11-Oct-2011 - Update on our ongoing battle against bots

Dear RuneScape Community,

I would like to take a moment of your time to address the highly emotive issue that we face as a community – bots.

At the beginning of the year, when we brought Free Trade and the Wilderness back, we promised that we would couple that with programmes that would combat the inevitable botting that would result from that decision. Over the last few months we have initiated a number of programmes to do this, some of which we have already mentioned to you, some of which we haven’t because of legal reasons and some because we do not want to warn gold farmers and bot makers about our counter measures.

The challenge for us is that despite all of our programmes and best intentions the problem is still huge and, most annoyingly, still adversely impacting parts of our game.

We are continuing to battle bots on all fronts. In an effort to be more open and transparent we wish to share a couple of measures and initiatives we are about to release/have released recently:

• We have recently improved our internal systems to be able to spot spam from the chat window and instantly mute the offender preventing the constant flow of communication from the gold farmers which are impacting the game experience. Your reports are very helpful to us here!
• Continuing our ongoing legal cases against bot developers.
• Mandatory email validation for new accounts will add extra account security and impair the mass account creation that gold farmers use.

There are several other initiatives and actions that we plan to implement over the next few months and we will share these with you as often and in much detail as we can. The most significant of these is to come soon. Also, we recognise that we have not been the best at communicating what we are doing and that changes today.

While we are winning small battles by spending significant money and resources in trying to combat this problem, the war is not going in our favour as we are struggling to keep up with companies whose only business 24 hours a day 7 days a week is to find ways to get bots into the game. As a result, one thing has become really clear to us despite our ongoing efforts.

We cannot win this battle alone. We need your help.

So how can you help? First, we would like to hear from you in a more coordinated way regarding your thoughts about how to fight the bots problem. We will be developing surveys to help us understand more about bots directly from you... we would love to hear your response.

We would like to set up a special forum where we can have targeted Q&A’s and get formal feedback from you about specific initiatives. We will let you know when this forum is set up and invite you to join us.

We hope that you will engage with and encourage your friends to use any tools that we provide to you that will help us identify and ban the bots like the Spam Filter feature.

And finally, we would ask that you refrain from using bots or supporting gold farmers. If there is not a market, then bots will not exist. As was so eloquently put in a recent post on Tip.it “Standing up to Jagex [by voicing one’s opinion on the botting issue], one might argue, requires a certain amount of courage, but much more is required to stand up to one’s friends”. The player went on to say, “The community needs to stand up for itself by following the rules and shunning those who do not. Lacking customers, the websites that set up the bots will close, and the only botter will be the isolated real player. Ultimately, following the three pillars of the code of conduct that Jagex set up-“Honour,” “Respect,” and “Security” are a responsibility of the players and the community as much as they are of Jagex.”

We are committed to ridding our game of bots. We are committed to providing a more open discussion with you about the real challenges that we face as a result of our efforts. We are committed to involving you more in this war so we can win this fight together.

Most importantly, we are committed to continuing our investment in evolving and making RuneScape a great game to play and an amazing community to be a part of.

Thanks,

Daniel Clough
Chief Operating Officer & Vice President of RuneScape

Dear free players and people who pay us,

We don't know how the hell to solve the bot problem.

Since the beginning of time (or At the beginning of the war), even before Free Trade and the Wilderness were taken out of the game, we tried really hard and said we would solve this...and we failed epically. Over the last few months we have done some stuff to try and defeat bots, but again we have failed. Also, we can't tell you what these things are since we don't want more people botting...but trust us, we are trying really, really, really hard.

The problem is we can't beat the bots and it continues to make the game suck even more with the addition of more bots everyday.

