SRL Archive - Discussions and Debates

As a fact from all past bot nukes, our bots where always left untouched. i.e. their algorhythms where unsuited to properly detect us 100%. For all they know we are all severely retarded, not bot. But appearently they have come up with something new. Moreover they seem to be prrrret-ty confident with this new automated detecting system.

I am curious as to what SRL-Members think the parameters are for this new system. There will be graphical updates, suuuure, SMART might break, maybe no more safe mode, but that's not what I am asking here.

I am more interested in wilder philosophies. I will add my thoughts to this discussion later.

So, what are the new parameters for Jagex's new nobot system?

When I see a player and a bot doing both the same thing it is hard to tell the differences between the two. I think if they want to ban more botting players they should look into the accounts of big gold selling sites, where billions shift between them with no real pay back. Also looking into play times would be a solid way of checking if someone is a bot. Even the most dedicated players take small breaks, most of the bots do not.

I still think we are on the safe side. Apart of making SMART unusable, also consider it could become detectable. This would have more severe effects since they could ban our current accounts.

They definitely seem very confident that most bots are going to be eliminated. I wouldn't be surprised if they do something client-wise. After all, every program available (besides Simba of course!) requires the use of a specific bot-client. Or perhaps they've improved the autonomous side of the report system.

I'm thinking down the same path as runaway.
I see them moving towards a client that would eventually totally stop JAVA bots.
Their newest update brings JAG(jagex account guardian) which further suggest this is a possibility. Obviously SIMBA would remain untouched by that.

They may monitor mouse patterns, I see this as one of the biggest solutions for them…

If I might quote myself from a previous post I made on Sythe:

http://www.sythe.org/showpost.php?p=11372174&postcount=5

From: XWX (Me)


Things like this certain people can pick up enough hints to get any idea of how the detection system will work. They stress the fact that the system must be tweaked to prevent legit players from getting flagged & banned by it. So what does that tell us? That means it's not an absolute detection that "This player has loaded a modified client", or "This player has a certain program running while they're playing Runescape". It's more than that, a deeper detection system.

Based on that little bit about the possibility of it making false positives we can assume it will look for something along the lines of human behavior. Repetitive tasks maybe? Perhaps X amount of hours in a small area of RS. How often does the player interact with others? How many of one raw material does this account have, is it the only high number of raw materials the account has? How much XP is this player getting in a certain skill; does it remain this same rate of XP every time they do this activity?

I'm not making any accusations, but keep in mind examples like these are some of the factors Jagex can keep track of and can mistake bots for legitimate players. Not many bots will pass any of those tests. It's the ones like RiD and (most of) Simba scripts that would have the least chance of being flagged.


I didn't mean to talk so much, I just thought I'd point out that we can get a good idea of what's to come if we just pay attention to the hints.

Thanks for the info, Trent!. And also, thanks for that image YoHoJo. Yeah you're right, no one at all will know for sure what's to, so it's pointless to try and adjust at this time, but if we have an idea of what they might look for we can adjust stop running bots/scripts that could be picked up on now (to avoid the ban) and adjust later after we know for sure what's being monitored.

From: Flight
If I might quote myself from a previous post I made on Sythe:

-snip-

I agree and disagree; particularly on this:

From: Flight
That means it's not an absolute detection that "This player has loaded a modified client", or "This player has a certain program running while they're playing Runescape". It's more than that, a deeper detection system.

They might be able to detect whether or not an account is using a web browser, the official client or an unknown client. This would be a great way to flag accounts from the start since they know that they only have to monitor accounts using an unknown client. But it could be people using a personal client, swiftkit and similar things, or a botting client. They cannot flat out ban those not using a known and trusted source since there is a chance that it is a legitimate player.

Of course, this is all assumption and I don't know much about their ability to actually detect a client. Though I wouldn't rule this out based upon what they have said.

From: Flight
If I might quote myself from a previous post I made on Sythe:

http://www.sythe.org/showpost.php?p=11372174&postcount=5

I definitely hear you there Flight, direct comparisons to how a regular player would play.

http://iseclab.org/papers/botdetection-article.pdf

Page 22, I think they will be using something along these lines.

