- Joined
- Jul 31, 2018
- Messages
- 33
- Thread Author
- #1
First of all - botting always has a risk of getting banned. It's against the rules. Simple as that. Never bot on an account you're not willing to lose.
Now to get into it.
Most people that talk about bans here go straight to "How long did you run your bot and what bot was it?"
I don't think that time has a massive impact on ban-rate. Surely - suicide botting is just that, a suicide for you account. You shouldn't bot more than a regular human would play. No one plays 24/7. That being said - I don't believe that botting for more than "couple of hours" is a massive sign for getting banned. Surely human players play for ridiculous amounts of time. I wouldn't be surprised if it'd be possible to bot 8-16 hours every day on an account for extended periods of time and get away with it.
"You're talking shit! I once killed cows on fresh account for just 5 hours and got banned!"
Yeah, me too, just recently. I started a fresh account on OSRS, familiarized myself with the interface, killed a couple of goblins etc. I then checked over to Bot Store and decided I will kill cows for couple of hours to start with.
I'm not surehow long the bot ran exactly but it wasn't for more than 5 hours I'd say. Then it got banned.
After that though, I made another account and started to write my own bot. I started with fishing, and later on added a couple of combat options. Now I'm in process of adding variety of tasks and locations the bot is able to choose.
My idea for this bot revolves around the point I'm trying to make - no human player kills cows for 5 hours straight.
So we come to the idea that it's more about behavior than it is about time. Time being simply a cog in the machine of behavior.
So here I am, on a fresh level 3 - writing a bot that does variety of tasks. Writing bots often give undesired results. Spam clicking the hell out of something. Opening and closing bank 50 times in rapid fire. Running around back and forth for long periods of time around some wall because some area is not defined perfectly etc. etc. etc.
Oh, and I've been running this WIP bot for the last... 4-5 days by now for most of the day. Probably 8-14 hours a day every day. Well... as much as I can, anyway, being able to only run it at 3 hour bursts at time without being a "Bot Author" ( It's been over a week, please push my sheep shearing bot
)
There have been breaks of maybe about an hour couple of times during the day, and I am not able to run the bot overnight because of the 3 hour limit.
There's no ban yet. With a buggy bot that runs for 8+ hours a day.
And even though my account here is new, I've been writing bots before, and I've found this to always be the case. I've had very few bans overall. I also use very few bots written by someone else, overall.
Why?
No reasonable human being kills cows for 5 hours straight.
And I kind of feel I've proven this, at least to myself, to some degree. Even when I had the bot simply train melee - kill stuff - but it also go out to fish and cook itself some food at times - mirrors human behavior much more closely.
This gives variation - a change in equipment or inventory setup, movement around map. And most importantly varied activities.
And I'll go further with my theory of how parts of bot watch work.
When I do stuff at computer, such as write my bot - I have mostly random videos playing on my other screen. One of these videos was live stream of jagex mods banning bots. And yes, they say that this is not how they generally ban bots, and it's just for entertainment. But it did give me a reason to further cement my theory.
In this live stream they used a heatmap to see where the bots were. Now this would be useless in a live world (they used private world where they forced all the bots in) as generic heatmap would just show where players are. But I also doubt they implemented a heatmap function just so two guys can put on costumes and stream themselves online.
My theory is that they also use account specific heatmaps.
So when you bot at lumbridge cows your heatmap would have a burning trail from cows to bank and back. Always taking the same (generally speaking) path. And same for any type of bot.
Unless it's bank-standing activity, which I understand has lower ban-rate because human players do it too.
But that alone is not a reason enough to think a player is a bot. I mean, someone out there might decide to manually kill cows for 16 hours straight like a robot. Never socialize with anybody. Just murder them damn cows. Fucking cows.
However, now you do have a suspicious heatmap now that you could compare to others in the area. Oh, and look at that - 99.9% identical heatmaps on 70 accounts on the same world. How realistic is it that they are not running the same bot and are actual cow hating humans playing the game, just happening to act virtually the same?
You can even have your break-handler, and it still wouldn't matter if as soon as you log back in you continue to burn your heatmap in even further.
So my personal advice and conclusion is:
If you use bots - don't use the same bot over and over again, even if it gives you great experience or many GPs. Switch it up. Find several bots to rotate between, or play yourself. Don't use the same bot, with same settings for extended periods of time, or eternity.
Also, try to be social when you can. Just a little bit. Ask a random person some stupid question or whatever so they wont try to be your friend and you can move on quickly.
If you make bots - I honestly do think that it makes a huge difference to give the bot some variation. I think it'd be better to make bots that are smarter, and less configurable.
Lets take a miner for example - Give the user an option to choose an ore for example, but not the location. Or even better - make it just work by clicking "start" - check the levels, check the requirements and make the bot work out a semi-educated, semi-random ore to mine, and location it's available to be mined. And make it switch mid runtime.
"Oh, rimmington mine has so many people, I will go mine coal at barbarian village instead" - that's something a human could think. Why not make the bot think the same thing?
Even if the location is not the most optimal. Even if the ore is not the most profitable.
It's better than getting banned? I mean - you're botting and not investing any time anyway.
