Comment by 58x14
4 years ago
In the late 2000s, as a teenager, I was gifted a Runescape account. This account had level 80+ woodcutting, allowing one to chop magic trees - which would produce the most expensive lumber in the game. It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum.
At some point I had realized that there were different sketchy websites that would buy and sell the in-game currency, gold pieces or GP. It was something like $10 to 1M GP. I could chop enough magic logs in about 4-6 hours to make $10.
I had a breakthrough. What if I wrote a macro to record my cursor and clicks during my route from the 'bank' (where you can deposit any amount of any material) to the nearby respawning magic tree forest?
Weeks went by and I had passive income. Runescape eventually introduced the Grand Exchange, a literal in-game stock market that allowed power users like me to sell much larger quantities of certain items instantly, across all Runescape servers (referred to as Worlds) simultaneously. This required a standardized pricing mechanism, like an order book, where prices of any item would fluctuate based on buy and sell orders.
Suddenly, I now could see a +-10% change on the value of my digital assets, on which my passive income was built.
I could go on; Runescape in fact taught me much about economics. What's extraordinary is selling Runescape gold led me to Bitcoin, and I've watched cryptocurrency for nearly a decade, seeing trends from a MMO propagate throughout the world. It seems human nature to innovate and stagnate, and the more immediate our collective feedback loops, the quicker these cycles are.
I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? Runescape set up a system that was so grind-heavy that players broke server rules and wrote automated scripts to grind for them, and other players gave them money to do that. Because the minute-to-minute gameplay of Runescape was bad; people were willing to pay $10 of real money to remove 4-6 hours of gameplay from the game.
Well frankly, that's 4-6 hours of gameplay should never have been in the game in the first place. Players should not feel bored playing your game for that long, certainly not bored enough to pay money to get out of it.
I have no doubt that learning how to exploit these systems was really fun for people, because learning how to exploit systems and build macros and read economic signals and avoid detection from a company is genuinely really interesting, fascinating work. It's just a shame that the only way Runescape could (inadvertently) enable that experience for people was to make a crappy grind process for an even larger portion of their playerbase.
I can't get away from thinking of the experience 58x14 is describing is a failure of game design. 58x14 has fond memories of this because they were playing an entirely different much more exciting hacking game than the crappy grind that Runescape's designers had built and intended for the majority of their playerbase.
And I think that perspective is worth keeping when we look at play-to-earn games. These are boring games, and some people are doing some fun economics stuff on top of them. That doesn't make the core gameplay any less boring though, and the fun economics stuff only works because a lot of other players are having a miserable time with the intended mechanics. I don't like praising a design ethos that says that a nontrivial portion of your players will be bored and will pay someone else to play the game for them.
I believe this is what happens with any open world MMO. There's no storyline to finish, there's no ending, and game devs have incentives to keep players playing forever (the more hours a player plays, the more likely he will spend more money).
There's only two ways to keep players playing: new content and/or grinding mechanics.
Grinding mechanics are way, way easier to create. You can even reuse sprites and just change names - a lv10 tree, a lv50 tree, a lv100 tree. Real content is hard to do, requires imagination, development, testing.
So most open world games will have a high grinding/content ratio. But, as lame as it sounds, some people do like it. I'm guilty of playing a RuneScape-like game for mobile (Ancients Reborn). Things are slow and you need hours and hours to raise skills but, even though it's arguably boring, I find it relaxing. And there's pvp and talking to fellow players to keep it fun. So, in the end, I agree with you it sucks to have a game some players pay to not play it and others have fun cheating it, and it's a cheap design choice, but there are some people find it relaxing to watch a little toon chop down a magic tree.
Now you've made me wonder: those hours I spent mesmerised by watching the colourful display of Windows 95 defragging the disc, would I have paid a monthly subscription for it? What if they'd added achievements, or leveling up? "Congratulations! Your wizard can now restructure directory chains!"
14 replies →
>There's only two ways to keep players playing: new content and/or grinding mechanics.
You neglected what's by far the funnest and most important and user-retaining aspect of open world MMOs: player-to-player interaction - be it friendly, neutral, or hostile.
The absolute most enjoyable open world MMOs I've played had essentially no content. Players forged their own content in the form of geopolitics, war, economics, and copious communication (propaganda and shittalking, largely). They felt like a completely unplanned, natural simulation of militaristic human societies from hundreds or thousands of years ago. Probably not ideal in real life, but very fun for a game.
I'm convinced the best MMOs to come out over the next 20 years will have very little content and very sparse grinding mechanics. The magic is the emergent game and meta-game that springs forth from the bonding and strife between gargantuan numbers of human agents.
4 replies →
> But, as lame as it sounds, some people do like it. I'm guilty of playing a RuneScape-like game for mobile (Ancients Reborn). Things are slow and you need hours and hours to raise skills but, even though it's arguably boring, I find it relaxing.
To be clear, I don't think that part is lame at all. That part is great. I'm all for relaxing repetitive games.
But I don't think that is what happens for all of the players in a game with pay-to-skip mechanics, and I think when we talk about the positive aspects of a game like Runescape, we're kind of engaging in a little bit of wishful thinking about how universal that experience was for all of its players. If a game is genuinely optimizing for creating a relaxing repetitive experience, then it (and 3rd parties around it) probably shouldn't also be monetizing getting rid of that experience.
Runescape grinding in theory was a relaxing, great experience for some people. I'm very happy for those people, but in practice, enough people obviously hated the grind enough that they were paying for bots. I am less concerned about the people who genuinely enjoyed chopping down trees, and more concerned about the obvious subset of players who were somehow feeling trapped by the game into spending real-world money to avoid something that was obviously unpleasant for them.
Willing theraputic, relaxing, repetitive grind is great. Hard to monetize with microtransactions though, and when I look at the play-to-earn model more broadly, that model literally doesn't work if people enjoy the grind. The only way the money comes into the game is the grind isn't theraputic or relaxing, a nontrivial chunk of the playerbase has to hate that process or else nobody makes money.
