Hi Everyone,
I’d like to offer some commentary around recent bot bans so that everyone can clearly understand our position and have the full facts to hand regarding the current ban situation. Much of the discussion you may have read on social media and our own forums relates to a couple of specific recent situations. We’re not perfect, sometimes we do make mistakes as we’re human – thanks for letting us know to anyone who genuinely feels we’ve got it wrong, but generally, we want to keep as many players playing as possible – it’s as much against our interests as yours to ban players for no reason, and that’s what we try to do in an extremely complex game environment.
It was really unfortunate that we banned a particular player who wasn’t cheating at all. We’ve put that right of course and the player is happily back in game. In this case, the player was a very effective and highly productive RuneScape player – and their game play was so efficient that a member of staff interpreted the data our systems produced about the account as macro use. Now before you start thinking ‘well I’m efficient will I get banned’ – the context of this situation is that this account is one of only two other accounts that we have ever seen play so efficiently that they look like a bot, and we have been looking at this data for years now, so it really is incredibly unlikely that anyone will ever appear this way to us again. Naturally we are not happy with even that small risk though,
so we have (for now) stopped applying manual staff bans so we can conduct a thorough review of our macro ban processes to ensure they are robust moving forward.
The other incident that is being discussed relates to a number of players complaining on our Forums and social media due to a recent mass ban for bot use. This ban was designed to specifically target bot users based on data and system analysis information that we collate on an ongoing basis and I can confirm that this wave of bans centred specifically on RSBot users. I should also add that we have banned, and will continue to ban, players for bot use both daily, and periodically. Some of those people banned may feel the ban is unfair because they may have only used RSBot once, or twice – RSBot, or the use of any other bot program, is against the Rules of RuneScape, and we will take action if players use them – even if only once or twice.
The accuracy of these recent bans is 100% - all those who were banned used RSBot – we checked them manually, and we remain confident that our detection systems are up to scratch. On other bot bans, just to be sure, every day we sample and verify a number of bans and we will continue to apply solid checking and analysis of our heuristics before deploying anything that can lead to a player being banned.
Finally, I wanted to touch on offence appeals – I’ve read a lot in the past few days about people finding it hard to appeal, not getting a response to their appeal and so on. The truth is I agree – our current offence appeal system is not fit for purpose and I have been working with some of the guys here at Jagex to get some changes to the offence system implemented. We openly discussed this in the Offence System Q&A back in October (Quick find code: 103-104-1-65498132). Right now I’m not 100% sure what any changed system will look like or when we may release it – but throughout the project (which we have been working on for some months now) I have retained some key principles that must exist in any new offence appeal system we use.
These are:
1. It must be clear whether an offence can be appealed or not
2. If an offence can be appealed – submitting an appeal must be a simple process
3. We must offer players more ways to explain their side of the story in any appeal that can be made
4. We must promptly review and answer every single offence appeal that is submitted
I hope that provides some context around the recent bans, what we are doing to make sure that bans remain accurate and also how we are looking to make things much better for those players who wish to appeal offences in the future.
Thanks for reading, and I hope this clarifies some questions.
Mod Kelvin
RuneScape Customer Services Manager