Runescape Bot Maker Loses Big In Lawsuit

[Trippy Turtle]

I remember when I used to make the default looking character and try to make myself look like a bot.
I wonder if PVP is still good with all the new updates.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

I don't get it, how does affect other players at all? Or even Jagex, for that matter.

 

[weirdee]

I remember when I used to make the default looking character and try to make myself look like a bot.
I wonder if PVP is still good with all the new updates.

After the shakedown, people trolled by dressing as bots and imitating them. It was good for a laugh.

PvP is probably way different than you remember, though.

 

[JoshuaMadoc]

I realize this was all good and necessary and stuff, but damn, they really degraded the people in the company. The public apology, the banning from any Jagex game ...

and having to give up and destroy all their source code and domains... Might as well ask em to just undress in the court room with that last demand.

Don't tell me you wouldn't do the same when you're the victim of relentless heckling and product stealing for almost a decade from a bunch of recurring thugs in Tommy Hilfigers who like to piss on your dog as well?

 

[tthor]

Along with having to fork over an unspecified but inevitably hefty amount of money, Impulse is also forbidden from providing information on how to hack Runescape, its employees are permanently banned from any and all Jagex games and it must transfer ownership of its websites to Jagex and destroy all bot code. It's even legally barred from commenting on the case, although it did issue an apology to Jagex and acknowledge that it was in the wrong.

Ouch. Still, I do hope this sets some kind of precedent. People who use bots/trainers are terrible people and should feel terrible. (Yes, Escapees. I made a blanket statement. COME AT ME, BRO!)

rune scape is a terrible game that should be renamed to grindscape. considering how long it takes to get one skill to 99 let alone 5 or 6. wanna make money go fish farming for 20 hours and rake in the money. wanna get the best armor? well go fish farm or enemy farm till you get enough supplies or money to buy or make the damn thing.

if runescape wasn't so tedious and boring to level up skills there wouldnt be much bot use. and how do bots hurt the company anyways? you still gotta be a member if you want to access all the skills/weapons/armor/world anyways.

thats kinda the point, the game DOESN'T expect you to be maxing out your skills.. if you choose to spend days on end just to do so, be my guest I guess..

tho i won't lie the game did have a lot of damn grinding

 

[Rhatar Khurin]

I didn't even realise this game was still running, i am quite astounded.

 

[Frostbyte]

I don't get it, how does affect other players at all? Or even Jagex, for that matter.

Alright. Let's say you play a mmorpg called "Smorld of Smorecraft". To make money, you mine gold at the mines, then you sell the gold at the marketplace. Then one day, you see a player called IIiIllIIi1llI next to you. He, like millions of other bots, are mining gold with an inhuman efficiency. Hundreds of thousand bots, like this, at all the mines, and all the trees, and all the monsters. Then they sell their gold, and logs, and drops at the market place, driving the prices down, making it harder to make money. Except that, when you are at the marketplace, you see hundreds of "people" spamming the chatbox with messages telling you to "Buy gold at www.smorecraftgold.com!", or "Join the Smokin Mills club to make money!". Never stopping. Never faltering. Lines of code masquerading as humans. Never ceasing hordes of bots, overcoming all moderator attempts to stop them. They cost thousands of players coins, experience, and they cost Jagex, and other gaming companies hundreds of thousands of dollars in quit players.

And that, my friends, is why bots are bad.

 

[Strazdas]

the iBot made one large flaw, and that is rebuildign runescape client in the bot. if it wasnt for that - they would have gotten of "not doing anything illegal".

It's even legally barred from commenting on the case

infringement on freedom of speech much? fascism anyone?

now as far as the game itself, it has outlived its time. there are many better free mmorpgs out there now, and with the changes in runescape i wonder why any people still play it anymore. then again i always knew there were stupid people around, and ofc there are those who live out of leveling up and selling runescape accounts.

 

[MorphingDragon]

Jagex, why don't you fix the legions of automated gold sellers before attacking iBot.

Also, better games exist.

 

[Azarhac]

People whining that Runescape is Grindscape are just pathetic seriously, who the hell cares? People have quit the game for that reason but even I was heavily involved in the game for freaking 7 years and I don't recket anything, I had the best "interwebs" friends and conversations on Runescape and farming and grinding isn't anything too horrible if you are chatting with 3-5 friends at the same time.

