This story misses that, because an important followup to the point above is that these are not 1player:1charcter types making gold, but owners of bots and bot farms, associated with gold selling farms.
If botting was less prevalent, this would be a non story, and I suspect the reason RuneScape is even in the picture at all, as opposed to some other MMO.
But agreed, their bot detection is horrible. I was botting 1+ action per second for 12+ hours a day for months and was only caught when I made a dumb mistake. Tough though, since there are real players with the same playing habits.
I suspect that machine learning might be the only path forward for tackling these issues but even then sophisticated bots will probably still exist.
Some have played their entire life and bot because they want to get ahead. Others bot because they don't have the freetime. It's complicated. As long as you don't really abuse it, Jagex has never really banned for this stuff. The idea here is that you don't get banned because it means losing a potential life long customer, sometimes they subscribe for a few months on and off but they eventually usually come back. There's a lot to it, in reality it's really obvious. Most of the more advanced ones just send packets, though that's another story and it's very obvious. Jagex just doesn't immediately ban them because well, there's not really a point.
My first thought was, well anything Jagex does is going to have to be server side, right? But I just remembered I recently watched a video on anti-cheat software (i.e. spyware).
Did they make RS2 worse, or is Runelite just that good? I haven't played in literally 15 years.
Not even close to that difficult.
> A huge percent of players use Runelite, a 3rd party launcher, because it provides invaluable tools (the game is near-unplayable without it)
This is a non-point? Bot detection should be serverside.
> Tough though, since there are real players with the same playing habits.
Bring back aggresive/violent random events. Evil chicken, come back!
Do you have any evidence to back up this claim? My understanding is that they have plenty of basic barriers in place but bots have become sophisticated enough that they're no longer able to prevent/detect them with the simple stuff.
Also, the community seems to believe that Venezuelan gold farmers are typically not bots but instead real people doing simple tasks on multiple accounts at the same time.
Anyone whose looked into OSRS botting from the perspective of the botters knows that the "Jagex isn't doing anything" meme is not actually true. It's very easy to get banned and bots have to go to all sorts of absurd means to not get banned quickly and emulate human behavior. Botting tutorial island can even get you banned, which is saying something since bot scripts have had over a decade to evolve.
Now, could it be better? Definitely. But ultimately without locking down the game client more, which would alienate the majority of the playerbase who uses third party clients, it is very difficult to effectively ban bots at a scale that would be appreciated by the playerbase. In just a couple days you can implement some botting capabilities through client plugins, popular bot software has years of manipulating the client, so without a major change to the client it's very hard to ban bots.