I played it for a few months just for the economics of it. This is how I learned what it means to 'corner the market'. I was trading water runes. It was a resource that had a niche usage for high-level wizards, when people wanted to sell it, (e.g. when they changed battle strategy), they usually wanted to sell them quickly, when they wanted to buy them, they also wanted to have them quickly. Also it was required for some more advanced spells so the people who bought them had been playing the game a while and had a lot of gold coins. Also because it was for such a niche use, substantial sales didn't occur very often. At one point, I had enough Runescape gold to buy up every offer that came up on the market for a low price, then I just waited for a desperate rich person to buy them all in bulk at a much higher price. Nobody else could provide them in bulk because I bought up all the smaller offers and big players who were engaged in high-stakes battles and had a lot of gold coins didn't want to run around buying up small amounts from a lot of different people.
Eventually, I had enough gold coins to buy a rare purple partyhat which already cost like 50 million gps at that time. I quit the game when I went to university, sold the partyhat and gave away all the gps to some in-game friends. I regret doing that haha becuase now they're worth billions today and you can sell them for real money for thousands of dollars.
> This is how I learned what it means to 'corner the market'.
That’s similar to my experience in WoW. I custom wrote an add on to buy all glyphs below a certain price. It also spit out a list of all glyphs that were above that price. When I started I would craft missing glyphs (above the price), but eventually ended up with enough gold that I could just buy out the bottom of the market and re-list with higher prices. I made tons of gold with almost no effort.
There were a couple others that did it too. I didn’t know them, but we never undercut each other by more than 1 copper. It was a nice little oligopoly and I was in-game rich. Lol.
In retrospect, I feel silly for having missed out on the Bitcoin trend in real life given my experience. I didn't see these virtual currencies as having real value. I think maybe because selling in-game items for real money is technically against the rules of most games.
I used to do this for crafting supplies in WoW. Eventually I stopped actually playing the game and instead sat in the auction house all day buying up all the silk bolts or whatever and reselling for slightly higher
RuneScape fascinated me as a kid but going back as an adult, it got really boring once I got past level ~60 in anything as the content did not change quickly enough to keep me engaged. Never seemed fun to grind something for hours just to get another level.
I thought about getting into custom botting as a fun challenge but it’s still kinda pointless - even if I had a ton of gp and max levels there would not be much to do except all the quests. PvP in the contemporary scene seems way too complicated and difficult due to the reliance on quirks of the game engine.
Definitely an interesting and quirky game but can’t fathom spending days of RL time grinding levels to chop a different color tree.
Ironman here btw. I started playing Old School Runescape in 2018 in my 30s because of the swamp man. I fucking love this game.
I take frequent breaks from the grind, but I keep seeing a parallel with real life effort: nothing worthwhile is achievable unless you put your back and a LOT of time into it.
Like the meme says, Runescape players either are basement dwelling NEETs, or accomplished people with families, going to the gym every day. There's no in between.
(Grinding OSRS a couple hours a week is the only thing keeping me sane while trying to bootstrap a business)
I haven't played since maxing and finishing my 200ms circa 2016, but at least at that point your meme was pretty true of the efficient skilling community. A surprising number of high-ehp players held down professional jobs while legitimately competing with the NEETs for highscore ranks by pushing the envelope on high efficiency skilling methods like tick fishing. Iirc, a number of fairly prominent skillers like autumn elegy, mazhar, gingbino and other hexis people worked in tech.
We all die, become dust and soon forgotten, whether your time is spent maxing RS or achieving world peace. The only judge will be yourself in your deathbed.
(It might now be obvious I was not raised Protestant nor Calvinist)
Not all, just 2277 + buyables/easy ones, but still well north of 20k hours (including rs2, so not just since 2013) all told. If it actually were 200m all I'd probably feel differently.
And no, not really.
