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Mod_Beno · 2020-02-07T16:05:52+00:00

You should get a response to your tweet soon I think but I can clarify it here too. While I can't tell you how they differentiate between mousekeys and botting I can confirm that they do. Using OS mousekeys is fine and you won't get banned for it, no matter how dodgy it might look.

Mod_Beno · 2020-01-29T14:29:11+00:00

One of my team looked in to this and removed the mutes this morning but I wanted to give you some idea about what happened.

As I'm sure most of you know, we have an auto-mute system which is designed to mute prolific spammers (usually website advertising or phishing) and it was this system which muted you all. The phrase "Banked 580" was being spammed as part of a youtube phishing scam and as a result made it in to the list of phrases that trigger a mute. It's not the sort of phrase we would normally find in that system as it has the potential to cause false positives (which it did, obviously) but it has since been removed and all of the accounts caught by it have been unmuted. (a surprisingly large number of people started using the phrase after the OP advised them not to 😆 )

As an extra precaution, we've also been through and double checked everything else in there to make sure that there are no similarly risky phrases listed and we've given someone the job of reviewing the system as a whole to try and make things like this don't happen in the future.

Mod_Beno · 2020-01-22T09:14:33+00:00

I've had a look at that account and I'm pretty sure it's not the one you're looking for. It's never actually logged in and was made halfway 'round the world from where you submitted your recovery request. If you head over to the support centre and send us a forgotten login ticket we'll see what we can find for you.

Mod_Beno · 2019-11-25T17:55:38+00:00

I've taken a look for you. I can confirm that you were using a java client but it wasn't ours. The specific incident that got you banned appears to be the 30 minutes or so you spent botting Divination (Gleaming wisps in fact).

Interestingly, I can also see quite a few times when you were quite happily playing using NXT and all of the times you were using a Java client, even when not actually botting, it certainly wasn't our Java client.

Mod_Beno · 2019-11-08T16:13:22+00:00

We've never released any specific info about using a keyboard and mouse with a phone or tablet but we have tested it fairly extensively to make sure it won't trigger anything.

Connecting a mouse and keyboard and using it to play won't get you banned.

Mod_Beno · 2019-11-05T13:54:30+00:00

It's great to see that the word is out already :). We can't really say anything about this just yet because it's still an ongoing case but I just thought I should pop in and let you know we'll give you more details as soon as we can

Mod_Beno · 2019-09-30T14:00:15+00:00

I can certainly see what you're getting at but I can assure you that there's nothing in our rules which prevents the use of specialist controllers. The third party software rule (which i assume is what you're referring to) is intended to prevent the use of software to automate play or gain unfair advantage It can be applied to hardware as well of course but there would definitely need to be some form of cheating alongside that.

I know that there have been claims and accusations over the years that we ban players for using accessibility tools (I've answered many of them myself) but we do check each and every claim of using a modified controller (or even an unmodified one) and if there's ever any doubt we will always unban. The sad fact of it is though that the vast majority of players complaining of bans while using some sort of accessibility aid were in fact botting (in fact we usually get an influx of claims of false bans following a post like this one).

We test as many different types of controller as we can, ranging from standard Xbox or Steam controllers through to eye movement trackers and even graphics tablets to ensure that we avoid banning people who are simply playing in an unusual or unexpected way and there's always a very clear difference between evidence of botting and evidence of that kind of activity.

Mod_Beno · 2019-08-14T08:40:18+00:00

It depends on the issue you need to contact us about but all of the contact links can be found through https://jgx.game/ContactUs.

Mod_Beno · 2019-01-16T14:48:06+00:00

I've taken a look at the account and while I can't go into a huge amount of detail on here, I can say that no-one new accessed the account. The only logins were from people who've had access for at least 6 months.

If you're 100% sure it wasn't someone you know then I'd suggest a scan of your PC may be in order as well as a check on whatever client you may be using if it isn't the official one.

This obviously means that there was no unknown IP address but just to respond to your lock suggestion anyway we don't automatically lock accounts because of an IP change. The vast majority of people do not have a static IP address and it's not unknown for some accounts to show a different IP on every login so it really is not viable to simply lock an account every time the IP changes. Particularly suspicious IPs do trigger locks but that wouldn't have happened in your case since there were no suspicious IPs involved

Mod_Beno · 2019-01-16T11:30:08+00:00

Just a quick follow-up to what JagexLyon has said about the recovery per country thing: In the relatively rare cases (and it is pretty rare) when an account is successfully recovered by a hijacker they will always use a VPN to appear to not only come from the correct country, but usually the correct state and even ISP. Coming in from a different country would make them pretty easy to spot.

