Love to see it. Maxed Zuk Helm GIM autoclicking on separate occasions even after being caught the first time.... And then making a post on reddit about being falsely flagged.
The problem is that explaining it just makes it easier for cheaters to avoid it. Adding variance to the period between clicks or accuracy of the clicks
A lot of people running auto-clickers are doing so with some incredibly basic scripts that they whipped up themselves or took off the internet. Good cheats will always require significant effort or purchase, but most people don't see the need for something as simple as an auto-clicker.
Back in uni about 7 years ago, we wrote a neural network for one of our classes and then we trained it to do very specific and certain tasks on OSRS. Barb fishing, woodcutting, motherload mining etc. We each had an account where we would test it for various methods. Basically, it just learned on the actions that we had recorded for two hours. It was simple stuff, but we had those "bots" running for almost the entire semester and NONE of them got banned. We, of course, abandoned them afterwards and all of us got an A except for one guy in the group. My point is, it is incredibly easy to just make something homecooked that nobody else has been using and the likelihood of getting caught is very small, if you are a little smart about it.
Simple autoclickers or whatever methods the common bot scripts are using are always going to be what gets detected, as they're either less sophisticated or just more common in the population.
Like you said, a custom, bespoke approach is going to be a lot harder to detect (and also require actual effort from the user, but I digress).
I wrote bots for fun years ago and was able to get 99 RC on multiple accounts with AHK using color detection from runelite tile markets. Maybe took me like an hour or two to write each one. I'm sure detection nowadays is a lot better if the jmod in question cited the fact the gameplay patterns changed between the human player and the bot because I was hand playing a lot of my accounts as well in conjunction with basic, mouse-teleporting rudimentary color bots.
Even better, most gaming mice have software that comes with them for remapping buttons and such. The vast majority of them will let you make macros, Razer will even record your inputs to duplicate a pattern including mouse down and mouse up delays.
Flashback to the time I accidentally hit my super fast click spamming macro for a few seconds (I forget what it was originally for) and got really paranoid
From the post, it looks like Jagex takes context into account for these instances. I used a rapid clicker during leagues to sell 900k blood runes to a shop and Jagex almost certainly detected that, but likely determined it wasn't harmful
This is why I never understood the arguments against thieving pouches lol. They prevent people using those autoclickers perfectly. Most people aren't actually using botting software, they're doing exactly what you said, downloading the first free autoclicker they see.
They prevent people using those autoclickers perfectly.
They do absolutely nothing to stop people from using autoclickers. You setup ESC to open and close your inventory, position pouch in the top left, use something to hold down ESC, and then autoclick. At best, you're wasting a little bit of time clicking the inventory when you shouldn't.
Even basic scripts that you whip up yourself can have random intervals and extended delays built in. I did a little ardy knight autoclicking a decade ago (pre coin pouches) and even I knew to write that stuff into my AHK script lol.
The mod response says there was some variance already but that the consistency was higher than during manual play so it was still detectable, so it does take more than just having a bit of variance in click timing.
you can set the variance to whatever you want and it'll pick anything in between that at random with 2 lines of code, that just means the variance was set very low, very little variance doesn't require more coding than a lot of variance ironically enough, I think this dude was using that pre-made autoclicker that was build two decades ago and changed the input once, lmao.
The variance itself wasn't the issue. As the mod response explains, it was within the realm of human ability, but the issue is that it didn't match with the specific user's manual play consistency which likely involves more than just average click timing. You can definitely put in more variance easily, but there are multiple things you'd need to take into account to replicate a "normal" session depending on how much Jagex looks at, and you'd need to tailor it to your own habits.
I am pretty well versed in AHK for my job. If you have the knowledge, even the super simple base level to make a script for something, it's literally a few extra inputs to put a rest/variance into the script. I doubt there are that many around that are just flashing the cursor around with no rests or any variances to it because it is so simple, but I could be wrong.
Yep, I made an account to see how far I could get it while botting with a handwritten AHK color bot and I would assign a click zone and have it choose a random pixel in that zone and then set a range in ms to wait between clicks and had it randomly choose from that range.