One, it was a lot of fun. I guess I should clarify that I spent much of that playtime doing pvp of one sort or another and the stats were almost incidental. Mastery of one thing has always been more attractive than spreading time around a bunch of different games, and I have a lot of fond memories of what it was like to play that game at a high level and still have good friends from that time. So, from that angle I don't consider the time wasted any more than I'd consider time spent relaxing, playing any other games or reading a good book wasted. I was never a NEET and didn't really push it beyond what I'd call fairly typical entertainment hours per week, but those hours were just concentrated on this one thing over a long timeframe, and that adds up - especially when both leisure and competitive goals are satisfied by different aspects of the same thing. More a case of being unusually efficient in using my spare/entertainment time than of reshaping my life around it.
On that note, you develop some pretty intense split focus abilities regularly playing multiple accounts at once and/or doing high-intensity skilling. A lot of those hours were actually me, in some kind of zen robot state, bashing out actions while paying almost full attention to reading or watching something else. Read an awful lot of books while grinding, worked on my language, got some good treadmill/powerlifting time, that sort of stuff. I find that I'm more relaxed and creative when doing some kind of physical activity like running, and that same dynamic felt true of skilling. When not multilogging, skilling can be very meditative and relaxing. Something about having a task that takes some but not a ton of attention is just nice.
Sorry, as down-thread, I phrased that terribly - not 200m all, just 2277 and ~1b total xp, though I guess I was top 100-200 overall/ehp when I was playing. My distribution of xp is unique enough to identify me, so sorry for not naming the skills.
I played RuneScape compulsively[1] from about 2005 to about 2013, but haven't really played it since (besides trying OSRS a bit). It's probably the original reason I was interested in programming (I fondly remember poking the client's memory in a debugger to make my local GP seem higher than it actually was).
[1]: I mean this literally: RuneScape is an addicting game, in a way that makes me a little sad.
I played RuneScape daily from 2005 - 2009 (I started playing with a friend after school every day when I was in 2nd grade).
Definitely gave me a leg up on things like spelling, social interaction, learning not to trust strangers who promise to guard you through the wilderness, etc. Arguably guided, subconsciously, some much later intuitions I had about psychology / economics / game theory. And it was probably also responsible in getting me interested in computers.
I could see it being part of a funnel that makes people more likely to wind up on HN.
It exposed me to scripting early on (13), when I started trying to figure out how to bot making bow strings or whatever. Computer club was lit in middle school…
Even though I played many games in the 2000s, I actually never played Runescape, even though it sounds like something teenage me would have absolutely loved. I feel like I really missed out on a part of many people's childhoods
This is interesting, because back when I was still playing one of the frequent topics of discussion[1] on the RS3 side was the rampant in-game inflation. It's interesting to see an alternate explanation for it.
The Runescape economy is pretty interesting in general, in part because the community maintains such an extensive price history of every item, including commodity price indexes[2]. The wiki even has a page that gives a basic economics lesson[3], including supply/demand curves, arbitrage, and price controls. (And there's also the constant accusations of discontinued rare prices being artificially inflated through insider wash trading)
In the past couple years they added a tax to all GE trades that adds gold to a pool. Part of the pool is deleted and the other part is used to buy back items from players on the market which then also deletes them. This has helped with some rarer boss/raid items but the game still has a real issue with base resource inflation (runes/logs/etc) because the trend recently has been adding these drops to boss tables.
>base resource inflation (runes/logs/etc) because the trend recently has been adding these drops to boss tables.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but wouldn't that lead to price deflation? I definitely remember skillers complaining about the price deflation effect that the huge quantities of boss drops had on the price of logs and herbs.
And runes were/are the outlier, because everyone hates runecrafting and Jagex kept pumping demand with FSOA and arch ancients (smoke cloud?) making other combat styles obsolete, or at least making magic a mandatory switch for top level PVM?
Yeah sorry, that's what I'm getting at. The most optimal way to get many supplies now is solely through bossing rather than actually doing the skills. These bosses also drop huge piles of them so their prices have crashed like crazy (herb seeds are one big example)
Runes were the outlier before the rc minigame was added. Bloods have crashed like crazy the past year, nature runes are almost at alch value, which is kinda funny
I'd treat those price indexes with a pinch of salt, especially the common trade index. They've been left alone for many years and so track items that are perhaps not quite true indicators of inflation.
