TruthScape.com  9  The TruthScape Soapbox - Opinion and Commentary on RuneScape and Beyond

The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #3 - Sorry, Comrade, but Price Controls Don’t Work The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #5 - It’s Not Too Late to Save the Patient

Published: November 30, 2007

RuneScape is a multiplayer game, and interaction between players is supposed to be one of its strengths. I very often enjoy meeting new people and discussing various aspects of the game with them, and firmly believe that people who never like to deal with others would probably be happier in a single player game rather than in a MMORPG.

On the other hand, there are times when I really don’t feel like talking. Perhaps I am concentrating on what I am doing, I am multitasking, or I just am not in the mood. Or maybe I am in a place where a lot of other people are blabbering about something I just don’t want to listen to.

Fortunately, the game allows us to turn off public chat and just play quietly if we want to, so there’s no problem, right? Wrong, thanks to the ongoing obsession that some have with finding “bots”—players that are actually computer programs playing RuneScape automatically. Some are so eager to seek out these fakes that we have come to the incredible situation where a legitimate player can be accused of being a cheat just for minding his or her own business quietly.

The other day I did something within RuneScape that I haven’t done in months: I spun bowstrings.

I am not a big fletcher by any means—since I find it incredibly boring and it’s certainly not a money-maker—so my Fletching level is fairly low for my overall skill total, and I rarely use bowstrings. Even so, I found myself walking back from the astral Runecrafting altar to the bank on Lunar Isle, and since my inventory was empty and there are flax fields there, I figured, “what the hey”. I stopped, plucked 25 flax or so and put them in my bank.

Some time later I found myself at the spinning wheel in Seers’ Village. I started to spin my flax and then switched to another window to check a discussion on the RuneScape forums. When I returned, I saw something approximately like the following in my chat window:

“Hey”

“Hey, are you there?”

“OMG must be a bot.”

I don’t exactly remember what I said in response, but it was probably something sarcastic like, “Yeah, I’m a level 121 bot. Good catch.”

In the example above, what reason did I have for making my accuser think I was a bot? Only one thing: I didn’t answer him when he talked to me. Now bear in mind that this isn’t a case where I was walking back and forth from the bank to the spinning wheel over and over, using robotic-like motions. I had been there for less than a minute; I was only spinning one inventory of flax. Yet the other player who was there didn’t think anything of accusing me of being a cheat, solely because I didn’t speak.

So, I’m sure you’re saying to yourself that this must have just been some random idiot, and nothing to be alarmed about, right? Wrong. Having players accuse others of being autoers is becoming ridiculously commonplace. It’s a real problem, because in some cases it leads to people being unfairly reported for “crimes” they didn’t commit. It is also creating a culture of paranoia within the game.

What’s going on here? Simple: RuneScape has an out-of-control problem with bots, autoers, gold farmers, whatever you want to call them. Legitimate RuneScape players get annoyed by having these cheats exploiting the game, competing for resources and driving down prices. So, since these bots usually have particular behaviors—such as not talking—players are constantly looking for these characteristics as being signs that the players around them are bots.

If people just called others “bot” without evidence, this would be annoying, but no more so than say, hearing “noob” 5,000 times a day. The problem goes far beyond that, however, because they often don’t just call you a “bot”, they report you as being a rule-breaker. Jagex not only allows players to do this, it actually encourages them to do so.

In effect, Jagex has made everyone in RuneScape a sort of “bot deputy” or “bot bounty hunter”, and players have embraced this role. Only one little catch: Jagex never bothers to educate players about how to properly distinguish a bot from a real player. So we end up with the current ridiculous situation, which is sort of like what one might expect if every driver on the highway had the right to pull over any other driver who “appeared to be speeding” or “looked suspicious”.

I don’t spend a lot of time skilling these days, but whenever I do, I always see comments about “he’s a bot” or “he’s a gold farmer” being tossed around. Naturally, this is most common with the skills where bots are a problem, such as woodcutting, fishing, mining, flax picking, and so forth. Again, usually the only requirement for the accusations to start is that someone isn’t saying anything.

All apples are fruit, but that doesn’t mean all fruit are apples. Similarly, all bots may be silent when they play, but that does not imply that everyone who is silent while playing is a bot! There are many different reasons why a player might be quiet or might not respond to comments or questions. Some of the more common possibilities:

• The player is multitasking or on another window (as I was with my flax spinng);
  
  
• He or she is in a private chat discussion or on a clan chat channel;
  
  
• Your comments weren’t seen because of in-game message spam;
  
  
• The player’s computer is lagging or got disconnected;
  
  
• The person is muted; or
  
  
• The player has public chat off.

