Bots Q&A: Follow-up Questions
Following on from last week's Q&A, we've compiled some additional questions asked by you and answered them for you!
Q&A Session about Bots
Simon van der Spoel - Facebook
Q: Are you at all worried about regular players botting to test out the new anti-botting measures?
A: That would be pretty stupid, but to avoid such things from happening we plan to publish a video showing exactly what happens to a bot when they get caught, including the warning messages.
Fox Xyteen - Facebook
Q: I was wondering if you might be thinking of releasing an event to celebrate the Botany Bay such as double drop days like last year?
A: No plans to do this. Our focus is banning the bots! Don’t forget that those players that go to botany bay to watch the trials can earn unique rewards, like a flaming pitchfork!
Jordy Geebelen - Facebook
Q: How comes Runescape doesn't gets ddosed ? There are strong ddosers out there, well not " strong " but people who have the right tools to take down major sites and games. How comes no one is able to take down Runescape ? And if I may ask, how much do you spend on protection ?
A: We do, we get an average of 400,000 DoS attacks a day but it’s also been in the tens of millions on occasions, our proprietary infrastructure is designed to remain robust and secure from the ground up, we even went to the lengths of writing our own web server technology to ensure the game always remain available to our players at all times and crucially their personal information is very well protected.
Carl Edwards - Facebook
Q: Can you give us any insight into how you detect bots, and how the bot nuke will work to spot them? What's the difference, if any?
A: We can’t give away any specifics details on how we identify bots because we don’t want to make the bot developers life easier. Suffice to say that identifying the player as “not acting human” is the key to the whole thing which gives us a far more scalable and provides a longer term answer to this problem.
Chung Vui Hsiung - Facebook
Q: Jagex, the bot issue in Runescape Classic has been there for years without any actions taken against these rulebreakers. It is understandable that Runescape Classic is no longer updated by Jagex, but is there a chance that you might take actions as well against these botters? The Runescape Classic community will not a single doubt be extremely grateful for moderation for Runescape Classic
A: Ah, classic. Fond memories
Always happy to talk to a lover of classic! To be completely honest with you, it’s very, very difficult for us to do anything at all to classic, let alone build in a system like botwatch to work there. It’s sad to admit that there is little we can do about things like that happening in classic.
Jeffrey Joseph De Cola - Facebook
Q: If the random events will be removed, what about the rewards they give? Will we still be able to get them?
A: Yes! we don’t intend to remove the rewards from the game just the annoying random event
David Baines - Facebook
Q: Now that you are releasing botany bay, will this mean you will be able to focus more man power on other in game content such as quests and mini games?
A: Those are completely different departments. Our content developers don’t work on the systems that identify and ban bots. The Botany Bay updated wasn’t a massive project at all and certainly is nowhere near the size of a quest or minigame.
Foolin3 - Forum
Q: Has any consideration been given to eliminating free trade again?
A: We did look at all possibilities but the impact on genuine social gameplay would be too detrimental so its not something we would want to consider.
20-Sep-2012 14:33:36 - Last edited on 20-Sep-2012 14:43:38 by Mod Sushi Pi
