Jagex would have probably liked this week in Old School RuneScape to be primarily focused on the updated release of its Defender of Varrock quest line, but instead the conversation has been dominated by players discussing the sandbox MMORPG’s endless botting problem, which got a new light thrown across it thanks to a financial article.
The Financial Times wrote up a lengthy piece about Jagex and OSRS, which was primarily focused on the studio’s sale to CVC Capital Partners as it tried to disambiguate Jagex’s valuation, but one portion of the piece about botting caught players’ attention:
“From a business perspective, however, there‘s a philosophical issue: these bots are now part of the game experience, and for many (paying) players, it’s bot labor that allows them to focus on more enjoyable parts of the game like doing quests and fighting other players. The message from the incoming management seems to be that some bots are basically OK — especially if their owners are paying. ‘Bots are a part of the RuneScape ecosystem, they just are,’ the person close to CVC told us.”
The CVC insider source continues to talk about Jagex’s policing of excess bots and how it tries to maintain “a sort of equilibrium of players and bots” in what reads like a focus on bad actors instead of those using mule accounts.
Unfortunately, some players used that poor phrasing as a cudgel against Jagex, isolating a very specific portion of the write-up to argue that Jagex and its new owners are OK with letting bots proliferate. This has brought forth one of the MMORPG’s devs, who provides hard data to try to reassure players that bots are being targeted and that there’s no wider company conspiracy.
“Since the news of the acquisition came about, many of you have been saying we’re not banning bots on purpose, mostly pointing to how we’re padding out player numbers. That just isn’t true and would not be good for the game. We are banning bots, more than we ever have before. But the reality is, and this is something we’ve said time and time again, it’s an arms race. As fast as we ban them, new bots are made. We’re constantly working to keep ahead of this race, and we ARE working on bigger initiatives to tackle botting as a whole, although we aren’t ready discuss the details of this just yet.”
The developer then shared several stat lines as proof that bot banwaves were happening, with over 6.9M bot accounts banned last year and an average of 67K OSRS bot accounts being banned each week in 2024 so far. “I hope this provides some much-needed clarity for now, and I’ll end this by saying the following… Having Membership on multiple accounts does not factor into our decision making for applying bans. Ever,” the post closes.
As for the returned Defender of Varrock quest, that’s the highlight for the latest update, promising a new weapon, new enemies, and “a little Old School flourish” to the original 2008 quest.
