SRL Archive - Bot Information and Spottings

Population crashed at around 10 UTC today; I am assuming it was a server restart for a small cache update. Most of the population rejoined quickly. Then you see the group of ~30k players that did not come back; what do you think happened to them?

I think most of those would be people using bots that stop their script when the "System Update" message appears (aka most of them). There might be a small group of people who decided to not rejoin because they realized they had real-life stuff to attend to, but I can assume those that didn't come back within 30 minutes were botters.

Just some food for thought about the massive botting problem. :garfield:

I thought there's more bots : D

Do you know someone who doesn't bot in person?

I think that seems like a small number of bots myself, but then again 30,000 is still a huge number of bots running at one time.

There are mass numbers of bots, but I've been seeing less of them as of lately. Maybe it has to do with new detection methods released or soon-to-be released, I'm sure we'll know soon enough. I'll be browsing the forums for recent complaints of lots of people being banned.

Do you think you could record player statistics on every world? I would like to see them, but I don't have a computer I can run 24/7 (yet). Also what are you using for graphing?

From: R0b0t1
Do you think you could record player statistics on every world? I would like to see them, but I don't have a computer I can run 24/7 (yet).

Also what are you using for graphing?

I could. It would not be worthwhile though, and it would probably make Jagex mad as well (they request you not load the world list at a set time, and that you only do it when a user requests it, as it probably uses quite a bit of their CPU time).

I am using rrdtool + Perl. Runs every 5 minutes.
Perl side (queries player count, adds to RRDatabase):

#!/usr/bin/perl
use LWP::Simple;

$print_flag = shift;

my $content = get("http://www.runescape.com/title.ws");
$content =~ s/(.*)<span id="playerCount">(.*) people currently online//gi;
$content = $2;
$content =~ s/,//gi;

print $content . "\r\n";

if ($print_flag)    {
    print "rrdtool update /rrd/rsplayers.rrd N:$content\n";
}

print length($content)." length\r\n";

if (length($content) > 1) {
`rrdtool update /var/lib/rrd/rsplayers.rrd N:$content`
} else { print "le fail!\r\n"; }

Bash side (creates the actual graphs using the .rrd files):

#!/bin/bash

rrdtool graph /var/www/harry.lu/files/rrdtool/rsplayers_daily.png    \
        --title "1-day RuneScape Players Online"              \
        --width 600                                     \
        --height 350,                                   \
        --start -86400                                   \
        --vertical-label "players currently connected"           \
        --no-legend \
        -E \
        -W "Created at `date` on Harry.lu" \
        DEF:nc=/var/lib/rrd/rsplayers.rrd:connections:AVERAGE    \
        AREA:nc#32CD32                                   \
        LINE1:nc#336600

rrdtool graph /var/www/harry.lu/files/rrdtool/rsplayers_weekly.png   \
        --title "1-week RuneScape Players Online"             \
        --width 600                                     \
        --height 350,                                   \
        --start -604800                                  \
        --vertical-label "players currently connected"           \
        --no-legend \
        -E \
        -W "Created at `date` on Harry.lu" \
        DEF:nc=/var/lib/rrd/rsplayers.rrd:connections:AVERAGE    \
        AREA:nc#32CD32                                   \
        LINE1:nc#336600

Crontab:

*/5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/rrd_rsplayer.pl > /dev/null 2>&1 && /usr/local/bin/rrd_rsplayer.sh > /dev/null 2>&1

I could probably make them all into one file, but I am le lazy!

I noticed this on Wednesday; however, I believe my bot was on a break when the system update ran. I set up the bot right before I left for a few hours on Wednesday. There were botters everywhere. When I came back my bot was still running and there were no others around. (I think it was in the middle of a break during the server restart) I haven't seen any bots since. (except my own, of course)

Damn, that's a very interesting graph. At the same time, kinda sad. I hate how there's always around 30 people on every world botting ess. What if a legit player(such as myself) wanted to mine ess? I did the other day after getting 93 summ. 1k ess in half an hour. I was excited because I remembered seeing p ess being ~130 each. Went to GE and they were under 100 each.

There were only about 3 people in the Varrock east bank after the update, when before the update there were at least 20-30 people mining essence. I' m surprised to hear that anybody mines essence these days without using a bot.

From: Runescape Pro
1k ess in half an hour.

How?

He's a runescape pro.