A Step Forward

This has been spreading around a few fansites and forums recently, but hasn't made it's way here yet.

On 12-Aug-2011, Andrew Gower and Mark Gerhard announced that RuneScape has been nominated for a Golden Joystick award in the category "Best Free to Play Game". Following this announcement, there has been some controversy over the quality of F2P gameplay in particular as a result of advertisement bots used by gold selling websites.



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We at RSBuddy love to see people no longer spending hours of their time performing repetitive in-game tasks, and to see our software become more and more human-like. We're not intent on ruining people's experience of RuneScape when starting up their account, or taking part in activities with friends or clanmates. Our goal is to make our bots as seamless and human-like as possible.

Unfortunately, some people are fine with abusing automation software to spam their websites and have caused a spam-bot epidemic in F2P. Although Jagex is in the best position to end this activity, we don't want to assist in making this harder for them and as a result we have taken the following steps:

1. All scripts that support or encourage spam advertising are removed from our repository.
2. All scripts that are designed solely to "troll" or otherwise irritate legitimate players are removed from our repository.

3. All text input methods are added to our greylist and scripts will be rejected from the repository if they perform any of these actions (human-like talking is, of course, still allowed).
4. We will deny the use of RSBuddy by account and network bans to users reported and shown to be performing any of these actions.

Although we cannot put a complete end to this, we are wary that our continuing additions to our minimal-cpu botting features should not be allowed to make this issue worse. We understand that the companies in question have access to other automation platforms, and encourage other websites to take similar action against these activities.

Is this a step forward between botting companies and Jagex? Is it fair to say that even owners and coders of bots still want the game to be fun and enjoyable?

We also see here the power and inspiration that Jiblix has done. While he was demodded for apparent "unmodly" actions, I'd say that getting a botting site to remove certain scripts would be considered modly.