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Comment by rcme | Hacker News Reader

An interesting bit of trivia: the first bot (that I'm aware of) to use deobfuscation of the game client was called Aryan. It was quite revolutionary for the cheating community because using the true game state worked so much better than the screen state. I don't know the specifics, but apparently the developers were threatened with legal action from Jagex. As part of their agreement with Jagex, the develoeprs released a new version of the client that sent a -1 up to the server for some field on the user that was always supposed to be positive. Jagex used this to mass-ban everyone who was using the bot.

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Interesting to see this story here, I didn't know enough of that info was public to even end up here. (You have to be someone I know/know of, right?)

Basically true, though:

- Aryan wasn't the first clientmod, not even the first to deob - probably the first to go fairly 'mainstream' and end up being well known outside the circle of people using it, though (being free probably helped here)

- No legal action, tbh. Well, the same amount of legal action that all of the cheating scene got (some C&D's, domain takedown attempt type stuff at various times, but not the scary kind of legal action in the way other bots got)

- The banwave backdoor did happen, and basically as you say (iirc it was the actual UID but negative, rather than -1) but was more of a conscious decision, there wasn't an 'agreement' beforehand - it was proactively taken. Jagex were informed about it in order to detect it though, as far as I'm aware.

> (You have to be someone I know/know of, right?)

Doubtful. I was just a kid at the time who lurked on forums. Were you involved in the scene? If yes, do you mind if I ask what you ended up doing professionally? RS cheat developers were my role models growing up. I’ve often wondered what members of that community are up to now.

Yep, I used the nick 'Mopman' then, if you remember that name at all. Kind of appropriately for the name, I was mostly a janitor :D Admin @ Moparscape and the public Aryan channels, there's a few commits of mine in the bot but I definitely can't take credit for most of the bot itself, that was other peoples work. I did make few releases of it after the banwave incident you mention, though quickly passed that torch on (it was a lot of hassle, tbh).

Professionally nowadays I'm a pen tester/security consultant.

That's so cool. I'm star struck. I haven't thought about RuneScape in a very long time, but this thread has made me overcome with a bitter sweet sense of nostalgia. I knew so little about programming back then, so people who could manipulate this game I loved with their own code were like gods to me. The whole experience made a very strong impression on me. Thank you!

That later turned into iBot, and then rscheata https://secure.runescape.com/m=news/jagex-vs-ibot--anti-bot-...

Worked on contributing a lot to that project, became my first (semi) open source contributions, and the scripts were my first forays into selling my work :)

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