I don’t think I’ve used that screenshot in almost two years. Last October, Jagex accomplished what many of us had thought to be impossible: busted a grand majority of the bots in RuneScape in one single move known today as Bot Nuke Day, or Project Clusterfutterer. The update demolished reflection and injection bots, or 98% of the bot community according to Jagex’s estimations, and has proven to be successful enough that 40% of the player base was banned within the following month.
On the main RuneScape website, Jagex is enjoying their recent major victory over a major bot writer in a recently settled case, and they announced plans for even more bot eradication, this time focusing on the more basic bots that auto-click or search the screen for specific colors.
We remain committed to our ongoing work to ensure that the successes of Bot Nuke Day are never undone by staying a few steps ahead in the arms race with the remaining bot developers and gold farmers. We’re already well underway with our next generation of anti-botting software called Optimus, which is going to be released shortly, and we’re also currently developing ways to remove the remaining screen-scraper bots from the game. We’ll also be continuing to fight gold-farmers on every front.
Jagex has done quite a bit over the past months to completely rid their game of cheaters and scam artists, from the bot nuke back in October to the removal of popular gambling tools. With the upcoming Stellar Dawn and Transformers Online, Jagex losing their reputation as saturated with cheaters can only boost the game’s receptions.
MMO Fallout 
Wrong. They’ll be back in a month. Since I started playing in 2001, all JaGex does is come up with ways to briefly combat the botting community to make the legit players happy. They know full well that this game will be ridden with bots until the day it dies off (which could be sooner than later judging by content). When the bots come back, JaGex will say “We tried! Sorry, but help us report any bots!” and then nothing will happen for another year or so. It’s very hard to make a game like RuneScape bot proof, let alone any mmorpg. As of recent, JaGex even got so desperate as to actually do some illegal activities so i hear.
The game isn’t “ridden” with bots, even now. Clusterfutterer got rid of the grand majority (98%) and they’re taking aim at the last 2%.
I’d like to hear about these illegal activities.
code-named the ‘ClusterFlutterer’, as part of a RuneScape game update intended to permanently prevent “reflection” bots from working. The release of this was nicknamed the “Bot Nuke”, and is estimated to have banned 98% of the accounts that were using bots.
RiD and Simba were released shortly after Bot Nuke Day, they’re not the quality of the ol’ ASM Injection bots, but they’re still high quality bots. Jagex hasn’t defeated bots yet, I don’t think they’re close to doing so either.
Absolutely, Sage, not all of the bots have been removed. However, Jagex got exactly what they needed with the settlement against the Snellman brothers: Legal precedent. Their prior case was delayed because of some hiccups in the process (to my understanding, RuneScape wasn’t even copyrighted in the US at the time), but if it comes to not being able to detect it, I wouldn’t put it past Jagex to take the legal route, seize the code and customer list, and just perform a massive sweep.