6 ms·

Its always surprised me that software engineering hasn't been an outcome of the venny/rs situation. OSRS is incredibly easy to write complicated bots for, but t

by soared 3y ago

Its always surprised me that software engineering hasn't been an outcome of the venny/rs situation. OSRS is incredibly easy to write complicated bots for, but the vast vast majority of gold farms are still just humans playing accounts. Seemingly it would make sense to have one of your farmers learning software/automation, as with not very much software experience I had a bot doing a top 10 moneymaker in the game, making the equivalent of ~3 Venezuelan farmers.

sosodev 3y ago
I'm sure plenty of Venezuelans are running bots. It seems that manual gold farming is done because it's less likely to result in bans. If they're patient enough to make it to end game content before selling the gold they might actually make way more than the bots would just due to the crazy exponential scaling of profit rates.
- throwaway33381 3y ago
  No that's not it. There's a limited number of servers or worlds, the profitability for certain things doesn't scale when you're competing with other players. Writing bots doesn't work because the cost of electricity soon outscales profits for many things. You'll often see certain bot farms running doing specific tasks that the game needs to run the economy, in a sense Jagex uses them to save on labor costs.
  - andai 3y ago
    Wait, are you implying Jagex itself is using bot farms? Couldn't they just change a line of code in the game, or are they that committed to realism? ;)
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - robby_w_g 3y ago
      Jagex is not using bot farms, they’re relying on gold farmers to produce in game resources. The Old School RuneScape economy relies on these gold farmers because most players don’t want to take the time to gather the resources themselves. Most players purchase resources from the games global market, the grand exchange, with the money going to both gold farmers and regular players. Theres another aspect though, and this is where the gold farmers make their real life money: They sell their in game gold to players who are essentially cheating by trading real life money in exchange for large sums of in game money. These players then use this in game money to more quickly level up skills. I’m not sure Jagex can clamp down on this cheating without breaking their in game economy. As a side note, there’s a fairly popular game mode in OSRS called Iron Man where you’re forced to acquire resources purely via the tedious game mechanics instead of purchasing via the grand exchange. It’s a bit masochistic, but I enjoy it personally.
      - rot13xor 3y ago
        Real life money for gold is sanctioned by Jagex if done through bonds. Bonds are about 3x more expensive than the black market but bonds can't get you banned because Jagex gets a cut.
        andai 3y ago
        That's one hell of a tax!
  - wswope 3y ago
    Power draw from a desktop running 16 RuneScape clients ≈ 500W @ $0.13/kW h ≈ $0.07 Reasonable profit/hr from botting ≈ 4M/hr/account ≈ $1/hr/account ≈ $16
    - qumpis 3y ago
      4M per account per hour is top tier profit making in the game. Nobody would run 16 accounts on a single desktop. It would require to buy proxies and take care of the caching checks of accounts used on the desktop, which is not something a novice would do
      - wswope 3y ago
        My point is that power cost is absolutely not the bottleneck, but to address the rest of your comment: 4M is actually relatively low endgame profit per hour. I haven’t touched the botting scene since 2012, but I run 9 merching accounts on the same box. I have a custom Runelite launcher to manage cache/windows/plugin data, and it’d still be under 20 lines of simple bash to add proxying. Botters routinely run far more than 16 accounts on the same box by running the game in Android VMs with a lot of graphical rendering disabled. SOTA afaik is to pick up a few wireless hotspots with IPs behind CGNAT, and lock clusters of accounts to common IP pools.
        rivid 3y ago
        Know any resources for reading more about present / old solutions? Was into this scene a while ago, interested to see where it has evolved since
        wswope 3y ago
        Sadly, I don’t know any good references; everything’s a bit more underground these days IME. I hang out on flipping discords, and that’s how I’ve run into/chatted with a few people who were still in the botting scene.
        qumpis 3y ago
- neurobama 3y ago
  Don't know if they're Venezuelan, but some botters are now using LLMs to simulate human conversation in-game and avoid bans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbTsHEPMQoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbTsHEPMQoo
opportune 3y ago
I highly doubt gold farms are fully human. Most likely they are human-proctored for things like solving bot-detection events, transferring gold, getting things unstuck. As you mention, bots exist, why the hell would they not use existing crude bots to make themselves more efficient? I assume one of the biggest challenges with scaling botting is that the traffic is really hard to conceal and sameish. You’d have a bunch of users either connecting from a fixed pool of IPs (and you can check where these are and if they belong to a cloud/datacenter pretty easily), sharing IPs, or swapping IPs much differently from how a human would. And even with noise injected, the high level behavior would be extremely similar across accounts. Plus with enough skills to work around all these things you are almost certainly better off doing better things to make money… Do you have a source as to gold farming being fully done by humans?
- TheFreim 3y ago
  > I highly doubt gold farms are fully human. You'd be correct. Bot farms often use human mules to pick up the gold, then they use human intermediaries to sold the gold to (who in turn operate gold selling operations, everything is pretty specialized). > Do you have a source as to gold farming being fully done by humans? From past experience, there are fully human gold farms since sometimes it has been cheaper for people to hire poor people from the third world for slave wages and it helps avoid bot detection. Most setups are hybrids, someone willing to run a gold farm is also likely running bots, humans, and hybrid as covered above.
qumpis 3y ago
It gets quite complicated once you need to scale: your bot needs to be dynamic through a timespan of months to mimic human behavior, you need accounts that don't give off money farmers' vibes. Getting an account on higher-level activities banned is very costly.

