RuneScape is losing the war on bots

Kill player to player trading and you kill gold/loot farming, auction house monoplies and gold spam. Yeah it sucks but if you can't use an auction house or physicaly swap items with other players you can't sell them anything.

Return to a gameplay style were players have to earn all of their rewards by playing the game themselves. No third party buying or trading at all.

It's gotten worse, indeed, and Runescape is going to suffer. They brought back a much needed feature(Wild/Free Trade) and that brought new life to the game then it's steep decline in 2007 when both of those were taken away.

Now, they have to deal with RMT.

free to play is the wave of the future!!!

Subscription games are doomed to failure!!!

@lslp55r getting real sick of clicking the red ! ON THIS GUY, Massively, care to ban him or something ..or do you like these ads?

Can someone explain why the wilderness was removed to combat botting? I don't understand what the wilderness has to do with it but I would be very interested if someone can tell me :)

Gold farming is a capitalist endeavor, boiling down to the basic principles of supply and demand. As long as demand for the product exists, there will be people out there seeking to fill that demand.

No matter how hard you try, you're not going to succeed in killing gold farming by going after the sellers. Unfortunately, all these developers keep taking an approach of punishing the sellers while merely appealing to the buyers. And they wonder why the market continues?

Sellers have no emotional investment in the game or their characters. Characters and accounts are nothing more than tools to them. Break that tool by banning the account and they simply respond by getting new tools. Threat of banning is no threat at all.

Players do have an emotional investment. But the players who use these "services" do so because there's no real threat. They know that the odds of them actually being banned for buying RMT items are next to nil. As a result, they just keep right on feeding the monster.

If a developer truly wants to kill RMT they have to grow a pair and actually start banning buyers in earnest. Do it very visibly, making an example of the players. When players realize that buying gold is like playing Russian roulette, the market will dry up. Sure, there will always be a few who are willing to take the risk, but by that point demand will have dropped to the point that farmers have had to move on to other games because they can no longer recover their costs without jacking prices up so high that even the die-hards aren't willing to buy anymore.

This is a problem brought on by casual games, corpse looting and some sort of item locking system - for a price of course - would put an end to bots.

Well botting requires drastic measures to take.

Very restrictive game API, encrypted log files (so you can only view them in-game) so 3 rd party programms do not have free access to them like it is now when they are in plain text file. + game checking if certain .exe bot files are running on your computer, like already some games are doing.

Is this nice? No it is not.

But 'normal' measures failed, so either players suck bots up or they sacrifice some of their convenience and theoretical privacy (allow game to scan what aplications are running at your computer while you play a game) to fight it.

10+ years showed that normal measures or companies selling items and gold themselves throught item shops/ cash shops does not sinnificantly hurt botters and gold sellers.

It's hard to kick bots when they make up 50% of your payed subscribers.

There is but one way to win this war: sell everything the gold sellers are selling at a cheaper price, that is to say, legalize dru-- er, gold.