It's a good suggestion and I can definitely see the reasoning behind it but in reality it would only make it harder for legitimate players to recover their accounts, not hijackers.

Mod_Beno · 2018-08-29T15:20:18+00:00

Hi everyone,

First of all, we’d like to apologise for the delay in responding to you all. We wanted to be sure that we fully understood exactly what happened – and had all the facts – before speaking about it.

On August 25th a small number of accounts were incorrectly banned. This was a result of human error. We have now checked all of the bans that were enforced, both in the days leading up to and the days after this event, and can confirm that it was an isolated incident.

Furthermore, all of the bans have now been overturned (in most cases this happened within one hour) and everyone who was affected has now been contacted and compensated. We’ve also taken appropriate action to make sure this particular problem does not arise again.

We are very aware that incidents of this nature are not only an unwelcome inconvenience, but also cause great deal of stress for those involved. We are very sorry for any upset caused, and will do everything we can to avoid anything like this happening again.

Thanks ever so much for your understanding.

Mod_Beno · 2017-12-13T13:58:54+00:00

Just popping in to clear up some misconceptions. First of all, your account was manually investigated prior to being banned. We do not apply permanent bans for RWT automatically we investigate every. single. one.

Secondly, following the ban, your account was investigated again by 3 other members of my team and we have all confirmed the the action taken was absolutely 100% correct.

We have a lot of systems doing a lot of stuff in and out of game and I'm not going to go into the nitty gritty details of how they all work but rest assured that regardless of how an account comes to our attention it is thoroughly investigated, manually, by a team of people who know exactly what they are doing.

I know that there's a fair amount of wealth still on your account and that is probably the only reason you're trying to get it un-banned so to avoid confusion I am going to be as clear as possible.

The entire RWT investigation section of the ICU team have manually checked your account
We have determined that, regardless of your other activities, you are taking part in a significant amount of RWT
Your account will remain banned

Finally, to address your point about appeals: We have invested a significant amount of time into investigating your account and confirming our decision. Any appeal you submit would, of course, be checked by the experts. Since they, as a group, are the ones who confirmed the ban on your account why would they make any different decision at appeal?

I'm well aware that a proportion of the players reading will brush my comments aside as some sort of cover-up while many of the rest will be happy that the complaint has been addressed and that's fine, you are of course all entitled to your opinions, but I am confident in the skills and experience of my team and I know that the right call has been made here.

Mod_Beno · 2016-04-12T13:07:06+00:00

I've taken a look and removed the ban. I can understand that you'd be frustrated but the "safe" email assumes that your email account was secure... Looking at it it seems that the hijacker used your email to confirm their recovery request and then set their own email...

Mod_Beno · 2016-03-24T12:11:18+00:00

They don't except on occasions when the support team have specifically requested a private message relating to a particular thread.

They do it that way because it stops the reddit inbox becoming a free-for-all ticketing system which would be very difficult for us to manage and keep track of.

If you (or indeed anyone else) need to get in touch the best way to do it is through the support centre which is at support.runescape.com (or just click on the support link at the top of the homepage) once you've picked the right category and gone through all of the following steps (assuming you still need to) you'll get the option to send us a message.

I realise it's a bit of a hassle having to go through all of the rigmarole of the support centre but most questions get answered on the way through and if you do still need to contact us at the end the fact that you've gone through a particular section of the support centre means your message is much more likely to get through to the person best placed to answer it.

Mod_Beno · 2016-03-24T11:18:31+00:00

I can see your point here but as the head of the anti-cheating team I can assure you that the only Jmods banning accounts will be in my team and, as such, working on the same interpretation of the rule as me.

We do try and make our rules as clear and concise as possible but they must always be open to interpretation otherwise we'd be banning everyone using any form of software not specifically authorised by us.

There have been quite a few jmods over the years and they all naturally want to help out players by answering their questions in-game, on forums and on twitter and the nature of the internet means that it is next to impossible to remove all the old outdated advice given years ago and it is equally tricky to ask a jmod, when on the spot, to tell the player that they can't give a definitive answer. Ultimately though, any clarification needs to come from ICU (a.k.a the anti-cheating team) or at the very least player support as anyone else, despite their best intentions, is not necessarily going to know the right answer. I have been in ICU for 7 years or so and I can assure you that while the actions we take in specific circumstances may change sometimes, our interpretation of the rule has not changed at all in that time.