The healthy, relaxing, kind of best-case scenario grind you describe is the opposite of what a play-to-earn game designer wants; those designers have a strong incentive not to allow their games to have enjoyable grinding, because the whole point is that they expect the majority of their players to pay money buying resources from other players. That monetization model only works if people aren't enjoying the grind.
>Grinding mechanics are way, way easier to create. You can even reuse sprites and just change names - a lv10 tree, a lv50 tree, a lv100 tree. Real content is hard to do, requires imagination, development, testing.
Reuse of content in new context doesn’t have to be a boring clone.
Disney would regularly reuse animations of characters between animated films to save money. It did not necessarily take away from the wrapping content’s best moments or overall entertainment value.
For example dancing reveries and other sequences in Robin Hood used rotoscoping heavily. [1]
There’s no doubt the reuse was cheap but in some ways that allowed the designers to focus on new characters and scenes.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/disney-reuses-animation-2015...
> even though it's arguably boring, I find it relaxing
Fishing in Final Fantasy XIV is boring yet strangely relaxing, and in many cases doesn't even require looking at the screen.
2 replies →
> There's only two ways to keep players playing: new content and/or grinding mechanics.
I'd argue that PvP is a third option. Though that does impose its own requirements to do justice and ensure longevity.
Chess (and most competitive games/sports/simulators) has almost 0 content from "the devs". The rest is UGC/PVP challenges. Endless replay value, endless opportunities to practice and study for an advantage, no forced grind.
While I personally agree with your view that gameplay should always be actually fun, I think that misses the magic of games for a significant population of gamers.
Is most of your real day-to-day life truly "fun" in a game-like sense? Most people would say "no", X hours in a day is a lot of time to be consistently having fun, yet a lot of people would still describe their lives as "rewarding" and therefore worthwhile. In fact, the harder your life is, the more rewarding it can be.
These games aim to be "rewarding" and therefore worthwhile. In many ways, these types of games offer an alternative world and life that's more rewarding than reality. The parallels with real life are direct and intentional: "grinding" is like real work that earns you fungible profit that you can then trade to skip other types of work that you don't like to do. This is a proven loop of reward in reality and it works in games too, being consistently "fun" isn't the only way for a game to satisfy players. I can't speak to Axie Infinity which seems like it's not even well developed to that extent, but for other games in the field these grinds aren't exactly a failure of design, they're effective at constructing a life-like reward system that doesn't solely rely on "fun".
Of course the elephant in the room is that this "reward" is artificial, hence the whole article about this being a bullshit job. I personally avoid these types of games (basically all MMOs) for this reason and I don't see how web3 makes any of it better. But I find it hard to criticize it objectively. I think real life is bullshit anyway, so the cheap imitation of life that these games offer isn't always completely worse. I can see why many people willingly buy into it.
I used to play WOW until I realised what I was doing. I still remember the day I quit because I was supposed to show up for some massive raid and just didn’t. I have not logged in since.
The whole MMO and Freemium space is a bit grim if you ask me since you are essentially manipulating the feelings of players with no worthwhile rewards.
I think this is why I have gravitated heavily to board games. You meet up once a week or so. Play against real humans. No grind. And they can help sharpen your thinking.
I can't stand this kind of thing, but I do enjoy a lot of games that basically punish you until you develop enough skill to beat them. This is its own form of "grinding," I suppose, but one I find much more rewarding than essentially being rewarded for the number of hours I'm willing to do monotonous tasks.
4 replies →
> I think that misses the magic of games for a significant population of gamers.
I don't doubt that some people are enjoying this, and I think that's great; meditative games are fine. But I've never played a meditative game and been tempted to pay real money to turn it off.
I think there's a little bit of wishful, optimistic projection about player intention that happens during these conversations, because if everyone playing the games felt the way you describe, then the monetization model wouldn't work.
We have games that have chores in them (Animal Crossing springs to mind). And we have repetitive games. And we have MMOs where people like to grind. None of that is a failure of design. But what you notice is that in the best instances of these games where people actually like the grind, they pay money to play the game, not to stop playing it. When a player is earning $10 every 4-6 hours by automating chopping logs, that's a sign that some of your playerbase isn't enjoying what's happening to them. They're sending the clearest possible economic signal they can that the grind isn't a positive or rewarding experience for them.
We can talk about the people who do enjoy the grind or get something out of it, but I feel like we're all kind of lying to ourselves if we say that's the primary experience happening with the vast majority of players. Games wouldn't make money from microtransactions unless a nontrivial portion of their playerbase thought it was valuable to skip gameplay. You won't make very much money giving players ways to skip gameplay unless you're confident that a nontrivial portion of your playerbase won't find that gameplay rewarding.
7 replies →
> Of course the elephant in the room is that this "reward" is artificial
It's only artificial in a sense that it's one level deeper than our current economy (and is smaller and subject to the whims of the developers), but in the grand scheme of the universe our current economy is just as artificial.
1 reply →
These games aim to be "rewarding" and therefore worthwhile. In many ways, these types of games offer an alternative world and life that's more rewarding than reality.
You could look at the existence of these games as a triumph of capitalism. We have raised productivity to such heights that the real world does not provide enough grind to sate the need for reward, so people literally invent fictional realities to create more opportunities for grinding your way to a reward.
What is missing here is purpose. The reward could be more than just meaningless progress in the game. For example, why couldn’t you have a game were the grind is designing tailored-for-one phone cases, which then get printed and shipped in the real world. People could be ordering an NFT-backed guaranteed unique phone case, and many people would be willing to pay real money for that.
That these games have a grind that amounts to meaningless work disconnected to physical reality seems like a failure of imagination and a waste of opportunity.
The reason grinding exists is also economic in nature: the "consumer value for money" equation is often reduced to maximizing hours of playtime. This has led to extremely padded gameplay all throughout when we compare to arcade games, which are premised on "operator value of time" and therefore always endeavor to shuttle players in and out of their session in a few minutes.
