Daniel Clough – MMO Fallout

Hi,

Today we have banned several high-profile accounts from the dicing scene.

We can happily confirm that the ring leaders found to be involved in selling RuneScape gold have been banned. Their actions have directly funded a sizable portion of all real world trading activity within the game, led to increased macro use, and resulted in huge surges in spam advertising.

Such actions are strictly against our rules, and all accounts have been wiped and permanently nuked.

This should serve a clear warning to anyone else engaged in similar activities; expect more bans of any continuing offenders.

We have been finely tuning our new anti-cheat and anti-hijack tools over the past few months and are now steadily bringing these systems online in select areas. This is part of an on-going rollout that will be completed over the course of next two months. More good news will follow in due course.

Some of you may already have noticed that we have started cleaning up the high scores over the last week and this will assist us in being able to re-introduce relevant gold farmer free F2P high scores again.

Mark Gerhard
CEO

Hi,

Today we have banned a large number of accounts involved with self-titled “botting clans”. All of these accounts have been identified by our new data analysis tool and are 100% guilty of breaking our rules. These accounts have been permanently banned with no chance of appeal.

As mentioned on the forums yesterday, expect more bans and punishments in the very near future.

The use of bots will not be tolerated and will result in permanent action against any accounts found to have cheated in this way.

Daniel Clough
COO & VP of RuneScape

Daniel Clough is the Vice President of Runescape, probably having just recently been promoted to the position because it is once again time for a public announcement by Jagex that they will be doing everything in their power to trounce the issue of bots and gold farmers that have not only come back in full effect since free trade was returned earlier this year, but have managed to infiltrate and saturate all manner of training spots.

We are constantly looking into ways of making the game experience the very best possible for all of our players and as part of our on-going programme to rid the game of bots, Jagex is actively pursuing companies that support the macroing market as well as those who bot. As such we are currently pursuing various bot developers through multiple legal channels, although sadly we cannot yet disclose the full details of our actions for legal reasons. Separately, as part of normal legal process and procedure, we have also taken steps to acquire the details of all players who have purchased bots.
Once we have the information regarding the players involved we will take action specifically to ensure that these players are not compromising the game’s integrity through the use of a third party programs. We are committed to undertaking various initiatives to identify players and companies who are using and distributing bots within RuneScape and will endeavour to inform you all of these efforts as we can.
In the meantime, be safe, don’t fall to the dark side and we look forward to the positive outcomes of our actions ultimately making the game experience a better one for everyone.

If Jagex wants to give the impression that they are fighting bots, the first step is probably to put a damper to the legion currently inhabiting Runescape. Jagex should be improving their detection software, make it much more difficult to create throwaway accounts, the kind of inhibitory processes that stop a vast amount of accounts being created.

As I’ve stated before, Jagex’s main cause of concern with bots is and always has been the payment of membership via stolen credit cards, which cause Jagex a large sum in reversals and fees and harm the company directly. While bots are paying with legitimate forms of payment, you will not see the bot population drop significantly.