OSRS Ban Megathread - 9/27/2018

[Logicfury]

1 hour ago, NinjadGuy said:

The way you go about this (the analytical approach and figuring out things by trial and error) is a good thing and I do appreciate your effort.
The only thing I want to point out is why sharing it is bad for you, and why people that bot successfully don't go and tell what works for them.

1. Sharing things that work for you will only make other people copy it and cause the market to be flooded with gold/accs. Imagine everyone successfully farming gold or making mains easily. Gold prices will drop and so the value of the accs/services.

2. Don't forget Jagex mods are lurking the forums and always strive to make their bot detection better. This will only make your methods to not work anymore and you just end up shooting yourself in the foot.

People share enough information to keep botting alive but not enough to destroy it.
Botting is like making/selling drugs, you have to be discreet about it to make it work (especially if you wanna go big).

I might be wrong here, but you might want to rethink this after giving it another thought.

By this logic we should ban public education and make it as inaccessible as possible because it leads to increased competition and devalues the current knowledgeable working force.  This is a very naive perspective of the real world and is a reflection of a general lack of life experience and how young you are if nothing else. I'm not a gold farmer and don't bot the game with hopes to turn a profit, so I'm not incentivized to keep this information to myself. I work a well-paying job and play/bot the game purely as a hobby. Also, I think the idea of trying to hide botting best practices from the anti-cheat team is an extremely naive and, frankly, pretentious way of thinking. I don't think there is very much about botting practices that  Jagex's team is not aware of (especially since they have at least one confirmed talented bot scripter / ex-goldfarmer on staff working for them). Many of the users on this site have become proficient at goldfarming while minimizing losses, but that knowledge doesn't directly transfer over in so far as being able to assess where Jagex stands in terms of handling bots and how it operates. Getting your farms wiped is part of the cost of doing business for a gold farmer so "not getting banned" is not even a question they would bother asking themselves, rather they are concerned with extending the lifespan of their farm as long as possible. That is a distinction that must be noted.

Lastly, being that my background is in operating/analyzing/performing turnaround buyouts of tech companies I believe that I offer a rather unique perspective. As an operator, it would not be beneficial for Jagex to ban every bot they identified as that would drastically hurt their bottom line. Remember, a considerable portion of their P2W player base bots or RWTs in some capacity. By that logic, it is not unreasonable to think that Jagex would purposefully let the small offenders off the hook, and focus primarily on banning the gold farms, big RWTs and excessive botters ( > 4-8 hours a day lets say). I also believe that it isn't unreasonable at all to think that they could ban the vast majority of bots in one swoop with their current machine learning/ big data capabilities but the false positives this would cause would be the end of the company financially (so it will likely be a long-time - if ever - before they fully trust a machine to do all the banning). Even with manually-assisted reviews they are producing quite a few false positives.

Thanks for participating in the discussion

Edited August 23, 2018 by Logicfury

[ZX700]

Agree with everything you said. Nice job thinking through it all and putting it up here for us.

[Logicfury]

18 hours ago, ZX700 said:

Agree with everything you said. Nice job thinking through it all and putting it up here for us.

You're welcome! If you experience any bans it would be helpful if you shared them in the thread. One very useful potential outcome would be to track the batches of daily/weekly bans that Jagex processes. We could gain insight into how they batch these accounts (I guarantee you it is not random). Do they batch by age? Total time online? By skill? They likely do a mix of the above but it would be impossible to track unless the community pulls together (the casual botters at least). It would also help people identify if they were able to successfully avoid a batch of bans (and extrapolate best practices from their experience).

Edited August 25, 2018 by Logicfury

[Logicfury]

Small updates added.

[yfoo]

I like how the thread title's date constantly gets updated. Thank you for your diligence. 

Edited August 29, 2018 by PayPalMeRSGP

[H0rn]

Very interesting read. 

[CSGOslave]

I like this read. Many interesting points indeed.

And for those who are afraid their goldmaking secrets are getting out there for a post like this... 

[Jack Is Dead]

banned for playing pest control for 2 hours. no other botting was done for months.

 

funny cos i had quashed and expired offences...however it was a straight perm ban..not even a 48hr ban lol

[Logicfury]

5 hours ago, PayPalMeRSGP said:

I like how the thread title's date constantly gets updated. Thank you for your diligence. 

Thanks!