The other day I visited the local pinball joint and the old EM game I was playing got stuck counting up the 3000 point bonus during gameplay. I cradled the ball on the right flipper, thinking "hmm, how interesting!" One of the staff came over and apoplectically remarked "If you don't continue play I am going to have to turn the game off", and when I did as instructed, showed great distress at how I had managed to roll over the score and accumulate two free credits, but also appreciated that he had gotten a bit closer to the mysterious issue of the game repeatedly ending up with 9 credits.
I see the impact of NFTs as a pendulum swing towards "item value in context", which has no particular relationship to time or even defined scarcity, but would instead favor broad reusability across numerous contexts. P2E is just the early mimicry every new model has to go through before getting to the good parts, in the same way that early console games took a few years to start relaxing the constraints of arcades in earnest.
I think a much more likely early candidate for interesting NFT gaming will be small collectable games, derived from the procedural arts scene. Scarcity sets individual prices within a collectables market, but the value of the collection as a whole is determined by other modes of context. There's no need to squeeze or stretch the gameplay loop or make it addictive or insert monetizing gates; every instance can be exactly designed to be "ideal" on its own. Instead the game has to cater to speculative interests, which is a whole other set of trade-offs and can even favor characteristic flaws. For some reason I have not yet seen the "pay to lose" NFT game, but to me it seems blindingly obvious that being able to lose in an interesting way will command speculative interest.
Grinding is boring but it's also extremely satisfying when you finally achieve your desired level. It feels like a real achievement, and it lets you show off to other players because they know how much time you had to spend. If it was also fun, it wouldn't be as impressive. In that way it's sort of like Proof of Work in Bitcoin. If it wasn't a total waste (that is, if the work itself produced something useful that was worth something) then it wouldn't do its job as a disincentive to cheat the system because you're not actually wasting anything by doing the work.
> It feels like a real achievement
I've mentioned this elsewhere, but if people can pay money to skip something, then I don't think doing it is a public/social achievement. At best, it's a personal achievement, which could hold value for some people. But you're not really signaling anything publicly by going through a grind if someone else can pay to skip it.
This is also why I'm kind of skeptical of NFT games as being about "earning" something in-game, or about showing off status. Why should anyone care about or respect someone for having an asset in a game that can just be bought?
3 replies →
> In that way it's sort of like Proof of Work in Bitcoin.
It’s not sort of like PoW, it is basically exactly the same. People play games for fun, but they also play for status. Status, like Bitcoin, has a hard supply cap so there is no limit to the amount of energy that individuals might expend in pursuit of it.
Runescape never intended folks to hit that high a level. Two brothers made the game and they just kind of filled the endgame levels never expecting anyone to reach it. Later, they added more and more content to fill those later levels. So it also suprised them I guess.
> is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it?
The things that people are willing to spend money on in games are usually interesting for people for the exact reason that those things are scarce. So it is, from my experience, all about showing off.
Saying this as someone who exploited a lot of games and made some large passive income from that, "back in the days". I'd say 95% of -- "end-customers" (as opposed to resellers which you need if you move a lot,) bought stuff just to show off.
So if those things were readily available and didn't require grinding, people wouldn't desire them. It's almost a bit of a paradox, I guess.
It’s a bit disheartening when you look at how many people deal with the numbness ever present in their lives by playing games that mete out little rewards in easily quantifiable bits. This is not what humans need, or, if we’re honest, want.
Isn't this the same as many of us do even outside of games?
1 reply →
I wouldn't think of a game like Runescape as one thing, but more of a collection of many things.
What you pay for is the ability to skip the parts of the game you don't like, so you can focus on the parts of the game you do like. Ideally everyone would like everything you make, but that feels more like a naive way of thinking than to worry about people wanting to skip parts of your game.
As long as "pay to skip" doesn't become "pay to win", I'd say a game is probably fine, overall, if people are enjoying substantial portions of that game, even if they're not enjoying all of it.
It's odd that this doesn't come up in other media or other experiences, right? The closest analogy I can think of is unskippable advertising.
We never have a movie series where people pay extra money to remove scenes. You never go to a restaurant where the owner forces you to eat carrots before you can have your main meal, even though some diners might like carrots. It's basically just games and advertising where we have this model that consumers should either be forced to endure a part of the experience they dislike or that they should pay us money to give them the stuff that they directly do like.
Like, imagine if you were watching a show on Netflix, and you tried to skip a filler episode or fast-forward through a gory section, and Netflix wouldn't let you continue the series until you either watched that content in its entirety or paid them 99 cents.
2 replies →
I don’t know if it is possible to have “pay to skip” not become “pay to win” in an MMO.
The whole point of an MMO is that your character progresses and gets better as they do more things in the game. If you are paying to skip something that makes your character better, your character will be better than if you didn’t pay to skip that.
If what you are skipping is not making your character better, you wouldn’t be doing it in the first place.
MMOs are be definition pay to win. You either pay with time or pay with money.
3 replies →
People play games for all sorts of personal reasons. “Boring” gameplay is apparently in demand. If you don’t like that kind of game, don’t play it. If you don’t understand how anyone else could possibly spend time on it, then maybe you should open your mind and talk to some of these people to try and understand what is undoubtedly a much more complex phenomenon than you believe it to be.
This is ignoring the reality that people are paying to get rid of this gameplay. I do understand why people like boring games, I've sunk my own share of time into therapeutic experiences like Animal Crossing, and even a few pure idle games. I've grinded out 100% soul collections in old Castlevania games. That kind of repetitive action and optimization can be personally rewarding and emotionally satisfying. And I've no doubt that some players of these games genuinely enjoy the minute-to-minute process of chopping logs.
But you're just kidding yourself if you say that's the primary thing going on here. If people enjoyed the grind, they wouldn't pay to remove it. The difference between grinding in a game like Castlevania and grinding in a game like Runescape is that there's not a Castlevania real-world monetary economy based entirely around shortening the game.
We can't really seriously say that everyone playing Runescape enjoyed the grind if there was enough demand for gameplay automation to make botting a reliable income source.
