Paul, talking about bots

Hey guys. There's some thread on ROF that got bumped and has an interesting thing from Paul that I hadn't seen before. Basically says reporting players is their main way of catching us.

30-Sep-2010 10:02:28
Last edited on 30-Sep-2010 10:07:20 by Paul
We ban people caught botting permanently.
we do ban thousands each month.
We have detection systems, which do various things.

The bot writers will continually upgrade their bots to try and get round our detection, we continually upgrade our detection systems to combat this. (and still are doing)
It's a bit of an arms war in a lot of ways and a continual drain on our programming resources which I'm sure could have been used for other more entertaining purposes. If we'd not touched it in 6 years things would be a lot worse now.
Our systems are actually very advanced on this front compared to other games, largely because we have been targeted by rulebreakers on this front a lot compared to other games, (comes with being the largest free to play game I guess) unfortunately this has resulted in the bots becoming pretty advanced too - I think some bot writers like the challenge of continually evolving adversary .

I can't go into a lot of detail of how our detection systems work as it does (and has in the past) give the bot writers information to program round what we do.
Our bans of bots have always been a mixture of automatic and manual banning.
Reporting bots does help a lot, as some of the more robust detection methods do involve manual checking of information and with millions of accounts to check through, reports do help us decide which ones to focus on.

Some of the random events the bots figured out how to get around a long time ago, when it was getting to the stage that the events were more of an annoyance to the ordinary players than to the bots(as was the case with the deadly ones) then we needed to consider their place in the game. Most players I've spoken to support the removal of the deadlys

We do take bots seriously, we've done some pretty drastic things over the years against them, including a number of highly unpopular gameplay updates that we really didn't want to do. (believe me most of our developers would have preferred to work on things that they get player praise for)
Paul

Jagex Mod

30-Sep-2010 11:00:45
Last edited on 30-Sep-2010 11:03:11 by Paul
We do have staff dedicated to banning bots.

Sometimes staff go into game to ban bots, but not that often as to be honest this is mostly just useful for publicity that we ban bots, than an efficient way of dealing with them.

It is somewhat less efficient than checking logs of reported characters behind the scenes.
It's hard to tell hundred percent just by looking at someone in game to determine if they're botting, not talking isn't enough on it's own.
I've certainly been in the situation of being in a very busy clan chat which spams up my screen, then clicked back to my chat tab to see that there was someone earlier accusing me of being a bot.
So when we do in game checks, they've tended to been more intensive than just talking to people and seeing if they answer.

Going in game to ban bots visibly, also means that you will inevitably be asked all sorts of questions from players in the area, which tends to distract one from the actual task of bot banning.

I.P banning just isn't reliable, there's still dial up providers which change your i.p each time you dial up, plus many other ways to change your i.p.

Random story for you. I remember when I was playing a MUD (MUDs were basically early text based MMOs) back in about 1996 from the university computer labs. One guy managed to misbehave enough to get the computer lab i.p banned for the purposes of creating new characters on that MUD.
Ironically he was the one who also had diallup at home. So the effect of the i.p ban was the rest of us , who hadn't done anything wrong needed to go to this guy if we wanted to create a new character.

If it was a simple case of ban their i.p and it'll stop them from coming back, believe me it would have happened in 2001/2002.




QFC: 14-15-6-61731223

 

Sorry, but this is 100% BULLSHIT. If they had detection software, you wouldn't see so many bots get away with there stats. Nuff said, JaGex FAILS at everything they try to do against bots.

 

did you read the whole thing?

 

Yes I read the whole thing..

 

Typical botter...

 

Lmao, never botted, nor never will, dont see the point in getting the stats/wealth/ect roll backed.

 

so you think they'll fail catching botters, yet you're afraid to bot? Does not make sense in my head

 

Obviously, bullshit.

 

Wow, nice find. Do realize it's from September, though.

 

Read the whole thing.

Still have a bot farm.

Come at me Jagex.

 

I've noticed in the area that I bot 90% of my reports are from other people (some I assume some are fellow members here) who are setting up there bots. Since I run over 100 I always have to check them and over the past few months i've watched so many people accuse me of botting. I then wait about 10-20 minutes and start talking to them and they do not respond and end up being there for days just like me. I know what I am saying is a little off topic but wanted to share this little rant of mine

 

This c/p is so old and so full of bullshit.

1) fagex cannot detect bots
2) fagex can only tell if you are botting via reports
3) fagex most likely need multiple reports of you doing the same thing over and over to ban you.

 

Jagex makes these statements all the time, all bull.

 

Old news is old. And they dont ban bots permanently they give macroing minors to some people who bot.

 

i read this like last week i found it funny=)

 

Jagex has a detection method that logs mouse movement, camera movement and most likely other things such as mouse click hotmaps etc.
Problem for them is current bots don't get caught by that detection.

 

Botters will always be one up on Jagex.
There's a lot more botting sites than their are Jagex Employees. So Jagex will always be trying to catch up in the bot war.

Another load of crap from mark mod

 

That was Paul, Andrew's brother(Developing rs from the beginning) not Mod Mark...

 

It's funny how you guys imply "not botting", as if it's a bad thing, when you are on a site where more than 80% of RSGP transferred is due to bot farms and personal bots. Hundreds of trillions of gold has been botted and transferred throughout Sythe over the years and some of the users have gained an income due to this market and you act as if you're too good for botting. It's funny.

Typical Non-botter.

 

I bot, wat u talkin bout