[patcolez]

Could we please have an answer from the staff? I just want to know how you guys think of this.

 

[bill kooly]

I personally have done the whole stopping the bot/restarting the bot and going holy moly, I got charged. However, the simple fix to this is you can pause the bot, not stop, pause the bot to fix things and continue. Sure, I was a little flustered during holiday weekend when I seen I messed up doing PC and such and used over 10 hours of bot credits but then I realized something.....if you compare the price of these reliable, smooth, easy to use bots which only cost cents on the hours versus other bots which have a flat rate and a high ban rate...it's worth the fee even if I did mess up and pay the author several times. Plus to be honest, if we read the screen before hitting start, we could avoid some probs

 

[patcolez]

@Bill Kooly, it's not JUST about the stopping/restarting, but this way you are in almost 99% of the cases paying more than you should. For example you botted for 90 minutes today, then you paid for 120 minutes. The next day you do the same thing and paid for another 120 minutes while only botting for 70 minutes.

If you bot on a daily basis this payment system will let the average botter pay like 20 to 50% more than was advertised.

 

[bill kooly]

I see your point but as a customer myself, if they did that then they would pretty much have to charge per minute versus per hour (or prorate) and that would be all sorts of a mess. I understand what you mean. Sometimes I'm in a session and decide I gotta cut it off. It's not that they are devising a scheme to overcharge, the bot is triggered every hour for the charge. You start the bot-Boom, you just got charged your first hour. You did run a full sixty minutes, boom, automatically charge into hour 2 for sixty one minutes and above. Back to cell phone examples or internet providers, they give you x amount of gigs of data. Even if you used 1 MB over that, you are automatically charged for the next GB package (or whatever they offer).

What you are saying is say you cut it off seventy two minutes in, they should pro rate that based on the 12 minutes you used and give you 48 more minutes at a later time. Of course as a customer there is that part of me that would love that. However, these devs put a lot of time into coding these bots and to do that system would probably cost them a lot more in resources and you can't really pay in a value less than a penny? So....I'm not trying to seem as if I know it all. Just stating from my experience the one and only time prior to these I tried botting you paid a flat fee for the bot NOT KNOWING if it was outdated, reliable, even tested. You know what happened? Got banned.

These are just my thoughts of course.


Also, Runescape membership is the same was as this is. You pay for a month. Even if you don't play the whole month, did you still have to pay the same as someone who did?

 

[max4186]

@Arbiter
@Cloud
@Party

 

[savior]

@Arbiter
@Cloud
@Party

This has been discussed so many times before with arbiter, it's most probably going to stay this way.

 

[party]

What do you want to know, exactly? The system is designed to provide fair pricing plans than scale the distance from your average user to your power-user. Whilst I might not agree with finer details of the plan, the overall process works effectively and costs your average user less than monthly access would.

 

[yuuki asuna]

What do you want to know, exactly? The system is designed to provide fair pricing plans than scale the distance from your average user to your power-user. Whilst I might not agree with finer details of the plan, the overall process works effectively and costs your average user less than monthly access would.

Even though I agree that it seperates the power users from standard users, the average user (1 account) actually pays more than what it would cost monthly.

For example, if you'd run Quality Smither (god knows why) for 10 hours a day for 30 days on 1 account, it'd cost you $24. I'm sure the monthly fees for a "high-end" smither on other botting sites wouldn't be $24/month. But other than that statement I agree with you.

 

[party]

Even though I agree that it seperates the power users from standard users, the average user (1 account) actually pays more than what it would cost monthly.

For example, if you'd run Quality Smither (god knows why) for 10 hours a day for 30 days on 1 account, it'd cost you $24. I'm sure the monthly fees for a "high-end" smither on other botting sites wouldn't be $24/month. But other than that statement I agree with you.

Using a bot for 30 days at 10 hours a day would class you as a power-user.

 

[savior]

Even though I agree that it seperates the power users from standard users, the average user (1 account) actually pays more than what it would cost monthly.

For example, if you'd run Quality Smither (god knows why) for 10 hours a day for 30 days on 1 account, it'd cost you $24. I'm sure the monthly fees for a "high-end" smither on other botting sites wouldn't be $24/month. But other than that statement I agree with you.