by soared 3y ago

sosodev 3y ago

I'm sure plenty of Venezuelans are running bots. It seems that manual gold farming is done because it's less likely to result in bans. If they're patient enough to make it to end game content before selling the gold they might actually make way more than the bots would just due to the crazy exponential scaling of profit rates.

throwaway33381 3y ago
No that's not it. There's a limited number of servers or worlds, the profitability for certain things doesn't scale when you're competing with other players. Writing bots doesn't work because the cost of electricity soon outscales profits for many things. You'll often see certain bot farms running doing specific tasks that the game needs to run the economy, in a sense Jagex uses them to save on labor costs.
- andai 3y ago
  Wait, are you implying Jagex itself is using bot farms? Couldn't they just change a line of code in the game, or are they that committed to realism? ;)
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - robby_w_g 3y ago
    Jagex is not using bot farms, they’re relying on gold farmers to produce in game resources. The Old School RuneScape economy relies on these gold farmers because most players don’t want to take the time to gather the resources themselves. Most players purchase resources from the games global market, the grand exchange, with the money going to both gold farmers and regular players. Theres another aspect though, and this is where the gold farmers make their real life money: They sell their in game gold to players who are essentially cheating by trading real life money in exchange for large sums of in game money. These players then use this in game money to more quickly level up skills. I’m not sure Jagex can clamp down on this cheating without breaking their in game economy. As a side note, there’s a fairly popular game mode in OSRS called Iron Man where you’re forced to acquire resources purely via the tedious game mechanics instead of purchasing via the grand exchange. It’s a bit masochistic, but I enjoy it personally.
    - rot13xor 3y ago
      Real life money for gold is sanctioned by Jagex if done through bonds. Bonds are about 3x more expensive than the black market but bonds can't get you banned because Jagex gets a cut.
      - andai 3y ago
        That's one hell of a tax!
- wswope 3y ago
  Power draw from a desktop running 16 RuneScape clients ≈ 500W @ $0.13/kW h ≈ $0.07 Reasonable profit/hr from botting ≈ 4M/hr/account ≈ $1/hr/account ≈ $16
  - qumpis 3y ago
    4M per account per hour is top tier profit making in the game. Nobody would run 16 accounts on a single desktop. It would require to buy proxies and take care of the caching checks of accounts used on the desktop, which is not something a novice would do
    - wswope 3y ago
      My point is that power cost is absolutely not the bottleneck, but to address the rest of your comment: 4M is actually relatively low endgame profit per hour. I haven’t touched the botting scene since 2012, but I run 9 merching accounts on the same box. I have a custom Runelite launcher to manage cache/windows/plugin data, and it’d still be under 20 lines of simple bash to add proxying. Botters routinely run far more than 16 accounts on the same box by running the game in Android VMs with a lot of graphical rendering disabled. SOTA afaik is to pick up a few wireless hotspots with IPs behind CGNAT, and lock clusters of accounts to common IP pools.
      - rivid 3y ago
        Know any resources for reading more about present / old solutions? Was into this scene a while ago, interested to see where it has evolved since
        wswope 3y ago
        Sadly, I don’t know any good references; everything’s a bit more underground these days IME. I hang out on flipping discords, and that’s how I’ve run into/chatted with a few people who were still in the botting scene.
      - qumpis 3y ago
neurobama 3y ago
Don't know if they're Venezuelan, but some botters are now using LLMs to simulate human conversation in-game and avoid bans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbTsHEPMQoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbTsHEPMQoo

opportune 3y ago

I highly doubt gold farms are fully human. Most likely they are human-proctored for things like solving bot-detection events, transferring gold, getting things unstuck. As you mention, bots exist, why the hell would they not use existing crude bots to make themselves more efficient? I assume one of the biggest challenges with scaling botting is that the traffic is really hard to conceal and sameish. You’d have a bunch of users either connecting from a fixed pool of IPs (and you can check where these are and if they belong to a cloud/datacenter pretty easily), sharing IPs, or swapping IPs much differently from how a human would. And even with noise injected, the high level behavior would be extremely similar across accounts. Plus with enough skills to work around all these things you are almost certainly better off doing better things to make money… Do you have a source as to gold farming being fully done by humans?

TheFreim 3y ago
> I highly doubt gold farms are fully human. You'd be correct. Bot farms often use human mules to pick up the gold, then they use human intermediaries to sold the gold to (who in turn operate gold selling operations, everything is pretty specialized). > Do you have a source as to gold farming being fully done by humans? From past experience, there are fully human gold farms since sometimes it has been cheaper for people to hire poor people from the third world for slave wages and it helps avoid bot detection. Most setups are hybrids, someone willing to run a gold farm is also likely running bots, humans, and hybrid as covered above.

qumpis 3y ago

It gets quite complicated once you need to scale: your bot needs to be dynamic through a timespan of months to mimic human behavior, you need accounts that don't give off money farmers' vibes. Getting an account on higher-level activities banned is very costly.