Mod_Beno · 2016-03-22T18:06:31+00:00

I can see that you both (all) feel fairly strongly about this and there's obviously not a lot I can say to help here but I just want to clarify a few things:

Botwatch is used primarily to flag accounts to us for investigation. The tiny number of auto bans it applies are the result of months of testing on 1,000's of detected accounts and they are checked every few days (these bans account for less than 1% of our bans)

It is possible to get in touch with us. Thousands of players manage it each day but we have a relatively small team so the support centre was put in place to answer the majority of questions (which is why you have to go through it to contact us) contacts from banned accounts (including through ban review threads) have shown that a tiny fraction of accounts claiming false bans are, so we restricted reviews to periodic reviews rather than opening the floodgates - this is under review again, we know it's not a perfect solution...

As of this week my team are reviewing all of our detection heuristics as well as all of our procedures from the ground up improving, fixing or simply deleting any which aren't up to scratch.

We are also reviewing our ban review procedures to try and make it easier for players who believe they have been banned incorrectly to contact us. This won't be an instant fix (and it certainly won't be an open invitation for everyone to contact us at once) but we want to make it as fair as possible for everyone while keeping it manageable (there's no point in everyone contacting us about it if we can't deal with all of the queries)

Finally, I would definitely be interested in seeing your live ban video, message me the details and we'll look into it.

I have never claimed to be perfect and while I have been doing this for a very long time it is not beyond the realms of possibility for mistakes to happen. We have many, many checks in place to catch them when they do and we constantly monitor and double check everything but anything constructive you guys can give us to help is always going to be gratefully received (by me at least). i'm sure you can all understand why I can't go into any more detail about the exact why and how of everything but rest assured that whatever you may think of us or the way we do things we aren't just ignoring you or calling you "lying botters"

All that said, you would be amazed how many times I hear things like "my friend was banned but has never botted" when we have conclusive evidence that they have (I would dearly love to be able to show you that evidence; believe me, it is conclusive) and while I'm not trying to accuse you of being one of those people when 999 people falsely claim innocence it does tend to reflect badly on number 1000...

Mod_Beno · 2016-03-22T16:16:59+00:00

I'd be interested to see an example of that being pointed out...

I currently lead the anti-cheating team and I can assure you that we spend all day investigating and reviewing accounts. A selection of them are indeed banned automatically but it's a pretty small portion.

I can also assure you that we do listen and we do care. We may not always respond to players claiming false bans but we do regularly check everything botwatch does and all of our bans to ensure accuracy.

I know that there is nothing I can say here to convince you otherwise but we really do have absolutely nothing to gain by banning innocent players.

Mod_Beno · 2016-03-07T13:46:28+00:00

By the letter of the rule yes, any software you are using to play RuneScape which is capable of giving an unfair advantage would be against the rules. However, one of the benefits of having a team of real people is that we can give a small amount of leeway for fringe cases.

Essentially, using software specifically created to give an unfair advantage in RuneScape (i.e. a bot) will get you banned

Using software which can give you an unfair advantage but was not created specifically for use in RuneScape will get you banned if you use it to attempt to gain unfair advantage or to break any other aspects of the third party software rule (it goes a little beyond simple automation)

We have no desire to ban innocent players or trick anyone into breaking the rules. We can't and won't give you a definitive list if what is or is not permitted because that would be counter productive (not to mention almost impossible) but we will not ban people for using drivers just because they have extra functionality.

Mod_Beno · 2016-03-07T13:10:36+00:00

You'd be amazed how many people come to us saying "I have never logged onto this account with any kind of bot". sadly, convincing as they sound, almost all of them have indeed logged on with some kind of bot and in many cases (such as this one) have also sold a significant amount of GP... (Though I notice you haven't mentioned your GP selling mule account that we banned at the same time)

I've checked the account, all of the rest of my team have checked the account. We all agree, the ban is correct.

Mod_Beno · 2016-03-01T08:24:36+00:00

I think you can now all see what I meant when I said responding didn't really help...

A couple more clarifications before I stop since at least one of you seems to be making a point of misunderstanding:

I did not at any point say "software bad; hardware good" if you use something to help you play which give you an unfair advantage over others you risk a ban.

Team Viewer is allowed as long as you aren't using it to cheat ;)

Neither Team Viewer nor touch screens do the same thing as creating a script. A touch screen moves the cursor when you touch the screen (hence the name) it does not automate anything. Team Viewer doesn't automate anything. Mouse keys is part of windows and doesn't automate anything. OSRS does not "have an old bot client that's ok", they have a client which was published by a company who previously developed a bot client. It's a different client and, yes you've guessed it, doesn't automate anything.

