[worek]

So over the past month I've gotten quite a few high TTL accounts banned doing very mundane tasks that I've never been banned for on suicide bot accounts. That's fine -- expected even. I was lucky enough to have a bank of accounts available with a range of TTL's ranging from Max melee NMZ accounts with 1 everything else to max skillers, basically everything from 600 TTL - 1700 TTL available, so I decided to try and do some testing on ban rates, what I found was quite strange. I plan on using this post to outline my findings and see what people think. I will be excluding the name of specific scripts but include the general activity.

The general setup:
15 accounts total, different range of TTL.
Each one started with 1 bond of membership.
10 accounts were running with proxy.
3 accounts were running with VPN's to different locations.
1 account was run at my office
1 account was run at my house.

The Initial tests (based on what I was banned for previously):

Rock crabs - 3 accounts TTL ~ 600/900/1300 -- Suicide botted for 3 days straight no ban on any Account.

NMZ - 3 accounts TTL 500/750/1400 -- Suicide botted for 3 days straight no ban on any account.

Woodcutting - 3 accounts TTL 500/800/1100 -- Suicide botted for 3 days straight. 800 account permed (no priors)

Fishing - 3 accounts TTL 600/700/1500 -- Suicide botted for 3 days straight. 600 account permed.

Mining - 3 accounts TTL 500/800/1000 -- suicide botted for 3 days straight. 500 account permed, 1000 permed (both no priors).


The inital bans were somewhat expected, although I actually expected more bans. However, upon checking the logs I noticed something strange, all 4 banned accounts threw an exception that was consitent with bot breaking rather than being unable to login within 1 second of recieving a message to the account that it was banned for macroing. And all bans were at random times of the day.

I thought that was odd, so I started playing around with more tests, doing different activities from Wintertodt to Pest control, to Guilded altars, etc.

The guilded altar script is where I found my next "hmmmmmm" moment. While running it, I was sitting at my PC watching it on a 2nd monitor and I thought Ok let me give this account a break, so I hit stop on the bot, and instead of normally stopping it threw an exception. I also noticed at this exact time I hit stop the account logged out (not exaggerating). So I was like okay maybe it threw some wierd exception that interacted with the client. Tried logging back in and to my suprise was banned. I checked the message center and saw the message at the exact same second mark as the exception was thrown that I was suspected of macroing. I though this was very coincidental so I wanted to try and force this.

I loaded up 6 accounts with dragon bones/wyvern bones -- wasn't cheap. And started them all doing guilded altar. Every couple minutes I would try different ways of stopping the script. Either killing the processes, hitting stop, hitting the X, command line, etc. No exceptions were thrown for the first 2 hours and I tried every 15-20 mins or so.

Then it happened. On one account I hit Stop and an exception was thrown and the account was logged out. Banned, message center at same time as exception.

I tried again for another hour and same thing occurred.

Then I switched activites. I took 2 accounts to rock crabs and tried the same thing. One account was banned within 30 mins and I decided to stop my tests.


So.. I'm not pointing fingers here, but this was so coincidental and repeatable that I found it very odd.
Just to make it clear -- I am going to continue to bot appropriately, I don't encourage people to take the same approach I did -- but I thought this would be a neat experiment.

Any opinions here?

 

[savior]

Interesting, it'd really help if you could show us the exception (censoring any bot name etc if you feel like it).

 

[worek]

Interesting, it'd really help if you could show us the exception (censoring any bot name etc if you feel like it).

This is the part that is driving me insane. There is no errors/exceptions thrown in ANY log. The script's log just ends, as in the previous line was written but there is no graceful termination of the script, it's just an abrupt termination.
The Runemate log doesn't appear to have anything correlated to the error, the last line is:
[Biostatistics] An error of type FileNotFoundException occurred while trying to retrieve the movements of clouse pack dedF
[Clouse] Downloaded 989 human mouse movements selected for you by Clouse.

IMO that's unrelated.

The Runescape.log has some errors but IMO not correlated as well (there's no timestamps), but I see this error :
Java.rmi.RemoteException: Unable to retrieve the value of ej.o for 24735784; nested exception is:

That Java error could be thrown at launch of client, which would make it unhelpful.



To better clarify -- if you've ever hit STOP on a script and seen the script freeze and then rather than seeing a "Please Leave a Review" you see an Exception Window popop (doesn't terminate runemate - just the script), That is exactly what happened.

Just to confirm, this could be an issue with how this script works. I ran a quick test of starting and stopping the bot gracefully and no errors were thrown but the log does not actually log a graceful termination either which is incredibly unhelpful for this scenario.

 

[savior]

The Runescape.log has some errors but IMO not correlated as well (there's no timestamps), but I see this error :
Java.rmi.RemoteException: Unable to retrieve the value of ej.o for 24735784; nested exception is:

That Java error could be thrown at launch of client, which would make it unhelpful.

This is the relevant part. There's tons of exceptions thrown for various reasons, but 99% of them are bot sided and the game doesnt get affected by that at all.
However if an uncaught exception is being thrown in the game, jagex will know about that.

@Cloud maybe something worth shining light onto. TLDR accounts getting instabanned at the same time this kind of exception is thrown in the game jvm.

 

[worek]

This is the relevant part. There's tons of exceptions thrown for various reasons, but 99% of them are bot sided and the game doesnt get affected by that at all.
However if an uncaught exception is being thrown in the game, jagex will know about that.

@Cloud maybe something worth shining light onto. TLDR accounts getting instabanned at the same time this kind of exception is thrown in the game jvm.