I think you might wanna rethink the meaning of an "average user"

 

[yuuki asuna]

I think you might wanna rethink the meaning of an "average user"

How so? It's just 1 acc training.

 

[savior]

How so? It's just 1 acc training.

So you would say that the casual user is using a premium cannonball bot for 10 hours every single day on his main to train smithing? Bro...

 

[justcurious]

What do you want to know, exactly? The system is designed to provide fair pricing plans than scale the distance from your average user to your power-user. Whilst I might not agree with finer details of the plan, the overall process works effectively and costs your average user less than monthly access would.

The issue here is not the pricing scheme itself. Paying per hour per account is fine. That's not the issue OP raised with this topic.

The issue is that there are situations where a user will pay for an hour, but not receive that full hour of service because they stopped and restarted the bot.

An analogy:
It's like paying $10 for a month of RS membership, but that membership cancels itself if you don't log in every day. You don't know this, and when you get your credit card bill at the end of the month and it turns out you paid Jagex $90 because you don't play every day. So then you go on ask Jagex what the hell happened and they say, "Oh, you didn't know you had to log in every day? There's a post on the forums about it." Any reasonable customer is going to reply with the question of, "Why didn't you tell me that I had to log in every day when you took my money?! Why is that condition not told to me on the billing page?!" Even if Jagex then refunds them $80, there's a high chance that they'll be pissed off enough to just say, "Screw these guys," and spend their money elsewhere.

In that analogy, you could potentially fix the problem by just telling them up front that they have to log in daily. Most people would still feel like that's a shitty system, but at least they'd know about that condition before getting charged multiple times.

Honestly, everyone in this thread is unaffected by this problem. Because we know it exists and is a problem. Because of this thread, I now know to triple check all my settings since (in some bots) I can't stop the bot to change them. I know to pause bots instead of stop them. And I know to always set a timer and run a bot for no more than, say, 4 hours and 59 minutes, instead of letting it run till 5 hours 6 minutes. Since I know how to work the system, I can get my money's worth. This issue doesn't affect me. But one shouldn't need to know how to work the system to get their money's worth.

 

[party]

That's a dumb as hell analogy seeing as you just specifically said it wasn't a monthly subscription.

There's a really simple solution, don't stop and restart your bots. If you really feel like you need to change your settings, hound the author to implement support for that.

EDIT: I can argue this later but I'm at work at the moment so if my responses seem half-finished, you know why.

 

[nviii]

How would you solve it? (out of curiosity)

Make it so it's an internal time, across all sessions.

Basically, running 6x 10c/h bots will charge you for an hour every 10 minutes.
3x 10c/h bots will charge you an hour every 20 minutes.
2x every half hour.


Basically the exact same way the metrics are setup, just so that we actually get the time we pay for with premium bots.


People wouldn't be able to get anymore than 1 free hour if they're trying to be shiesty.
It's a win for everyone who isn't happy about stealing 10 cents at a time...

 

[justcurious]

That's a dumb as hell analogy seeing as you just specifically said it wasn't a monthly subscription.

There's a really simple solution, don't stop and restart your bots. If you really feel like you need to change your settings, hound the author to implement support for that.

EDIT: I can argue this later but I'm at work at the moment so if my responses seem half-finished, you know why.

You're not seeing the forest through the trees here. My analogy isn't monthly vs hourly payment. The unit of time is completely irrelevant to what I'm saying. Here's the exact same analogy using a daily payment scheme. The unit of time doesn't matter. That's not the issue here.

Another analogy:
You pay for RS membership daily. $0.50 a day. You think this is fine and sign up. It turns out that there's a post buried on the forums saying that your membership expires the moment you log out, and logging back in means you get charged again. It's not mentioned up front when you pay for the membership. You, like any other reasonable person, assumed that when you paid for a day of membership it meant you got a day of membership regardless of whether you log in or out.

So you pay in the morning, play for a while, log out to grab lunch, play a little more, log out for dinner, play some more, call it a night, remember you wanted to buy something, and log back in real quick to play with the grand exchange before bed.

Well because you've logged in 4 times, you'll have paid $2.00 to Jagex because your "daily" membership expired every time you logged out.

