Bots and Real World Trading

Jagex recently announced a severe crackdown on the runescape cheats that have blighted the game for a long time. The scale of cheating significantly increased and got to the point where Jagex had to act to maintain the integrity of runescape.

In total, 19035 accounts were banned last week for bot usage. This figure shows some of the extent that the cheats had on the game economy. It is unknown whether all the accounts banned were throwaway accounts that were used to harvest gold to sell online via cheat sites. This should act as a warning to any player who thinks they will gain an advantage by using a bot to train their account - Jagex have massively stepped up their bot hunting.

On top of the 19035 banned for using bots, Jagex banned an additional 2300 players who were buying runescape gold from cheat sites. These were actual players who had spent time training up their account and have now been permanently banned.

It is a shame that players had to buy runesape gold as their accounts are now useless - not only did they spend considerable amounts of money to acquire virtual wealth, but they had invested a lot of time over years to build up their characters. All of that time wasted because they wanted to try and gain an advantage.

Overall, it is good Jagex have started to clear out the cheats and have improved their mechanisms for bot detection. Hopefully players will now realise that they should not risk their accounts, either by using a bot or buying runescape gold. Jagex will eventually catch up with you and all the effort will have been wasted.