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As one of the oldest, biggest, and best-understood MMOs around, Old School RuneScape has long been plagued by bot accounts using scripted actions to generate ill-gotten gold to sell on a gray market. This has led to congestion at popular areas in-game, with real players fighting bots for space and resources, and huge fluctuations in a trade market battered by absurd spikes in supply. But for the first time in a very long time, an extinction-class meteor seems to have hit the bot armies.
Two OSRS experts, SirPugger and FlippingOldSchool, both weighed in this week and came to the same conclusion: bots have been annihilated. This follows several periods of record-high OSRS botting in the past few years.
More pertinently, it comes on the heels of a renewed crackdown on botting and real-world trading by developer Jagex under new CEO Jon Bellamy. Jagex has obviously had anti-bot measures for ages – like every game with cheaters and anti-cheat, it's a never-ending battle – but for a while it seemed to be pretty clearly losing to botters. That's changed dramatically in 2026 thanks to harsher punishments and improved detection tools, seemingly with far more resources put behind them internally.
SirPugger, who has investigated and reported shockingly large bot farms for years, reckons "RuneScape No Longer Has a Bot Problem." Common bot hotspots in OSRS are completely vacant today. "I've never seen the caves so empty and I don't think I found a single bot," he says of one popular area in the Wilderness PvP zone.
Several professional botters have spoken to SirPugger over the years, and a current large botter reportedly believes that the current climate in OSRS is untenable. There are other games to bot, and OSRS is a less appealing target when it's harder to escape account action long enough to reliably generate and transfer gold, especially when you have to spend real money, or gold that you'd rather sell for real money, to get those bots into more lucrative membership areas.
"He told me that, all of the sudden, in January this year, bots in members [worlds] started getting banned in a matter of hours, not days or weeks," SirPugger relays. This trend has seemingly continued through the spring, with another recent blow sparking this discussion around the absence of bots. Updated account security numbers from Jagex show that over 8 trillion gold, roughly two-thirds of the 2026 total, was removed from OSRS in April alone as a result of bans and other account action.
"From what I've seen, the ones who claim they know how to avoid bans right now are the ones selling bot clients and scripts," SirPugger adds.
This is generally good news for the health of the game, but as FlippingOldSchool points out, there is a flipside. On one hand, the value of several heavily botted items – typically, resources that can be passively farmed in large quantities – has skyrocketed, giving players access to more profitable money makers (even if they also have to pay more for those items themselves). It's also a lot easier to find an available world for multiple activities, which is especially good for Ironman players who don't care about the trade economy because they have to get everything themselves anyway.
However, a lack of bots ironically makes botting more appealing because it makes it more profitable. Those higher prices can also benefit the few bots who slip through the net. Whoever can crack the current climate first and establish a reliable bot farm stands to earn considerably more gold and money than they would have even six months ago. And a lot of botters will have entire stables of accounts ready to go if and when the dust clears.
I don't think we'll ever see a true end to the bot wars in RuneScape, but this is by far the biggest blow dealt to botters in recent memory. I've seen countless videos and posts from players lamenting the scourge of bots in recent years, with some major content updates seriously sabotaged by locust-like botters, but the game's really bounced back. A comment on FlippingOldSchool's video sums it up for me: "When green drags are empty, you know things are getting better."