Its always surprised me that software engineering hasn't been an outcome of the venny/rs situation. OSRS is incredibly easy to write complicated bots for, but the vast vast majority of gold farms are still just humans playing accounts. Seemingly it would make sense to have one of your farmers learning software/automation, as with not very much software experience I had a bot doing a top 10 moneymaker in the game, making the equivalent of ~3 Venezuelan farmers.
I'm sure plenty of Venezuelans are running bots. It seems that manual gold farming is done because it's less likely to result in bans. If they're patient enough to make it to end game content before selling the gold they might actually make way more than the bots would just due to the crazy exponential scaling of profit rates.
No that's not it. There's a limited number of servers or worlds, the profitability for certain things doesn't scale when you're competing with other players. Writing bots doesn't work because the cost of electricity soon outscales profits for many things.
You'll often see certain bot farms running doing specific tasks that the game needs to run the economy, in a sense Jagex uses them to save on labor costs.
4M per account per hour is top tier profit making in the game. Nobody would run 16 accounts on a single desktop. It would require to buy proxies and take care of the caching checks of accounts used on the desktop, which is not something a novice would do
My point is that power cost is absolutely not the bottleneck, but to address the rest of your comment:
4M is actually relatively low endgame profit per hour. I haven’t touched the botting scene since 2012, but I run 9 merching accounts on the same box. I have a custom Runelite launcher to manage cache/windows/plugin data, and it’d still be under 20 lines of simple bash to add proxying.
Botters routinely run far more than 16 accounts on the same box by running the game in Android VMs with a lot of graphical rendering disabled. SOTA afaik is to pick up a few wireless hotspots with IPs behind CGNAT, and lock clusters of accounts to common IP pools.
4M per botable hour used to be really high circa 2022 on 'bottable' accounts, which don't require insane man-hours to reach. So I guess it depends on scale.
Regarding SOTA: yes it's interesting seeing the mobile-based clients to overtake the scene due to lower detectability/enforcement and resources usage. But when I was in the scene a big question was on client detactability, which nudged some to employ computer vision and screen-scrapping as opposed to fiddling with client code and spoofing official client. I wonder if this question has been settled.
Sadly, I don’t know any good references; everything’s a bit more underground these days IME. I hang out on flipping discords, and that’s how I’ve run into/chatted with a few people who were still in the botting scene.
Wait, are you implying Jagex itself is using bot farms? Couldn't they just change a line of code in the game, or are they that committed to realism? ;)
Jagex is not using bot farms, they’re relying on gold farmers to produce in game resources.
The Old School RuneScape economy relies on these gold farmers because most players don’t want to take the time to gather the resources themselves. Most players purchase resources from the games global market, the grand exchange, with the money going to both gold farmers and regular players.
Theres another aspect though, and this is where the gold farmers make their real life money: They sell their in game gold to players who are essentially cheating by trading real life money in exchange for large sums of in game money. These players then use this in game money to more quickly level up skills.
I’m not sure Jagex can clamp down on this cheating without breaking their in game economy.
As a side note, there’s a fairly popular game mode in OSRS called Iron Man where you’re forced to acquire resources purely via the tedious game mechanics instead of purchasing via the grand exchange. It’s a bit masochistic, but I enjoy it personally.
Real life money for gold is sanctioned by Jagex if done through bonds. Bonds are about 3x more expensive than the black market but bonds can't get you banned because Jagex gets a cut.
I highly doubt gold farms are fully human. Most likely they are human-proctored for things like solving bot-detection events, transferring gold, getting things unstuck. As you mention, bots exist, why the hell would they not use existing crude bots to make themselves more efficient?
I assume one of the biggest challenges with scaling botting is that the traffic is really hard to conceal and sameish. You’d have a bunch of users either connecting from a fixed pool of IPs (and you can check where these are and if they belong to a cloud/datacenter pretty easily), sharing IPs, or swapping IPs much differently from how a human would. And even with noise injected, the high level behavior would be extremely similar across accounts. Plus with enough skills to work around all these things you are almost certainly better off doing better things to make money…
Do you have a source as to gold farming being fully done by humans?
