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Comment by OsrsNeedsf2P | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact, Jagex (the makers of RuneScape) were very close to acquiring OSBuddy (a closed source Runelite competitor) and shutting Runelite down, but Runelite blew up in popularity weeks before the agreement to buy OSBuddy finalized. When Jagex finally told Runelite to close doors, the community retaliated big time, and Jagex+Runelite came to a compromise [0].

[0] https://runelite.net/blog/show/2018-05-16-Update-RuneLite-th...

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For those unfamiliar, it's worth pointing out the OSRS team at Jagex operates pretty differently from most game companies. Nearly every change made to the game is run past the community in the form of in-game polls. Generally, the dev team doesn't build things that the community doesn't want.

OSRS came to be after years of updates and changes to RS3 which slowly alienated the original base. Now, what was originally a reboot of a 2007 backup of the source has hugely eclipsed the original in popularity. Pretty great story.

It is unusual that they allow custom clients in a pvp game, though.

Its not primarily a pvp game, theres pvp stuff you can do but the overwhelming majority of the game doesn't have any pvp.

True, it's not exactly Counter-Strike, but PvP is an important (although optional) aspect. But I'm not sure if it makes any difference.

It definitely makes a difference, there are some runelite plugins (both allowed and against the rules) which make pvp easier for those using them. I think almost all players think that the improvements to the game we get from plugins outside pvp are worth the negative aspects of their use in pvp.

There are also straight up bots people use sometimes in pvp which aren't possible for any human to fight. They can react to what you do instantly and perfectly, you can't really touch them. They're very rare though, the people who are capable of making them keep them expensive and uncommon.

This is also the game that make a big spectacle out of banning players who get caught using bots because it’s such a problem

I would say "players" using bots is a fairly minor problem. The overwhelming majority of the bots around are from people making money out of them. I'm not sure if many of these people really play the game.

For people who don't play the game it might be hard to understand the scale of the botting problem. Recently the majority of the top 100 accounts in the highscores for killing a boss called leviathan got banned. Its not unlikely that in the top 100 there was one real human (who went fron rank 77 to rank 14 in the highscores because so many who were ahead of him got deleted).

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