]I've been getting asked a lot lately, "XYZ says bots which use vision will be destroyed next, should I be worried?"
The answer: No. Keep enjoying your RS and RiD, that's what it's all about. We've been successfully adapting to changes in RS for 4 years, so don't let wild speculation from biased sources bother you.
Bots which read data take Jagex on, on Jagex's turf, and because of that they are vulnerable to Jagex updates. RiD and bots like ours are standalone applications and are more free of Jagex's influence. 'Reflection bots' (as I will refer to them) used to go down a few hours every RS update, whereas bots like ours would go down for a few hours 1 in every 100+ updates.
90% of what makes up a RiD bot is under the hood, 0% is Jagex's code, and the 10% which involves looking at the screen is easy to update. For example, when Ivy's were made invisible on Bot Nuke day it took me about 20 minutes to code the bot to find ivy through spacial awareness instead of color (however ivy was made visible again before I could implement that). Colors are constantly changing in RS, making those color changes more aggressive, or introducing a night/day cycle, making thing invisible, may result in us having to adapt, but does not make it permanently un-readable.
Making graphics more confusing isn't a deterrent to botting, because a computer can see what is on-screen better than a human can, and creating confusing graphics only damages a game. For example, a lot of players complained when ivy became invisible on Bot Nuke day, so much so, Jagex reverted back to visible ivy within a few days.
Jagex's expectation was not to 'Nuke' every botter, but 98%. Which is interesting because RiD users actually made up 0.2% of bots seen in-game before bot-nuke. That's from analysing the number of total players online in RuneScape before and after the nuke, it seems Jagex based their estimate on community size (average number of people online during peak times on each of our forums pre-bot-nuke, Powerbot 1.5k, RSBuddy 2k, all the Nexus sites combined 1-2k, RiD 100, SCAR 100 - which puts RiD at around 2%). However 'reflection bots' yielded a far greater number of bots in-game, per person on forums, because of a wide selection of free bots, multi-client support, and the fact there were a lot of farmers using them, even using bots to launder money for RWT...
Jagex have (at least for now) done an even better job of stopping real world traders than they realize. I'm not convinced the damage done since the RWT epidemic can ever be repaired, it is now 10 times harder to earn enough to buy a partyhat than it was this time last year... but since Bot Nuke, the markets are showing signs of recovery and you can't argue the game has gone back to the social experience it used to be, overnight. Reflection bots were 90% ftp according to Jagex, and most popular with gold farmers. Our members are 98% paying members of RS, generally older gamers who work or study full-time, want to be competitive but need a bit of help. The gold farmers were the big problem, and I believe Jagex are a lot more concerned in keeping them out the game, than they are about the remaining 0.2%.
Beyond Bot Nuke, Jagex have added right-click reporting and say their focus will be tackling the root causes of people using bots like grind, and any graphical changes they make should be aimed at improving the game, not making things harder to read... which would probably be more detrimental to human players than bots.
tl;dr
I do expect RS to change and improve graphically, but you can't make graphics unreadable without making it impossible for a human to play.
For as long as the gameplay is long and repetitive, and there are people who need a bit of help with RS, there will be bots.
Clusterflutterer vs 'Screen-Scraping' Bots
