Who do OSRS bots damage the most?

Who do OSRS bots damage the most?
I think it’s a really cool problem to attack. Couldn’t find an answer to this question directly so I’ll have to dance a little around it.
Jagex is known for not giving any information about OSRS, probably because someone will find a way to use them to their advantage.

To start we can go with a side question: How do bots affect Runescape economy? We can find an answer to that question if we look at the relatively recent trade restrictions on F2P account that Jagex implemented. Not gonna lie I lost some money there. All commonly boted items went up in price for obvious reasons.

I had a chance seeing a guy make 3 bill OSRS gold just by investing in “Jugs of water” when they were 20 gold and selling them when they were 40 gold. That was really cool.

Now if we ask ourselves a question: Is that spike in item cost good for others? It certainly is if you want to make money as F2P account. But it’s not if you want to let’s say train a skill, supplies for training are way more costly.

As that update demonstrated to us how the economy works with almost zero F2P bots. The situation stabilized in a couple of months. Of course, there were some permanent consequences. For example, there are more P2P bots, I don’t have official information, but from reading on forums and discord chat rooms I see the change. (Maybe I’m wrong. Let’s say I’m not)

Here we are getting to the interesting questions: Who does benefit the most from this change? We know bonds are not on Grand Exchange by default. Someone has to buy them from Jagex for €5.69 and sell them for 4-5 mil OSRS gold. Therefore when we buy a bond on Grand Exchange. Jagex earns €5.69, and now that there are more P2P bots, people are buying more bonds. Well, I think Jagex won here by lowering F2P bots and encreasing P2P bots.

After we have that out of the way we can ask: Who does this increase of P2P bots hurt the most? Let’s take Zulrah for example(Zulrah is mid/high level boss in OSRS). Everyone talks about Zulrah and Zulrah ready botting accounts are pretty popular nowadays. Before an increase in P2P bots, on Zulrah you could earn about 2.2mil OSRS gold per hour, now you can do around 1.8mil an hour. My guess is that all items that Zulrah drops just dropped in price by little. This affects normal players that want to farm some gold, but on the other side it benefits them because some potions, food, and materials are cheaper.

Now that we went through low and mid-level botting, we can talk a little about end game botting. I’m pretty sure there is no such thing as raid bots. And if there is something like that, not everyone can get or buy those scripts. That’s why high-end items are relatively stable.

In the end, it would be nice to shorten this whole journey into a couple of sentences. In some cases, bots could be useful for Jagex because they also require bonds. To normal players, bots can sabotage their gold earnings but help with resources that are cheaper on Grand Exchange. It turns out more bots there is less profit they get. So bots are not sabotaging other players as much as they sabotage themselves.


Those were my deductions. Let’s see other thoughts.

 

Bots add significantly more revenue for Jagex from bonds and codes, especially since they are banned often.

Players who farm the same things that are botted would see decreased returns due to botting, put people who buy those items benefit from lower prices.

 

Hi there

There is no doubt Jagex wins in most of these scenarios as botters buy membership from them, maybe not directly but end up doing so anyway. These accounts are often banned fairly quickly too resulting in the botter making more accounts to add membership to.

Item prices will fluctuate but I don’t see Jagex truely doing everything they can to remove botting as it hurts business. From my perspective it looks as if they are trying to only “control” the botting scene to a point where it doesn’t get out of control but where they can still profit off of it.

 

I think this may be true as well, their detection is probably at the best its been but they likely know how much profit botting and RWT brings to the game.

 

it all just balances out in the end.

e.g. people run WC bots. people WC-ing makes less money /hr, but people who wanted to buy logs can get them for cheaper.

Even with GP prices! Farmers make less money due to lower values of GP, but buyers can buy the GP for cheaper. etc etc