That's my take on it anyway. If you read trough it, you're a champ. Let me know what you think.
Now to get into it.
Most people that talk about bans here go straight to "How long did you run your bot and what bot was it?"
I don't think that time has a massive impact on ban-rate. Surely - suicide botting is just that, a suicide for you account. You shouldn't bot more than a regular human would play. No one plays 24/7. That being said - I don't believe that botting for more than "couple of hours" is a massive sign for getting banned. Surely human players play for ridiculous amounts of time. I wouldn't be surprised if it'd be possible to bot 8-16 hours every day on an account for extended periods of time and get away with it.
"You're talking shit! I once killed cows on fresh account for just 5 hours and got banned!"
Yeah, me too, just recently. I started a fresh account on OSRS, familiarized myself with the interface, killed a couple of goblins etc. I then checked over to Bot Store and decided I will kill cows for couple of hours to start with.
I'm not surehow long the bot ran exactly but it wasn't for more than 5 hours I'd say. Then it got banned.
After that though, I made another account and started to write my own bot. I started with fishing, and later on added a couple of combat options. Now I'm in process of adding variety of tasks and locations the bot is able to choose.
My idea for this bot revolves around the point I'm trying to make - no human player kills cows for 5 hours straight.
So we come to the idea that it's more about behavior than it is about time. Time being simply a cog in the machine of behavior.
So here I am, on a fresh level 3 - writing a bot that does variety of tasks. Writing bots often give undesired results. Spam clicking the hell out of something. Opening and closing bank 50 times in rapid fire. Running around back and forth for long periods of time around some wall because some area is not defined perfectly etc. etc. etc.
Oh, and I've been running this WIP bot for the last... 4-5 days by now for most of the day. Probably 8-14 hours a day every day. Well... as much as I can, anyway, being able to only run it at 3 hour bursts at time without being a "Bot Author" ( It's been over a week, please push my sheep shearing bot
)There have been breaks of maybe about an hour couple of times during the day, and I am not able to run the bot overnight because of the 3 hour limit.
There's no ban yet. With a buggy bot that runs for 8+ hours a day.
And even though my account here is new, I've been writing bots before, and I've found this to always be the case. I've had very few bans overall. I also use very few bots written by someone else, overall.
Why?
No reasonable human being kills cows for 5 hours straight.
And I kind of feel I've proven this, at least to myself, to some degree. Even when I had the bot simply train melee - kill stuff - but it also go out to fish and cook itself some food at times - mirrors human behavior much more closely.
This gives variation - a change in equipment or inventory setup, movement around map. And most importantly varied activities.
And I'll go further with my theory of how parts of bot watch work.
When I do stuff at computer, such as write my bot - I have mostly random videos playing on my other screen. One of these videos was live stream of jagex mods banning bots. And yes, they say that this is not how they generally ban bots, and it's just for entertainment. But it did give me a reason to further cement my theory.
In this live stream they used a heatmap to see where the bots were. Now this would be useless in a live world (they used private world where they forced all the bots in) as generic heatmap would just show where players are. But I also doubt they implemented a heatmap function just so two guys can put on costumes and stream themselves online.
My theory is that they also use account specific heatmaps.
So when you bot at lumbridge cows your heatmap would have a burning trail from cows to bank and back. Always taking the same (generally speaking) path. And same for any type of bot.
Unless it's bank-standing activity, which I understand has lower ban-rate because human players do it too.
But that alone is not a reason enough to think a player is a bot. I mean, someone out there might decide to manually kill cows for 16 hours straight like a robot. Never socialize with anybody. Just murder them damn cows. Fucking cows.
However, now you do have a suspicious heatmap now that you could compare to others in the area. Oh, and look at that - 99.9% identical heatmaps on 70 accounts on the same world. How realistic is it that they are not running the same bot and are actual cow hating humans playing the game, just happening to act virtually the same?
You can even have your break-handler, and it still wouldn't matter if as soon as you log back in you continue to burn your heatmap in even further.
So my personal advice and conclusion is:
If you use bots - don't use the same bot over and over again, even if it gives you great experience or many GPs. Switch it up. Find several bots to rotate between, or play yourself. Don't use the same bot, with same settings for extended periods of time, or eternity.
Also, try to be social when you can. Just a little bit. Ask a random person some stupid question or whatever so they wont try to be your friend and you can move on quickly.
If you make bots - I honestly do think that it makes a huge difference to give the bot some variation. I think it'd be better to make bots that are smarter, and less configurable.
Lets take a miner for example - Give the user an option to choose an ore for example, but not the location. Or even better - make it just work by clicking "start" - check the levels, check the requirements and make the bot work out a semi-educated, semi-random ore to mine, and location it's available to be mined. And make it switch mid runtime.
"Oh, rimmington mine has so many people, I will go mine coal at barbarian village instead" - that's something a human could think. Why not make the bot think the same thing?
Even if the location is not the most optimal. Even if the ore is not the most profitable.
It's better than getting banned? I mean - you're botting and not investing any time anyway.
That's my take on it anyway. If you read trough it, you're a champ. Let me know what you think.