The Bot That SAVED RuneScape

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Botting has always been one of Jagex's biggest problems. Bots and botting software destroy RuneScape's economy and ruin the game for real players. But at one point in time, bots actually helped saved one RuneScape! Today we take a trip back in time to RSC and find out why.

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[HamburgerExplosion]

This will be a pretty controversial take I think. I can say for sure that data from APOS scripts have improved understanding of RuneScape Classic in some areas, but the majority of scripts did not record data like that unfortunately. I reached out to lots of ex-botters and they weren't able to be very helpful with things like skilling success rates or some of the things you'd hope they would have been able to if it had just been recorded. We did get a nice PvM combat formula and drop rates for the most popular monsters from the botting community. Dialogue, I'm not sure, but if Stormy says they used apos to transcribe transcripts for the wiki, I'd believe it. Most dialogue was saved via RSC+ replays.

I know too that having about 70% - 90% botters online turned off a lot of people from Classic, and I think it's part of the reason why third-party servers which don't allow botting are doing a lot better in 2023 than the official servers did in 2018. Jagex officially blamed rampant botting as part of the reason for Classic's shutdown. Though I know that's not actually the real reason (bots had been rampant much longer without Classic being shut down), it does show that their attitude never changed towards considering botters legitimate subscribers of RuneScape Classic.

My experience as a legitimate player is that the botters on Classic didn't bother me existing (except when Giants were taken on all 5 worlds). They were like an element of the game world. It was fun to idle in Draynor with them and watch the stakes & drama. They did breathe more life into the game from existing. Not everyone felt that way about it though. Thanks for the video, good one.

[attatt]

RIP 2006scape, if none of you played, you really missed out.. amazing private server, was stuck to my laptop all summer of 2011.. Ps: F Mod Vault.

[krazypeople]

You know you're old when you go to play oldschool runescape, and it's the new version of runescape.

[supportmytroups]

14 years ago. I remember the removal of free trade. People going into the wilderness not knowing what’s going on. People went in for fun risking a lot because they knew nobody could hit them

[eikotehgrowingmouse]

before the GE, I used to do commission work for things like coal or yew logs and used a simple bot. it was like a job for me as a kid. Was fun!

[joshuaclark]

As someone who has played Classic till the end, I really hope the game gets revived some day

[gwiggle]

Mouse movements are not tracked by the client. If it was none of the Runelite plugin bot scripts that still exist would work for a second using direct api calls to send actions instead of moving the cursor and clicking something

[DPelicanGaming]

i still have a 21 year old account. i still play it on OSRS and played classic untill the shutdown.

[tpotshax]

I love that "Awesome Piece of Software" (APOS) is the same acronym as "A Piece of Shit" of which I am much more familiar. I feel like it has to be intentional.

[mldychese]

I’ll be up front. I botted heavily in RuneScape 2, but not to get ahead or sell anything. I just really loved watching progression. I maxed an account through high school botting, but funny enough I would watch the bot play. Not to monitor, but it was like an idle game. It’s where I realized my interest in AI and idle games. I would frequently go to f2p worlds to pass out gold from what I was making. Even then I wasn’t being efficient. I don’t think I ever got past 300m, and even then I just invested that in to more skilling. Botting may be against TOS and the vast majority may do it with nefarious intentions, but being a severely disabled individual now I can actually see the viability of those clients being beneficial for accessibility. Just food for thought. Love the content. Been binging the past week or so.

[johnnyunfiltered]

Packet manips are surprisingly still a thing, they just have to be done manually - I'd love to see a botters only version of osrs so we can just see who can make the craziest scripts - like the fight caves script that dropped that was in the works for roughly 5 years, as an ex botter i'd love to be able to mess around without hurting the game, just some good clean nerdy fun

[ArchonZach]

Not the hero we deserved but the hero we needed 😔

[aaabccc]

I used to talk to Storm all the time, had no idea she was still around.

APOS was a special place that I miss dearly. The slight revival over on Shizzled was cool too, but nothing like APOS was.

[JubieFresh]

This is the coolest sponsor I’ve seen so far, so happy for you!

[Brentastrophe]

The 2009 era of runescape is the year I flourished the most. I had a ton of banked "junk items" that I could use to abuse the trade limitations with. It's where I got my pirate's hook that is keepsaked on my rs3 acc now. I paid actual 4m gp for it with an estimated 11m junk items to go with it. Junk items included headless arrows, maple logs, plain bones, balls of yarn, etc so I gave away items that would not really have value or they'd be nearly impossible to trade reliably.

[YumIsHere]

Out of curiosity, were you making a game using mirage source or one of it's branches? Since you showed vb6 and a similar game (even though, I think the sprites were rpg maker)

[thecanadiansavage]

Great videos as always Colonello, I take inspiriation from you and Kemp for sure and hoping to make a video as great as this one, one day

[theboxofdemons]

It's kills me that I know that keemstar laugh is from when he laughed and said "can't wait to report your death" in regards to totalbiscuit. God what a tool.

[RonsInkLOT]

Man, this video brings back so many memories. I use to have a bot strictly for fishing/cooking lobsters just to supply my PKing clan. Had so much fun pking in Edgeville and the castle.

[Diced]

Wait so is that why I can’t seem to log into my old as RuneScape account