SRL Archive - News and General

From Jacmob @ RSBuddy:

Recent Developments - Moving On From Bots

Why have you put an end to RSBuddy’s bot client?

Bots have changed the gameplay of RuneScape. With the use of bots becoming increasingly widespread since the introduction of free trade, and the recent announcements by Jagex, it is clear that bots have become flagrantly detrimental to the game. If you’re like any of us and you enjoy playing RuneScape, you’ll have noticed that bots are anti-social and make the time you spend playing feel diminished in worth. At the same time, bots are abused heavily by gold farmers to ruin the game to a significant extent only for their profit. We hope to assist in the selfless movement by Jagex in fixing this problem and hope that you will join us in playing the game with real people.

To some this will seem like a quick change of heart. See my interview with Ability44 on YouTube.

Is this the end of all botting in RuneScape?

Yes. I am confident that you will not see the return of major bot clients to RuneScape, and that the small number of simple 'auto-clickers' and 'screen-scrapers' that remain will be dealt with very soon.

Another bot site says they’ll be up soon; why shouldn’t we believe them?

The other bot sites out there may claim for a bit longer that they will fix their bots within the next few days or weeks: Had I decided to release RSBuddy 1.5 to the public, it would have required another overhaul just a few days later. The fact that no other botting sites had any update ready by the end of last week shows how exceedingly far behind they are. Don’t hold your breath.

I know another huge MMO that hasn’t dealt with bots; what makes RuneScape different?

Removing bots from the game requires both commercial investment and the time of talented developers with other updates to work on. I haven’t seen any other company willing to take that hit; it requires a huge amount of care for the game we’re here for.

I used RSBuddy on my account, am I going to be banned?

The information we have on customers and users is private and won’t be used to ban any accounts. We hope that you have come to understand why botting has no place in the game and take this opportunity to become part of the RuneScape community.

I purchased a premium script, am I entitled to a refund?

If you purchased a script within 7 days of the update last Tuesday we will happily refund your purchase on request. Any purchases made before this time are not eligible for refunds. Information on subscription changes is available on our subscriptions page.

This is the end for bots, not for you!

It’s not only you that doesn’t have a bot client to use. RuneScape is a social game for humans to play. If you feel that there was anything botting did to keep you interested in the game, please join the discussion of what updates would remove any need for them.

More Information

BenTellsAStory interviews NoEffex, Trigoon, Arbiter and myself on YouTube.

My RSN is 'Gouraud' (after the shading algorithm). inb4 spam. I'll be on IRC as usual.

Sounds like someone got a sweet deal with jagex….

Funny how I just finished reading this exact post.

I do wonder how far he went, but as he didn't release any of it and gave up… not too far I suppose? Seems like colour bots are the future.

-RM

From: Sir R. M8gic1an
Funny how I just finished reading this exact post.

I do wonder how far he went, but as he didn't release any of it and gave up… not too far I suppose? Seems like colour bots are the future.

-RM

Agreed on both of those comments. :thumbsup:

Did jacmob just say he helped Jagex combating bots?

Hooray for more resources :)

Yeah, color! loving them :P
but some Ref was fine tho. from here ofc… never used other ones :)

From: BraK
Hooray for more resources :)

Amen :)
And hooray for SRL :spot:

From: thr0wback
Did jacmob just say he helped Jagex combating bots?

Yes, he's joining Jagex to stop bots. The RSbuddy update and the RS update happened at the same time.. Imo, it was the wrong thing to do to the scripters who made RSbuddy get to where it is/was. They were just screwed over big time!

This is nonsense i mean who could actually want to click on a damn tree or a rock all day. I'm sure average intelligent people rather like to play a real game. also i would like to see them try to break color bots entirely.

Sad to see them go. No wonder he put that timer up.

From: tom99
This is nonsense i mean who could actually want to click on a damn tree or a rock all day. I'm sure average intelligent people rather like to play a real game. also i would like to see them try to break color bots entirely.

they could, just remove the game, or make it enduce seizures with strobing colors everywhere

"Sad to see you go, but I love to watch you leave"

Just because the Java bots are basically done for, doesn't mean that's the end of botting. This is our time, let's step up and show them how awesome color bots and SRL is!

Feels a little like we're going back in time :p

From: Kave
Feels a little like we're going back in time :p

Indeed it does. And remember what happened back then?

From: WT-Fakawi
Indeed it does. And remember what happened back then?

Dinosaurs :O, or am I going to far?

But this is awesome! Let's hope it stays as empty as it is.

Was reading through some of RSBuddy's forums past few days, it was pretty funny how if you said anything against rsbuddy random people would start flaming you and calling you a troll. Wonder how stupid those people feel now…

From: masterBB
Dinosaurs :O, or am I going to far?

