Last week, well-known Old School RuneScape content creator Solo Mission released a video report on "how many bots" there are in an average world (or server) for the timeless MMO. The findings and methodology were a bit soft, but the bot problem is clear and the video reignited discussion and monitoring around it. This has now seemingly led to a separate player investigation that has already seen many bots rooted out, much like unearthed AI.
Earlier today, September 2, Reddit user Lepton_Decay flagged that OSRS bots running the minigame Last Man Standing (LMS), where players compete in a battle royale-style PvP arena, could be baited with a simple prompt. If you typed "how many" in the in-game chat, LMS bots – or at least a large subset tied to a specific bot farm script – would respond with a string of numbers.
It's unclear what these numbers mean – players speculate it's related to how many points or rewards the bots have earned, or how long they have been active – but multiple people reported observing the same response. Ask how many, and behold an unnerving string of digits fresh from the metal mouths of stamped-out sock puppet accounts.
The LMS bot infestation is so bad that the tower of responses runs off the screen, which really hammers home just how many bots are in an average match of the minigame. There have surely been plenty of LMS rounds of exclusively, or at least primarily, bots fighting bots, all of them just ripping ill-gotten gold out of the ether. (Ironically, this is one case where bots can be helpful for real players, as many bots suck at PvP, though some are capable of inhuman combos.)
This little bot hotspot was so bad, in fact, that it quickly caught the attention of a Jagex moderator, Mod Pheasant. As another Reddit user noted shortly after the initial report hit the game's community, Mod Pheasant also turned up to ask "how many," triggering a storm of replies from bots which were powerless to resist responding to the very moderator that's about to smite them.
I no longer play OSRS myself, so I asked a friend to hop on the game and check LMS to confirm these reports. They found loads of people asking "how many" at the minigame's main world, demonstrating that this Reddit post had clearly made the rounds, but by this point, Mod Pheasant had apparently worked their magic. "The bots were banned," the mod said in one in-game message.
Approximately 11 zillion bots still infest OSRS, of course, fueled by about as many gold buyers, but this specific hive has been squashed for the time being. Hoping to see wider and more permanent solutions to botting, players pounced on an anti-cheating specialist position at Jagex. I've reached out to Jagex for comment on the bot problem and Solo Mission's report, but haven't heard back.
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