[Tinfoil] Jaglord's are terminators

[brookpc]

21 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.

A very interesting response certainly, and I completely agree with what you said about market equilibrium. However, I think at this point in time it could be unlikely that Jagex is interested actually attempting to create such a true equilibrium. Definitely agree with the methodology, however I do have a few concerns with areas such as scope. Things such as blast furnace support this idea as well, considering its got one of the quickest ban rates in the game. However, I do find a few issues here and there. For one, machine learning is surprisingly easy to implement, its really a matter of their resource capacity. While they do have some of these resources, it would take one hell of a neural network to handle such a task and a hell of a lot of node capacity. By no means impossible or necessarily improbable. It would allow for much wider method detection and a continuously growing scope. This would allow them to focus less on bot detection and more on other areas of development. While doing this they could also simultaneously manage an acceptable population of bots on the game at all times as so to maintain what many theorize as an inflated number.

 

Either way, your method is likely to be closer to the target than mine, but hey, we all knew their was tinfoil wrapped around this thread at the start.

[Super]

On 4/6/2020 at 9:20 PM, brookpc said:

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.

The notion that Jagex knows how to properly use machine learning made me laugh

If Jagex knew what it was capable of they could eliminate most bots by just using the data submitted to high scores alone.

Anyways, there is this thing that most people know about called "Botwatch." It was created with the help of Jacmob when Jagex recuited him to the dark side. Jacmob previously ran one of the most successful botting clients pre-eoc. Botwatch profiles accounts and analyses the data collected to determine account legitimacy.

Botwatch was implimented into OSRS but there is no way of telling how well it works or if it works at all.

Before Botwatch even comes into play, lot of accounts are most likely flagged for things listed on slides 14 & 15 of the below link
https://www.blackhat.com/docs/eu-14/materials/eu-14-StJohn-Next-Level-Cheating-And-Leveling-Up-Mitigations.pdf

Sources:
https://rsplayers.fandom.com/wiki/Mod_Jacmob
https://runescape.fandom.com/wiki/Botwatch
https://secure.runescape.com/m=forum/sl=0/forums?380,381,77,65448272 - lol mod reach

[brookpc]

20 minutes ago, Super said:

The notion that Jagex knows how to properly use machine learning made me laugh

If Jagex knew what it was capable of they could eliminate most bots by just using the data submitted to high scores alone.

Anyways, there is this thing that most people know about called "Botwatch." It was created with the help of Jacmob when Jagex recuited him to the dark side. Jacmob previously ran one of the most successful botting clients pre-eoc. Botwatch profiles accounts and analyses the data collected to determine account legitimacy.

Botwatch was implimented into OSRS but there is no way of telling how well it works or if it works at all.

Before Botwatch even comes into play, lot of accounts are most likely flagged for things listed on slides 14 & 15 of the below link
https://www.blackhat.com/docs/eu-14/materials/eu-14-StJohn-Next-Level-Cheating-And-Leveling-Up-Mitigations.pdf

Sources:
https://rsplayers.fandom.com/wiki/Mod_Jacmob
https://runescape.fandom.com/wiki/Botwatch
https://secure.runescape.com/m=forum/sl=0/forums?380,381,77,65448272 - lol mod reach

Sources and even a presentation.........might try to marry you watch out

[Super]

7 minutes ago, brookpc said:

Sources and even a presentation.........might try to marry you watch out

And if you haven't put 2 and 2 together, botwatch is basically a batch/online learning system that runs in the background while we play.

Batch and online learning would only be able to detect the bots that it has been trained to detect. This is why people don't give out niche money making methods. Their method basically goes undetected until the system is trained to detect it.

So with that said, botwatch would be dependant on constant updates.

A semi-supervised k-means clustering system would detect the most bots and it would be able to flag niche methods for review/labeling but it is something that is most likely outside of jagex's capabilities and interests.

[brookpc]

2 hours ago, Super said:

And if you haven't put 2 and 2 together, botwatch is basically a batch/online learning system that runs in the background while we play.

Batch and online learning would only be able to detect the bots that it has been trained to detect. This is why people don't give out niche money making methods. Their method basically goes undetected until the system is trained to detect it.

So with that said, botwatch would be dependant on constant updates.

A semi-supervised k-means clustering system would detect the most bots and it would be able to flag niche methods for review/labeling but it is something that is most likely outside of jagex's capabilities and interests.

 

Well put and a well backed arguement , you may have won this battle! But I'll be back!.................................... On the next episode of DragonBot Z.........

[powerrangeralt]

Detecting the bots in real-time would also be very expensive, and would need to scale with the number of players. That's likely why bans are at certain time periods unless something else has been flagged