I agree with most of this including pay-to-earn, more worryingly there are other types of to-earn being floated like learn-to-earn. It’s almost like people are rushing headlong into dystopia and ignoring all the downsides of extrinsic rewards.
That said a successful game like this will always have a non-trivial part of the player base willing to pay to skip parts of the game. They want the success now not later and aren’t willing to work for it. Even if the journey is actually fun. Most games take this quite seriously though and work against gold farming and cheating as it ruins the experience they set out to make.
Where it becomes evil is when you set out to make it horrible intentionally so a bigger part of the player base has to pay to remove it and continue playing.
I agree with you ideologically but challenge this statement:
> [that] gameplay should never have been in the game
How many millions of hours of 'pointless' content are uploaded weekly that people watch? No one is forced to play this game, or to pay for it. Why should it not exist? If game developers create something that people play, is that not a success from their perspective?
This quickly becomes a philosophical conversation. As others mentioned, how much of life is the boring, grind-y parts? How many of us on HN find clever ways to circumvent, augment, automate the grind? Is it immoral to create profitable, addictive systems of human engagement? Does 'good' game design have a quantifiable definition?
There is a valid conversation to be had about whether art needs to be edifying. However, I think we're talking about an entirely different level of exploitation when we talk about making something so unpleasant that people are willing to pay to get rid of it.
Millions of hours of pointless content gets uploaded to Youtube, but if people choose to watch it, fine. That's a conversation about edification and people choosing to waste their own time. What we have here instead is a system where people are signaling with real money that the experience is unpleasant for them. We're not talking about deciding what's best for people against their will or forcing art to have emotional/intellectual value, we're talking about building an experience that's monetized around players openly signaling that they dislike what we're doing to them.
Not that the deeper conversation you bring up about addiction or "junk-food" stimulation doesn't have value, but I think exploiting pay-to-skip mechanics is a more obvious form of exploitation that's just on another level of harmful. The comparison here isn't giving people junk food or hooking them on useless Youtube videos -- the comparison is the ads that roll in front of those videos. It's giving someone a meal and putting something gross in it, and then forcing them to pay you to remove it or to pick it out themselves. It's taking something that people want, and then breaking it or obscuring it, making it so cumbersome to get at that valuable core that the act of playing the game is no longer satisfying to the player.
That’s a very romantic view of the goals of game design. For a live service game the metrics to hit are mainly retention and monetization. Whether something is subjectively fun doesn’t really come into the picture
If this was 100% true for all live service games, then they would all resemble casino games; a lot do, but some don’t.
1 reply →
> is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it?
If you're designing a free to play game and want to make money from it, this is not just good, it's a design goal -- as long as the developer is the one making the real world money.
Clash of Clans perfected this model over 10 years ago:
https://gyrovague.com/tag/clash-of-clans/
> I can't get away from thinking of the experience 58x14 is describing is a failure of game design. 58x14 has fond memories of this because they were playing an entirely different much more exciting hacking game than the crappy grind that Runescape's designers had built and intended for the majority of their playerbase.
I can’t stop myself from reading this as an argument about the real world :) The grinding pricess certainly gets boring sometimes so we begin hacking a more exciting game on top of it for sure ;)
I have to say that many of my fondest memories from all kinds of systems; games, work, play, all of my favorite times were when I was finding an unscratched edge in a model. There’s something superlative about finding a hack, a way to obtain something that the designer of the game did not intend. The feeling of “I know your game better than you do” is something I shall never forget.
Those fleeting moments where you have a temporary advantage gained without malfeasance but with pure cunning and skill (or cleverness if we’re being bold), those are the happiest times in my life.
Finding the little edges where things just don’t quite add up, shining a light on them, and wielding them as your own; that’s the stuff from which real hackers are made.
You make it sound so posh but there is other, much more real face to all this - breaking the game for everybody else. You are basically having fun at the expense of literally everyone else involved.
Sure, you achieve it by being clever, and theoretically you report your finding to creators and don't abuse your position of power, but thats not what usually happened.
Behavior like this is the core reason why I don't play online games of any type anymore - the idea of proper fun looks distantly different to this constant 'finding metagame' for which I have less polite names. Plus its a waste of life and ones talents but thats another topic.
> … from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it?
This was addressed brilliantly in a South Park episode, “Freemium Isn’t Free.” In it, a character, Stan, blows a ton of money advancing a by-design boring game. The game is revealed to be a sham to bleed players of cash. It likens addicted gamers to alcoholics. This mock commercial appears in the ep:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_n5nbx0Z9s
In my experience, plenty of people will want to skip even the most fun game experiences to get to the farming/grinding endgame just to watch their numbers and loot collection expand.
> I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it?
From a business perspective, you're allowing for engagement despite different time valuations by player personas. The savvy game designer would not only encourage this, it would develop a way to capture a portion of the proceeds.
> is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it?
The difference between now and then is that people had to go to third parties; nowadays the game developer themselves will sell you the skip. Or a chance to gamble at a boost.
Some of these mechanics are "compelling", in a very visceral sense - they compel people to spend time or money, in a way that isn't quite describable as fun. And yet creating an obsession and a goal and providing a way to grind or spend to that goal is popular.
> And yet creating an obsession and a goal and providing a way to grind or spend to that goal is popular.
Now that the veneer of such "games" is dropping away to reveal that they've just been casinos all along, the bright side is that society might finally find the gumption to start taking gaming addiction as seriously as gambling addiction.
2 replies →
At a certain point these look less like games, and more like status symbols being pursued. I suspect that this explains much more of the economic and social aspect of things like Runescape more than trying to think of them like a game.
This kind of grinding is probably the part I enjoy most about games. It's almost meditative. I usually play games to kill time anyways. I guess that's why I enjoyed games like FF8, WoW, and Maple Story.
If people care enough to exploit your game or buy items in your game economy, your game is a success. If it was truly boring, they wouldn't bother.
your game should so funny that they cannot give up it, but it is so boring result in they want to pay money for skipping it. this is business model.
