[Tinfoil] Jaglord's are terminators

[brookpc]

Okay, so this is probably going to be a lot of tin foil, but hey at least I'm telling you that off the bat. Proceed knowing that.

 

     So, lets talk about jagex, their staff numbers, their player numbers, and their techniques with handling bots and clients. There's no doubt that as time has progressed, runescape has been lucky enough to survive and even thrive at times. With tens of thousands of active players, there's no doubt that with their small team they've been racking up some pretty nice profits. That being said, I think a lot more money has gone into this than many realize. A common complaint among the OSRS community is that, "if jagex does nothing bots will ruin the game." This is something that I agree and disagree with. I think Jagex has determined that its healthy for the game's existence, and in ways its economy, to allow a portion of their playerbase to be made up of bots.

     Now I wouldn't go so far as to say that this is something ridiculous like 50% of players, but I would say easily maybe 20-25% of the playerbase number is inflated by bots easily. So why don't they do anything? Well it's absolutely not for a lack of capability, and I think they have been trying to a degree. Primarily I believe that Jagex uses a machine learning system to flag patterns and player behavior. This could then put these accounts into levels of severity for review based on factors such as total level, time played, etc. This would explain why some higher level accounts get 2-days and new accounts get the permaban, including buying old, "rested" accounts. The accounts that would be categorized as having almost certainty of using bots get batch insta-banned. There's too many of us in this community alone with bot farms for them to be manually reviewing every account. However, we've never had the evidence (that I know of) to directly support the idea behind more advanced techniques such as polymorphic signature detection. Such a feature could be implemented to then easily detect the latest versions of the most popular clients. 

 

Tired, kinda drunk, but I think they may be implementing those more advanced techniques into RS3 but leaving them out of OSRS to purposefully inflate their playerbase numbers.

[powerrangeralt]

tl;dr?

[vendicci]

I don't think that it would benefit the CEO's bonus at the end of the year if all bots got removed and the player base dropped a large % due to it.
Budget cuts are likely to happen if the player base dropped by a lot.
All the Chinese stakeholders see are numbers & statistics, they don't care about the long-term health of the game &
would rather see more bots so that the player base numbers look better before they sell jagex.
Many jagex employees see the company as just a stepping stone so they don't care.
The anticheat team have to prove their purpose &  are there to not make it obvious.
& it subsides their salaries. Even mod mark did not know what the anticheat team were doing everything is kept secret from all others
We don't even know who are in their team other than 1-2 if we knew that their would probably be some information out by now linking them to a sythe gold page or something similar.

I really don't see what the point would be of removing all bots from the game there would only be downsides for jagex to it.
What is worrying to me is that they don't even see the point of investing into decent customer support

[IDontEB]

1 hour ago, brookpc said:

Primarily I believe that Jagex uses a machine learning system to flag patterns and player behavior. This could then put these accounts into levels of severity for review based on factors such as total level, time played, etc. This would explain why some higher level accounts get 2-days and new accounts get the permaban, including buying old, "rested" accounts.

There's 2 reasons why that's very unlikely. The first reason being a person capable to write the ML model for doing anything would not work at Jagex. Jagex pays like $30-40k/year and anyone who knows ML in UK can prolly get a job easily for >100k. The second reason that it's unlikely is that I've had 6h old accs get temp bans before, it's likely just dependant on what you're doing when you get caught.

[lunapt]

4 hours ago, powerrangeralt said:

tl;dr?

jagex knows bots exist n stuff

[Khaleesi]

Bots keeps the economy steady.
Nobody wants to do the boring tasks ... let the bot do them

I'm pretyt sure they don't wanna get rid off, bcs I'm sure the game will have a huge dip after that..

[Czar]

Personally I think if they had the power to do machine learning, they would at least have the power to have a non-peasant tier customer support system, it's among the worst in all games unfortunately  Not that customer support is more important than bots, but i'm talking about their ability to do something at least  

[deathguy39]

I mean its easy they get a lot of income of bots, not everybody buys bonds through gp, so the membership sales would go down a lot with out bots.

[Ace99]

6 hours ago, Khaleesi said:

Bots keeps the economy steady.
Nobody wants to do the boring tasks ... let the bot do them

I'm pretyt sure they don't wanna get rid off, bcs I'm sure the game will have a huge dip after that..

Yeah no one wants cannonballs to be 1k+ each or then have to make them their-selves.  Nuking all bots like that would ruin the cannon, and any game-play that involves it.

Just one scenario but the ripple effect would hurt them more than help them in those aspects.

[Khaleesi]

1 hour ago, Ace99 said:

Yeah no one wants cannonballs to be 1k+ each or then have to make them their-selves.  Nuking all bots like that would ruin the cannon, and any game-play that involves it.

Just one scenario but the ripple effect would hurt them more than help them in those aspects.

Exactly
 

[dabswax]

literally if bots didn't run things like, (ranarrs, birds nests, logs, bows, bow string, flax, raw and cooked fish, pots, etc) would skyrocket and everyone would turn ironman, quit or become rwt whales imo.

Edited April 7, 2020 by dabswax

[powerrangeralt]

Yep. we're supporting the economy

[Swizzbeat]

The "bots help support the economy" argument is stupid. Assuming Jagex were to completely eradicate bots yes there would be a small adjustment period but prices would eventually stabilize according to the market equilibrium.

Investing time into machine learning to detect bots is even more stupid. You could probably detect 90% of active botters using k means clustering on different game regions. Large clusters are more than likely a farm and for verification purposes you'll only need to manually review one account within the cluster to reasonably assume if that cluster consists of bots or not.

[Khaleesi]

19 hours ago, Swizzbeat said:

The "bots help support the economy" argument is stupid. Assuming Jagex were to completely eradicate bots yes there would be a small adjustment period but prices would eventually stabilize according to the market equilibrium.

Investing time into machine learning to detect bots is even more stupid. You could probably detect 90% of active botters using k means clustering on different game regions. Large clusters are more than likely a farm and for verification purposes you'll only need to manually review one account within the cluster to reasonably assume if that cluster consists of bots or not.

Just like Corona helps the animals

Edited April 8, 2020 by Khaleesi

[powerrangeralt]

20 hours ago, Swizzbeat said:

The "bots help support the economy" argument is stupid. Assuming Jagex were to completely eradicate bots yes there would be a small adjustment period but prices would eventually stabilize according to the market equilibrium.

Investing time into machine learning to detect bots is even more stupid. You could probably detect 90% of active botters using k means clustering on different game regions. Large clusters are more than likely a farm and for verification purposes you'll only need to manually review one account within the cluster to reasonably assume if that cluster consists of bots or not.

Only review one account in a cluster? Nice introduction of bias there.