The game is fucking fabulous with the best quests, weekly updates and frequent next skills and mini-games and so much random crap to do it can easily have a play-time of 20 000 hours with no trouble, sure it's not a game my now uber graphic desiring mind could handle but it is still a great game if you socialize.

I don't see people bashing on other classic MMO's like Ragnarok / Ultima or DAO so shut up if you don't give a damn.

Edit: Yeah I am heavily biased towards the game surely but it only has 2 real "flaws" which are very outdated graphics and heavy amounts of grinding, everything else is freaking gold and you can't ever prove otherwise.

More Edit: Oh yeah and RS still has the BEST npc-talking system ever created, which is why all other MMOS have disappointed me in that section... fucking rolls of mindless text, so stupid.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

I don't get it, how does affect other players at all? Or even Jagex, for that matter.

Alright. Let's say you play a mmorpg called "Smorld of Smorecraft". To make money, you mine gold at the mines, then you sell the gold at the marketplace. Then one day, you see a player called IIiIllIIi1llI next to you. He, like millions of other bots, are mining gold with an inhuman efficiency. Hundreds of thousand bots, like this, at all the mines, and all the trees, and all the monsters. Then they sell their gold, and logs, and drops at the market place, driving the prices down, making it harder to make money. Except that, when you are at the marketplace, you see hundreds of "people" spamming the chatbox with messages telling you to "Buy gold at www.smorecraftgold.com!", or "Join the Smokin Mills club to make money!". Never stopping. Never faltering. Lines of code masquerading as humans. Never ceasing hordes of bots, overcoming all moderator attempts to stop them. They cost thousands of players coins, experience, and they cost Jagex, and other gaming companies hundreds of thousands of dollars in quit players.

And that, my friends, is why bots are bad.

But if that brings the price of everything down, the smart thing to do would be to buy it all up and re-sell. And I doubt it would cost most MMO's a cent. The subscription fees from all the bots would probably outweigh the money lost. Jegex' case I get, because the game is free. But in most circumstances, I don't see it.

 

[MASTACHIEFPWN]

Mother of God...
People still care that much about this game?
Runescape really has killed-over the past couple of years, and they removed a crap load of stuff that made it cool.

But jesus christ, this brings back memories of the bald guy in the green shirt with a goutee always chopping down the yew trees.

 

[gigastar]

I don't get it, how does affect other players at all? Or even Jagex, for that matter.

1) The player economy.
Runescape has always had a player-run economy. Prices both before and after the Grand Exchange update were largely influenced by how rare they were, how useful they were and how hard said item was to get.

But after the Grand Exchange update, it suddenly became easy to trade any item in high quantities, meaning it just became easier for the gold farmers to off thier goods.

After a couple of months of this the market was flooded with more raw materials than the legitimate players could use. This drove prices right down on those raw materials, but it made gathering those raw materials for a profit a basic waste of time.

2) Jagex's financial issues.
First of all i should say that to my knowledge Jagex was, and certainly [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/115418-Runescape-Bot-Maker-Loses-Big-In-Lawsuit] is not in any sort of financial diffculty.

Ill keep it simple here. It came to light two months ago that over 60% of the active P2P playerbase were bot accounts, and most of those bots were paid for with stolen credit cards.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

I don't get it, how does affect other players at all? Or even Jagex, for that matter.

Ill keep it simple here. It came to light two months ago that over 60% of the active P2P playerbase were bot accounts, and most of those bots were paid for with stolen credit cards.

That was basically the response I was looking for, that makes sense.

 

[Calcium]

I don't get it, how does affect other players at all? Or even Jagex, for that matter.

Alright. Let's say you play a mmorpg called "Smorld of Smorecraft". To make money, you mine gold at the mines, then you sell the gold at the marketplace. Then one day, you see a player called IIiIllIIi1llI next to you. He, like millions of other bots, are mining gold with an inhuman efficiency. Hundreds of thousand bots, like this, at all the mines, and all the trees, and all the monsters. Then they sell their gold, and logs, and drops at the market place, driving the prices down, making it harder to make money. Except that, when you are at the marketplace, you see hundreds of "people" spamming the chatbox with messages telling you to "Buy gold at www.smorecraftgold.com!", or "Join the Smokin Mills club to make money!". Never stopping. Never faltering. Lines of code masquerading as humans. Never ceasing hordes of bots, overcoming all moderator attempts to stop them. They cost thousands of players coins, experience, and they cost Jagex, and other gaming companies hundreds of thousands of dollars in quit players.