But this is awesome! Let's hope it stays as empty as it is.

No Kaitnieks went down :(

There's no way he didn't work out a deal with Jagex. No one gets a moral epiphany like that to give up on all that work. Either that or it simply wasn't fixable.

This makes me pretty happy :D

Also, I believe this would be a great time to invest in heavily botted resources such as logs, fish, ore, etc. The supply is going to go way down real quick.

Hoorey for us! :)
Long live the SRL!!!

~Eerik.

Will screen scraping ('colour') bots be taken down soon?

Yes. It's good to leave the easiest to deal with last. - Jacmob

Are we up for the challenge?

From: Popo009
Will screen scraping ('colour') bots be taken down soon?

Yes. It's good to leave the easiest to deal with last. - Jacmob

Are we up for the challenge?

We'll fight till the end!

~Eerik.

From: Popo009
Will screen scraping ('colour') bots be taken down soon?

Yes. It's good to leave the easiest to deal with last. - Jacmob

Are we up for the challenge?

scare tactic

It's so sad watching those users @ Rsbuddy. There all rage quiting, writing letters, and furious (I wouldn't be surprised if some were crying).

Kinda scares me now, but I know WT-Fakawi and Wizzup wouldn't do such a thing.

Wow I was really scared reflection bots would be back in a few weeks or months, but seeing this I'm very happy! (Sad that such a great bot and so much hard work is now gone, but happy RS is more bot free)!

I also agree JAGEX made a deal/threatened him. He was making tons of money off of RSBuddy as well as enjoying developing it, no one would just stop all of that because they gave up or all of a sudden cared about the game they were raping.

I hope we are all still safe from any JAGEX shenanigans and legal actions, we always have been, COLOR IS KING!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1usrfFXyOFo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0XFP-ihcvs

Some videos of REAL interviews of Jacmob (RSBuddy Lead Developer) and other big players.
One of them claims that they have indeed 'teamed up' and 'joined' jagex.

Oh well…good news! No more bots ruining the game!
oh…wait…SRL…
SRL lives forever :D…for now :) Colors are the future, we are here to stay.

RIP reflection bots

With Rsbuddy now gone, and Nexus as well as Powerbot severely crippled, Jagex appears to have succeeded.

From: WT-Fakawi
No Kaitnieks went down :(

Oh shhh…
You're talking about Aryan going down, correct?

Knew I would eventually end up back here when reflection was taking down.

Hopefully Scar can be back on top again.

Aryan went down and then Kait got a kid. But I don't think Wizzup wants kids anytime soon :)

I love how he talks about we being gone soon. But I'd like to challenge this. I personally will not let SRL just die because of Runescape updates. Come on baby, throw it at me!
However, if Jagex gives me a few $k, I'm willing to make a deal x)

Yeah, I don't see how we're easier to defeat without causing massive problems for legit players.

From: Popo009
Will screen scraping ('colour') bots be taken down soon?

Yes. It's good to leave the easiest to deal with last. - Jacmob

Are we up for the challenge?

Unless they make Runescape only for the blind, I don't think there is a problem.

Runescape, black and white version! Coming soon! :D

From: Popo009

Are we up for the challenge?

We are and will always be we where one of the first but definitely will be the last

first kbot gone now rsbuddy lost idung pro oh well lets do 70 till 85 legit

I honestly cannot wait to see how Jagex plans to deal with color bots. I say this not because I am over-confident about how safe we are, but because I truly believe that they will attempt to take color bots out to the fullest of their abilities. This challenge excites me.

The most obvious ways to remove color bots is to simply remove colors, but obviously this approach cannot be taken. They have already announced that there will be options in the interface that will remove uptext, but this would be only a minor disturbance. What other potential roadblocks do they have in their arsenal? In theory, they can change the shading of colors so that they are not always the same, but this is counteracted by tolerance. Any dynamic changes can be easily, or somewhat easily, maneuvered around. To be completely honest, I see only the re-addition of fatigue, or a fatigue-like system as an actual threat to color.

Only time will tell what we will encounter, and hopefully defeat.

This smells like he tried to fix the bot, but couldn't, and now he's making excuses such as why it is morally the right thing to not continue rsbuddy.

"If you’re like any of us and you enjoy playing RuneScape, you’ll have noticed that bots are anti-social and make the time you spend playing feel diminished in worth." You say that after countless months of raping the game without mercy. Seriously?

He's pretty wealthy (pre-RSBuddy) and he makes quite a lot of money from the project, why wouldn't he just go an hire a professional Java engineering team to aid him if he personally couldn't fix it. It sure smells like he sold his soul to Jagex.

