Ducking Sick
Active Member
- Joined
- Dec 29, 2010
- Sythe Gold
- 0
- Messages
- 143
Paul, talking about botsHey 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
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