You'd be correct. Bot farms often use human mules to pick up the gold, then they use human intermediaries to sold the gold to (who in turn operate gold selling operations, everything is pretty specialized).
> Do you have a source as to gold farming being fully done by humans?
From past experience, there are fully human gold farms since sometimes it has been cheaper for people to hire poor people from the third world for slave wages and it helps avoid bot detection. Most setups are hybrids, someone willing to run a gold farm is also likely running bots, humans, and hybrid as covered above.
It gets quite complicated once you need to scale: your bot needs to be dynamic through a timespan of months to mimic human behavior, you need accounts that don't give off money farmers' vibes. Getting an account on higher-level activities banned is very costly.
Quite interesting. It's basically like a centralized digital currency which is legal. most of the time folks think Fiat vs Crypto because it's de-centralized and it kinda promise the promise land but I wonder if we will be moving to just a world with centralized central bank currency and no banks.
Look at the conflict with Russia and tension with China. Look at Sudan. Do you really think humanity is ever going to reach a point where everyone gets along well enough with everyone that we have one kind of centralized digital currency? We're still arguing over borders and religion, mate.
Wait, really? As there are 20 countries in the euro zone, that means some countries have more than one currency? And don't forget about the West African CFA Franc, which is used by 8 countries. Are there other currencies which are shared between countries?
There are territories that aren't recognized countries that have own currencies. For example, Somaliland has the Somaliland shilling. Also, there are oversea territories that have own currency. Like Bermuda has the Bermuda dollar.
Also, there are only 130 currencies that are independent. The rest are pegged to other currencies.
There are couple other shared currencies, like West African CFA franc, Central African CFA franc, and Eastern Caribbean dollar.
Yes, plenty of countries have multiple currencies accepted as official legal tender. E.g., Jamaica has both Jamaican dollars and US dollars. Poland uses zloty, but euros aren't uncommon tender, despite not officially being a member of the Eurozone.
I’m based in Warsaw and I can’t think of a single store where I can pay with euro cash. Perhaps this is more common at the eurozone borders (with Germany, Slovakia and Lithuania) but it’s by no means an alternative currency here.
I only saw that prices in euros once. It was in a tourist location, and the exchange rate was outrageous (I think more than 6pln/euro and you didn't get any change).
> We're still arguing over borders and religion, mate.
Agreed. But until countries started to cease to exist, the reality is that anarchy is basically dead. Very dead. Because the government have more tools to control the people tightly and concisely. Look at China for example, there are cameras everywhere looking at your face and counting your every moves. You have nothing to hide from the government and you're still trying to fake a happy face.
The big government trend is not going to slow down unless we have a world-war scale catastrophe where the control of the government is severely impacted -- but this would imply infrastructures and livelihoods are also being killed
Crypto is fiat.
And game gold is closer to crypto than a bank. It isn't regulated the way money is: it isn't reversible, there are no tx fees ( or low tx fees if you count the risk of being banned), they are anonymous or pseudonymous,etc..
The Runescape 2 economy is quite a fascinating semi-simulation/semi-reality case study. It was originally a free market economy - players traded freely and advertised wares in public places, such as the incredibly busy server World 2 in Varrock. There was a backing of bots doing repetitive work, which was seemingly unofficially permitted (e.g. any player can disable their public chat, making a non-communicative player plausible) but not officially allowed. Virtual gold was also traded online for real cash. Then Jagex decided to go socialist, and brought in the grand exchange, which centralized and controlled prices.
I played before and after the GE was introduced. You're right, but it kind of leveled the playing field in a lame way. The GE made merchanting much more difficult.
Prior to GE, I'd buy as much as I could of an item in the morning in World 2 when the prices were lower but there were still plenty of people selling. Then in the evening, I'd sell and make large profits. I don't remember the details but the GE made the prices more stable and my World 2 merchanting scheme didn't work anywhere near as well.
