On September 15, 2010, Jagex released a news story on their website about z-buffering, a new feature that is going to allow them to introduce many new graphical updates to the game. One of the largest advantages of z-buffering is that players are able to exist outside of their own individual squares, making combat and other animations much more realistic and appealing. With this z-buffering update, however, arrived an odd, unexpected, and random side effect.
The wilderness ditch, once used to separate the mainland from the wilderness to help new players distinguish between the two and save their lives, became “unsightly” and was therefore turned into a wall. This wall was supposed to have the exact same properties as the ditch, with the only difference being the appearance. When players crossed it, it was supposed to take the exact same amount of time, and the wall was aligned at the exact same spot the ditch once was. Any normal player would have believed Jagex, but a large community soon realized otherwise, and felt the negative repercussions very quickly.
The day after the update, interesting videos quickly surfaced on YouTube that showed Jagex Moderators surrounded by large crowds of people by the newly designed wilderness wall near the Grand Exchange. But it wasn’t just a fan club – there was something peculiar going on. These Jagex Moderators were standing there with a purpose. It is unknown if they planned for this to happen or simply found out by chance, but regardless, it was working.
“There’s another one! There’s another one!” screamed the audience as the Jagex Moderator took action. After a few seconds, a player disappeared into thin air. “There’s another one!” they shouted again, and the processes repeated over and over. What exactly was happening? Why were people disappearing? The answer is simple – the Jagex Moderators were banning players.
There are some very stupid people in this world. Some of these people are stupid enough to set their RuneScape bots running overnight so they can wake up the next morning and see their higher stats and nice pile of coins. Seeing as botting is against the RuneScape Terms of Service and in-game rules, you would think that these people would be more careful about using bots – maybe by watching their bots run in csae something bad happens. But many of those dumb enough to still use bots even after Jagex is apparently “cracking down” are also dumb enough not to consider that.
A very popular bot for killing Green Dragons in the wilderness and looting them to make lots of money was coded such that it was specifically designed to cross a wilderness ditch, not a wilderness wall. After the update, the bot didn’t know what to do when it reached the wilderness wall, so it just stood there. This bot banked the loot in either the Grand Exchange of the Edgeville bank, which was why it was stuck near the corner of the Grand Exchange. After Jagex Moderators found out this was happening, they quickly arrived at the scene and waited for more people to show up at the corner. At that point, they would talk for a while to see if the stuck players would respond. After several more minutes of idling, the stuck players would be banned, as the Jagex Moderators would then be able to conclude that the stuck player was a bot using the Green Dragon killing script.
This is a pretty clever method of finding botters – finding a script that bugs up after a particular update, then capitalizing by banning all players that are using the script at the time. Something similar to this happened earlier on in the year when Jagex released a games update. A man that sold game items was created in Al Kharid; his products helped clans and other groups of people play games using in-game items that you might use to play games in real life. One of these new items was a race marker, used to set a destination or boundary for a race. Someone decided to set one up in Aubury’s Rune Shop in Varrock one day, and discovered something quite interesting.
After the marker was set up, a majority of the people in the shop froze in place. A majority of the people that entered the shop froze in place and never left. It was like Aubury’s shop turned into a black hole of movement. Upon removing the race marker, everyone in the shop suddenly spurred into action and teleported to the Rune Essence mine via Aubury. This race coordinator had discovered a bug in a Rune Essence mining script by pure chance. The news quickly spread, and for a while, this method was used to scout out Rune Essence botters.
Except for instances like these, I haven’t heard many stories about people getting banned on RuneScape for botting. Once in a while, I get news about someone getting banned because they botted too excessively, but “too excessively” is generally about 20 hours per day. Anyone with a brain would know not to bot for 20 hours a day, because to my knowledge, there isn’t anyone that plays games for 20 hours and spend the remaining 4 hours sleeping and working enough to survive.
A recurring theme throughout the past several years from Jagex is that they’re working on ways to fix the botting problem. They assure players that those who play fair will end up being rewarded after all, and those who cheat will be removed from the game. Jagex claims to have developed technologies far superior than those of the botting community. Unfortunately, this appears to be a bluff. The only times Jagex publishes an article warning people of botting and claiming to have banned thousands of players is after an update that could have bugged up bots. These advanced technologies they use to detect bots don’t appear to be working very well, and so far, the only confident bans appear to be those made by Jagex Moderators appearing on the scene of the bot and verifying their absence from the computer.
Does this mean that bots are ultimately going to take over the game? Is Jagex rapidly losing the fight to people that are beating them at their own game? It seems like a very simple way to combat more botters is to make more meaningful back-end changes every time the game is updated, such as tweaking the code for how particular actions are done so the bots are either confused or utterly broken. But why hasn’t Jagex done this already? It appears to be a simple fix. Have they finally realized that by removing all the bots from the game, the RuneScape economy will be flipped upside-down so badly that nobody will know what’s going on?
Video of the Day
If there are big empty spaces below where the videos are supposed to be, it means that you either have Flash disabled, your internet connection is slow and you have to wait for the video players to load, or connections to YouTube.com are being blocked.
The following three videos are from the Pizza Eating Contest that I went to five days ago. These clips weren’t good enough or applicable enough to go into the main video for the Badger Herald, but they were still worth posting. A link to the main video can be found in the blog post from the 23rd of this month.
The next video is of a RuneScape event hosted by Tip.It that I attended this past Saturday. Double click on the video to be taken to the page with the description of the video where you can read more about the event.
And finally, this next video is Part 1 of a play-through I’m doing of Pokémon Heart Gold. I intended to do this a long time ago but never got to it, and now I finally found some time to get it started. The video is for entertainment purposes as well as game-educational purposes; portions of the video can be used to find solutions to puzzles in the game or help a player when he or she is stuck.
The Daily Shoot Assignment of the Day
Click on the images for more details.
This isn’t a very good picture, seeing as it doesn’t show the massive volume of people that was at the stadium, and doesn’t even show the stadium itself.
But it was the best I could do in the state of sleeplessness I was in.
My wall is not only a single shade of disgusting dark brown, but two shades of disgusting dark brown!
I don’t know how that discovery is revolutionary.
But it’s still interesting.
This is the no laptop area of the Law Library. I came here because I didn’t have my laptop with me anyway, and there’s a lot less people here compared to the place where laptops are permitted.
And finally, this is the extra floor lamp that my parents brought for me when they came to visit a few days ago. As most of you know, my walls are dark brown so the wall light provided with the room isn’t bright enough because the color of the paint absorbs the light. Apparently, a majority of the shade on the floor lamp broke on the trip here, so I just took the whole thing off.