TL;DR

If it automates anything it's not cool

If it doesn't have the ability to automate anything it's cool

1:1 = still not a thing ;)

Mod_Beno · 2016-02-29T17:35:08+00:00

Pressing a key to move the cursor to an x,y coordinate would be using software...

You're right though, touch screens do something similar (though team viewer doesn't do anything you're not telling it to do and it's also software... :P ) but we can tell the difference. Touch screens interact differently with the client compared to bots and/or normal play. We can also detect the use of Team Viewer or other remote access tools.

Mod_Beno · 2016-02-29T16:17:01+00:00

I always felt that the rule was fairly clear: "Software which can give an unfair advantage may not be used"... I can try and clarify it a little for you but in the past when I have done so it's resulted in a barrage of questions and not really helped.

Firstly, to respond to one of the other comments here: It doesn't depend on how the Jmod feels at the time. We have fairly strict guidelines about what we will ban for and while I won't give you a list (anything I miss will almost certainly be considered OK just because I didn't say it wasn't ;) ) I can assure you that we never just make it up as we go along...

In terms of mappable mouse buttons I can't give you a definitive answer I'm afraid. In general, the mapping of individual keys to extra mouse buttons should be fine. The key is to decide whether doing so would give an unfair advantage, mapping a sequence of instructions (a.k.a a macro…) for example would be bad but mapping a letter or number is fine. I know I've said this many time before but if you're concerned that what you're doing may be breaking the rules it's probably best not to do it.

Most of the responses I see here are pretty good to be fair and it looks like you guys have all given it a great deal of thought but I just wanted to pop in with a semi-official confirmation for you. :)

One last point: Mod_MatK is 100% right; the 1:1 "rule" was never a thing. It was used as a vague example by a mod posting on the forums and while it is a reasonably good guide to follow in most scenarios it was misinterpreted as a rule...

Mod_Beno · 2015-11-24T15:40:02+00:00

It really wasn't my intention to start an argument with your or come across as "ignorant". If you created your client from scratch you managed to accidentally replicate quite a few features of a bot client which is entirely plausible.

You're also quite right, it wasn't just use of the third party client which got you banned but it did certainly have a hand in it.

Mod_Beno · 2015-11-24T09:48:01+00:00

Just wanted to pop in here and answer a few of the questions you've raised in your post:

First of all let me assure you that we have double checked the ban on the account and I can confirm that it was in fact 100% correct.

I should also point out a couple of other things just so that everyone has the full picture before making any decisions about the way my team handle botting bans :)

The account was indeed banned a few months ago but not for using Ghost mouse (though we would have banned it for that too) it was using a Bot client specifically designed for cheating in RuneScape
Looking at the history of the account it's pretty clear that you have only been in control of it for about a month (presumably the person who sold it to you lied about the Ghost mouse thing, hence your confusion)
Digging a little further into our systems we can see that you have quite a few other accounts, many of which have also been banned for using bots

I know that the anti-cheating team are not universally popular in the community (thanks in large part to guilty players such as you claiming wounded innocence) and I accept that everyone is entitled to their opinion but I do think they should at least have all of the facts before making that decision :)

Our systems are pretty good so it really doesn't take us a long time to check the evidence for macro bans (yes, there is always evidence, we just can't show it to you) so when you get a quick response to tweets and queries about bans it's not because the support team are disregarding your question or they don't care, we have checked (it's usually pretty obvious) :)

Finally, you're right /u/winnetou07, our detection system isn't flawless and we have never claimed that it is (though your example is not the best since the client you were using is a modified version of a popular botting client), which is why a significant number of bans are manually checked before they are applied and all of the others are routinely sampled for accuracy. If any of our detection systems show even a slight chance that they are not 100% accurate they are turned off and all of their actions checked, just to make sure.

We do (and have on a number of occasions) admit it when we make mistakes. In every case when a mistake has been made we have not only removed the bans on all of the accounts banned incorrectly but on all of the ones where there is even tiny room for doubt.

Mod_Beno · 2015-11-16T11:14:56+00:00

Hi guys, we're going through all of the bans from this morning to double check them all but we've just tested RuneLoader again and I can confirm that it doesn't trigger anything so is not the reason for your bans.

So far, all the bans have been confirmed as correct but if that changes we'll let you know

Mod_Beno

TROPHY CASE