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As the game has grown, the demand for gold has grown with it, so it is worth gold-sellers' time to make smarter bots. "We keep developing technologies to combat bots, but it's like an arms race – we stop bots, they improve their macros, we stop them, they improve again," says Andrew. The longer we keep doing this, the harder it's going to be to keep stopping bots. "If we don't break that vicious cycle now, it would just keep getting worse and worse. It could reach a point where macro software becomes undetectable."
Who ya gonna call?
We have various Customer Support units set up to deal with the problem. Two of these are the Snapshot and Ban Appeal Team (SBAT), which investigates player-submitted Abuse Reports, and the Community Management team. Community Management's Jagex Moderators regularly root out and instantly ban as many bots as they can find - we call this bot-busting. The Player Moderators and Forum Moderators help us to identify bots in game and on the Forums, respectively.
Another is the Investigations into the Community Unit (ICU), which looks into account theft, macros, bugs and exploits, takes down gold-selling websites and more. ICU's Mod Chris81 says, "All Customer Support teams combined, we're banning tens of thousands of accounts each month that belong to real-world traders. Most of these are bots, but we also secure many accounts that real-world traders have stolen, and return them to their rightful owners." Every plausible idea mentioned on our Forums on how to remove bots, we have considered, tried or already use – for instance, we do ban IPs. We've also involved our lawyers and even talked to certain governments!
During 2006, we banned bot and real-world trader accounts carrying RuneScape gold and items worth over 200 billion gp. During 2007, so far, we've banned over 525 billion, which has a real-world value of over $2.6 million US - that's an increase of over 250%. At that rate of growth, we'd be looking at banning over 8 trillion gp in 2010 - that's 8,000 billion gp - which has a real-world value of over $40 million US. It's an almost unbelievably high number, but it hammers home the sheer size of the problem we are facing and why we have to take action against it.
Finish the fight
"The Player and Forum Moderators, and other legitimate players, have put in a lot of effort and deserve recognition."
Mod Paul M
Community Management - Player Moderator Unit
Community Management's Mod Paul M says, "For a long time, players have thought we're not doing anything, as they don't see everything we do. We've been working on this problem every single day." Bot-busting is our most visible method, but not the most effective. If we ban one bot, it's easy to create a new account to take its place. It's better to take the time to track that account and find every other account it's linked to, then ban all of them at once. Mod Rob, Customer Support Operations Manager, adds, "We still regularly go bot-busting, though, so players can see we are doing something."
Mod Rob continues: "We have automatic and manual systems in place to identify bots, but limited resources to deal with them. It isn't possible to find and ban every single one." Mod Paul M follows with, "The Player and Forum Moderators, and other legitimate players, have put in a lot of effort and deserve recognition. They see more than we ever could, so we follow up on as many Abuse Reports as possible."
Unfortunately, these methods are reactive – find a problem then solve it – and if we just react, we'll always be chipping away at a larger problem. Even if we spent every penny we earn on staff and systems to ban bots – which would mean no game updates – gold-sellers would still massively outnumber us. Mod Hobagoly says, "Every time we double our efforts, gold-sellers quadruple theirs. We can't continue only using our current methods, throwing more and more resources at it." The only way we can win is to be proactive and take the fight to them.
Removing unbalanced trade
Taking into account how serious this issue is and knowing that reactive methods could never completely stop real-world trading, what are the proactive solutions? Well, considering how much money is involved, one solution would have been to allow real-world trading. Why not just let players sell their RuneScape gold and items and take a small cut of the profits ourselves? "We've seen other MMOGs take that route and it works, but only to a limited extent. Some players would sell gold through their own website to avoid paying the developer a cut. Worse than that, the demand for gold was still mostly being met by players using bots and scams, ruining the experience for legitimate players," says Mod Chris81.
Mod Hobagoly says, "It would be very difficult to find a way of allowing players to buy RuneScape items for real money that doesn't cheapen the game." There might be some way of doing this, and without all the negatives, but it wasn't the right solution for ridding RuneScape of real-world traders and bots. Andrew follows with, "We looked at any number of different possible solutions. We've read independent studies and spoken with other people in the MMOG industry. Ultimately, the consensus is that the only way to remove the real-world trading market is to develop your game so you cannot make unbalanced trades."
An unbalanced trade is where one player trades something of value to another player, but does not receive something back of roughly equal value. Real-world traders have used this method to trade millions of gold pieces in exchange for nothing in game, as they will already have been paid in real money. Removing unbalanced trade will mean real-world traders can't do this, so there is no way for them to deliver gold to buyers - and if you can't sell gold, why bother farming it in the first place?
These gold-sellers are businessmen. They're in it for the money and are going to be looking at the bottom line: their profits. Mod Mark says, "The key phrase is 'not profitable'. We're changing our game in a way that doesn't negatively affect its gameplay, but which makes real-world trading not worth the effort." It's a bold move to make, and one that no other MMO developer has attempted. We are fully aware of how the RuneScape community will react to such a change, which is why we been worked hard to find the best way to implement it.
