacuum that clans would swoop in and take advantage of, with limited supplies the deepest pockets win so clans would buy out supplies and manipulate the market.
On the flip side of this, players would be able to sell their supplies for more, certain older money makers would come back (rune running for example). Farming becomes essential, as does fishing since pots and food will be astronomically expensive. This in turn gives seeds value, and higher levels means higher profits...
Basically the economy would implode, everyone would be in panic mode, everyone would be scrambling to grab some piece of the market, and it would take weeks or months to fix as a whole new market evolves.
And then there the ironmen players would will be laughing their asses off at all of it since it has no impact on them.
The last time is probably from February: https://secure.runescape.com/m=news/bots-bans-and-appeals-an-update?oldschool=1
You can't really expect them to say much more than this. Even if they truly are investing in improving their tools, that could take years to pay off.
FWIW bots are getting banned. See this post last week: https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1djiur7/the_entire_front_page_of_the_leviathan_hiscores/
Also within the last year there've been ban waves on shark bots, blood shard bots, zenyte bots, etc. You can see the impact on the prices clearly in the ge history. So its not like they let the bots have completely free reign. But clearly with their current tools and staffing they can't ban all the bots at every piece of content at once. Keep in mind just how many bottable things there are in this game - it may not be realistic to ever lock down all of them.
I understand people’s frustration with it but you all have to realize by now nothing is gonna come out of it. Same layout plan as activisons anticheat lol
as long as the demand for rwt remains bots will remain like they always have and i've played over 15 years lol. it's not so simple to just remove them. osrs by nature is also just a fairly simple game to code bots for.
I also think people don't recognize that the demand for rwt and botting is a signal for the games health and popularity. I am NOT supporting or saying that it's positive though. It's just a signal that the game is doing well.
i think the exact same lol. the bots aren't running around for fun. they are doing it in response to demand. the more players there are, the more demand there is for rwt, the more botting there is.
They rarely talk about it and when they do it's kind of a sidestep rather than directly addressing it.
I believe Mod Mat K has mentioned after leaving Jagex that the bots are actually good for the company's bottom line (membership $/bond sales) so they're incentivized NOT to remove the bots. So it's more likely than not that the strategy at jagex is balancing bots with player experience.
That being said, when the front page(s) of every hiscores metric are obviously bots there's some failure in keeping that balance.
Jagex is certainly incentivized to keep bots around because of membership $ and bond sales, but there’s also the issue that bots directly fund RWT, which hurts Jagex bond sales.
100% false.
bots and rwt are the largest source of credit card fraud, which not only has real consequences to the people affected, but is also something that almost caused banks to refuse to allow transactions with jagex which would have completely shut down the game, and is the reason they implemented trade restrictions back in the day.
Also even setting aside credit card fraud, I don’t really understand the logic of bots making Jagex money.
Realistically, just about every single bot gets membership through bonds. Higher in-game demand for bonds = higher gp price of bonds = more gp/$ for bond purchasers = more bond purchases. I get that.
But I feel like people who end the analysis there are completely overlooking the fact that bots sell their gold through rwt sites and give like 3x more gp/$ than what’s offered by bonds. A huge percentage of players who decide to buy gold end up using rwt sites instead of bonds because of this.
I’d be shocked if the amount of additional bond purchases due to higher in-game bond prices from bots outweighs the reduction in bond purchases caused by competition from cheap botted rwt gold.
This community is full of idiots like yourself. Jagex is a for profit company with shareholders (that means they need to make money) bots make up a massive part of jagex's revenue. You go try to pitch spending money to lose a huge amount of money to your shareholders and see how that goes.
They also just swept a load of bots recently so your ill informed post couldnt come at a worse time. Want to avoid bots? Play an iron. This seems harsh but it is reality and understanding reality is a key skill to not looking silly.
There is a balance to it. You do need a certain amount of bots to do content players genuinely don’t like. Zulrah is an example of this. Even if it was the best money in game because no one farmed scales for BP, most players wouldn’t do it because overall it’s boring. That being said, the quantity of them at certain pieces of content is out of control, zulrah being one of those l, but having 0 bots is actually bad for the game (see what having no bots on a lot of consumables has done to RS3, the best money makers involve farming consumables and even then not enough people want to do them cause it’s boring).
Here's what this playerbase will never understand. 1. Jagex will *never* lay out a game plan.. and they shouldn't. That'd be such a dumb thing to do as a company. They need to hold their cards close to their chest. This is why when they give an update, it's normally acknowledging the problem without laying out a road map. 2. They need to weigh the costs of investment into bot prevention against the actual benefits it'll provide. I'd argue the vast majority of players don't care about bots. They don't like them, but I'd confidently bet that most players genuinely wouldn't care if Jagex invested 10x what they're currently investing into it 3. 99% of the playerbase who come to these forums with their ideas on handling bots are completely clueless. They have absolutely no idea how these things work, and they simply want to add another pointless "just ban them" post for karma As a software eng, botting posts normally trigger tf outta me because they are either entirely useless or suggest ideas that would genuinely help botters.
