Bot-Busting and Bonuses For All

Hi everyone,

Last week, Daniel Clough shared more news with the community about our ongoing war to eliminate botting and gold farming from the game. Today, I am really happy to say we are in the long-awaited position of being able to announce that we’ll be launching our most formidable bot-busting weapon in our history, targeting what we believe to be 98% of the bots seen in game.

I anticipate that this update will be a defining triumph in our battle against the bots which you’ve clearly told us have been harming your game. However, we are not resting on our laurels and will be continuing to develop numerous systems as well as still making a number of improvements over the coming months in an attempt to remain a few steps ahead of both the bot makers and gold farmers alike.

As Daniel made clear last week, we are dedicated to battling bots and gold farming on every front. We have also recently detected and banned over 1.5 million botting and gold farming accounts. While we work behind the scenes on certain projects, we know that sometimes the necessary secrecy can be rather frustrating for players and, as a team, we’ve all desperately wanted to share details about this upcoming project with the community since the very beginning of the year when we had first believed it was going to be imminently ready. However, sadly sometimes when innovating in multiple uncharted areas it takes a lot longer than expected and we were therefore at necessary pains to keep this project tightly under wraps while completing it and, crucially, not giving bot makers any information or warning that could assist them in working around it or preparing for it.

The project, code-named the ‘ClusterFlutterer’, will be launched as part of the RuneScape game update on Tuesday the 25th October permanently preventing “reflection” bots from working again.

We anticipate that next Tuesday will go down in RuneScape history as 'bot-nuking day'. To celebrate this landmark event, we’ll be running a series of one-off bonus days from Tuesday’s system update through to Friday. Over the course of these events, members will have the chance to gain triple XP in Slayer and additional points and rewards in some of our most popular D&Ds and minigames in a bot-free RuneScape:

Tuesday:

Slayer skill day: All Slayer XP earned from killing assigned targets will be tripled. Some monsters will have a faster respawn time.

Wednesday:

Castle Wars day: Tickets earned from winning a game will be triple the usual amount.

Thursday:

Distraction and Diversion day: Bonus rewards will be given for the following distractions:

Penguin Hide & Seek: Double points.
Evil Tree: Triple XP.
Shooting Star: Triple XP while mining it and increased final rewards.
Familiarization: Players will receive the lucky charm AND ingredient box instead of having to choose.

Penguin Hide & Seek and Familiarization will be reset on the day, so you can do them again if you have already done them that week. All other D&D limitations remain the same (e.g. only two Evil Trees a day).

Friday:

Soul Wars day: Players will receive triple the usual amount of zeal points.

These days will run from midnight to midnight (BST), with the exception of Tuesday which will run from game update time until midnight (BST). Unlike previous Bonus XP events, these modifiers will not deteriorate and will remain constant for the durations stated above.

As promised we’ll be as transparent as possible in keeping everyone updated on the status of our fight against bots and gold farmers and, equally, as before we also ask of you to continue to do your part in helping and supporting too.

I look forward to seeing you in-game soon.

Have fun!

Cheers,

Mark Gerhard

If this is true...by god will it be the day. I really hope this bot system works as well as they plan it to, it would bring back a bit more respect for JaGex, which they desperately need. They lost the gold joystick behind World of Tanks, that's enough said right there. I don't see why they felt the need to add bonuses...but hey, not gonna knock on some celebratory double penguin points.

Also, 1.5 million banned...I like the sounds of that. And lol at the name. "ClusterFlutterer"

I'm guessing they all realised they had left it too long so they wanted to give something back to us. All in all..fantastic update if its all true. Let's see if Jagex are true to there word.

Really like it. But I have to feel like its a temporary solution. Bots will be back within a week. Only real way to stop them is to get rid of free trade.

Theres also still 189k people on, which is typical for this time I think. havent checked any bot spots, so idk.

Sounds like a fun week ^^

Got to love the idea of free exp over the week, i am even going to try soul wars because of this

Really looking forward to this update. It will make LRC worlds 84 and 77 awesome places to be.

My friend did mention that this update is addressing two types of bots - Reflection and Injection (don't ask me what that means, I have no idea). Apparently these are the most commonly used bots by all. There is another type of bot out there though I guess, so it will not completely kill all bots, and they could start to resurface as they update to this other type of bot thing. Hopefully Jagex will keep coming up with solutions, and not end their work here!

I think ANY step Jagex takes toward fixing this is good. They know they can't kill all of them, but they are showing they are definitely making efforts!

Sounds like it will be awesome! But we will see!

Reflection, unlike injection doesn't know where everything is, a bot using injection can see through the walls and click with pinpoint accuracy, which is arguably more detectable... But is it really? If I'm training wc legitimately and the trees are through a wall or obscured in some way, I'll quickly develop a technique of clicking past it, a bot which is searching for the tree everytime it needs it isn't human-like.

The reason why injection is detectable is because it modifies the game code, something reflection does not do. Therefore it can be detected server side.

Found this info to help understand the reflection vs injection.
The botters are all proud that they bot 24/7 ....I mean what for? It's a game!

Well, it's either going to be the best damn update they've ever released OR completely let down all of their legitimate players. I really hope they're actually onto something here. Only time will tell..