Well when you notice this on your credit card bill, you're going be pissed and think you were getting way overcharged. When you ask support and they tell you, "No, you were supposed to pay that much! Didn't you see the forum post?" you're gonna be feeling scammed and taken advantage of. It's bad business. Sure the customer can work around it. But only if they know the restriction exists. And there's certainly the question of why there should even be a need to work around it in the first place.

 

[savior]

Make it so it's an internal time, across all sessions.

Basically, running 6x 10c/h bots will charge you for an hour every 10 minutes.
3x 10c/h bots will charge you an hour every 20 minutes.
2x every half hour.


Basically the exact same way the metrics are setup, just so that we actually get the time we pay for with premium bots.


People wouldn't be able to get anymore than 1 free hour if they're trying to be shiesty.
It's a win for everyone who isn't happy about stealing 10 cents at a time...

Having such a flowing concept would be ridiculously painful to implement and maintain. If you want a flowing system analog to time passing, dynamically scaling with the amount of sessions you have active, would require the time to be updated every second or so which is going to use a hell of a lot more processing power on the servers.
 

You're not seeing the forest through the trees here. My analogy isn't monthly vs hourly payment. The unit of time is completely irrelevant to what I'm saying. Here's the exact same analogy using a daily payment scheme. The unit of time doesn't matter. That's not the issue here.

Another analogy:
You pay for RS membership daily. $0.50 a day. You think this is fine and sign up. It turns out that there's a post buried on the forums saying that your membership expires the moment you log out, and logging back in means you get charged again. It's not mentioned up front when you pay for the membership. You, like any other reasonable person, assumed that when you paid for a day of membership it meant you got a day of membership regardless of whether you log in or out.

So you pay in the morning, play for a while, log out to grab lunch, play a little more, log out for dinner, play some more, call it a night, remember you wanted to buy something, and log back in real quick to play with the grand exchange before bed.

Well because you've logged in 4 times, you'll have paid $2.00 to Jagex because your "daily" membership expired every time you logged out.

Well when you notice this on your credit card bill, you're going be pissed and think you were getting way overcharged. When you ask support and they tell you, "No, you were supposed to pay that much! Didn't you see the forum post?" you're gonna be feeling scammed and taken advantage of. It's bad business. Sure the customer can work around it. But only if they know the restriction exists. And there's certainly the question of why there should even be a need to work around it in the first place.

Thats still a pretty bad analogy. And you wont be able to make a good analogy with runescape for that matter. Its a completely different concept.

 

[noblefrenzy]

The premium bots are basically milking the average botter on their money on basically 1 acc even tho its not the end of the month
the "lowest" amount of money by paying each week if your an average 24/7 botter botting on just 1 account is 6.30$ a week The middle amount your paying is 13$ per week and the highest amount is 16$ per week.
Note: there are 4 weeks in a month.
even tho if ur not a 24/7 botter it will add up soon enough

 

[savior]

The premium bots are basically milking the average botter on their money on basically 1 acc even tho its not the end of the month
the "lowest" amount of money by paying each week if your an average 24/7 botter botting on just 1 account is 6.30$ a week The middle amount your paying is 13$ per week and the highest amount is 16$ per week.
Note: there are 4 weeks in a month.
even tho if ur not a 24/7 botter it will add up soon enough

Y'all missing the point that users are using more than 1 premium bot. If a user desires to bot for 3 hours per day, he pays 3*30*~0.08=$7.20. On other platforms, where bots cost a monthly price, he has to buy a month of botting for each bot he wants to use. So even if a bot only costs $5/m which is fairly low, he has to pay $20+ just in order to use like 4 different bots.

 

[nviii]

Having such a flowing concept would be ridiculously painful to implement and maintain. If you want a flowing system analog to time passing, dynamically scaling with the amount of sessions you have active, would require the time to be updated every second or so which is going to use a hell of a lot more processing power on the servers.
 

Thats still a pretty bad analogy. And you wont be able to make a good analogy with runescape for that matter. Its a completely different concept.

Sounds lazy to me, but okay.

Could also be updated every minute, what would be the harm in that?
Why would it NEED to be every second?

What's the downside to updating every 60 seconds?
Afraid someone's going to steal 60 seconds of your bottime?

Well we're all frustrated that we're paying for bottime we can't use. Hours. Not minutes.

Hours.