It was much more fun to try and reign in the chaos of a live manual market than a corporate feeling GE. Maybe there's some relation to the old-school stock market floor where everyone was screaming and yelling to trade?
In its latest incarnation yes, but for a long time prices were locked always to 5% +- of a average value. I'm not sure why that was done, but it must have some article somewhere. They eventually reverted it (years after), now you can put the price you want to anything. When you are buying the lowest price offered get bought, when you are selling the highest bidder wins, given that the price you offer at least matches the other party
"Runescape 2" is doing a lot of work in the original comment.
The GE was originally introduced as a key aspect of restricted trade - the game system disallowing unbalanced exchanges of wealth, either through trade or PvP to combat goldfarming - along with the removal of the real wilderness. Trade value was calculated from GE value, so a trade would only go through if the GE value of the items on both side ~matched.
The +/- 5% thing was at least originally partially intended to prevent players pumping obscure items on the GE via wash trading, then using that inflated GE value to transfer gold through trades that look fair to the system but are unbalanced in actual economic reality.
That sort of unbalanced trade still ended up happening via "junk trading" - players would find items with fixed, high GE values (e.g. addy arrows p(++)) but low actual value, and conversely items with low, fixed GE values (e.g. mint cakes) but high actual values, and use those to circumvent the balanced trade systemm.
In OSRS, on the other hand, adding the GE was fairly uncontroversial because it wasn't introduced along with restricted trade, and because it replaced third-party marketplaces like the Zybez exchange that were shitshows most people disliked having to use. That version of the GE functions as you describe.
It wasn't socialist, it was the extreme case of anti-money-laundering.
In some way it was the most strict social-credit-supervisor sees all economy and prevents illegal dealings experiment in a game. You couldn't trade any value at all to other players above some low threshold, and everything was explicitly priced to prevent all transfer of value. If you tried to trade something whose grand-exchange price difference exceeded a limit, you'd be blocked.
I remember there were items which were intentionally mispriced in the grand exchange, and other items which were unsellable "junk" were used to pad trades. So if you had "junk" you could find "mints" (it was literally mints) and make an "equal value" trade that really isn't equal value, or it is but not because of the values the game expects. It was interesting watching how true economic value tries to wiggle its way through a dystopian all-seeing anti-money-laundering system.
They eventually killed that system because obviously it ruined the game, but it was interesting that even in a game someone tried to take absolute totalitarian measures to fight money laundering, despite the huge players backlash.
This is just comically wrong, I'm sorry. The grand exchange is literally one of the closest implementations of an in-game item exchange that I've seen that's similar to an actual stock exchange. It's a double sided market using a price-time order book. It's basically a dark pool. Jagex literally took one of the cornerstones of modern capitalism and copied it into their game for their commodities/item exchange.
The only thing that seems even vaguely authoritarian (which is what I assume you mean by socialist, even though that's basically the opposite of the words meaning) was during the no-free-trade thing after their payment processor almost kicked them off due to chargebacks from botters using stolen credit cards to buy membership.
If anything, the original state of W2 was a lot more socialist than the GE is.
Calling Jagex "socialist" for introducing the GE is more than a little ridiculous: they've always (and necessarily) regulated the game's economy via gold and other resource sinks.
My recollection (from 2007) is that they introduced the GE as a counterbalance to the PK/wilderness removal and the effect it had on the economy. Heavy handed, maybe, but not particularly ideological.
An important point is that Jagex has no ability to deal with bots. The simplest anti botting measures are not implemented, at all.
This story misses that, because an important followup to the point above is that these are not 1player:1charcter types making gold, but owners of bots and bot farms, associated with gold selling farms.
If botting was less prevalent, this would be a non story, and I suspect the reason RuneScape is even in the picture at all, as opposed to some other MMO.
Most venezulean golf farms are actually humans, rather than the bots. But Jagex is slowly making progress on a problem thats really difficult. A huge percent of players use Runelite, a 3rd party launcher, because it provides invaluable tools (the game is near-unplayable without it). Jagex is working hard to improve their launcher to the level of Runelite, and then they'll be able to implement much better client side botting detection (since currently its all server side).
