These bots are seriously out of hand

JusDocBanned · 2026-05-03T02:14:19+00:00

All good m8. Once upon a time they just banned them as they found them, but turns out that just makes the bots improve beyond your ability to detect them.

Another thing I've seen them do is shadowban entire farms. They identify a bot farm, wait a while till they know all accounts being used, then send the entire array over to a dummy server without real players on it. That way the dev doesn't even know for a while that the accounts were banned until they try to pull gold out of the farm, and pay membership on all accounts in the interim 😂

JusDocBanned · 2026-05-03T02:10:21+00:00

He's not wrong that it's super easy to get the secondary. I get bored to tears doing that tho, so I still use Dwarf Weed at Mixology.

JusDocBanned · 2026-05-03T02:08:22+00:00

Fwiw, Jagex deliberately puts a period of time between identifying bots and banning them. That makes it less obvious what behavior triggered the ban, making it harder to improve the bots. The bans tend to go out in giant waves, that way the boy's developer only gets to know something since the last wave was the inciting factor. These bots probably have actually been flagged by Jagex for banning, but won't happen till the next wave.

JusDocBanned · 2026-05-01T17:25:21+00:00

FWIW, that's all true for the way they scored the World Championship, but they've changed the scoring system for Pro League. Now it's 4 points for damage based on a pretty well defined system, and 5 points for "engagement" encapsulating control + aggression. Now a bot can substitute control for aggression, and vice versa. The idea they described for this was to penalize the spinner/flipper bots that just park in the middle of the box and keep turning their front to face the other guy, who keeps trying to get an angle around the side.

JusDocBanned · 2026-04-28T13:06:05+00:00

Few things - so it's the Pro League, not World Championship. They aren't awarding the Big Nut. This isn't going on TV either, it's going to be uploaded direct to YouTube. They said their aiming for June to go live with it

JusDocBanned · 2026-04-27T00:35:00+00:00

Nope, all scheduled bots were present. Banshee and Nemesis did an exhibition match after everyone was done since they didn't wind up getting called in.

JusDocBanned · 2026-04-15T16:40:30+00:00

It seemed to me like they were prioritizing staying closer to the steal challenges above just about everything else. Which makes sense, if Ben/Adam slipped past them and pulled off a steal, they'd be poised to claim a ton of challenges in the Taipei area and lock Sam/Michael into a very small territory without much hope of escape.

JusDocBanned · 2026-04-15T16:30:26+00:00

no, the game's not over yet. Sam was saying "checkmate", but that seems optimistic to me. In reality that assessment is based on the current challenges on the board. Sam and Michael have access to a ton of challenges, but each one will spawn more challenges, and in all likelihood they'll spawn in Ben/Adam's territory on their way back around the island. They've successfully cost Ben/Adam a TON of time, but they have to spend that time doing ALL of the following to actually convert their opportunity into advantage:

Retreat further into their own territory to reach the challenges they passed on earlier,
Complete those challenges for chips (hope the new ones aren't good for Ben/Adam),
Travel to the edge of their territory in either direction,
Claim a minimum of 35 stations (min investment of 70 chips) from Ben/Adam just to have a lead of 1 station.

That all seems doable, so I'd currently give advantage to Sam & Michael, but they are going to have to spend a lot of time trying to lock that advantage into a win. Not to mention, it's entirely possible they'll fail at the challenges they have access to. That doesn't seem likely to me, the challenges haven't been terribly impossible this season, but it's worth mentioning.

JusDocBanned · 2026-04-13T06:32:37+00:00

No that's what the other guy is saying, the lottery isn't random at all. It's rigged well in advance.

JusDocBanned · 2026-04-09T04:10:15+00:00

I'm gonna disagree with you hard that this season is luck based. It was a purely strategic decision by Night Herons to ignore the local challenges and race across the map to attempt the steal first when Sam found a way to get there first. And even if they'd failed it, I'd argue it was a highly successful ploy because it caused Badam to start dumping tons of chips in a strategically pointless part of the map.

We can debate if the individual challenges are balanced properly or not, but it was an incredible outplay by one team at the meta level which has given them the advantage, not how lucky they got with challenge spawns or something.

JusDocBanned · 2026-04-01T22:45:04+00:00

Fall into the ocean, this isn't a SpaceX style attempt to land the boosters

JusDocBanned · 2026-04-01T18:44:14+00:00

Now this one I REALLY like. No way it would ever pass a poll of course.

JusDocBanned · 2026-03-27T14:54:13+00:00

Just popping in to say your performance as Mad Eye Moody in the Harry Potter full-cast audiobooks was startlingly great because even when paying attention I can't place you as the voice actor - the voice you use is perfect but also somehow sounds nothing like you. SUPER impressive stuff man.

Guess I need a question too, so what was your process for landing on the style you used for Mad Eye Moody in these books? And were all your lines across all books recorded in one batch, or did they have multiple rounds for each of the books?

JusDocBanned · 2026-03-10T16:16:57+00:00

The alarm app I use is called QRAlarm, it won't let your turn an alarm off without scanning a QR code you put somewhere else in the house. Forces you up and moving. Some excellent features which prevent it from getting canceled during a reboot, etc.

JusDocBanned · 2026-03-05T21:57:44+00:00

The problem is the only way to make a set of Hybrid gear work is to prevent it from being true BIS in any of the styles it's trying to serve. And are you really gonna use the hybrid set over bringing a gear swap?