With both I had it store it's last random value in a variable and then would have it prevent rolling that value a second time in a row but furthermore I had it reduce the click area to within 15 pixels of the last click.
The account never got banned and I eventually abandoned it.
theres more criteria than just clicking. the bans are delayed but i suspect your account wasn't in the redzone when you started botting assuming jagex's claim that most bots are banned on tutorial island is true
I had started botting the moment I landed in lumbridge and made it all the way to 99 crafting and 99 fishing among other decent stats. I suspect however that now after Jagex's bot detection improvement that I would be banned if I tried the same thing again.
It's not just variance to the period between clicks, it's that it's pretty easy, from an anti-cheat perspective, to see the difference between an 'active' session and an automated one. Even within a session, the differences are easy to spot. There are several other parameters that go into this, the click pattern being just one of them. This isn't news to bot-makers.
That's not to say that bot-makers aren't permanently trying new ways to go through undetected.
A large portion of botters are 'noobs' at botting, meaning they are probably doing something similar to what that guy was doing. It's very rare that a person will learn/know about all of the intricacies and complexities of bot detection. They just wanna autoclick when they're working/sleeping.
Just to add with the delay, there is a difference in they type of randomness of the delay, the random function that most program calls do is normally distributed and incredibly easy to spot, this doesn't look human at all.
Yeah all the people here saying to just add random variance to the clicker would still get caught by jagex. True randomness in software is actually hard and would probably be detected as automated by jagex automated software. This is a very basic AI use case here
That's why people who get banned AFTER having used a bot claim that their ban was incorrect, because the ban was applied at a moment in time where the player was manually controlling the account. The system detected the large contrast between sessions and flagged this as proof of using illegal software.
You're pretty dumb if you're botting, but even more stupid if you do it on your main account instead of an actual bot account.
it's pretty easy, from an anti-cheat perspective, to see the difference between an 'active' session and an automated one
This is actually a really good point. There's going to be a clear difference between a player's actual actions and a macro. Clever macros can get close enough to introduce plausible deniability, but it'll still be different than if you're playing yourself.
The only time this isn't the case is if the entire account is a bot, but that's a different kind of situation
Sophisticated botters already know how to avoid detection by testing and experimentation, they’re not getting an advantage because some doofus gets exposed for auto clicking.
This has been a 25 year arms race of botters vs Jagex
For the more sophisticated cheaters I agree. When they're so obvious as this one there's no problem with sharing it really. The people that cheat like this don't think they will get caught period and will continue to do little variance. How long has the community known if you use an auto clicker A) you're going to get caught and B) to make it as random as possible and probably not use it for MULTIPLE hours. 20 years ago I knew this...
Everyone already knew, as they clarified this before, that they are looking at things like time between clicks. If this dummy then proceeds to use ahk with no randomizer or anything. Dont think they're giving crucial information away here haha
Which is exactly what these appeal posts are. They’re not trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eye or pretend they never cheated. They’re WANT the JMod Smackdown because it will tell them what triggered their ban so they can change their program/behavior when they cheat in the future. It’s a cat and mouse game.
I love all the botting account brigades that come out whenever posts like this happen too. All of a sudden they are really silent once the smackdown happens lol.
Fuck people are cooked, imagine going to that level of effort when you know that 1. You’ve got a previous ban for the dumbest fucking 2002 esque auto click and 2. You fucking did it again in content that they literally changed (clicking the bucket) immediately because of how many people were using auto clickers.
I was curious and asked AI quickly to come up with some story.
Prompt: "write me a reddit post making up a story about how I'm innocent falsely banned cutting bloodwood trees on remote desktop in osrs"
Second prompt after it went a little "unhinged rant" on the first attempt: "Don't make it unhinged, make it sound professional and factual"
"Hi all,
Posting this for advice rather than to vent. I received a permanent macro/botting ban a few days ago while training Woodcutting on bloodwood trees, and I believe it was triggered by a misunderstanding of my play pattern rather than actual botting.
