Botting is very popular amongst a lot of online games. Popular gaming titles such as Old School Runescape, League of Legends, World of Warcraft, and many more have all experienced players botting on their game for an unfair advantage.
Botting on games works through a script in which someone has coded to run that is able to automatically carry out activities in a game without an actual player controlling it. It is called “botting” as bots are usually added in games by the developers that can play with players without actually needing two or more people in the game.
People have taken the concept of “not needing an actual person controlling a player” and used it for personal benefit in games; unfair benefit.
How does botting work?
Botting is the computer automatically doing tasks that you set it to do. It usually consists of using keyboard and mouse clicks in certain locations of the screen just as a human would be doing as normal. A basic form of botting would be making repeated, planned mouse and keyboard clicks at set time intervals.
However, nowadays botting scripts have become far more advanced as they begin to check the games current situation.
For example, if you were attacking a monster in a game, newer bots are able to detect where these monsters are and click in that location so you automatically attack nearby monsters. If your health gets low, some bots are able to detect that your health is low and perhaps eat food or potions.
Playing Legit vs Botting
Almost every single player who bots in Old School Runescape, used to play the game legit at some point in their Runescape lives. After all, the main purpose of the game is to provide entertainment for people.
However, some players decide to bot to boost up their accounts while they are unable to play. This could be for a variety of reasons, one popular reason being that people have work or school for most of the day so cannot play during these hours.
One example could be a Sand Crabs bot. Killing Sand Crabs is a very popular activity within the Old School Runescape as it provides decent combat experience and a good amount of Runescape gold.
According to this Sand Crabs Training for OSRS, you need to be active every 5 to 10 minutes or so in order to regain aggressiveness from the Sand crabs because they stop spawning if you stay in the same chunk for too long.
If you were to use a bot, you could be killing Sand crabs from work or school without having to even touch a mouse or keyboard as it will all do it for you. This means you are able to maximize your experience gains for your account. Whereas if you were to only do it manually, that’s a potential 8 hours or more that you are missing out on gameplay.
How Jagex Can Detect Botting
Of course, with most games, including Jagex, botting is against the rules as it gives a heavy unfair advantage to players. This is why Jagex will ban players who are caught botting and typically, Jagex is able to catch people botting eventually; whether it takes one day or a whole year, you are almost guaranteed to be caught botting especially if you make your botting obvious for them.
A few things that Jagex look out for are: your time spent online in a row. If you are online for 24 hours in a day, chances are, you will be tracked by Jagex as it is an unusual activity to be online for that long in a row. Your delays in keyboard and mouse clicks are also tracked, and it’s clear to Jagex if you have been spending the exact same amount of time to carry out the same activity for a period of time, you will most likely be detected for botting as this is also unusual behavior.
Benefits of botting
There are several advantages to botting on Old School Runescape. Firstly, you are able to maximize your account EXP gains while you are unable to play the game. This allows you to progress your stats at a much faster rate.
You can also bot some profitable activities in the game such as bosses. This can grant you with passive OSRS gold while you are not playing.
Negatives of botting
Compared to the advantages of botting, there really aren’t many disadvantages. The only main disadvantage is that if you are caught botting, your account will get banned and your hard work will be gone.
