OSRS - Bots, they are back

Bots have always been in Runescape (and other games), but, I have noticed in the last couple of weeks that there are more and more.  Every time I go to the G.E. (Grand Exchange) there are two or more bots advertising various sites for bots.  They think they are clever by using special characters and punctuation to hide the name of the site, but, I a person can recognize the URL it isn't that hard for a script to scan the logs of public conversations to find them too.  Every one I see I report just-in-case there is something new that may get missed.  I have noticed that Jagex has made a minor, but, nice change to the reporting function.  Before I would report and then mute so I wouldn't get 'spammed', but, now mute is part of the reporting function and that is a small AND nice change.  I trust that Jagex is on top of this and in the future do another bot nuke.

In my less-than-humble opinion they should also collaborate with the other gaming companies and see what can be done as a group.  I suspect the bot makers are not just Runescape specific and if the group can shut them down it would improve the game play as players cannot buy/cheat their way to being top tier players.  They also should follow the money.  Who is processing the credit card orders may be pressured into dropping the companies.

The sad thing is that bots will always be around and there is a small core of gamers who will not follow the rules and cheat their way through the game.  They think the goal is to finish all quests, get 99 in every skill, max out their banks and they are wrong.  The goal is explore what is there and the above is the end result of having fun.

Botany Bay - Finally bots get nuked again!

The new bot killing that Jagex is in place and it seems to be working.  I have been able to get on to F2P and I can actually now gather resources without too many problems competing with the bots.  The animation on spam bots is nice and it happens within about two minutes of their going 'live'.  The court itself may be 'lame' for some players, but, it is a nice distraction and I like to be able to choose their final method of being removed permanently from Runescape.  The only thing I can see is that if you are F2P I would recommend that you log on to a F2P world as the cases happens much faster there.  When I was on P2P I would get maybe one bot tried an hour, but, F2P I watched seven within thirty minutes.

It will be interesting to see how long it will take before bots make another comeback, but, I truly hope that they never will.

One of the players watching was commenting that bots are not bad in that they help make materials ready.  I wonder if that was a bot master or user.  I find that bots are extremly annoying in that the spam-bots make reading chat almost impossible or they send you 'private message' without permission.  They also hog resources so that you cannot gather materials and artificially distort prices of raw materials which further discourages players from even try to gather materials to sell so that they can buy other items for progression within the game.  If anyone disagrees with me on this please think of the blue dragons and the bots there.  I had blue dragons as a slayer task and had to cancel as there were at least four bots for every dragon and it would have taken me weeks to finish that slayer task.