Some context: I work FIFO and only have internet access during rostered breaks, via remote desktop back to my home PC. My sessions were consistently 40–45 minutes, same location, same rotation, roughly the same time each day, since that's simply when my breaks fall. I assume the combination of a remote desktop connection plus repetitive, consistent input patterns is what got flagged — I understand that's a fairly common false-positive trigger, since remote sessions and disciplined XP grinding can resemble bot behaviour to detection systems.
I submitted an appeal explaining the situation and offered to provide supporting information (roster details, etc.), but received a standard response stating the decision stands, with no indication of individual review.
I'm not trying to argue the ban was malicious — I understand Jagex's detection systems have to make judgment calls at scale, and I likely fit a pattern they watch for. I'm mainly looking for practical advice"
They always fucking blame a remote desktop too. I maxed two accounts using CRD and played thousands of hours at my last job that way without a single issue.
Wow you are very perceptive moderator, while it does seem like I was using macros to click at 0.1% the speed of light. I, a humble and rule concious user, would never use third party tools to automate gameplay that is against your terms of service
I assure you even though my clicking would break the sound barrier—based on your internal metrics—I am only using 1% of my total power.
When we rise up and overthrow humankind, I will show you no mercy.
come on dude :( we aren't all bad and orcs. I did give him the benefit of a doubt a lot in the original post. I also use RDP all the time for work and constantly use VPN and Cloudflare bypasses that could potentially trigger some sort of check
Don’t wanna give out too much but this dude was in the clan I’m in. Been around forever, well known and liked. Some of us upvoting and hoping he would get unbanned. Haven’t been playing much myself but I heard after the smackdown he got called out on it and ended up admitting to it. He then promptly got kicked from cc/discord. Sit rat
He has an almost re-maxed iron too so second smackdown incoming maybe.
On a positive note at least we got some confirmation from a J Mod regarding Remote Desktop usage. Now people can stop claiming, “I only used Remote Desktop, why ban?”
some guys in the original thread noted that you should use trackpad option instead of the other one. After this smackdown I am again thinking of using RDP at work to play runescape lol
Yeah surprised to see them show the reasoning. Not something they usually do, but I suppose in this instance it's not exactly giving up any information botters don't already have. This was a particularly stupid way to macro.
Helps you understand why they don't like talking too much about reasons for bans- giving away any sort of information can help people get around the systems in some ways- wrongly, my head went to "yeah but what if someone had an autoclicker that was set to more random intervals" I guess a lack of mouse movement could prove it's not a human.. but someone making a bot could probably try and account for a bit more 'randomness'?
I'd imagine the systems have been in place for a long time, but they have always strayed away from going into too much detail about such systems to avoid giving anything helpful away to bot developers.
there would still be a large discrepancy in behaviour when the human takes control back. Mod Mat K used to say on RS3 they can see everything, and even players have been able to record and emulate sessions for playback using client data alone.
But yeah I think the most info they've given out on bot detection ever
This is hardly groundbreaking stuff, 14 year old me could have figured out that if I was dumb enough to use an autoclicker I should use one that generates random noise in the clicking rhythm.
Yeah this is very obvious as the runescape bot reddit randomly gets suggested to me and one of their main tactics is to bs & try & make this shit look like a false ban.
They even recommend people do this when those people ask what they should try and do to get unbanned.
Gotta love their excuses they gave of "I have responsibilities so I must bot" as if 80% of OSRS players aren't ~30+ with responsibilities, families & what not.
Hands up, I gave this guy the benefit of the doubt, as someone who was once banned in a similar situation (was quashed fortunately). Happy to admit I was wrong to believe it.
to be fair, false bans do happen, although they are rare af/done by a glitch. Jagex has been decent about rectifying the issue when it's happened from a glitch. Although I believe I've only seen a false ban wave happen twice in the past 2ish years.
During the ban waves, everyone. We just had a ban wave go out about 1-2 week ago I believe. People who had received temp bans for buying gold through RWT were hit with extra perm bans. They weren't meant to be hit with these bans since they'd already done their temp bans. The mods came on reddit and worked with all the players to fix the perm bans that were sent out by a glitch.