The players who are in such a big hurry to “hunt down” and report bots need to get it through their heads that the fact that someone doesn’t speak does not mean he or she is a bot.

The last item in my list above is probably the cause of most of the problems, and is a real sticking point for me and many others. It’s infuriating to read comments from “bot hunters” who say that players who don’t want to be reported should “just leave their public chat on”. Sorry, but it’s none of your damned business how I play the game; I have the right to turn public chat off if I want to. And when I end up in places overloaded with childish players spamming the chat box and acting like fools, I definitely want to.

As annoying as it can be to be called an autoer, I must confess that I didn’t write this article because this is such a big problem for me personally; in fact, I get it only rarely. I’m relatively safe from the accusations because I have a combat level of 121, which means that most people will normally assume that I’m a real player and not a bot.

It was just having someone say that to me that made me suddenly aware of just how prevalent it has become for other players. Being silent is now a “bot indicator” in some people’s eyes, and so is being a newer player or one with a low combat level. In fact, it seems that the lower the character’s level, the more likely the person is to be accused of being a bot/autoer. In the case of very low level characters, such accusations seem to be not only common, but routine.

The particular problem here is that the only way you can immediately judge characters in RuneScape is via combat level, because that’s all that is shown. Anyone who has been around a while knows that combat level does not necessarily correlate to how much experience a character has within the game. There are many legitimate players who just happen to have low combat ratings. In fact, there are skiller accounts specifically designed by their owners to focus only on support skills and not combat; they may have tens of millions of XP and level 99 in many skills, yet only be combat level 3 or 4.

The point here is similar to the one I mentioned in the previous section: most autoers may have low combat levels, but that doesn’t mean that anyone with a low combat level is an autoer. Don’t judge players by their combat levels any more than you judge them based on the fact that they don’t respond to a question.

Jagex’s approach to suspected rule-breakers seems to be to tell everyone to report anything that looks suspicious and then let them sort it all out. The company says that it carefully assesses these reports, and I believe them; I would assume that they don’t just ban people based on flimsy evidence like “he wasn’t talking”. But even leaving aside the gross inefficiency of having people report for stupid reasons only to have the reports discarded, there are other problems with this approach as well.

Obviously, those innocent players who get reported are happy that they don’t get banned for no reason, but they still have to deal with the charges themselves on an ongoing basis. How much fun would you find a game where people were constantly interrogating you, accusing you of being a cheater, and threatening to report you? Frankly, I consider this behavior to be a form of harassment; and worse, it’s a perfectly legal form of harassment that the game unwittingly promotes.

The damage goes even beyond that, however, to the entire community as a whole. Too many RuneScape players are turning into paranoid ninnies who see bots lurking under every mining rock and behind every yew tree. Many players no longer feel free to turn off chat if they want some peace and quiet, or to create characters the way they want to, or simply to relax and enjoy the game.

It’s up to both the RuneScape community and Jagex to put an end to this insanity.

RuneScape players need to educate themselves better about what really indicates that someone is a bot. This should start with the two main issues I raised in this article: silence doesn’t mean someone is a bot, nor does a low combat level. Players should train themselves to only suspect someone of being a bot after a great deal of careful observation, and not to throw accusations around wildly.

For its part, Jagex could do a lot more to raise the education level of players about what bots look like than I can in an article like this. It could also take some other specific steps that would help avoid a lot of problems, such as:

• Specifically telling people not to report others just because they aren’t talking, due to the many reasons that I outlined earlier.
  
  
• Making an “I am muted” emote, which is long overdue in the game anyway. If people are going to be allowed to keep playing but not talking, they should have a clear way of telling others their status.
  
  
• Moving beyond just combat level to make it easier to check out players’ statistics and status. Many of the accusations made against level 3 skillers would go away if it were easy to see that they had high levels in multiple skills.

I don’t really expect Jagex to do any of these things, of course. As is usually the case, it’s probably going to come down to the good players of RuneScape to work towards less stereotyping and better education of the “bot hunting” population.

The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #3 - Sorry, Comrade, but Price Controls Don’t Work The TruthScape Soapbox - Issue #5 - It’s Not Too Late to Save the Patient