Tag: Runescape

Jagex Wins Lawsuit Against Bot Makers


In a measure that will certainly cause more rage-filled comments here at MMO Fallout, Jagex has won their case against bot makers, with some tasty bit of extra information to top it off. In the case of Jagex Vs Impulse Software, the judge ruled in favor of Jagex on counts of copyright infringement under federal law, circumvention of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, trademark infringement under federal law, Computer fraud and abuse under federal law, and Tortious interference with contract (Tortious interference is when your actions damage a company’s relations with customers/business partners).

In addition, the members of Impulse Software are now forbidden by court order to write bots for any Jagex game, help write bots for any Jagex game, and even play any Jagex game, as well as releasing the source code for their bot software. The URL’s will be transferred into Jagex’s possession, as well as a large amount of documents they had relating to the program. In addition, Impulse has been ordered to put out a public apology.

The amount that Impulse is paying to Jagex has been sealed, so how can this news get juicier, I hear you ask. Pay attention to this little snippet:

Within 10 days of the entry of this Order, Defendants shall identify and provide all contact information in their possession to Jagex for all current or past resellers,script developers, code developers, and customers for any product marketed, licensed, or sold by Defendants dealing with any Jagex Game.

The developers and customer list handed over to Jagex? I smell Jagex Vs Jon Doe 2: Electric Boogaloo coming soon to a theater near you.

(Court document)

Gambling In RuneScape: Just Say Neigh To Gambling


Back in November, I discussed a growing problem in RuneScape: Gambling. The introduction of dice brought with it an underground casino-style ring of players setting up shop by the Grand Exchange (RuneScape auction house) and betting on dice rolls. In order to combat the in-game street dice, Jagex removed the item entirely, at the same time making way for the less popular gambling techniques to fight for control of the market. Enter horsing:

Toy horses were introduced by Jagex way back in 2004 on April Fool’s Day joke, as a gag item for players who had asked for horse mounts. The horses can be played with, where they broadcast one of three phrases randomly. In its use in gambling, a player would offer his wager (trade money or items to the house) and place a bet one which one of the three phrases would appear. Then the house would activate the horse, and the player would win or lose depending on what the horse said. As with the dicing, this carried the risk of the house simply walking away with your money, regardless of whether you won or lost.

In a hotfix today, Jagex removed all three of the horse’s phrases, replacing it with one: “Just say neigh to gambling!” On the forums, Mod Emilee posted to announce the change, reminding players that gambling is not supported by Jagex. Players should be alert for scams, especially in a game like RuneScape where Jagex does not return any coins/items stolen even if the scam artist is found guilty and banned.

Still, this doesn’t stop the multiple other gambling methods in RuneScape:

  1. Flower Game: This uses Mithril seeds. The seeds are planted by a player, and grow into a random color. The gambler places a bet on which color he thinks will sprout.
  2. Dungeoneering Cape: The dungeoneering cape, which can be bought by players at 99 dungeoneering, selects one of three emotes randomly. The gambler bets on which emote will appear. Unlike the other gambling methods, this can be rigged to produce a specific outcome every time. This is also far less prevalent, as it requires over thirteen million experience in Dungeoneering to obtain the cape.
  3. Seal Emote: The “Seal of Approval” emote from RuneScape’s Christmas events. When used, the player turns into a seal with a backpack displaying a random number between 1 and 6. The gambler bets on which number will appear.
  4. Christmas Wand: I may be completely off on this, but this one appears to be based on the holiday item. Using it on another player throws either a Christmas pudding, a bauble, or a snowball, randomly. The player bets on which will be thrown.
  5. Classic Cape: In this method, the Classic Cape generates one of three emotes, and the gambler bets on which one will appear. This is much less prevalent, because the cape can only be obtained by players who have access to RuneScape Classic. In 2005, Classic shut down to new accounts. Since then, Jagex had opened the game up to new players on multiple occasions, with the last event in September last year to be the last ever. Now Classic is only accessible by those who had played it at one point.