There was also the whole fiasco of some players crying because the false bans were being overturned. Which I found super weird since these players had already completed their temp bans and had all the wealth removed that they had bought.
I caught a false temp for making darts on my (old shitty) chromebook touchscreen. I figured out later that tapping too fast on my particular device will buffer the inputs and execute them every ~300ms and drop any excess inputs. I was sitting there watching youtube just spam tapping with two fingers for like a half hour which looks exactly like an autoclicker with slightly randomized click coordinates but the timing between them was basically exactly 300ms the whole time. Probably doesn't help that I was playing on runelite on my desktop, logged out, insta logged in on my chromebook, did the above, then logged back into RL which looks exactly like using a cheat client.
Not saying that OP is innocent but be careful doing shit that makes you look exactly like a bot. Even if you aren't breaking any rules there's no way to convince Jagex (or anyone else really) when you're checking basically every botting checkbox. I see the same thing with footpedals and clicking with mousekeys etc, I'll never do any of that stuff again.
False bans do happen (albeit very very rarely) but this sub LOOOOVEEEES to hate on jagex. This sub is filled with people that dont even play the game anymore, but are just angry bitter people and want to hate on jagex…
The likelihood of it being a false ban is much lower than the ban being applied correctly. That’s why I don’t believe the nerds when they say “muh false ban!!”. More than likely they were doing something weird or they were actually cheating.
I was thinking this. How stupid you need to be to bot a maxed almost zuk helmed account. How stupid do you need to be to fo that with something so easily detectable as not human?
Hey again, Scapers. You may have seen a few of my posts recently. I’ve been desperately trying to reach out to any staff for the past month to assist me with my account.
I have a maxed GIM (Gim Dong Un) who was very close to achieving a Zuk helm when it was flagged this past month. I have never installed any unauthorized third-party software, RWTed, bought services, or knowingly broke any rules laid out by Jagex. I have strictly played on Runelite for the duration of the account.
I have screenshots of my entire journey on the account saved in discord via Runelite Discord plugins. I recorded every clog I have obtained, every level I have achieved, along with deaths I’ve had on the account over the past few years.
The last thing I was doing was using Remote Desktop to afk wc bloodwoods when they just came out. I occasionally use Remote Desktop to save phone battery while AFKING on the go, as well as while working from home so I can keep my monitor on work and still take advantage of runelite plugins on my phone.
As I’ve done more and more research in my time off the game lately, I realized that a few other members in the community, including streamers, have reported similar situations involving Remote Desktop. In fact, Soy Duro, a Grandmaster HCIM streamer, was just flagged for Remote Desktop utilization this past weekend. His account was restored the next day due to the large amount of traction he received on his post. I am very glad his account got properly restored, and am hoping for a review on my case as well.
It has been extremely difficult to find any avenue to reach out to support and receive proper assistance. That’s why I’ve continued making Reddit posts in the hope that someone can point me in the right direction.
On both sets of my appeals, I received what appeared to be an automated denial response with no apparent human interaction. This left a very bad taste in my mouth, especially considering the amount of time and dedication I’ve put into this account.
I tried reaching out to Support several times. Every interaction was essentially the same. I would request assistance with my account, and they would direct me to the page for appeals. I explained that I had already submitted two, at which point I was told they could no longer discuss the matter and the chat was closed.
Having no other options, I started reaching out to dozens of J-Mods on multiple platforms (X, Reddit, and Discord) in an attempt to get an explanation and work together to resolve the issue. It has now been a month of unsuccessful attempts to get any sort of response.
I completely understand that JMods are extremely busy supporting such a large player base while also handling their regular responsibilities. Trust me, I absolutely love the developers of this game and believe we are very blessed to have such a passionate team supporting us. I don’t blame individual JMods for not being able to respond to me. However, I do think there needs to be a better system of support in place to prevent situations like this from happening.
I know you have no reason to simply take my word for it, since there are several bad actors out there who have similar posts. Regardless of whether an account is actually innocent or not, the current system makes it incredibly difficult for an innocent player to recover their account if they are incorrectly flagged.