Nitpicks because this game was my childhood. I totally support your sentiment though.
> It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level
* 97 logs (30 minutes)
* 293 oaks (1 hr)
* 714 willows (2.5 hr)
* 19,246 maple (very inefficient compared to willow cutting rate - 60 hour). If you did yews it would be many hundreds of hours.
About 70 hours done inefficiently.
> What if I wrote a macro
Macros were fine but easily detected due to the repeated patterns. Botting in general was the wild west in this game from about 2008 - ~2014. Interesting how botting numbers drastically inflated player counts and engagement and the company Jagex became a private equity darling getting bought and sold several times, its almost like they had an incentive to keep the practice going.
> Economics
Absolutely. I learned devops managing really inefficient gold farms that got free servers from the Azure promotions when Microsoft cloud launched.
> Botting in general was the wild west in this game from about 2008 - ~2014.
There’s a weird, secret history around Runescape botting that I really hope gets told in full one day.
Essentially, the biggest and best botting client from the 2008-2011 era was Powerbot, later rebranded RSBot. It was written and managed mostly by some CS student from the UK, who went by the handle Jacmob, and used some bytecode editing + reflection to bind game objects directly, meaning that it allowed full interactivity with the underlying game, rather than just a simple image recognition and mouse control framework.
During this era, Jagex (makers of Runescape) made some big efforts to combat the botting. They started using obfuscators to make reverse engineering the bytecode harder, and reworked the handling of all String objects internally to mask them. There were more efforts, of varying success, but without fail, this one guy would have the botting client (and by extension, the whole botting ecosystem) back online in a week or so.
Flash forward to 2011, and Jacmob starts teasing something big for his RSBot 4.0 release: a “web-walking” API that would allow script writers to input any two positions on the world map, and have the botting client find them a path there, navigating through buildings, portals, teleports along the way. This was going to be an absolute game changer - script writing required insane attention to detail, trial and error, and tedium to navigate the world map in a slightly-randomized/hard-to-detect way. And yet a week or so before the big release… boom, another big effort comes from Jagex to stop the injection clients: the Great Bot Nuke of 2011.
This was different from the prior attempts by Jagex. Radio silence from Jacmob and the RSBot team, which was weird given the pending release. As the dust settled over the following weeks, it comes out that Jacmob, King of the botting community, has become Mod Jacmob, employee of Jagex, with very little fanfare both then and ever since. RSBot 4.0 was not to be.
Jacmob left the company several years later, but led their efforts through 2014 to combat botting, with great success. There’s very little information publicly available, but I strongly suspect he was using the obvious strategies of looking at probability distributions for click positioning on game objects and delays between certain behaviors to spot automation.
Jagex’s operations have grown much sloppier after his departure, but the scene has never returned to its former glory pre-2011. One nerdy, talented, quiet figure was responsible for so much of the Runescape community’s development - and yet you’d never know it without having been there yourself. Quite a world we live in.
(@Jacmob, if happen to read this - can I interview you pls <3?)
Edit: this is all from memory, I’m probably bungling the details in quite a few places.
For those interested, here is a pretty well produced video on the situation:
https://youtu.be/4ELRFROUf64
One thing that was left out in your summary is how jacmob was hired: Shortly after the Bot Nuke he showed up at the annual convention of Jagex and showed off his (still working) new Bot to the one of the heads of Jagex, who ended up hiring him.
2 replies →
The key to a lot of bots isn't making them smart so they can grind all day - that is usually the easy bit - but making them dumb so they look like humans.
When I wrote a bot to grind Star Wars Galaxies for me I coded a ton of mistakes into it so it would click on the wrong buttons, miss the buttons completely, just generally do daft stuff. It looked human. Except for the fact it was grinding 24x7. I guess they never checked for that.
I think I was banned during that wave in 2011 and only just recently got back into RS.
Back in the day I couldn't be bothered to gather the resources myself.
Now I'm the bot, but somehow I'm (sometimes) happier fishing sharks than being IRL...
There was also a lot of other history outside of Jacmob...
There was iBot by Ruler Eric who got sued in Florida court by Jagex, with Jagex winning. iBot started of as a color bot, then eventually completely transformed into byte code editing.
Before Powerbot/RSBot, there was Arga, and before that, Aryan. IIRC Arga was the first bytecode editing bot, and Aryan was just a modified RuneScape client.
There was also a C++ Chinese bot used amongst all the Chinese farmers during the Arga days IIRC. This bot apparently working at the packet level (this is what AutoRune did back in the RSC days) and had super low resource usage. However had access to this bot definitely had a huge leg up to any other offerings.
Scar always existed, the forums exploded with activity inbetween the bot nukes (Aryan dying, etc.). I also remember SRL, and the horrible Pascal that came with it. All the random event solvers (e.g. magic box weren't open source -- they were hidden behind a compiled DLL that shipped with SRL).
Weird history, but I'm still in contact with a lot of people from the scene I've met 10+ years later.
So glad you shared this story. Runescape was my childhood as well. Would love to hear from Jacmob if he ever sees this.
This is great, thanks for sharing!
>Absolutely. I learned devops managing really inefficient gold farms that got free servers from the Azure promotions when Microsoft cloud launched.
I mined cpuminer cryptocoins on azure free servers about this time. I got banned fast but still made a few 100s of dollars (which is basically a million to a 16 or 17 year old like me).
Delightful, I very nearly stopped my stream of consciousness to check the numbers, I wondered if anyone else would. It seems many of us share nostalgia around RS.
When I get really bored I create a new account for fun. I normally realize it’s a waste of time and stop after about 6 hours of clicking trees or ores lol. However it’s always cool to see it’s still there and normally changes quite a bit every time I go back to it. Skills go to 120 nowadays for example!