These are just the gambling methods I discovered after about fifteen minutes of searching, so no doubt more exist. Jagex is going to have a long fight on their hands to get rid of every easy form of gambling available to players.

(Source: RuneScape forums)

(From MMO Fallout:

Review: Runescape: Betrayal at Falador


Runescape: Betrayal at Falador is the first novel by T.S Church set in the world of Gielinor, envisioned by Jagex, more specifically the city of Falador and the White approximate king place approximately five years before the events of the game (the quest storyline), we find the world entering into chaos.  As the White Knights work to retrieve the demolished statue of a famous knight, a mysterious woman appears out of nowhere and near death. To the north, the evil Kinshra (black knights) under the leadership of Lord Sulla plot to sack Falador and conquer the region. Closer to home, a mysterious creature is murdering travelers, and the White Knights suspect a traitor is among them.

Betrayal at Falador is a treasure trove of Runescape lore, featuring everyone you would expect in the area around Falador: white knights, black knights, the dwarves, the Humans Against Monsters cult, as well as plenty of known names. Going into the book, my initial fear was that the characters in TS Church’s mind wound contradict the personalities presented in the game. Instead, Church goes to great lengths to preserve the quirks and details of each personality, reinforcing that this is in fact a Runescape book rather than a fantasy novel with some two-dimensional representations slapped on.

Betrayal at Falador follows an enormous cast of major and minor characters, and tends to jump around quickly between them often times offering not much more than a quick scene. In fact, a majority of the book’s chapters are only two or three pages long, with a couple single pagers thrown in. Oddly enough, this works to the book’s credit. Church manages to keep an appropriate pace throughout, shortening and lengthening each character’s part as needed without fluffing or needlessly slashing any details.

The story is tense, and the characters are fleshed out enough that you actually care when one of them dies, even if they play a relatively minor role in the story. That being said, Church employs one of my most hated methods of storytelling, the convenient obscurity. I can better explain by giving an example: one character is hunting another character, but does not refer to him by name. Only after a convenient reveal is the character referred to by name, both in the narrative and in dialog (internal and external). A small complaint, but I find it obnoxious when one character refers to his prey as his prey for several chapters, but once the person is revealed in another chapter in another location entirely, all of a sudden he feels comfortable referencing by name.

Church installs some interesting takes on the Runescape lore. The mysterious woman appears by way of a Ring of Life, a magical artifact which teleports someone near death to Falador. The ring is described as rare and powerful, and only fifty existing in the world, while in the game itself the ring of life is the product of a rather low level magical spell. The wizards are able to do far more with the runes of magic than players. Additionally, Church sets out a world large enough to remind us that what we play in the game is really just a miniaturized version of the full deal. Falador, housing less than a hundred NPCs in game, plays home to hundreds if not thousands of citizens. A trip to Taverly, mere minutes in the virtual world, is a multiple day trip for our heroes.

Runescape: Betrayal at Falador suffers from what I call Skywalker Syndrome, which plagues any story where the prequel releases years after the sequel. If you’ve played Runescape, you already have a good idea who is going to die. After all, if the person is present in the game, they lived. If they are prominent and do not appear in the game, they probably die. Overall the story is still suspenseful and engaging enough to keep the reader engaged, and Church was smart enough to cast the lead role as a character whose fate is left uncertain.

Runescape: Betrayal at Falador cost me over $40 USD when I bought it in 2009, because I ordered the hardcover copy at Jagex’s website and paid twice the cost of the book in shipping from the UK. Still, the book is worth every penny, even though you will spend considerably less than I did by buying the paperback at your local boom store. Likewise, you can purchase it in ebook format and save more money and trees. The book is about 400 pages.

The sequel, Return to Canifis, I will review when I have an opportunity to read it.