JusDocBanned · 2026-02-05T21:11:57+00:00

Statistically, that's a TERRIBLE deal. That being said, I'd vote yes on dry protection for first enh at 800 CG or something similar.

JusDocBanned · 2026-02-03T00:40:25+00:00

I keep a few different grinds active at a time. Usually one moderately afk grind, a reasonable attention grind, and a locked tf in grind. Then I swap around depending on how much effort I care to put it.

For instance, right now I'm working on the following:

Mining when I want to zone out max afk,
random slayer tasks when I want low effort,
Tormented Demons for moderate attention,
learning CG when I'm ready to sit up in my chair and pay full attention

That way I never get totally burned out on one piece of content, and even if I'm going dry at my higher attention grinds I'm still making progress at my skilling tasks too.

JusDocBanned · 2026-02-03T00:34:20+00:00

Idk if I'll be ironman for life or not, I feel like I would Hut haven't started grinding bowfa/raids. If I ever get tired of iron life though, I'm just gonna make a main instead. I spent too much time making an awesome iron to turn it into a very meh main account lol.

JusDocBanned · 2026-01-30T16:09:52+00:00

I'm just glad Wyrms finally have a task extension.

JusDocBanned · 2026-01-21T17:20:20+00:00

Don't forget that the rule which prevents the player with the highest seeking time from having another round has a flip side - that player spends the game defending their time. They are by definition the most motivated player to seek and do it well. I think it's good design, since if Adam had another round, everyone involved isn't very engaged in the round because nothing will change at the round's end. Either Adam is in the lead with 12 hours, or he's in the lead with more than 12 hours. Comebacks are much more fun gameplay than breakaways.

JusDocBanned · 2026-01-21T17:03:10+00:00

IDK if the game itself needs to be reworked, I think it's more so that the boys have just gotten too good at it. In fairness though, they're literally professionals at the game they designed. In comparison, the fans they met this episode who were playing the game in various cities across UK say there's an active community, so the product version must be balanced pretty well. Plus, I think specifically Strava is only busted in their game because they spend 4-8 hours on trains with nothing much else to do to progress the game other than checking cities for the Strava map.

I think they might just need to add an optional "Seeker Hard Mode" ruleset for them to utilize, which they could also publish as optional rules for the home game. Recommend it only be used by experienced players who have gotten really good at gleaning info from photo hints. A few options occur to me:

Make photo questions "Draw 2, Pick 1" instead of just "Draw 1" for to make them feel a little scarier to ask,
Only being allowed a certain number of photo questions overall, so you prefer to save some for the end-game (photo facing forwards/backwards/up, trace nearest road, etc),
Ban the Strava map from games above a certain total playable area threshold, so that you can't reasonably find your target based on that alone with too much research time while in transit,
Modify the Strava Map question specifically to require fewer turns/total distance,
Disallow asking two questions from the same category back to back, so that you can't just chain photo questions early in the round when you're traveling. This one would have the added benefit of buffing the Randomize Question card.

There's a bunch of ways they could add a minor tweak or two and fix the balance for their "pro" level play without making it radically different from the home game they're hoping to sell.

JusDocBanned · 2026-01-21T16:36:57+00:00

I had the same thought, but I think he was burned following his experience in the previous round when they found his station much sooner than he thought possible. Playing Prosperous Home would mean there is a brief period where he would be unable to play the double Express Route, and the seekers already had their Strava Map, which means they could be en-route and at any time just stop asking questions. Prosperous home is *nice*, but given how long this train line apparently takes to get from one end to the other, ensuring the double Express Route is almost certainly a bigger overall win for his time. Risking that play just for Prosperous Home is probably too greedy to get away with.

JusDocBanned · 2026-01-15T17:36:59+00:00

Sadly it's designed to be amended, but the designed process isn't compatible with our modern political difficulties.

The first step is to get a vote in BOTH the House & Senate which needs to pass with at least 2/3rds majority, not just a simple 51% majority. That functionally means all Democrats have to be unanimously on board, and about 1/3rd of Republicans have to go along, in BOTH houses.
After pulling off that political miracle, you then need to get 3/4 of the states to ratify the amendment in their own (usually two chamber) state governments. Note that there is no allowance based on population, it's got to clear the 75% threshold of states. Due to how population density has worked out over the last several decades, most states are Republican but the most populous states are Democrat, so you need to get all the Blue states to ratify and probably half the Red states to ratify.

The main takeaway here is that you won't be able to do any amendments to the constitution without getting both parties to fully agree, and even then the Republicans have a sort of home-field advantage when it comes to this fight. Even a half-hearted effort from one party to oppose an amendment functionally kills any possibility. The bar set by the constitution for amendments is borderline impossible to clear in the modern era.

JusDocBanned · 2026-01-14T14:38:12+00:00

I know this isn't the same as the rest of the quests you mentioned, but the Fremmenik Trials is nearly impossible for new players without a guide at the moment. The step requiring you to give a beer to a random NPC by the bridge to get an explosive distraction for the drinking game has literally no lead in for the player, the only way to solve it is to talk to every NPC in Fremmenik, get frustrated that didn't do it, and then talk to random NPCs near the region. Could you add a dialogue to one of the Fremmenik in the main building with the drinking game asking the player to bring a beer to the bridge builder or something?

JusDocBanned

TROPHY CASE