1 reply →
Macros are what got me into programming. I wanna write a blog on it if no one else has done it yet but you had different tiers of it in between 2005-2007:
AutoRune: top-tier -- This was the absolute best RuneScape classic bot but you had to pay $15 a month for an auth code to use it, which is extremely expensive for a school-aged kid. One of its killer features was that you could run the game in headless mode with no graphics so your PC would not be overloaded due to running too many expensive Java applet graphics processes.
If I recall correctly it had its own intuitive scripting language. Some of these scripts were extremely coordinated: you could have several accounts mine ore, another account transfer it, and another account to manage smithing it in an orchestrated fashion.
If you were into player-versus-player, RS Classic had this unintended concept of "having catch" on someone based on your player ID on the server. Essentially if your player ID on the server was lower than your opponent's, then in a fight it would be significantly easier to chase them until they were dead. Catching a player took some well timed clicks and coordination. AutoRune (and the other bots I'll talk about) exposed this player ID to you so you could log out and in until you received a player ID that was sufficiently advantageous enough for you.
Even more scary was that it had an autocatcher that made it effectively impossible for another player to escape you in PVP so that you didn't need to learn the proper catching technique.
There were also free to use but less powerful bots like IT-bot (scriptable with Java) and Runebot (IIRC only allowed you to autotrain).
Fatigue and CAPTCHAs defeated by crowd sourcing with Sleepwalker -- To deter bots, RuneScape implemented a concept called "fatigue" where your character would supposedly get tired after harvesting items or gaining a certain number of experience points and you would be forced to use your sleeping bag to rest. When you rested, you would have to solve a CAPTCHA to wake up. I am still amazed with the level of coordination that happened here: someone built a tool called SleepWalker where you would write CAPTCHAs for other people and gain points. Each point you wrote for someone else became a word that you were allowed to have someone complete a CAPTCHA for you. You were also able to pay money to avoid writing CAPTCHAs yourself, and Sleepwalker was smart enough to integrate with whatever bot you were using. Eventually the more sophisticated bots like AutoRune and IT-bot implemented their own OCR so SleepWalker became something only used by people who couldn't afford OCR, but I'm still amazed by the community coordination here.
Now, these bots interacted with the RuneScape world by sending server side commands so you would never need to actually click on anything in the world to watch your character do things. The problem here is that these methods were comparatively easy to detect so Jagex would periodically ban players caught cheating. This is where SCAR comes in.
SCAR = Shit Compared to AutoRune -- SCAR was a less sophisticated but extremely effective botting tool that relied only on clicking colors. You wrote scripts in Pascal (of all things!) to do the tasks you wanted like mine ore or kill chickens and it did this by clicking predefined pixel colors with the timings you specified. To do it properly, it calibrated your in-game compass to align properly so the pixel clicking would work. It also implemented its own timing and color jitter so that the simulated clicks would appear to be from a human and not a bot. There were also scripts that would handle cases where a mod would message you and ask if you were a bot and it would respond with 'noope im not a bot, gtg bye!'.
All the characters I automated with the API-based bots ended up banned, but I'm pretty sure the one that I used SCAR on never got banned. The clicking approach became extensible when RS Classic became RS2, and I'm sure AutoRune continued into the future too but this is where I became too busy with school to keep up with all this.
Anyway, RuneScape automation is near and dear to my heart and got me started in CS so I love talking about this haha.
The ecosystem around SCAR was really impressive, and with just enough drama to keep everyone interested as well. Basic color clicking in SCAR was a concept but not enough to make really sophisticated bots or to keep up with attempts at detecting repeated behavior. The mods caught on to exact pixel finding, abrupt mouse movements, and other stuff that a typical SCAR script would generate. The botting community developed the SCAR Resource Library (SRL) to generalize common operations in a way that would be undetectable (findObject, moveMouse, etc.), all with a sufficient amount randomness baked in. With this library you could write some _very impressive_ bots even though it all boiled down to pixel finding and clicking at some level. Over time there was some disagreement over the development of SCAR (it was closed source and had a single developer), and the SRL community rebranded to SRL Resource Library (SRL) as the first attempt to move away from SCAR as the only home for this pixel-finding-based library of advanced botting functionality. Some maintainers of SRL then introduced there own client as an open source alternative to SCAR called Simba.
I have had a 10 year career now developing software for the biggest companies on the planet, but to this day a lot of the most complex and robust code I've ever written was as a teenager in SCAR. Good memories. Would love to see some wiki history of this written up somewhere.
In my early 20s I played an MMO called Asherons Call. I discovered a vendor in one high level area that would sell bows for less than a specific vendor in a low level area would buy them, netting you a small margin per bow.
Being a programmer I wrote a script that used two different teleport skills (lifestone and portal recall I think?) and a bit of movement and clicking based on pixel (Color) matching to deal with latency, tweaking it over time, and started printing in game money. I would come home from work to a backpack full of D notes (unit of currency I adapted my script to convert).
Then I would sell these D notes on eBay. Did this for a few months. First month I made over 7k USD (I shit you not). 2nd month about 3.5k, maybe 1k third month, so basically the market collapsed and I moved on (to other fun exploits… once you’ve been bitten by the exploit bug…).
In retrospect I regret it.
I’m a total hypocrite saying this, but I think this sort of crap has ruined MMOs, and gotten far more advanced and efficient over the years.
The fun I had in AC before I started doing this stuff is something I wish more people could experience, but I suspect has been lost.
> I think this sort of crap has ruined MMOs
Once you start allowing (or failing to prevent) real world transactions from altering the play of the game, which is really hard to do while still allowing any sort of item/money transfer between players, some subset of the player base will view their effort as devalued. Some other part of the player base will be delighted that while they don't necessarily have the time to put into the game, they can still get help progressing. There are of course the fringes of those that devote themselves to supporting this market or exploiting the market to support their power fantasies (which of course include flexing that power on other players).
There are valid uses for that market though, such as those aforementioned players that don't have time but would like to not be stuck for inordinate amounts of time at certain power levels. Basically, the same reason some games have difficulty levels. Some people want the challenge, others just want to experience the game.
> In retrospect I regret it.