Most Surprising Act of 2011: Runescape Nukes Cheaters


Ever since Jagex’s inception, their fight against bots has been rather reactionary and ineffective. From 2001 with CAPTCHA codes and fatigue, to the random event system that probably claimed more players who had left the keyboard or lost connection than their intended targets, and so on. From 2005 onward, Jagex continued updates on an escalating basis to combat gold farmers who, despite massive bans and the shut down of Runescape classic to all but a few, continued growing at an even larger scale. In 2007, Jagex restricted trade to small imbalances, implemented the anonymous trading of the Grand Exchange. For over three years, Jagex implemented updates to soften those restrictions, and in 2011 all of that work went to waste when Jagex released the restrictions on trade and the gold farmers came back in an even greater force than they had four years prior.

So when Jagex launched the bot nuke and knocked the servers offline for the better part of the day, I joined a few other MMO journalists in awaiting the results, and were we ever surprised. Even after waiting for a couple of days, the bots hadn’t come back. The chatter on the cheat websites was of panic, and despite the attempt to keep their customers, the bot writers only seemed to be able to make big announcements of further upcoming announcements.

Bots still exist, don’t get confused, but those that continue on have nowhere near the complexity of their deceased brethren. Writing a bot that can click on specific sections of the screen in a specific order is easier to defeat than a bot that can fight dragons more efficiently than I can. So after years of telling myself that Jagex would never get rid of the bots due to a combination of incompetence and apathy, I can say that this year Jagex not only made me eat my shoe, but made me eat it dry.

Kudos to you, Jagex.

Picture of the ____: Runescape Christmas Feast


The Orb of Oculus is an item in Runescape that allows players to set up rather impressive screenshots. Taken at the Christmas holiday event released today, this is a reminder as to how far Jagex has brought Runescape’s graphics in the past few years.

Jagex Fights Gold Farmers, Restricts Free Accounts


Nuking bots from an MMO is easy, at least in comparison with nuking actual gold farmers. After all, programs can be broken from the outside, manipulated into revealing themselves, and detected through various means. But how can you know that the person behind the account grinding dragons for five hours is any different than the player grinding dragons for five hours to sell the gold for real money? Not until he actually makes the sale, and even then proving that the sale was for real cash is incredibly difficult.

With the new website, Jagex has announced restrictions for all new free accounts going in effect today:

  • New free-to-play accounts can only give away gold coins or items, or make a trade with an imbalance in the recipient’s favour, to the value of 25000 coins per 24 hours. This limitation also applies to drop trades.
  • New free-to-play accounts can make Duel Arena bets with no greater imbalance than 25000 coins per 24 hours.
  • We have also made a change to Wilderness PvP, where noted items will only appear to the original carrier when dropped upon death; not the killer. This affects all accounts – not just ones subject to the limitations above.

“The limitations will remain in effect until the affected account purchases membership. Subscribing will remove these restrictions permanently, even if the subscription later ends and is not renewed.”

It’s disappointing to see how much rampant gold farming can affect a game for its players.

Jagex Removes Dice In Runescape: Fights Scams


Back in 2009 when Jagex created the bag of dice, an item that allows a player to roll a set of dice and broadcast the results to his clan chat, they didn’t exactly anticipate that players would take their invitation of emergent gameplay and go ahead and turn the item into a tool for underground gambling systems run by shady, often fly-by-night operators. And when Jagex threw the nuclear switch and knocked all of the bots offline a few weeks ago, the number of players sitting at the grand exchange (and elsewhere) advertising their dicing services rose exponentially. Barring one shattered poodle, Jagex was forced to step in and proclaim that this is why we can’t have nice things, Pepper.

In response to the growing complaints over spam, scams, and shady business, the dice have been disabled and will be removed upon the next content update. Mod Mark commented:

Don’t gamble! There are too many people who will try to scam you or alter the odds in their favour. It’s never supported by JAGEX unless it’s about gameplay (like the duel arena). It’s likely that dice scammers will move over to another method of trying to scam you, so please, be vigilant and remember… if it sounds too good to be true, it’s probably a lie.