And that, my friends, is why bots are bad.

Annnd I'd add that bots take up room on servers which players could be using. I've heard that something like 60% of players were bots or something that got banned in the "bot nuke". That's a lot of money wasted by Jagex running extra servers so legitimate players can actually connect.

 

[Gabriel O'Brien]

And.... unleash the hate for Runescape!!

Seriously, I have some good memories of that game. I loved it, and still do. I don't play it much anymore, but I started playing it about 7 or 8 years ago. It got too tedious to level up (most of my skills were in the 80s or 90s) so I eventually stopped playing regularly. I still pop on for a bit. I think I've still got membership running on my card.

might want to cancel that stuff... that money adds up!

 

[JoshuaMadoc]

I have nothing to worry about, because Australia has the benefit of having the prepaid system where the minimum is AUD$15 for 35 days. No need for crummy PayByPhone shenanigans, just walk to a post office and buy the damn thing at my own whim. Not only that, but the cards are also valid after purchase for a year. Pretty brilliant, at least for me.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Well, you made some interesting points there. But what I don't get is why you seem to hate this game with such a passion.

I hate grind, not Runescape.

I get your point that grinding is a bad thing; I agree, but I also get the point Sovvolf is making that if you don't like it, you don't have to play it.

You're right. I don't have to play it.
But I don't want grind creeping into more games. It's a useless element of gaming that rewards the wrong kind of behavior for both gamers and developers alike.

However, it's also a popular mechanic for service-centric games because it takes an experience and pads it out, which translates directly into more revenue.

F2P games sell this in the form of "convenience", oppressing the players with grind, but offering a way out for a price.
Subscription games give you everything, but keep you playing for longer so that you pay more weekly/monthly subscriptions.

Fortunately, for the time being most games are still in the realm of products, not services.
But if the industry changes its payment model to shift more games to services (some are already starting to transition to that: Diablo 3 will only be online, and features strong incentives for players to grind, though fortunately it's still in transition so there's no subscription fees or F2P bullshit...yet.)

After all, speaking from my own perspective there are a lot of things that I don't like and I have my opinions about those, but that doesn't mean that I have a problem with people playing certain games that I personally don't enjoy.
Do I think Runscape's a bad game? Yes, I would say that the grinding is dispicable. But that doesn't mean that I think it shouldn't have the right to exist, if not as a vent for the developers' creative minds, then for all the people who do enjoy it.

But that's the thing: Developers could express themselves just the same without adding busywork, so why add it at all? It adds nothing!

A sense of progression? I think examples will illustrate my point better.

Super Meat Boy, didn't feel the need to introduce grind into its gameplay in order to provide you with a sense of progression.

Even among RPGs, it isn't necessary.
Nethack doesn't require you to grind if you plan your approach even just a little.

Suikoden 2 used a function that rapidly catches your team up to the enemy group's level (after 5-8 encounters, which you're easily going to get just running through as fast as you can).
And you couldn't "overlevel" very easily either. Grinding would get you MAYBE 4 levels above a region's enemies, but no more. This means that boss fights were actually challenging, and the outcome of each fight depended on your party composition, and how you developed their skills and inventory.

The challenge came from planning and execution. Not just having bigger numbers than the other guy. In a simulation, your abilities to plan and execute are the only accurate representations of your actual gaming "strength"; anyone can grind.

Personally: I find a victory that comes solely from the result of grind is hollow and anti-climatic.

But if you're still insistent that progress on its own is justification, I'll just show you this:
http://progressquest.com/

That is "progress" as a gameplay concept. Form your own opinion.

Actually buying a level 60 character is kind of like some arsehole walking into a Martial Arts dojo with a paid for Black Belt. Real life is a grind specially training, I put hours of effort into getting mine (actually only a yellow belt in the martial arts I do that include belts but that's beside the point) then some guy, the same stedhead mentioned above comes into the gym with his freshly purchased one from a local sports store, would I be jealous? course not, I'd be outraged though. Course the fellow would got the same as these bots and be quickly kicked out of the gym but still... I hope you get my point.

Why would you be outraged or jealous? You have the skills, he doesn't. If you went up against him, you're going to whoop his ass.
Pardon my presumption, but you practice to acquire the skills, not the belt. The belt is just a symbol, not skill itself.

