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Hey all,
As we all know, Free Trade is on its way in the coming weeks. I have seen a thread posted here outlining some behind the scenes plans to prohibit bots in the Free Trade system. What seemed to be commonly mentioned was the current rollback system, as well as a mass ban to those with regular botting patterns. This is certainly the right way to handle those botting on their main accounts, but this does nothing to prevent those botting on throwaway accounts in order to farm GP. This will undoubtedly be one of Jagex's main challenges with the new update.
Since Free Trade was removed, Jagex fixed a tricky little problem with Runescape. In the past, people would bot on useless characters for profit. By earning GP on these throwaway characters, people could actually make a good amount of money on Runescape. With the trade limits, low level characters had virtually no easy way to transfer. In Bounty Hunter days, you needed to be fairly high level to effectively transfer in the craters. Furthermore, the majority of transfers took place in the Medium / High Level Craters (50+ Combat F2P). This made low level botting unprofitable, and actually served as a great fix to the problem.
When Bounty Hunter was removed, transferring became even more complicated. Eventually, people found ways to manipulate the Grand Exchange to transfer. However, along with the complexity of these Grand Exchange methods, they also required substantial start cash on the sellers (as much as 10 Billion). Once again, this meant that low level botting was not a viable way to earn an income. Despite people botting on their main accounts, Jagex had indeed repaired the issue of creating profit from throwaway characters.
Flash forward to the present, and the problem seems to be right back on the forefront. Jagex is no stranger to it, these low level bots which used to saturate Yew Trees and Essence mines caused a great deal of issues for the company. They would often be paid for with subscriptions from fraudulent sources, which was the true underlying concern at the time. So what has changed now that Jagex feels this problem can be stopped (or at least lessened)?
I believe there will have to be several "tweaks" on the old Free Trade system. Complete freedom does seem to corrupt in-game, and Jagex surely must have done a great deal of research into preventing the use of throwaway bots for profit. I have spent a lot of time wondering about what these might be, and here is what I think Jagex will do:
Limiting New Players' Trade Limits - This focuses around the idea that Jagex will have trade limits in place for newly created characters. This restriction will likely be for a time period of 3-6 months, during which time these new chars will have the usual 5k limit we have today. They actually toyed with this idea at the very end of 2007, and implemented it. If they are able to quickly ban bots, any newly created ones will be useless. They will never be able to get the gold off the account. Jagex has also made some changes to prevent people from creating massive amounts of characters. By forcing attachment of your character to an email address, it becomes much more difficult to simply create mass chars. This will combat the issue of people creating a ton of characters and just waiting for the trade limit to expire.
I think this is the most realistic option so far. Recently, Jagex had a poll on Runescape.com asking how many accounts the average user has. I believe they used this data to create restrictions for how many characters could be created by the same person as well. Other game companies, such as Blizzard, have also been regulating players' account creation. In the game Starcraft 2, players are now forced to play with one account only. In previous Real Time Strategies by Blizzard, such as Warcraft III, players could create as many accounts as they wanted. Because this would interrupt the ladder system, the company took a new approach and restricted players to one account per game copy.
If any of you guys have other ideas, please share them here. I think this was the most pressing issue in Free Trade; many old schoolers remember the old level 3 bots which cheapened the game in the old Free Trade system.
As we all know, Free Trade is on its way in the coming weeks. I have seen a thread posted here outlining some behind the scenes plans to prohibit bots in the Free Trade system. What seemed to be commonly mentioned was the current rollback system, as well as a mass ban to those with regular botting patterns. This is certainly the right way to handle those botting on their main accounts, but this does nothing to prevent those botting on throwaway accounts in order to farm GP. This will undoubtedly be one of Jagex's main challenges with the new update.
Since Free Trade was removed, Jagex fixed a tricky little problem with Runescape. In the past, people would bot on useless characters for profit. By earning GP on these throwaway characters, people could actually make a good amount of money on Runescape. With the trade limits, low level characters had virtually no easy way to transfer. In Bounty Hunter days, you needed to be fairly high level to effectively transfer in the craters. Furthermore, the majority of transfers took place in the Medium / High Level Craters (50+ Combat F2P). This made low level botting unprofitable, and actually served as a great fix to the problem.
When Bounty Hunter was removed, transferring became even more complicated. Eventually, people found ways to manipulate the Grand Exchange to transfer. However, along with the complexity of these Grand Exchange methods, they also required substantial start cash on the sellers (as much as 10 Billion). Once again, this meant that low level botting was not a viable way to earn an income. Despite people botting on their main accounts, Jagex had indeed repaired the issue of creating profit from throwaway characters.
Flash forward to the present, and the problem seems to be right back on the forefront. Jagex is no stranger to it, these low level bots which used to saturate Yew Trees and Essence mines caused a great deal of issues for the company. They would often be paid for with subscriptions from fraudulent sources, which was the true underlying concern at the time. So what has changed now that Jagex feels this problem can be stopped (or at least lessened)?
I believe there will have to be several "tweaks" on the old Free Trade system. Complete freedom does seem to corrupt in-game, and Jagex surely must have done a great deal of research into preventing the use of throwaway bots for profit. I have spent a lot of time wondering about what these might be, and here is what I think Jagex will do:
Limiting New Players' Trade Limits - This focuses around the idea that Jagex will have trade limits in place for newly created characters. This restriction will likely be for a time period of 3-6 months, during which time these new chars will have the usual 5k limit we have today. They actually toyed with this idea at the very end of 2007, and implemented it. If they are able to quickly ban bots, any newly created ones will be useless. They will never be able to get the gold off the account. Jagex has also made some changes to prevent people from creating massive amounts of characters. By forcing attachment of your character to an email address, it becomes much more difficult to simply create mass chars. This will combat the issue of people creating a ton of characters and just waiting for the trade limit to expire.
I think this is the most realistic option so far. Recently, Jagex had a poll on Runescape.com asking how many accounts the average user has. I believe they used this data to create restrictions for how many characters could be created by the same person as well. Other game companies, such as Blizzard, have also been regulating players' account creation. In the game Starcraft 2, players are now forced to play with one account only. In previous Real Time Strategies by Blizzard, such as Warcraft III, players could create as many accounts as they wanted. Because this would interrupt the ladder system, the company took a new approach and restricted players to one account per game copy.
If any of you guys have other ideas, please share them here. I think this was the most pressing issue in Free Trade; many old schoolers remember the old level 3 bots which cheapened the game in the old Free Trade system.
