Its only been six days since Jagex declared Bot-Nuking Day and today at Runefest, Jagex announced they have banned 7.7 million accounts so far. Add the 1.5 million accounts that were banned a few weeks earlier and that brings the total to 9.2 million accounts. Let that sink in. Most games don’t even have 9.2 registered accounts, yet alone botting accounts.
During an insider session at Runefest, Jagex gave out some addition figures listed below.
- New botting accounts created every day — 100,000 – 200,000
- Gold-farming accounts banned on bot-nuking day — 1,500,000
- Accounts being banned per minute right now — 9,000
- Gold farming accounts banned since Tuesday — 7,700,000
- Accounts created from China and Korea per week — Old: 173,000, New: 953
- Decrease in player activity since bot-nuking day — 60%
- Banned accounts that were paid members — 10%
- Bots estimated to have been rendered ineffective — 98%
Jagex mentions that 10% of the accounts that were banned were paying members, so we can extrapolate that Runescape had about 7.7 million paying members before Tuesday and now currently has about 6.93 million paying members.
Congratulations go out to Jagex on their determination and success against the botters.
Check out the full insider sessions Runefest 2011 video below.
Ban all Chinese and Koreans. Even if they speak english they have horrible manners, and are not fun to group with.
Here’s the interesting question: What if this doesn’t increase the number of legitimate players?
Or even if it decreases them? Especially given the paid accounts lost?
It proposes the position, counter the intuitions seemingly everyone wants to have, that bots are good for business.
They actually comment on that in the video saying they are losing money by doing this, but think having a fair and legitimate MMO experience is more important.
@ Callan S
Even if the number of legitimate players doesn’t increase, RuneScape still sees around 90,000 people online at peak times. Last I checked, that’s on par with a lot of online console games, such as Halo or Call of Duty.
It also paves the way for any new games that they are liekly to bring out — Runescape is going to have to come to an end sometime probably in the not to distant future.
If they can use this to prove they are totally serious about stamping out botters and cheats its going to stand them in good stead when they bring their next big game out. Legitimate gamers looking for a cheat free experience are going to flock to any new game that they bring out if they pull it off.
@buttlord Lol, I know some of them are polite, but if we did that, they probably would decide against publishing archeage in Europe and the americas, as it is only planned to be in china and Korea at present, and it looks good :)