by Aristotle

Created on: July 26, 2011   Last Updated: July 27, 2011

There are many repetitive and boring tasks in Runescape that must be done in order to achieve a certain level or a certain amount of gold. Because of the sheer boredom of these tasks, some players resort to the use of macro scripts in order to quickly advance their characters.

Macro scripts are simply computer programs that execute a variety of commands in game. For example, a Woodcutting script will contain code to find a tree, chop the tree, collect the logs, navigate to the nearest bank, deposit the logs,and then return to the same tree location to begin the process over. This process, known as botting by many Runescape players, can go on for as long as the account owner wants it too. Thus, thousands of logs can be collected by a script that never tires, never becomes bored, and does the work for free. However, this is against the rules as stated by Jagex, owners of Runescape.

Their reason bases itself on the fact that, by allowing some accounts to bot, it is disadvantageous to those players who do the work by hand and therefore, botting should not be allowed. Also, Runescape is a game and because of this, not only is botting cheating as the player does not have to do any work, but the value and integrity of the game is lost if the game is overrun with millions of bots. Simply stating that botting was against the rules did not actually do much to stop those players who did bot. Because of this, Jagex implemented their own system which is designed to catch bots and ban them from the game. Jagex's bot detection system works as follows: first, a player must report an account who looks as though they are botting.

Next, the bot detection system begins tracking the players every click and mouse movement. Bots generally click in the exact same spot every time they click, or in a general area only a few pixels away. Also, bots do not take breaks as any normal player would after six hours of woodcutting or fishing.

The bot detection system records every click, and if there is very inhuman activity, such as the bot malfunctioning and sending a thousand clicks in a second to the client, or if the account has been doing a task such as high alching in the same spot, clicking in exact same location, and not talking to anyone for hours on end, it becomes easy to determine that the account is using a macro script and is botting.

Finally, some bots work by hacking the Runescape client and "injecting" snippets of code. This process is called injection and is detectable by

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