I will see if I can get some more information about the new system from Jacmob :rolleyes:

So all we have to do in order to counter this is to put in some AI? :rolleyes:
Too easy, just takes a lot of time to create

From what I got, they will know as soon as you start logging in that your a bot. I think that it will be to do with checking your browser and what is communicating with your browser.
Example: What plugins is the browser using, what browser is it, does this browser ever go to the first page of the runescape website, is there ever more than one tab in the browser open at one time, does the browser have a history, has the browser accepted the authentication certificate, does it act like a normal browser ? Idk what they will do but I'm sure they could do things along them lines.
Surely they could see what we are using and how we are using it, gather the info and make sure all that info is stored, to be used as and how they want to.

@Jakkle - click this and tell me that you need to access the RS homepage to play the game legit? This could be a bookmark if you are a serious and regular player.

I agree that they can clearly do some client detection as I have heard the new JAG update can detect if you are accessing RS from a client even on the same computer other than the one you registered as safe.

I don't know about their ability to monitor plugins the browser is using etc.

I do believe there will be detection of both client and human/bot-like behaviour incorporated. They have stated that the recent lack of bans have been as a result of them monitoring bots behaviour.

Thus I think it will be a combination of both behaviour and client analysis. I think their move towards HTML5 will also be a big attempt at kicking the java bots.

I see what your saying with the bookmark, but how many people do you think use a bookmark to that page ? I know mine is the runescape main site page in my google chrome browser. Plus like I said about running the authentication certificate, if you never used a browser it will never get accepted. I think smart needs to replicate the browser you have install on your system because if I want to look at the G.E then I'm using google chrome, botting I'm using smart which tries to look like firefox.
I agree with you that it will be a combo and as replicating a normal browser shouldn't be all that hard, it will then be more to do with bot like behaviour.

I'd more than likely be worried about Smart itself becoming detectable. If Smart does survive that is. Also if it does survive, and we are unaffected, I'd more than likely be worried that other bots will just adapt to other methods and out gun us. It's always been like this except at the very start where colour bots were the only things that existed.

Java bots came along, out gunned us in botting but maybe not detectability.

As for methods of banning, I'd say they probably just monitor various locations or put more client checks/security. There really is no way to kill injection methods other than destroying safemode but at the same time, they can make it so difficult it won't be worth it.

For colour bots, they never mentioned us but they did mention the 2% indirectly so that's us. Uhh they'd probably do some night and day kinda thing? Where the brightness and things look of items my change quite a lot and at a random amount depending on the server time or country time. Might just slow us down badly or permanently break us as colour recognition would be quite difficult for finding items.

I found this on the RS Forums, good little read. It's a few more questions answered after the live stream. http://services.runescape.com/m=forum/forums.ws?14,15,679,64005350

One of the questions asked was

Q: Can you give us any insight into how you detect bots, and how the bot nuke will work to spot them? What's the difference, if any?

A: We can’t give away any specifics details on how we identify bots because we don’t want to make the bot developers life easier. Suffice to say that identifying the player as “not acting human” is the key to the whole thing which gives us a far more scalable and provides a longer term answer to this problem.

It may be something with detecting the use of a modified client, that's what I started thinking when they required users to update their installations of the standalone client. I haven't read through the source to figure out what they changed though :(

Did you see this?

This is a ban report for using RID dated yesterday. How can Jagex "see" that this is RID? I have never used, but I still find this ban-on-account-of-RID very disconcerning. Can anybody shed any light on this recent event?

From: WT-Fakawi
Did you see this?

This is a ban report for using RID dated yesterday. How can Jagex "see" that this is RID? I have never used, but I still find this ban-on-account-of-RID very disconcerning. Can anybody shed any light on this recent event?

Where's that from? (Did it happen to you?)

I think the only way they'd find that it's exactly RiD and not us for example would be to enumerate window titles and/or process names (which is easy to dodge obviously)

nope. Not mine. RID, Me? Tssss :) I am getting a little worried though about smart being detectable, but I am not the expert in the field, so I dont have the answers here. Been browsing a lot recently through our friendly neighbours, but little to no factual info comes out.

Maybe the player was acting very RID-like…

11 people where man banned using RID on Sept 21 during a J-mod raid (At least, that's what they tell over there) RID took down a couple of scripts. More banned on account of "cheating", automatically. The RID bans are manual, otherwise the text woudl not have said: "Using RID"

From: WT-Fakawi
11 people where man banned using RID on Sept 21 during a J-mod raid (At least, that's what they tell over there) RID took down a couple of scripts. More banned on account of "cheating", automatically. The RID bans are manual, otherwise the text woudl not have said: "Using RID"

Wow thats pretty crazy. Any idea what kind of scripts were hit?

