5 ms·

An important point is that Jagex has no ability to deal with bots. The simplest anti botting measures are not implemented, at all. This story misses that, beca

• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• sosodev 3y ago
  > The simplest anti botting measures are not implemented, at all. Do you have any evidence to back up this claim? My understanding is that they have plenty of basic barriers in place but bots have become sophisticated enough that they're no longer able to prevent/detect them with the simple stuff. Also, the community seems to believe that Venezuelan gold farmers are typically not bots but instead real people doing simple tasks on multiple accounts at the same time.
  • vesrah 3y ago
    While not directly related to your question, back in the day (like 2002-2003 or something) Jagex added fatigue in attempt to combat botting. The solution was an addition to the botting client that encoded the captcha image and dumped it into an IRC channel. There was a second client called Sleepwalker, iirc, that read the encoded captcha images from IRC, a user would type the captcha text, and the client would put the decoded text back into the IRC channel for the bot client to pick up and use. There was basically a credit system so you had to spend some time typing others captchas so yours would be decoded by others.
  • TheFreim 3y ago
    > Do you have any evidence to back up this claim? Anyone whose looked into OSRS botting from the perspective of the botters knows that the "Jagex isn't doing anything" meme is not actually true. It's very easy to get banned and bots have to go to all sorts of absurd means to not get banned quickly and emulate human behavior. Botting tutorial island can even get you banned, which is saying something since bot scripts have had over a decade to evolve. Now, could it be better? Definitely. But ultimately without locking down the game client more, which would alienate the majority of the playerbase who uses third party clients, it is very difficult to effectively ban bots at a scale that would be appreciated by the playerbase. In just a couple days you can implement some botting capabilities through client plugins, popular bot software has years of manipulating the client, so without a major change to the client it's very hard to ban bots.
• sidvit 3y ago
  Most of the gold farmers for osrs are just people manually playing the game, especially WRT Venezuela. There's bots for sure, and jagex has come up with good ways to combat some of them, but with gold farmers they can't really do anything about it until they sell the gold.
• soared 3y ago
  Most venezulean golf farms are actually humans, rather than the bots. But Jagex is slowly making progress on a problem thats really difficult. A huge percent of players use Runelite, a 3rd party launcher, because it provides invaluable tools (the game is near-unplayable without it). Jagex is working hard to improve their launcher to the level of Runelite, and then they'll be able to implement much better client side botting detection (since currently its all server side). But agreed, their bot detection is horrible. I was botting 1+ action per second for 12+ hours a day for months and was only caught when I made a dumb mistake. Tough though, since there are real players with the same playing habits.
  • sosodev 3y ago
    Yeah, that's the tricky part. There are some unbelievably dedicated OSRS players that will do high intensity (1+ action per second) stuff for several hours a day. So how do you differentiate those from bots? I suspect that machine learning might be the only path forward for tackling these issues but even then sophisticated bots will probably still exist.
    • throwaway33381 3y ago
      This problem was researched over a decade ago. It's not really complicated, human interactions are different from bots you can't really create human like responses and for botters there is no incentive to really do so. Jagex just doesn't really ban them because there isn't really a point, people bot for a variety of reasons. Some have played their entire life and bot because they want to get ahead. Others bot because they don't have the freetime. It's complicated. As long as you don't really abuse it, Jagex has never really banned for this stuff. The idea here is that you don't get banned because it means losing a potential life long customer, sometimes they subscribe for a few months on and off but they eventually usually come back. There's a lot to it, in reality it's really obvious. Most of the more advanced ones just send packets, though that's another story and it's very obvious. Jagex just doesn't immediately ban them because well, there's not really a point.
  • voz_ 3y ago
    > But Jagex is slowly making progress on a problem thats really difficult Not even close to that difficult. > A huge percent of players use Runelite, a 3rd party launcher, because it provides invaluable tools (the game is near-unplayable without it) This is a non-point? Bot detection should be serverside. > Tough though, since there are real players with the same playing habits. Bring back aggresive/violent random events. Evil chicken, come back!
• TZubiri 3y ago
  Fun fact. Most botters use http/tcp proxies, but the game runs as a process, which means jagex could just send an ip packet along an http packet to detect ip diffs and detect botters. More solid proxy tech like ipsec vpns are expensive, so people just use the cheap proxies.
  • costco 3y ago
    I'm surprised that from the discussion here it seems like there's no clientless bots in Runescape. Is it one of those games where they change the protocol up every week to prevent that kind of thing? Also if they used plain IP like you said couldn't botters just spoof the source header to whatever the proxy address is instead of their actual address?
• qumpis 3y ago
  More sophisticated bots at scale exploit weaknesses of the anti-cheating system, such as running bots on mobile devices, which helped to get around their detectikn. But otherwise botting is not trivial if you run more than a few accounts.