Looks like I'm the only one who's sad to see java bots go away. I botted most of my stats on several accounts (2 bans and 1 is still alive). My the only legit 99 was woodcutting back in the day, and even that one was done by 2 people. I've used SRL all the time, except for the last account, which was mostly botted with RsBuddy. I really liked it because you only needed about 5 minutes to find a script and get it running. I botted only a few hours a day (not risking any bans) and even enjoyed playing in a bit legit, because a lot of progress was made. Now I don't really feel like playing because I know I'd have to play 3 hours straight to get something done.
The mass abuse of bots didn't really affect me, since I was botting in not so crowded areas and skills you can train at bank. When I played legit, I did some quests (done all) or trained skills like slayer with the gear I botted and it seemed pretty cool to play.

I think it would have been much better for us if Jagex would just have a mass bann every now and than. They could simply bann the people at places that everyone knew were heavily botted and they bothered the legit players. What bothered me more about the game then botters, were the dicers and duel arena whores. If dice clans can have 30B drop parties every week, than you know something isn't right. On my account I have 6 99s, all quests done and all except 2 skills over 80, and I couldn't even afford a spirit shield. On the other hand you see people with party hat sets and stuff and that just pisses me off.

As for the people in charge of RsBuddy, they sold out and I'm very disappointed. I've read the entire first post and some of the stuff there is just ridiculous. It's like you're in the mafia and one day you just decide to go legit, and you're even helping the cops… I don't understand how they expect the RsBuddy costumers to now start playing legit. Everyone there was there because they didn't want to do it and you just can't change that attitude so quickly.

Looks like everyone here thinks that this is a big chance for SRL to lead the way, but I only see 2 possible scenarios out of this. SRL won't get a lot more popular and Jagex will ignore it, or more people will join (I doubt this since SRL is a bit more difficult to use and people from RsBuddy aren't used to that) and Jagex will finish what they started - get rid of all bots.

Sorry for the wall of text, just had to get a different view out there :p and good luck SRL :) (I'll still stick around, even if I won't play it any more :p)

There just aren't a whole lot of scripts here right now. Hopefully that will improve as we're (obviously for now) moving away from reflection. Give it some time. And yes, we don't want to become too popular. I don't see that happening anytime soon though. There are just a lot caveats left that make SRL not _very_ easy to use (still quite easy). That'll probably keep away the majority.

Jagex not handling previous botters (removing wealth/skills) is completely unfair to players who did not. Unless something really changes, RuneScape will be split: bot products with 5B banks and multiple 99's and legit players with a few mill in the bank and no 99's. I honestly would like to see Jagex wipe everyone's account - I would actually play legit. As the game stands, it is VERY discouraging for new players and legit players to continue their RuneScape journey knowing that they can never obtain what the cheaters have in the past years coupled with the fact the cheaters got away with it.

From: t4
Jagex not handling previous botters (removing wealth/skills) is completely unfair to players who did not. Unless something really changes, RuneScape will be split: bot products with 5B banks and multiple 99's and legit players with a few mill in the bank and no 99's. I honestly would like to see Jagex wipe everyone's account - I would actually play legit. As the game stands, it is VERY discouraging for new players and legit players to continue their RuneScape journey knowing that they can never obtain what the cheaters have in the past years coupled with the fact the cheaters got away with it.

The richest players didn't bot for their money.

Excellent :)

From: mormonman
The richest players didn't bot for their money.

This. For the most part, they dice, stake, phish, merchant, or have been pvm'ing for awhile.

From: Coh3n
There's no way he didn't work out a deal with Jagex. No one gets a moral epiphany like that to give up on all that work. Either that or it simply wasn't fixable.

From: YoHoJo
I also agree JAGEX made a deal/threatened him. He was making tons of money off of RSBuddy as well as enjoying developing it, no one would just stop all of that because they gave up or all of a sudden cared about the game they were raping.

It's not fixable by the people that maintained the "current" bots. At least not any time soon. This is just him trying to save face.

One thing to say: LOSERS!!!

From: Wizzup?
There just aren't a whole lot of scripts here right now. Hopefully that will improve as we're (obviously for now) moving away from reflection. Give it some time. And yes, we don't want to become too popular. I don't see that happening anytime soon though. There are just a lot caveats left that make SRL not _very_ easy to use (still quite easy). That'll probably keep away the majority.

I agree with this entire post. Funny how a while ago we "wanted more leechers," now I'd agree since the times have changed more activity would probably turn out to be something bad.

Imo close registrations.

I'm really worried that this is going to end badly for us. We're already getting a lot more traffic since this RSBuddy announcement, and I get the impression there are used to a very different style of botting. Opinions?