The same cannot be said of the dude who walks in with his new level 60 character and twinked gear. For nearly every MMO I've played, the numbers matter far more than the skills unless the numbers are evenly matched; and that's my point.

When you make time the primary metric of power, you don't end up with even numbers (remember: time spent playing varies between players), and so the skill matters less and less.

The "grind" you talk about in real life (training and conditioning) has genuine benefits besides being able to kick ass. What benefit do you get from grinding in an MMO?
Nothing. It doesn't improve your mind.
"How about in-game skills?"
Fair enough, I'll give you that practice makes perfect.

But if you are bored with the grind, then chances are IT'S NOT A CHALLENGE, YOU ALREADY HAVE THE NECESSARY SKILL. It's just that the game refuses to acknowledge this until you've wasted an arbitrarily large amount of time doing it over and over again.

The problem lies in thus: in a grind-scenario, the PLAYER'S SKILL doesn't increase at the same rate as the CHARACTER'S SKILL (that is, their numbers).

I never had to seriously think about what skills/spells I was going to use when I tried a Priest on the WoW Trial, or my Knight on Ragnarok Online etc unless it was an exceptional circumstance (usually bosses and mini-bosses, or a raid/instance with a neat gimmick, which comprises a TINY FRACTION of the time I spend playing).

Instead, it's spent spending a short time figuring out my approach, and then following that same bloody approach for EVERY encounter...well past the point I had mastered it.
But the further I progressed in every game noted above, I noticed something: my approach and execution mattered less and less as time went on, to the point where it was only the numbers on my character sheet that mattered.
Either I had the numbers to win/survive, or I didn't. Nothing else mattered unless it was a very even matchup, which very rarely occurred.

If I may expand upon your analogy: Grind would be like if you have the skills and conditioning of a Black Belt, but even when you pass the test, you aren't given your Black Belt unless you do it 5 more times.

Why? "Just because".
That's hardly fair, isn't it?

Grind is taking an accomplishment you've already achieved, and stretches it out for no other reason than to waste time. You don't benefit from the added practice, and it's rather boring.
I'm not sure how one can have fun while they're bored, but if you can figure it out, by all means tell me.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Literally your only argument here is that it doesn't matter that botting ruins the in-game economy because it is based on grinding. If that is an issue for you then again I will say the solution is to not play the game. There are people who enjoy the grind, there are people who don't, if you are in the latter group then play a different game.

Sorry, but I'll need more than the "it's subjective" argument. It's hand-waving.
While I agree with "The game is not for you" it in no way addresses my point.

Also, I don't buy into the "people enjoy grinding" argument one bit.
From my personal experience, they ***** about it. Constantly. And with good reason.

Why do people put up with it? Skinner-Psychology. Grind preys upon human behavior that was necessary for survival in real life, but doesn't apply to a simulation.

This has research to back it up, and has actually been shown on this site before.
If you need elaboration, I'll be happy to provide it (in two hours, after class).

Believe me, the game is a million times better now that the bots are gone, and for anyone that relied on bots to play the game, well, Runescape is better off without them. Simply put, the game was not meant for them.

Well, good for them I guess. A game of economics can be great fun (Civilization and most 4X games do this) but I don't agree with which the way MMOs handle it.

 

[C F]

Man, I loved Runescape. I tended to bump into the worse parts of the player-base more often than not, but I know that there are a lot of community-oriented people in there, too. I never played to get all those skills to 99, and I think people who do failed to grasp the spirit of the thing. Besides, I knew I wouldn't have the time. So I did minigames, I quested, I grinded, I dabbled in just about everything it had to offer without focusing too much on any given area. Judging by the amount of time I spent playing, I'd say it's filled its MMO addiction quota. We've had a falling out over the years; it grew away from the game I fell in love with back in 2006. For me, the process started with the removal of Tutorial Island, and ended with Dungeoneering. Ah, but I can reminisce.

I'm not even going to bother trying to justify/condemn botting. They're breaking the Terms of Service. It's that simple. Maybe the end result shown here seems too extreme, but I see this as a great comeuppance for the multitude of bots I've seen over the years. Plus, Jagex is a name I've come to trust through my play experiences, so I'm perfectly fine with how this issue turned out for them. They've got a heck of a staff at HQ, let me tell you.

Hmm, come to think of it, typing this makes me want to start playing again sometime...