MMO community fears PvP bots have formed a "cartel" using false reports to get you banned if you kill them for their illegal loot, bringing Old School RuneScape's bot problem to a boil

For years, any celebration of Old School RuneScape hitting a new player count record has come with a non-trivial asterisk: a chunk of those 'players' are surely bots, or automated accounts following scripted behavior to collect resources, usually to line the pockets of gold sellers.

The bot problem has peaked and valleyed but never truly vanished, with developer Jagex engaged in an endless arms race between bot busting and bot operators. But it feels like it's become especially ugly in the past few months. The bot infestation in the MMO's big PvP zone, the Wilderness, has steadily worsened, and some folks taking matters into their own hands by killing bots have reported that the botters are fighting back by using mass reports to brute-force temporary account mutes or bans.

On June 21, Reddit user Mundane_Lobster3008 – and who wouldn't be feeling a bit of mundanity after 3,007 lobsters – sounded the alarm: "Wilderness Bot farms are potentially reporting players who kill them PSA," they said.

The OSRS Reddit community is no stranger to people claiming they were falsely banned or muted, and many of those posts end with a Jagex moderator saying, in so many words, 'ban deserved, get dumpstered.' But Mundane_Lobster was pretty thorough.

"I built a low-level void account to test this theory, and I only used this account to specifically target the revenant cave bots which have comprehensive anti-PK features programmed into them, such as 1-tick switching from ranged to magic armor in order to land a freeze and log out to escape," they explained.

As a 30-minute video demonstrates, they used this strategy to siphon valuable items from defeated bot accounts. It's their belief that the botters behind those accounts did not like this and, in retaliation, spammed the game's report function to target them, ultimately resulting in their brief ban.

Mundane_Lobster had posted about this kind of thing before, and there wasn't an incontrovertible smoking gun to their claims, so some players were skeptical. But on June 22, a post from AnnoyingN-Wah echoed the call likewise claimed – with a few receipts of their own, and with other players sharing similar experiences in the replies – that they had killed bots in the Wilderness and inexplicably been banned shortly after.

Back on June 10, OSRS YouTuber Greg2007 aired a similar claim: "I don't know why I got banned. My assumption is maybe the bot farming accounts mass-reported my account." Again, the concern is that Jagex's automated disciplinary system just sees a huge influx of reports and passes judgment without much or any fact-checking.

In all of these cases, players reported being banned for the same alleged offense, with screenshots, and while some details can't feasibly be verified, the piling reports at least make it less likely that everyone involved is just lying about the real reason they were banned by using the bots as a scapegoat.

Additionally, every one of these posts has been met with heaps of other players sharing their own bot-related Wilderness stories. There's no debating the Wilderness infestation – players regularly highlight obvious bot accounts with a zillion kills in one activity but virtually no other game time – and retaliatory reports from botters are looking more plausible by the day, though I've been unable to find any public response or confirmation from Jagex regarding this trend or potential anti-bot measures.

There's some hope that Jagex is staying quiet as it prepares broader countermeasures, and the dev does semi-regularly speak on its "Bot Busting" actions, but those hopes are frankly starting get a little moldy.

"The Wildy is being GATEKEPT by a BOT CARTEL," declares a half-parody, half-hyperbole June 23 post from Imaginary-Train-7071, who worried that "I've heard players attempting to PK these bots are getting mass-reported by bot farms and catching bans—while the bots themselves go unpunished!"

"Wildy is at danger, and its very important content," a top-voted reply reads. "Bots do more damage here than anywhere else."

Jagex admits egregious microtransactions are "harming" its game, the player base "isn't really growing," and it's time to clean up: "The era of a tainted RuneScape 3 is coming to an end."