But agreed, their bot detection is horrible. I was botting 1+ action per second for 12+ hours a day for months and was only caught when I made a dumb mistake. Tough though, since there are real players with the same playing habits.
Yeah, that's the tricky part. There are some unbelievably dedicated OSRS players that will do high intensity (1+ action per second) stuff for several hours a day. So how do you differentiate those from bots?
I suspect that machine learning might be the only path forward for tackling these issues but even then sophisticated bots will probably still exist.
This problem was researched over a decade ago. It's not really complicated, human interactions are different from bots you can't really create human like responses and for botters there is no incentive to really do so. Jagex just doesn't really ban them because there isn't really a point, people bot for a variety of reasons.
Some have played their entire life and bot because they want to get ahead. Others bot because they don't have the freetime. It's complicated. As long as you don't really abuse it, Jagex has never really banned for this stuff. The idea here is that you don't get banned because it means losing a potential life long customer, sometimes they subscribe for a few months on and off but they eventually usually come back. There's a lot to it, in reality it's really obvious. Most of the more advanced ones just send packets, though that's another story and it's very obvious. Jagex just doesn't immediately ban them because well, there's not really a point.
>client side botting detection (since currently its all server side)
My first thought was, well anything Jagex does is going to have to be server side, right? But I just remembered I recently watched a video on anti-cheat software (i.e. spyware).
> The simplest anti botting measures are not implemented, at all.
Do you have any evidence to back up this claim? My understanding is that they have plenty of basic barriers in place but bots have become sophisticated enough that they're no longer able to prevent/detect them with the simple stuff.
Also, the community seems to believe that Venezuelan gold farmers are typically not bots but instead real people doing simple tasks on multiple accounts at the same time.
While not directly related to your question, back in the day (like 2002-2003 or something) Jagex added fatigue in attempt to combat botting. The solution was an addition to the botting client that encoded the captcha image and dumped it into an IRC channel. There was a second client called Sleepwalker, iirc, that read the encoded captcha images from IRC, a user would type the captcha text, and the client would put the decoded text back into the IRC channel for the bot client to pick up and use. There was basically a credit system so you had to spend some time typing others captchas so yours would be decoded by others.
Anyone whose looked into OSRS botting from the perspective of the botters knows that the "Jagex isn't doing anything" meme is not actually true. It's very easy to get banned and bots have to go to all sorts of absurd means to not get banned quickly and emulate human behavior. Botting tutorial island can even get you banned, which is saying something since bot scripts have had over a decade to evolve.
Now, could it be better? Definitely. But ultimately without locking down the game client more, which would alienate the majority of the playerbase who uses third party clients, it is very difficult to effectively ban bots at a scale that would be appreciated by the playerbase. In just a couple days you can implement some botting capabilities through client plugins, popular bot software has years of manipulating the client, so without a major change to the client it's very hard to ban bots.
Most of the gold farmers for osrs are just people manually playing the game, especially WRT Venezuela. There's bots for sure, and jagex has come up with good ways to combat some of them, but with gold farmers they can't really do anything about it until they sell the gold.
Fun fact. Most botters use http/tcp proxies, but the game runs as a process, which means jagex could just send an ip packet along an http packet to detect ip diffs and detect botters.
More solid proxy tech like ipsec vpns are expensive, so people just use the cheap proxies.
I'm surprised that from the discussion here it seems like there's no clientless bots in Runescape. Is it one of those games where they change the protocol up every week to prevent that kind of thing? Also if they used plain IP like you said couldn't botters just spoof the source header to whatever the proxy address is instead of their actual address?
More sophisticated bots at scale exploit weaknesses of the anti-cheating system, such as running bots on mobile devices, which helped to get around their detectikn. But otherwise botting is not trivial if you run more than a few accounts.
Eventually, I had enough gold coins to buy a rare purple partyhat which already cost like 50 million gps at that time. I quit the game when I went to university, sold the partyhat and gave away all the gps to some in-game friends. I regret doing that haha becuase now they're worth billions today and you can sell them for real money for thousands of dollars.