[jessetaylor]

Can anybody give me guidance as to why there is a hard cap on refunds? I only believe I've requested somewhere in between three and five refunds within the past few months, all with evidence and legitimate reasoning. Today I was trying to run a Tempoross bot which I had running fine last night. After it crashing a handful of times and trying to troubleshoot, I ended up costing myself about four hours worth of credits. When I finally gave up and couldn't quite figure out the solution, I went to go request a refund on those missed times (total bot runtime through four sessions was sub ten minutes with zero actual progress or bot functionality) only to be met with a "refund limit reached" message.

Why is there a limit on refunds? It seems a little unreasonable when session times are tracked via the website and proof can be provided of inoperative bot functionality.

 

[wet rag]

 

[bigboysd]

no actual respond to that?

 

[densitymax]

Can anybody give me guidance as to why there is a hard cap on refunds? I only believe I've requested somewhere in between three and five refunds within the past few months, all with evidence and legitimate reasoning. Today I was trying to run a Tempoross bot which I had running fine last night. After it crashing a handful of times and trying to troubleshoot, I ended up costing myself about four hours worth of credits. When I finally gave up and couldn't quite figure out the solution, I went to go request a refund on those missed times (total bot runtime through four sessions was sub ten minutes with zero actual progress or bot functionality) only to be met with a "refund limit reached" message.

Why is there a limit on refunds? It seems a little unreasonable when session times are tracked via the website and proof can be provided of inoperative bot functionality.

There's a lot of issues here and staff brush it off rather than addressing it.

 

[bigboysd]

pretty unfair i would day. its easy to see how long the bot ran i mean if its more than 20 minutes you dont deserve a refund but if its just seconds or less then 5 minutes a refund is in order

 

[bistuanova]

no actual respond to that?

FYI Bot Authors are not staff and to be a bot author all you need to do is release a bot on a platform thats open for anyone to develop on. That being said we also have no power over how the refund system works

 

[jessetaylor]

Mildly relieving that I'm bringing up a concern that seems at least has some basis in the community. I know bot authors aren't the ones doing that - definitely a Runemate issue itself. Just wish it would get looked at. It's easy for staff to vet requests and deem which ones are legitimate or not. I shouldn't get penalized for troubleshooting issues instead of just running a crash report to the mod author. A lot of these times these issues are fixable by us, but it could take a few resets.

 

[swych]

I'll weigh in my 2 cents and see if it clears some things up.

Firstly, Staff are purely content moderators. We have no powers to push bots, grant roles, approve refunds, reset trials, any of that stuff. If there's a post that breaks a rule, we can delete it and apply a warning/ban, but that's essentially it. I feel like that's not terribly clear and the lines can be blurred sometimes, but that's where we stand in the pecking order at least.

As for refund requests, they go straight to the author regardless of their rank on the forums. We see what you see, effectively. For example, here's what I see when someone requests a refund:

The limit for refunds is 6 per month. It's unclear when that resets, whether its a rolling window like the hours of bot usage is where if you request a refund on the 1st of the month your "refund count" will reduce by 1 when the next month rolls around, or if it just resets all requests on the 1st of every month. I've seen reports of people claiming to have only requested 2 or 3 in the last X months but the system says they've already hit their limit. Again, I can't speak to that as I don't have visibility of it and have no way of gauging if that statement is accurate of truthful.

I do agree it seems arbitrary to such a low limit given the frequency in which you start bot sessions over the course of 1 month. Game update days are especially bad here given the way our (not mine, just speaking of RuneMate as a service) payment model works where you're charged on startup regardless of the elapsed time since the last session.

For what it's worth, I generally approve all refund requests unless it's for a really obscure reason, and I'm sure other authors do that too. At the end of the day, unfortunately, you'll have to do a bit of prioritisation. If you've got 6 sessions that crashed almost instantly due to a bug in the client or the game, or 6 that you ran for 12 hours but it stopped working on hour 2, you'd want to refund the longer sessions as they'll return the most amount of credits back to you right? We, bot authors and staff included, have advocated for safeguards to be put in place for years to better protect users (and authors, because users get mad at us when Jagex update their game) from having their wallets drained but there's been no change.

I think if there's any takeaway from my post here is this: Please don't let the negative experience of the payment and refund system shine a negative light on a specific bot. Authors are equally as powerless as you in this situation, and we'd love to avoid poor reviews based on factors outside of our control, and your "anger" (for lack of a better term) should be directed constructively to those who have the power to make change and in the correct forum such as here or in the "Help" section in our Discord server.

