The Runescape "blackmarket" was a fun world to play in!
Like the author, I got into creating Runescape bots for a bit - but never works to sell them, just made my own for fun and (in-game) profit.
As I dove deeper into the world, I came across people who would purchase a monthly VPS and install botting software on it. There were plenty of guides on how to go through - but no easy solutions for those who weren't technical.
Realizing I had an opportunity to capitalize on this - I built up a hosting company dedicated to the Runescape botting niche. Each VPS would come pre-installed with all the required software and make it dead simple to begin botting within 5 minutes or so.
At my peak, I think I had over 100 dedicated servers each running anywhere from 4-16 VPS on them. Some of my customers were using it to level up their personal accounts, others were running gold-farming operations.
The business was fairly passive, and I learned a ton from the experience. Things eventually came crumbling down when the creators of Runescape broke the bots (This would happen on occasion, but things would be up and running within a day or two normally) for a long time. I had to shut down as all my customers left overnight.
It’s when people admit to doing things like this without any hint of remorse, and no-one calls them out on it, that it becomes evident that this is really “Y Combinator News”, and not really “Hacker News”.
What would they need to feel remorseful about? Automating a video game? It's not like they're breaking the law... I think bots are the least harmful type of cheats anyway. I remember my first intro to programming was modifying Action Replay codes for online NDS games, that was fun but I ruined many people's games doing so. I do kind of regret abusing it like that in hindsight but I would do it again given how formative the experience was.
I would prefer if someone from an online game company could give their viewpoint; I think they could give a more understandable explanation than I could.
Well in this case they killed the game trying to remove the incentive for botting and then switched to a microtransaction model. Excessive botting makes player experience worse without at doubt but at heart I don't think you can actually just outright compare it. At its height the black market supported many people in a much more serious capacity than as a pleasure exploit for the masses.
A lot of these people were quite young when RuneScape was popular.
I would also appreciate at least a small effort to not glorify their actions...but what are you "calling out"? 13 year olds who botted some gold 10 years ago?
But I think your auto-typer was really one of the only "allowed" 3rd party programs, and auto-clicking was never really enforced strictly.
When the bots got advanced, they pretty much had two methods via either injection or emulation of the entire game. So either they broke them through making a bunch of fundamental changes of ingame systems or the ability to connect to the servers.
They do it through various methods.. original common ones were random events, sleeping bags, slight screen rotations every so often, changing the ways you could interface programmatically with the game, changing colors slightly, etc.
Wow! I used your tools! I received a few black marks for using the mouse recorder to auto-cast curse on the lesser demon on the south Draynor wizard tower. The other Garyhood tools were fine though. Thanks!
Like the author, I got into creating Runescape bots for a bit - but never works to sell them, just made my own for fun and (in-game) profit.
As I dove deeper into the world, I came across people who would purchase a monthly VPS and install botting software on it. There were plenty of guides on how to go through - but no easy solutions for those who weren't technical.
Realizing I had an opportunity to capitalize on this - I built up a hosting company dedicated to the Runescape botting niche. Each VPS would come pre-installed with all the required software and make it dead simple to begin botting within 5 minutes or so.
At my peak, I think I had over 100 dedicated servers each running anywhere from 4-16 VPS on them. Some of my customers were using it to level up their personal accounts, others were running gold-farming operations.
The business was fairly passive, and I learned a ton from the experience. Things eventually came crumbling down when the creators of Runescape broke the bots (This would happen on occasion, but things would be up and running within a day or two normally) for a long time. I had to shut down as all my customers left overnight.