So I just wanted to test around that error as well, I wanted to confirm it was NOT an error thrown at launch every time, since thrown at launch vs. seeing an error 2 hours later doesn't correlate.

I found that this specific error is not thrown every time the game launches. This leads me to believe it is one of these things:


1-The exception means absolutely nothign
2- The exception alerts jagex to activity and the account is automatically banned.
3- The exception was indeed thrown at launch, somehow alerts jagex the game is being modified, and once the account logs out it is immediatly banned. (less likely).

Personally -- I am incredibly confident that more than 95% of bans are not manual bans - they don't have the manpower to do this. But they are automated bans that are based off of something, such as catching a JVM exception or something.
 
If Anyone can clarify what this line means prior to an exception in Runescape.log:
Received command: zap

In every Runescape.log that I have that line is seen prior to an exception being thrown -- regardless of the exception.

 

[themango69]

Personally -- I am incredibly confident that more than 95% of bans are not manual bans - they don't have the manpower to do this. But they are automated bans that are based off of something, such as catching a JVM exception or something.
 
If Anyone can clarify what this line means prior to an exception in Runescape.log:
Received command: zap

In every Runescape.log that I have that line is seen prior to an exception being thrown -- regardless of the exception.

I legit never post on forums but I thought the need, firstly, thank you for this experiment, definately took 1 for the boys aha, Ive had acc's just like you have banned exact way quite recently, now we all know if someone says this bot is detected everyone is quick to brown nose and say it is even though they have no clue

What we do know is this; None of us know what Jagex knows or doens't know so.. personally I think some scripts are definitely s safer than others but Im super confident they can detect certain scripts. because as OP said they simply do NOT have the man power to hand out as many bans as what happens, come @ me brown nosers but I'm interested in OP's tldr = is rm totally undetectable as people say

 

[worek]

I legit never post on forums but I thought the need, firstly, thank you for this experiment, definately took 1 for the boys aha, Ive had acc's just like you have banned exact way quite recently, now we all know if someone says this bot is detected everyone is quick to brown nose and say it is even though they have no clue

What we do know is this; None of us know what Jagex knows or doens't know so.. personally I think some scripts are definitely s safer than others but Im super confident they can detect certain scripts. because as OP said they simply do NOT have the man power to hand out as many bans as what happens, come @ me brown nosers but I'm interested in OP's tldr = is rm totally undetectable as people say

Personally I don't believe runemate in itself is detectable, but leaning more towards what Savior had mentioned in that certain exceptions are detectable. Now these exceptions can be quite rare and I may have just stumbled upon a way of reproducing them out of sheer effort. Like I said in the Original post, it took me multiple hours of trying to stop the bots in strange ways to actually get an exception thrown.

 

[themango69]

Personally I don't believe runemate in itself is detectable, but leaning more towards what Savior had mentioned in that certain exceptions are detectable. Now these exceptions can be quite rare and I may have just stumbled upon a way of reproducing them out of sheer effort. Like I said in the Original post, it took me multiple hours of trying to stop the bots in strange ways to actually get an exception thrown.

Yeah I agree with that, but if thats true the bot causing exceptions is a form of detection is it not ?

 

[defxx]

Its good that im not the only one, that noticed this aswell. I was going paranoid. Many bans ive got, were 'that kinda bans" where you just stop bot and get banned. They are not dumb, they tested the bot client and found something how to autoban us. We need to figure this stuff out :/

 

[fishermansquad]

Just got my hunting bot banned, ive been running him for about 8-12 hours a day.. It stops when i lose connection. He was also level 3 with 76 hunting, hunting chins. Nothing on my main, ive been running bots on him a lot as well..
 
So what your saying is to pause the bot first before just stopping it?
 
So what your saying is to pause the bot first before just stopping it?

 

[cloud]

This is the relevant part. There's tons of exceptions thrown for various reasons, but 99% of them are bot sided and the game doesnt get affected by that at all.
However if an uncaught exception is being thrown in the game, jagex will know about that.

@Cloud maybe something worth shining light onto. TLDR accounts getting instabanned at the same time this kind of exception is thrown in the game jvm.

Thanks for tagging me on this one and bringing this to my attention. Although there is a mechanism in place to prevent any exceptions within the bridge from being elevated, I'll look into whether it could be malfunctioning

 

[savior]

They are not dumb, they tested the bot client and found something how to autoban us. We need to figure this stuff out :/

Neither of this is true lol

 

[kongdoubleg]

Any updates on this?

 

[weird]

Any further updates to this? @Cloud

 

[grundyr]

looks nice!

 

[boogalooblue]

I'm really into wanting to know updates now it's like a investigation and you guys are on the case

 

[curls]

Interested, Wow so long ago someone done this much work... hope it went somewhere

 

[weird]

An interesting addition to this is I just had an account banned whilst doing Wintertodt for the past few days. I have done many hours botting Wintertodt including multiple 99s and have not been banned on those accounts.

The only difference with this account is that I botted it shortly after game update and before the Runemate client had been updated to suit. In this time I got 2-3 exceptions whilst trying to run the bots. A couple of days later, account was banned after multiple hours of Wintertodt.

All of this ties in with the post here: Mod MMG on Myths and Misconceptions:

Since 2013 we brought a range of next generation anti-botting technology allowing us to detect all bots within hours with 100% certainty. We ban bots at random intervals a few days after first detection so that they never know exactly how they were detected.

 

[dark frost]

Is there anyway to prevent these types of exceptions from occurring? Someone above proposed pausing before stopping, is that effective?

 

[hit my gong]

Im not sure but I have a similar thing happen on an account I've successfully botted from level 1 - 1500 + total...

Now I'm scared haha