Thanks for reading, go use Hexis bots today

 

[echo_bots]

Well written Hex

I'll weigh in my 2 cents and see if it clears some things up.

Firstly, Staff are purely content moderators. We have no powers to push bots, grant roles, approve refunds, reset trials, any of that stuff. If there's a post that breaks a rule, we can delete it and apply a warning/ban, but that's essentially it. I feel like that's not terribly clear and the lines can be blurred sometimes, but that's where we stand in the pecking order at least.

As for refund requests, they go straight to the author regardless of their rank on the forums. We see what you see, effectively. For example, here's what I see when someone requests a refund: View attachment 16936

The limit for refunds is 6 per month. It's unclear when that resets, whether its a rolling window like the hours of bot usage is where if you request a refund on the 1st of the month your "refund count" will reduce by 1 when the next month rolls around, or if it just resets all requests on the 1st of every month. I've seen reports of people claiming to have only requested 2 or 3 in the last X months but the system says they've already hit their limit. Again, I can't speak to that as I don't have visibility of it and have no way of gauging if that statement is accurate of truthful.

I do agree it seems arbitrary to such a low limit given the frequency in which you start bot sessions over the course of 1 month. Game update days are especially bad here given the way our (not mine, just speaking of RuneMate as a service) payment model works where you're charged on startup regardless of the elapsed time since the last session.

For what it's worth, I generally approve all refund requests unless it's for a really obscure reason, and I'm sure other authors do that too. At the end of the day, unfortunately, you'll have to do a bit of prioritisation. If you've got 6 sessions that crashed almost instantly due to a bug in the client or the game, or 6 that you ran for 12 hours but it stopped working on hour 2, you'd want to refund the longer sessions as they'll return the most amount of credits back to you right? We, bot authors and staff included, have advocated for safeguards to be put in place for years to better protect users (and authors, because users get mad at us when Jagex update their game) from having their wallets drained but there's been no change.

I think if there's any takeaway from my post here is this: Please don't let the negative experience of the payment and refund system shine a negative light on a specific bot. Authors are equally as powerless as you in this situation, and we'd love to avoid poor reviews based on factors outside of our control, and your "anger" (for lack of a better term) should be directed constructively to those who have the power to make change and in the correct forum such as here or in the "Help" section in our Discord server.

Thanks for reading, go use Hexis bots today

Well written Hex

 

[michael5555]

Would love to see the number per month increased / non-capped. At least until we can solve lingering client issues.

As of late, my response to a user is "Have you tried restarting both of your clients? Send a refund request". There isn't much else I can offer them, I can only distinguish a client issue in code for very specific cases. For instance, toggling auto retaliate is pretty obvious if your bot loops this more then 5 times, it's clear the Varbit is returning the wrong value and you can inform the user to restart on the UI. Even with me informing them of the issue, they'd need to send a refund request for a minute long session where the bot just toggles auto retaliate

This is a conversation from today. For context the issue had nothing to do with the listener, the client was returning the wrong player position in the world. I just knew he had to restart clients because of my own warning I provide

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[jessetaylor]

I'll weigh in my 2 cents and see if it clears some things up.

This is the type of response I think everyone always wants to see but not everyone expects to get. Thank you for taking the time to add your ten cents (that's another hour of botting) to the mix, brother. I admittedly WAS under the misconception that staff directly are in control of these refund rules, so thank you for clearing that up. I know bot authors are much less involved in that kind of matter. With all of this being said, is this an issue we can push up to a higher authority? It seems there's at least a handful of people here within the last few days that feel equally as passionate about the policy that has been set. More than just a few people seem to think the cap is a little unreasonable so I don't think it's completely obtuse to try to enact a change.

 

[swych]

This is the type of response I think everyone always wants to see but not everyone expects to get. Thank you for taking the time to add your ten cents (that's another hour of botting) to the mix, brother. I admittedly WAS under the misconception that staff directly are in control of these refund rules, so thank you for clearing that up. I know bot authors are much less involved in that kind of matter. With all of this being said, is this an issue we can push up to a higher authority? It seems there's at least a handful of people here within the last few days that feel equally as passionate about the policy that has been set. More than just a few people seem to think the cap is a little unreasonable so I don't think it's completely obtuse to try to enact a change.

You can try your hand at making an issue on our issue tracker but I'll warn you that it might not pan out at all.