3 hours ago, H0rn said:

Very interesting read. 

Thanks for the kind words

2 hours ago, CSGOslave said:

I like this read. Many interesting points indeed.

And for those who are afraid their goldmaking secrets are getting out there for a post like this... 

Tragedy

1 hour ago, Jack Is Dead said:

banned for playing pest control for 2 hours. no other botting was done for months.

 

funny cos i had quashed and expired offences...however it was a straight perm ban..not even a 48hr ban lol

Thanks a lot for contributing to the discussion. Was this today? Mirror vs Injection? Do you suspect someone reported you?

[Jack Is Dead]

5 minutes ago, Logicfury said:

 

Thanks a lot for contributing to the discussion. Was this today? Mirror vs Injection? Do you suspect someone reported you?

Today 29/08/18 - was playing on mobile legit at around 1am

Injection

Doubtful someone reported in the two hours that were botted, i was using the chat to talk sometimes.

[Failure]

Client: Injection. 

Time online the day leading to a ban: 3-4

Activit(es) botted leading to a ban: Barabian fishing (Perfect Fisher), Slayer (Perfect Fighter, Bloodvelds), Fletching (AcerdFletcher) 

Age of account: 1660+ days. 

Extra info : was botting not longer than 4 hours a day (been botting before, combat 116, base stats 70) also been playing mobile in between and after botting of maxium of 4 hours. 

 

edit : took breaks every hour or 2 for 20/30 minutes.

Edited August 29, 2018 by Failure

[KnightOfZero]

Client: Injection

Account age before ban: 14 hours (fastest ban I've ever experienced)

Time Spent Online: Roughly 6 hours total of playtime

Bot actions performed: usage of Stealth Quester to complete Goblin Diplomacy, Sheep Sheerer, Romeo and Juliett and Waterfall Quest.

Except for doing those quests all other actions on the account were done legitimately. Current IP, HWID, and MAC should be unique as this was done on an old refurbished laptop. Potentially linked previous botting history with payment method use for membership on previous account.

I'm not sure how my experience can help others but as previously stated this is one of the fastest bans I've ever experienced and I was genuinely surprised to find my account banned after such a short amount of time.

[Logicfury]

3 hours ago, Failure said:

Client: Injection. 

Time online the day leading to a ban: 3-4

Activit(es) botted leading to a ban: Barabian fishing (Perfect Fisher), Slayer (Perfect Fighter, Bloodvelds), Fletching (AcerdFletcher) 

Age of account: 1660+ days. 

Extra info : was botting not longer than 4 hours a day (been botting before, combat 116, base stats 70) also been playing mobile in between and after botting of maxium of 4 hours. 

 

edit : took breaks every hour or 2 for 20/30 minutes.

Looks like you got caught during a manual sweep of barbarian fishing. It is a confirmed hotspot if you didn't know (mods get to tweeted to sweep that area and often oblige). Sorry for your loss!

[Failure]

2 minutes ago, Logicfury said:

Looks like you got caught during a manual sweep of barbarian fishing. It is a confirmed hotspot if you didn't know (mods get to tweeted to sweep that area and often oblige). Sorry for your loss!

Wouldn't it say due Bot Busting instead of Macroing? Thanks though, but that's the risk lol. Just sucks since I had an Quest Cape also (I hate questing...) 

[Logicfury]

23 minutes ago, Chrisgothigh said:

Client: Injection

Account age before ban: 14 hours (fastest ban I've ever experienced)

Time Spent Online: Roughly 6 hours total of playtime

Bot actions performed: usage of Stealth Quester to complete Goblin Diplomacy, Sheep Sheerer, Romeo and Juliett and Waterfall Quest.

Except for doing those quests all other actions on the account were done legitimately. Current IP, HWID, and MAC should be unique as this was done on an old refurbished laptop. Potentially linked previous botting history with payment method use for membership on previous account.

I'm not sure how my experience can help others but as previously stated this is one of the fastest bans I've ever experienced and I was genuinely surprised to find my account banned after such a short amount of time.

Don't think there is any merit to linking payment history. My hypothesis on high banrates with Stealth Quester is Jagex doing a special screen for accounts that complete quests that the script handles (in addition to another popular Questing Script from a competitor).  I don't own the script myself so I can't really give you more insights, I would just avoid it for now. Also the young age of the account is definitely a factor.

Edited August 29, 2018 by Logicfury