We want to tell you were are making every possible effort (even though we aren't really, it just sounds better than saying we keep failing). In an attempt to regain your trust and quiet you nay-sayers, here's a list of stuff we are trying, but that's not really helping at all:

• This is working towards more the idea we had intended in the first place of a "police state" game where we monitor everything and even ban people who we mistakenly think are cheating rather than worrying about obvious bots. We now actually notice when people are spamming and mute them on the spot. We noticed before and thought about doing something, but we choose to just wait until enough of you complained to us to do something about. We have enough work as it is you know...making money and not turning out lots of updates at a clip in addition to failing to solve the bot problem. Lots of work. Reporting isn't very helpful, but keep doing it anyway cause at least one report of every million gets noticed.
• Trying to go through the courts to get at bot makers, but it's a pain in the butt and not really getting anywhere too soon. Wouldn't really solve the problem anyhow.
• Mandatory email validation just is an extra step to creating an account. Not really hard to do, but at least we can get those lazy gold farmers who don't want to make lots of email accounts.

We plan to try more stuff soon and we might tell you about these as we go. They'll probably fail just like the other things we did, but at least you can see we are trying, and that's what matters, right? Following are last statement, we won't tell you what the soonest thing we are going to do is nor hint at what it might be. Communication sucks on our end, and we'll try better, but don't get your hopes up.

While we put our worst foot forward and sometimes catch bots, we can't stop people from farming. It's pointless to try because that would just dip into our profits more. Rest assured, we have learned something in this entire process.

We cannot win this battle...ever. But you will still play our game if you think we are trying or just because you don't mind the botting problem too greatly yet.

What can you try to do to supposedly solve the bot problem? First, keep ranting at us, but more politely. We don't like being yelled at. We are very sensitive people. We will listen to how you think bots affect the game (even though we already know how) to show that we do indeed listen. Action is something else and costs extra. Listening is free especially since that's all our interns do.

We want to create an entirely new part of the forums directly related to bots. We will call it "The Bot Rant Forum." It's a place you can go to yell and yell to your hearts content where none of our staff will check to see what is being said. It will kind of be like a sandbox for ranters where parents are entirely absent. We will let you know when this forum is made so you can start ranting at the top of your lungs to the empty sky above you. I even came up with this nifty play on an excerpt from a quote from Watchmen that describes the kind of activity that will take place in this forum. "...and all the free players and members will shout "Save us!"... and I'll whisper "no."" Well, we won't completely copy Watchmen. Instead of whispering "no," we just won't say anything as if we didn't even exist or were aware of the problem.

We hope again that you and your friends will try in vain to combat bots cause your efforts are free and cheap and work better than our attempts. So keep trying and we might get somewhere..

And as if we should say this, we ask that you refrain from using bots yourselves or get your gold from people like this. We know you don't mean to support them, you just want to get ahead. We all can understand that. And really, if no one went to gold farmers, botting wouldn't exist (except on individual accounts rather than on a mass scale for profit). Those bots would still exist. As was so eloquently put in a recent post on Tip.it that I randomly Googled since we don't actually read forums ourselves unless need be “Blah blah blah Jagex tries hard, but it's the players who should deal with the problem not Jagex even though it's their game”. The player went on to say, “By not trying to get ahead or getting gold by working for it is the only way we can solve the gold farming problem. Botting will still exist and I don't know what we can do about that. So let's just follow the rules, dudes, and everyone will be happy. Rules are meant to be followed and while we can't force people to follow them, we should certainly try to convince them to follow them. JAG3X RULEZZ!!!” We wholeheartedly agree with this statement and think you players need to try hard to solve this problem to alleviate some of our workload.

We are committed to making money while doing as little work as possible. We are more committed to providing excuses as to why we cannot solve this problem so you can understand our plight and agree that we try hard. We are committed to making you try to win this war since we can't figure out how, yet still take the credit if it is solved by you guys.

The most important thing to take away from this article is this: we are committed to dishing out the smallest and fewest number of updates for the greatest profit and to keeping you guys happy mostly enough and long enough to make even more money.

Thanks for giving us all your monies even though we have never solved botting nor will we ever,

Daniel Clough
Really important dude who drew the short straw of writing up this article even though Mark Gerhard or Andrew Gower should have written it up.
(Also, I get the cool title of Vice President of RuneScape)