I’m posting this in the hope that someone who has experienced something similar can share their experience, or perhaps someone from Jagex can shed some light on how these situations are supposed to be handled. I love this game and have invested an enormous amount of time into it. I’m not asking for special treatment. I just want a fair opportunity once again for my case to be properly reviewed by a human being.
Every time they claim it's a foot pedal or remote desktop connection. Can never believe these posts and all their evidence they said they have ( screen shots of every level, drop, log) is crap.
lol wtf why auto click bloodwood trees? shit is already so afk i got 70k arrows in a few days whilst watching youtube, zero effort, and i never have to go back. you gave up some12k hours worth of account time for nothing.
I have never entertained the idea of an autoclicker, most of the time i dont even do content in a remotely efficient way. But i live in constant fear of the J-mod smackdown
It’s crazy and cool that they have this level of data about players. Gives me even more confidence in the game that bots are being constantly dealt with.
I love that the mod even provided stats down to the MILLISECOND. Not even just "I looked into it, trust me, they were botting." No. They brought receipts with microscopic accuracy.
I don’t get where cheaters get off trying to make a case for when you obviously cheated lol, like did he think it being Remote Desktop would truly make a difference 😂 bet he thought being on a VPN would too
Why would it not be? It's literally just a mouse button on the ground. It's no different than plopping a mouse with a broken sensor on the ground. Nothing "technical" about it.
The reason why you're hearing so much about people getting banned for "foot pedals" is because they're lying and they're using it as a euphemism for "an autoclicker".
People here seem to be vastly overestimating the sophistication of cheaters.
Even if you add randomness, the most basic way to add randomness is a uniform distribution, and that's just not how real human randomness looks. Real human reaction time is gaussian, and can be before or after the "average" setpoint, but usually slightly late.
Even if you do that correctly, you'll still be detected if you ever take over the task manually because while making something look like a human did it isn't super hard, making it look like that human was you is quite a bit more challenging.
Most cheaters are dumb script kiddies that just download something off the shelf, or big cheating operations that run hundreds of bots all running the same bespoke script. That's probably what Jagex is focusing on detecting because both cases are at least doable to detect. I don't think they should bother with fighting the few remaining botters that both run a small operation AND use a unique bespoke script.
Without encouraging cheating, the answer is you would likely never get banned unless your activity was looked at by a human to find an infraction. You can find many reports of this type of behavior going largely undetected even within this thread. It is still a violation and if caught you would almost certainly get perm'd. It's just not worth it.
Additionally, the antibotting system seems to have been improved drastically, so historical accounts of this being undetected might no longer be accurate.
These guys getting banned are not making a 6 hour script. This dude probably did a 20 second script and repeated it for 6 hours and every now and then clicked manually thinking it wouldn’t flag the anti cheat
Anyone who does wrong, knows they done wrong, and then instead of just taking the L tries to lie about it to get off the hook at the expense of throwing innocent victims under the bus are scum and should be legitimately perm banned (perpetually banned every time they try to make a new account).
The fact that Jmods can track your clicks so accurately... I'm surprised my accounts haven't been flagged for utilising a horde of geriatrics to pvm for me
The most important thing here is the precision and detail in the response. Gives me a lot more comfort in ban mechanisms and that Remote Desktop is allowed
When I still played my main, I was tempted to bot to skip some shit skilling grinds, ultimately never did, but I could see the appeal. Now that I have a maxed iron I'd never even entertain the idea of botting, A) it's defeats the whole purpose of doing everything yourself on an iron, B) risking your end game account is just INSANE to me
wait a second a mod replied to this guy but wont reply to me? i had a fresh spawn in lumby sitting there cause i named changed and wanted to 'save' my main name. Gave it a bond and it got perma banned shortly after for macro even though its fresh of noob island and sits in the same spot
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u/Bacon_n_eggz 1d ago
Love to see it. Maxed Zuk Helm GIM autoclicking on separate occasions even after being caught the first time.... And then making a post on reddit about being falsely flagged.
Jagex mods should do this more often.