It's sort of like allowing yourself to use a cheat in a game the first time through. If you take away a significant portion of the challenge when that's one of the things you're there for, the game can become much less fun. Other times, it just becomes a game within a game where you're playing market trader or whatever, which is fun while money/resources are still scarce, but then less fun after they aren't because of your wealth, and then you return to the main game to find it's less fun too.
> and gotten far more advanced
In some cases advanced is debatable . Chinese prisoners forced to farm wow gold...
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/chinese-pr...
Similar to your story, I learned how to program by writing Runescape botting scripts.
Fast forward to today, and my hobby tech project for the past few months has been building a OSRS market-intel website for trading on the Grand Exchange. Great toy market that eliminates a lot of the complexity of “real-world” economics. Funny how outsized that damn game’s influence has been on the world.
RS was the perfect game for me and dramatically changed my life. Started when I was 12, played for YEARS slowly getting better.
Discovered staking and scamming at the duel arena. Invented a new scam and made bils. Made a sizeable chunk over a couple years (enough to pay all my bills in college and a LOT of beer money). Got into botting with some friends, made a little money doing that too.
My experience with RS led me to an interest in economics, and I'm now an accounting PhD student about to graduate. My bro got into coding bots, and is now an SWE doing high level work.
I love the game to pieces, and it isn't because I made money playing.
> Discovered staking and scamming at the duel arena. Invented a new scam and made bils. Made a sizeable chunk over a couple years (enough to pay all my bills in college and a LOT of beer money)
Do you feel any remorse or regret about scamming people out of thousands of dollars? I am a bit surprised that you are bragging about this sort of unethical\illegal behavior on an account directly tied to your real world identity.
Scamming in games is part of the game. Eve, Runescape, Path of Exile, Ultima Online, etc. These all add friction to trade and uncertainty to in game interactions and allow people to attempt to carve out a scammer career in the game. If it is allowed by the rules of the game then it is part of the game. A part of which players ought to be wary.
In Ultima and Eve various groups kept/keep tabs on the scammers and criminals. In Path of Exile, there is a group called The Forbidden Trove that helps the community reduce the risk of being scammed, along with providing dedicated high-reliability traders to get extra income by showing their reliable non-scammy behavior over a long period of time. These are all interesting interactions and systems that developers could totally short circuit with other design choices, but have chosen not to.
On the other hand, being scammed definitely sucks.
RuneScape was so famous for player scams it's a miracle anyone was willing to open the trading window at all.
Very similar story here.. I had a few party hats in Runescape which made the whole NFT thing and to a lesser extent Bitcoin so much easier to understand.
I still don't get it. We already sold digital assets so why do we need NFTs or Blockchain? What does it add here?
Party hats served no purpose whatsoever in the game except as a status symbol (arguably even!). Yet, was worth a lot of money in the game (and a god sum in real life for a high schooler)
Humans are emotional animals, utility is a very poor approximation of value.
A somewhat hard to erase record of which url "belongs" to whom. That, and it gives them the appearance of having some high tech magical properties that will lead to an explosion in value, helping to justify asking prices to the marks.
NFTs are the equivalent of decentralized RS party hats.
1 reply →
You need NFTs to have something to trade with your cryptocurrencies. And you need cryptocurrencies to trade NFTs.
1 reply →
Anyone interested in some nostalgia?
Long ago there was an MMO called Ultima Online. At one point gold on there reached the point that it was more expensive than the Italian lira. This was in a kooky time in 1999 when everything was at a peak. Here's the old article.
The NYT just wasn't having it.
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW THE NEW ECONOMY Money for Nothing A new breed of Internet profiteers is spinning virtual gold into hard currency. By JOHN COOK
Fixer-upper w/moat: The real market for imaginary property in Ultima is booming. enjamin Schriefer and Michael Gmeinwieser make money the new-fashioned way: they sell stuff that doesn't exist. And their customers, who pay them in cold, hard cash, don't mind one bit.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/magazine...
I remember castles in Ultima Online going for thousands of dollars around then on eBay. I think an 800pt Grandmaster build character went for a couple hundred dollars to $1k depending on the skill set.
I knew someone at the time who bought a brand new sports car with all the money they made off Ultima Online.
I honestly miss the game, had a blast playing it back in the day.
Here's a story about The Sims Online I posted a few years ago, in which I described making a maze solving bot to quickly and automatically generate millions of Simoleons, and an ad-hoc solution to the delivery problem:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730181
I wrote a bot for The Sims Online that manufactured Simoleons, then repurposed it to catalog and describe objects in the game for you with a speech synthesizer. TSO had some ham-fisted money making multi player games that forced players to interact with each other in exchange for Simoleons.
One of them was a maze solving game for two players, where one player is lost in the maze and can see the local walls around them, and the other player can see an overall map of the maze without the player's position, and has to guide them around and figure out where they are and how to guide them out by asking them what they see and telling them which direction to move.
That required a lot of work for two people to do manually, so there was a big reward, but it was trivial and fun to solve mazes programmatically! (Plus it made cool bleeping and kaching sounds as it solved the mazes and printed money!)
I would run two TSO clients at the same time, logged into different accounts in different windows. The bot attached to both of them, then screen scraped pixels and injected events to repeatedly solve mazes by moving the player around until it identified where they were, solving for the shortest path, and bringing them straight home quickly by machine-gun clicking on the arrow buttons.
My housemate had a good eBay reputation, so as an experiment, we tried selling Simoleons on eBay for real currency via PayPal.
I could generate arbitrarily huge amount of virtual currency quite quickly. The bottleneck was selling it, and the problem was customer service.
The problem was that many of the customers were pouty temperamental 15-year-olds using their parent's eBay accounts, who would give scathing eBay reviews if their order wasn't delivered instantly, or they suffered some imagined slight.
And the other problem was that TSO just wasn't designed to make it easy to transfer large amounts of Simoleons from player to player.
You couldn't just "wire" somebody an arbitrary amount of cash via in-game email -- you had to show up on their lot and meet them at a specific real time, and suspiciously hand it over to them $1000 at a time.