As promised here is two philosophies. I'll start with the wildest.

I presume the change in strategy and the so called hotspots can only be derived from running the rsbots and epicbot scripts themselves. Does that sound farfetched? To me it doesn't. Invest a little, gain a lot. And that's why they bought scumbag Jacmob, no? He knows his way around the forums and bots. At least, that is how I would have done it. Just buy the damn scripts, run them at HQ, analyse and ban. This is the simplest way I can think of. Keep the botting communities alive, but squash them from the inside out. Forget about humanoid measures. They are just buying 1 copy and analyse. That is what I think Jacmob is doing.

Rs will only be playable through their own client. I have read Gajex is working towards making runescape the next "Angry Birds". Thus porting the game to different "cosmetic" alien format. Rs on Ipad, Nexus and on interactive T.V. , stuff like that. I think this will lead to a RS-app culture, where it will be not possible to access it from the outside. You can't access casino's from the outside either, yet there are casino-apps for all platforms. Imagine I'd crack roulette with a bot, that's just unthinkable.

So, in short, I think they "analyse" by buying "premium" bots themselves (Jacmob is strong evidence for this argument). And/or, we will see the rise of an app culture.

Either way….I think we are not bad off at the moment.

From: WT-Fakawi

I presume the change in strategy and the so called hotspots can only be derived from running the rsbots and epicbot scripts themselves. Does that sound farfetched? To me it doesn't. Invest a little, gain a lot. And that's why they bought scumbag Jacmob, no? He knows his way around the forums and bots. At least, that is how I would have done it. Just buy the damn scripts, run them at HQ, analyse and ban. This is the simplest way I can think of. Keep the botting communities alive, but squash them from the inside out. Forget about humanoid measures. They are just buying 1 copy and analyse. That is what I think Jacmob is doing.

…

So, in short, I think they "analyse" by buying "premium" bots themselves (Jacmob is strong evidence for this argument). And/or, we will see the rise of an app culture.

That's exactly what I would do if I were in their shoes. Although a script can be so random it wouldn't be easy for Jagex to pick on on the fact it's a macro or not, but I believe the problem [still remains the users themselves. While the script is doing a certain task it can be random and undetectable while doing that task, but the problem lies with the user only wanting to do that task, never fluctuating.

This is up to the user; be smart & diverse or keep grinding that same skill or that same task…

From: WT-Fakawi
As promised here is two philosophies. I'll start with the wildest.

I presume the change in strategy and the so called hotspots can only be derived from running the rsbots and epicbot scripts themselves. Does that sound farfetched? To me it doesn't. Invest a little, gain a lot. And that's why they bought scumbag Jacmob, no? He knows his way around the forums and bots. At least, that is how I would have done it. Just buy the damn scripts, run them at HQ, analyse and ban. This is the simplest way I can think of. Keep the botting communities alive, but squash them from the inside out. Forget about humanoid measures. They are just buying 1 copy and analyse. That is what I think Jacmob is doing.

Rs will only be playable through their own client. I have read Gajex is working towards making runescape the next "Angry Birds". Thus porting the game to different "cosmetic" alien format. Rs on Ipad, Nexus and on interactive T.V. , stuff like that. I think this will lead to a RS-app culture, where it will be not possible to access it from the outside. You can't access casino's from the outside either, yet there are casino-apps for all platforms. Imagine I'd crack roulette with a bot, that's just unthinkable.

So, in short, I think they "analyse" by buying "premium" bots themselves (Jacmob is strong evidence for this argument). And/or, we will see the rise of an app culture.

Either way….I think we are not bad off at the moment.

I disagree about the Jacmob part. They wouldn't need him for that honestly. Idk if you know Jacmob at all, but he is a very bright individual. I was the one who promoted him to Moderator on Powerbot a few years back.

I would suggest using a lot of nub accounts to test out the parameters when it goes fully live.

EX's)
-Simple autoclicker, click on same pixel, same wait time over and over at a normally botted area
-Do the same thing in a remote area
(See how if 'hotspots' affect it much)



-Suicide an activity
-Take frequent breaks
(Does how long logged in straight affect it?)


I know those are simple tests and it probably takes into account all of those factors to some degree, but I think it would be helpful to see each one tested individually

The theory that they have bought and tried the scripts could indicate how they banned a user not long ago for 'Using RiD'