Runescape Against Botters: "The War is Not Going in our Favour"

Jagex, the developers behind the extremely popular Runescape MMORPG, today gave the community an update on their current struggle to combat botters and gold farmers. Basically they came out stating their initiative to stop bots, which began in the beginning of this year when Free Trade was reintroduced, has failed and they are losing the battle.

The challenge for us is that despite all of our programmes and best intentions the problem is still huge and, most annoyingly, still adversely impacting parts of our game.

While we are winning small battles by spending significant money and resources in trying to combat this problem, the war is not going in our favour as we are struggling to keep up with companies whose only business 24 hours a day 7 days a week is to find ways to get bots into the game.

While they will continue with their best efforts to try to stop botting, they’re asking Runescape players for help. Players are advised and encouraged to use the tools provided to report botters as well as provide feedback to Jagex on new ways to prevent the practice. However most importantly they are asking the players themselves to stop using bots and purchasing gold from black market sites stating, “If there is not a market, then bots will not exist“.

This certainly isn’t good news for legit Runescape players as it seems bot developers are unstoppable. If a Jagex developer is reading this, do what Facebook did and make users tie their RS account to a phone number before they can use it. That will stop botters from creating tons of fake accounts in no time. You’re welcome :)