Of course, dicing will simply be replaced by another popular method, assuming one hasn’t already. Still, busting bots and blasting a scam method in succession is rather impressive, even if the latter was essentially Jagex’s own Frankenstein’s monster.

Runescape: No Longer Housing Bots, Consolidates Servers


As I’m sure many of you are tired of hearing by now, Jagex dropped a bomb on its own game when they released an update that not only began banning bots at a rate of 9000 per minute (their figure, not mine), but also rendered the programs useless by gutting their core programming. When the dust cleared and the cheaters were gone, however, the impact of Jagex’s update became readily apparent, in the form of a 60% drop in player activity. Where 90% of the users removed were free players, according to Jagex, only 10% were paying members.

Breaking the bots caused an expected drop in free-playing activity due to millions of gold farmers no longer being in the game, so we have removed a number of free game worlds. While we were at it, we also made a smaller amount of changes to the member worlds, which will make grouping for popular in–game activities as easy as possible.

Unfortunately this has left the worlds a little sparse, and to make up for it Jagex has shut down around 30 servers today to consolidate players, from 172 down to 139. You can read the entire announcement here.

Jagex: Nuking Bots, Suing Cheaters, Sends Official Warning


Yesterday was bot nuking day at Runescape, and according to Jagex it has been an overwhelming success not just in cleaning up the game, but disabling 98% of the bots and gold farmers. Something has come to my attention from another player about receiving an email claiming to be from Jagex, offering amnesty and a last chance if the user no longer cheated. If the player continued botting, however, the email threatened to add their name to a list of defendants in Jagex Vs John Does, a pending lawsuit in the District Court in California.

The email is real, as Jagex confirmed on their forums. Check it out below:

Dear Player,

We have strong evidence that you may have purchased and used botting software in the past, specifically ibot software.

Botting and the cheating it brings is destroying your game, violates Jagex’s rights under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and any player that continues to engage in botting activity has no place in our community.

As part of bot nuke week we are offering you a 1 time amnesty and settlement lifeline, which is a chance to reform and change your ways. We’d like you to contribute to the community in a positive way, to compete on a level playing field as everyone else does and play in the true spirit of the game, with integrity. All of your accounts, main and otherwise, are now on our watch list and will be monitored for the use of ibot and all other inappropriate third-party software. Regardless of who you are or how long you’ve been with us, if you decide to cheat and bot ever again we will have no hesitation in: (1) permanently removing your account from our wonderful community in order to protect Jagex’s rights under the DMCA, and (2) naming you as a defendant in Jagex Limited v. John Does, which is a lawsuit based on DMCA violations that is currently pending in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California (Civ. Action No. SACV11-00969-CJC).

Please note that this amnesty and settlement offer is protected under Fed. R. Evid. 408. If you ignore our offer and instead continue use botting software, we reserve our rights to pursue statutory damages against you for between $200 to $2,500 per act of past, present, and/or future botting in accordance with 17 U.S.C. 1203(c)(3).

We do hope you make the morally sound and lawful choice of turning your back on bots. We look forward to seeing you in game having fun in a way that is true to the spirit of fair play and respectful to your fellow players.

Yours sincerely,
Mark Gerhard

You can find the thread confirming this at: 14-15-831-63310676 (Enter this into the “jump to thread” form on the forums itself). But wait! There’s more! Mark Gerhard promises yet another update today in Project Clusterfutterer (they’re going to keep making me say that, aren’t they?) with more updates later this week to combat the remaining 2%.

It's Bot Stomping Day In Runescape


It’s bot stomping day on Runescape, and that can only mean one thing: Celebration. Now, I’ll be celebrating in the usual fashion (cooking goulash and decorating my bathroom with crepe wrappers), but over at Runescape Jagex is celebrating with in-game events all week. Check out the announcement here, and prepare for a full week of extra experience, points, and more.

Yes, the servers are still down as of this writing, but what is a nuke without an accompanying electromagnetic pulse? I have a bit more coverage of Bot Nuke Day in Runescape coming up.