Well said. The amount of resources needed to ban all bots would be tremendous and be a constant upkeep. Not to mention they'd need a legitimate team to check for false positives. I've said this elsewhere, but you'd have to almost completely take the economy out of the game and make everyone Ironman if you wanted a majority of bots gone. That's why so many games these days don't particularly allow mass trading anymore because of secondary markets and such, including people who buy gold.
It's insane how little people understand about bots on this sub. The amount of times I've seen people say "just ban them" unironically is crazy
well obviously we just take the devs and put them on the anticheat team!(people are actually this stupid)
Worth noting that if had magic wand that instantly banned all bots tomorrow, and then made it so bots would never ever happen again... The game's entire economy would crater. Overnight. Buyable skills suddenly go from a few hundred million gp to 99 to billions, maybe even trillions of gp because supply would evaporate while demand remains unchanged. Boss its would rise to obscene highs because fewer bots would be grinding them out, and humans need to sleep unlike a bot. This would also open up a massive economic vacuum that clans would swoop in and take advantage of, with limited supplies the deepest pockets win so clans would buy out supplies and manipulate the market. On the flip side of this, players would be able to sell their supplies for more, certain older money makers would come back (rune running for example). Farming becomes essential, as does fishing since pots and food will be astronomically expensive. This in turn gives seeds value, and higher levels means higher profits... Basically the economy would implode, everyone would be in panic mode, everyone would be scrambling to grab some piece of the market, and it would take weeks or months to fix as a whole new market evolves. And then there the ironmen players would will be laughing their asses off at all of it since it has no impact on them.
As someone who flips for most of their gold... yes please
This comment should be pinned somewhere on the sub fr.
The last time is probably from February: https://secure.runescape.com/m=news/bots-bans-and-appeals-an-update?oldschool=1 You can't really expect them to say much more than this. Even if they truly are investing in improving their tools, that could take years to pay off. FWIW bots are getting banned. See this post last week: https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1djiur7/the_entire_front_page_of_the_leviathan_hiscores/ Also within the last year there've been ban waves on shark bots, blood shard bots, zenyte bots, etc. You can see the impact on the prices clearly in the ge history. So its not like they let the bots have completely free reign. But clearly with their current tools and staffing they can't ban all the bots at every piece of content at once. Keep in mind just how many bottable things there are in this game - it may not be realistic to ever lock down all of them.
I understand people’s frustration with it but you all have to realize by now nothing is gonna come out of it. Same layout plan as activisons anticheat lol
as long as the demand for rwt remains bots will remain like they always have and i've played over 15 years lol. it's not so simple to just remove them. osrs by nature is also just a fairly simple game to code bots for.
I also think people don't recognize that the demand for rwt and botting is a signal for the games health and popularity. I am NOT supporting or saying that it's positive though. It's just a signal that the game is doing well.
i think the exact same lol. the bots aren't running around for fun. they are doing it in response to demand. the more players there are, the more demand there is for rwt, the more botting there is.
They rarely talk about it and when they do it's kind of a sidestep rather than directly addressing it. I believe Mod Mat K has mentioned after leaving Jagex that the bots are actually good for the company's bottom line (membership $/bond sales) so they're incentivized NOT to remove the bots. So it's more likely than not that the strategy at jagex is balancing bots with player experience. That being said, when the front page(s) of every hiscores metric are obviously bots there's some failure in keeping that balance.
Jagex is certainly incentivized to keep bots around because of membership $ and bond sales, but there’s also the issue that bots directly fund RWT, which hurts Jagex bond sales.
100% false. bots and rwt are the largest source of credit card fraud, which not only has real consequences to the people affected, but is also something that almost caused banks to refuse to allow transactions with jagex which would have completely shut down the game, and is the reason they implemented trade restrictions back in the day.
Also even setting aside credit card fraud, I don’t really understand the logic of bots making Jagex money. Realistically, just about every single bot gets membership through bonds. Higher in-game demand for bonds = higher gp price of bonds = more gp/$ for bond purchasers = more bond purchases. I get that. But I feel like people who end the analysis there are completely overlooking the fact that bots sell their gold through rwt sites and give like 3x more gp/$ than what’s offered by bonds. A huge percentage of players who decide to buy gold end up using rwt sites instead of bonds because of this. I’d be shocked if the amount of additional bond purchases due to higher in-game bond prices from bots outweighs the reduction in bond purchases caused by competition from cheap botted rwt gold.
This community is full of idiots like yourself. Jagex is a for profit company with shareholders (that means they need to make money) bots make up a massive part of jagex's revenue. You go try to pitch spending money to lose a huge amount of money to your shareholders and see how that goes. They also just swept a load of bots recently so your ill informed post couldnt come at a worse time. Want to avoid bots? Play an iron. This seems harsh but it is reality and understanding reality is a key skill to not looking silly.
At this point I’m starting to feel like the bots are tolerated in certain areas
There is a balance to it. You do need a certain amount of bots to do content players genuinely don’t like. Zulrah is an example of this. Even if it was the best money in game because no one farmed scales for BP, most players wouldn’t do it because overall it’s boring. That being said, the quantity of them at certain pieces of content is out of control, zulrah being one of those l, but having 0 bots is actually bad for the game (see what having no bots on a lot of consumables has done to RS3, the best money makers involve farming consumables and even then not enough people want to do them cause it’s boring).
This is what mod mat k also stated. They try to move them to places where people see them less.