There was another better way to transfer cash more efficiently than handing it over grand by grand, and that was with tip jars: You could fill a tip jar with $5000 using the pie menu with a couple of mouse clicks, and then the user could empty it the same way.
So when I had to deliver our first million Simoleons, I came up with a system where I'd go to the lot of the customer and meet them, then ask them to line up a bunch of tip jars in a row. I would then use bot macros to fill each tip jar one by one with $5000, while the customer would quickly empty them as I filled them up, and then we'd go back to the beginning of the row and start all over again, until we'd transferred the entire million Simoleons, in only 200 $5000 hand=>jar=>hand transactions instead of 1000 $1000 hand=>hand transactions.
One time when we were making a big delivery of cash, running the gauntlet of tip jars in our customer's living room (which I admit looked pretty fishy), and their housemate came home, saw what was happening, and wisely sussed up the situation that there was some kind of deal going down, that she wanted in on.
So she put her own tip jar down at the end of her housemate's row of tip jars, and I blithely deposited $5000 into her tip jar several times, which she immediately snapped up.
When I realized what happened, instead of contracting The Sims Mafia to do a hit on her, I congratulated her for her loose morals and ingenuity. It was such a great hack, and I totally fell for it, and had more Simoleons than I knew what to do with anyway. It's all about good customer service!
It was a fun experiment, but other bots and offshore farmers were starting to work the system too, and customer service and delivery problems made it not worth continuing.
So the unemployed Sims bot wouldn't feel bored, I retrained it into a more practical assistive utility called "Simplifier", which knew how to recognize and navigate the Sims user interface to show, scroll through, and enumerate all the many items, wallpapers, floor tiles, etc, in the catalog.
Simplifier demo starts at 3:15: https://youtu.be/Imu1v3GecB8?t=3m15s
It took snapshots of the icons, and read the text off the screen to capture the title, price and description (it was all in a bitmap Comic Sans font, so it was easy for a bot to recognize, if not for your eyes to read), and made a searchable illustrated database of all your built-in and downloaded content.
Simplifier addressed the problem that many players would download thousands of objects from web sites, or make their own custom objects with tools like Transmogrifier and RugOMatic (shown earlier in the demo video), but it was impossible to search or keep track of them through The Sims interface.
And it was useful for Sims web site publishers to make illustrated catalogs of their own objects.
You could also operate it in manual mode, where you press and hold on an icon in the catalog, and it reads the object description to you with a speech synthesizer.
That was useful for kids learning to read, old farts with bad eyesight, and snobby designers who hate Comic Sans, who would enjoy having the object descriptions read to them.
Schneier on Security: Virtual Mafia in Online Worlds:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/virtual_mafia...
Randy Farmer and Bryce Glass: Building Web Reputation Systems: The Dollhouse Mafia, or "Don't Display Negative Karma"
http://buildingreputation.com/writings/2009/10/the_dollhouse...
Surprised to see you're downvoted. I found this intriguing, and mirrors many of my experiences with the logistics of selling virtual goods.
Yes but games now actively have to fight this or they become a Money transfer agent and then you have to comply with anti money laundering laws.
I think that Bitcoin and Ethereum tie a lot of things together that make them weaker but are great technological achievements. Eventually governments will regulate them properly and the whole environmental impact needs at least a layer two solution.
If you haven't already read it (or, heck, even if you have), I _strongly_ suspect you'd have a blast with Neal Stephenson's _REAMDE_: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reamde
Wow, thanks for the recommendation, I've added it to my reading list!
I wonder if we’ll have politicians and political philosophers in the near future who will credit MMO games for awakening their keen eye on societal issues.
MMO worlds and their economies taught many how the basics of our economy works. As a kid you got exposed to virtual versions of negative aspects of free markets that went against the meritocratic ethos of the game. (Especially if you were one of the kids not permitted to use money to buy virtual currency.)
I wonder the same. Played MMOs growing up. Got scolded a lot for wasting time on video games.
But I look back now and realize a lot of my foundational knowledge on economics, programming, networking, teamwork, came from MMORPGS. They are social games where you deal with people - and that is a valuable experience.
Unfortunately modern MMO’s are very asocial games and I don’t think much can be learned from them.
From https://medium.com/loom-network/blockchain-games-the-biggest...:
> "I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007–2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock’s Siphon Life spell.
> I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit."
— Vitalik Buterin, Creator of Ethereum
> It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this [woodcutting] level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum.
[laughs in agility]
Anyway I agree with Runescape teaching some real world skills. Runescape (and some other multiplayer games) also taught me about scams and I think trained me to be skeptical whenever something seems too good to be true. For a really basic example, that opportunity to double your BTC that Elon Musk is always offering his followers is literally the gp doubling scam, the most common Runescape scam from 2 decades ago.
> For a really basic example, that opportunity to double your BTC that Elon Musk is always offering his followers is literally the gp doubling scam, the most common Runescape scam from 2 decades ago.
Isn't this kind of thing illegal with real assets?
I'm fairly sure all scams are illegal regardless of the asset because a scam is by definition fraud which is illegal.
I traded custom scripts on a IRC channel. People would pay me with party hats and Santa hats which were some of the most ridiculously priced assets in the game.
The macro client even had a captcha queue where other miners could earn credits by filling out the captchas other players were getting and then use the credits to have other people fill out their captcha. This way you could leave it running all night as long as you did your part . You would get a captcha if you did the same thing for too long
I'm hoping the rest of the story was you putting some of your magic tree earnings into a few hundred Bitcoins when they cost pennies, and you are now a Runescape multi-millionaire.
Seems like it taught you a lot about finance, which is different from economics.
how did you find btc via rs?
Others in this thread mentioned similar patterns of acquiring and selling virtual assets. PayPal was a common money transfer platform and eBay was a common marketplace (before they banned the sale of digital items).
I stopped using PayPal for... a number of reasons, and BTC was a functional alternative.