From: Richard
I'm really worried that this is going to end badly for us. We're already getting a lot more traffic since this RSBuddy announcement, and I get the impression there are used to a very different style of botting. Opinions?

They are used to a very different style of botting. The Java bot users have a few expectations. Those expectations being:

• That a bot is no good unless you pay for it.
• Scripts are downloaded through bot program, or cohesive web interface.
• Scripts are supposed to be very easy to setup.
• All scripts have forms.
• There is an expectation of an account manager.

Obviously, if the script manager is integrated, a lot of these points will be covered.

From: Dervish
Imo close registrations.

i second this.

I have a 4 day weekend, I'm going to try and have a Sorceress' Garden script out by Tuesday…

Kinda scares me now, but I know WT-Fakawi and Wizzup wouldn't do such a thing.

Jagex is interested in Jacmob because he's ofcourse a competent Java programmer with pretty deep knowledge of the old (and new) client's internals… I'm not sure how interested Jagex is in this community's Delphi/Pascal leetness :D They'd probably hire Ben right off the bat though.

From: Richard
I'm really worried that this is going to end badly for us. We're already getting a lot more traffic since this RSBuddy announcement, and I get the impression there are used to a very different style of botting. Opinions?

Who was it who suggested both banking procedures and scripts have Members+ status? I'd say simple scripts that trains one's skill AND does not compete with others for a limited resource should be available to everyone, but beyond that, I think they should be kept in the Members+ section.

Or just close registration for a little bit. <:

But really, I'm fine with people having well-written and complex scripts. I just don't like so many people posting "DERP, Y U NO WORK, REFLECTION SCRIPTS? WE HEAR YOU ALL WORK HERE!" and nonsense like that.

From: Flight
Who was it who suggested both banking procedures and scripts have Members+ status? I'd say simple scripts that trains one's skill AND does not compete with others for a limited resource should be available to everyone, but beyond that, I think they should be kept in the Members+ section.

It used to be that any scripts that bank were not public. I wouldn't mind seeing that back in place. We still need more scripts first though..

From: Coh3n
There's no way he didn't work out a deal with Jagex. No one gets a moral epiphany like that to give up on all that work. Either that or it simply wasn't fixable.

Or he is really really lazy :p

The people who cannot comprehend how to work Simba and SRL will leave as quickly as they came. Already I have seen people post "I can't figure this out, its not worth it". We don't want those types of people anyway!

If someone has enough common sense and determination to FIND THEIR OWN WAY to the tutorials saying how to setup everything and begin, they deserve to be able to join. Those people who cannot figure it out will leave.

Why would we close registrations? This is when we need people more than ever.

From: n3ss3s
I have a 4 day weekend, I'm going to try and have a Sorceress' Garden script out by Tuesday…

That sounds really fun now that I think about it, in COLOR. XD To bad I'm hella busy atm..

@RSBuddy
Definitely a deal, imho.

Why is the Jr. Scripts section missing… I would have much rather posted my Draynor Fisher in there rather than the free section…

+1 @ NCDS.

From: t4
Jagex not handling previous botters (removing wealth/skills) is completely unfair to players who did not. Unless something really changes, RuneScape will be split: bot products with 5B banks and multiple 99's and legit players with a few mill in the bank and no 99's. I honestly would like to see Jagex wipe everyone's account - I would actually play legit. As the game stands, it is VERY discouraging for new players and legit players to continue their RuneScape journey knowing that they can never obtain what the cheaters have in the past years coupled with the fact the cheaters got away with it.

The richest players in RS are professional merchanters and a small percentage of high ranking members of large dicing clans. Legit people. These merchants are not playing the game for fun, they are businessmen doing RWT with rares and GP.

Also, it is more than prossible to have a fully legit account with all 99, have a bank over 5B (hell, over 50B) and still have a life. Most people just lack the discipline and patience to do this, so they go and idle at the GE.

From: noidea
Why is the Jr. Scripts section missing… I would have much rather posted my Draynor Fisher in there rather than the free section…

+1 @ NCDS.

It's still nice to have some good example scripts out there for everyone so they can learn from them. Obviously this should be limited to how many premium scripts are released, but let's atleast give a few.

Question: how is it that people know so much about Runescape inside out…. such as Ben?

From: noidea
Why is the Jr. Scripts section missing… I would have much rather posted my Draynor Fisher in there rather than the free section…

+1 @ NCDS.

That section was gone a loooong time ago.

From: WT-Fakawi
No Kaitnieks went down :(

I remember that, my world came crashing down lol. But seriously suddenly his conscience kicks in? but you can't have your money back. Lol@thewholsituation