Runescape’s Cheating Scene

[may]

Hello everyone, I’m ThirdEyeOpen (Most know me by other names but I am choosing to remain anonymous while posting on this blog). Here is an article I have written to share with you all regarding Runescape’s cheating scene. I’m currently retired from Runescape however I spent a total of 5 years playing the game on and off, mostly focusing on the darker side of the game which is cheating. This article details all the intricacies of Runescape and cheating and what really goes on behind the scenes, I assure you that it will surprise you.


Imagine this - Thousands of dollars are instantly wired to your bank account through some complicated anonymous online payment system you have worked out with your main buyer, it would have been a lot more but most of your product was confiscated earlier in the night. Your security wasn’t tight enough, they busted some of your guys… but only because the bastards have been spying on you.

You probably think I’m talking about some sort of organized crime ring, and in a sense your right. Calling it crime might be a little bit of a stretch, but we were definitely organized, and we were definitely pissing a large gaming corporation named Jagex Ltd. off. Welcome to the Runescape cheating scene – the real one. Think that’s a little bit too dramatic? Keep reading.

Ask your average 12-year-old flax-picking dragon-slaying Runescape adventurer about their conception of in game cheating, and you’ll most likely receive some sort of vague response regarding people who use auto-bots to get ahead. For the greater majority of what we call the “cheating community”, that is true. At face value, everything seems reasonably innocent; most of the kids just use simple autoing programs or pathetic scam techniques in some lame attempt to accelerate their progress within the game, and in the end it’s just a game… so they get banned from the game, or they get away with it, and that’s that. Right? It’s just a game….

The thing you’ve got to realize about video games is the more advanced they become the more closely they begin to emulate reality, I mean that is the point after all… trying to emulate reality as closely as our technology allows in some sort of fun and entertaining way. The introduction of Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMORPG) was an incredibly innovative leap in video game technology, it uses our advances in communication technology to effectively emulate a reasonably functional social atmosphere while still managing to keep the players entertained and focused. This is an amazing thing; you can now create and maintain social relationships that are almost as good as the ones in real life while sitting in front of your computer playing a game. The other thing that has come with the introduction of MMORPGs is the ability to consistently add new content to the game, essentially making it so the game never ends, providing the gamer with a space that he may participate in for incredibly long periods of time. So I mean when your in this space for extended periods of time, and there’s this intricate social atmosphere, and it’s entertaining and all that jazz, and as familiarity grows it starts to become more and more like real life, becoming a second life in some sense. In moderation, this is ok, however some people reach the point where they actually prefer the virtual reality to their day-to-day life, and it becomes an escape of sorts, which, as far as I’m concerned, is comparable to the same mentality our society uses against drug addicts.

This is no longer a game. To some people, this is an acceptable reality. As such the imaginary things in this game start to attain a real life value – the more games emulate reality the more influence they have in our actual reality. So now we’ve got this problem where people are assigning real life monetary value to these entirely intangible game objects such as high level characters and the virtual money within the game, and this is where our problem begins.

Some kid discovers that some other kid who enjoys the game a whole lot more than him will pay him $20 in real life for some of his virtual currency inside the game world, which he has attained by simply playing the game. Everything is still marginally innocent at this point, generally it would be impossible for any player to make a decent wage attaining and selling virtual currency assuming they are playing the game as it is intended to be played. This is where the cheating community comes in. Kids see this real life value vested within the game so they create and use programs which are designed to play the game for them with the intent of obtaining mass amounts of virtual currency which they can sell for real money at a minimal expense of their time since these programs are doing all the work. Naturally the gaming company frowns upon this and makes it against the rules to exchange the virtual goods for real life objects and justify it using some rather vague intellectual property laws, which state that since they created the game all of the data within the game belongs to them and is not to be exchanged for profit among players. Consequently, because there is still a relatively large amount of profit invested in this the cheating communities are forced “underground” and a black market manifests for the exchange of gold.

A Black market. Seriously. The thing to remember is that for the most part, we’re dealing with kids here… The average age of a Runescape player is probably about 10-13 with a few 14-18 year olds and a handful of adults as well. So these kids on these black market sites are facilitating these shady exchanges over virtual currency, and in the same way that the video game emulates reality, these off site black markets begin to emulate reality. It turns into a primitive version of any real black market, such as things for drugs and child pornography, except it’s inhabited mostly with teenagers with the slightly older ones running the show instead of adults. Organized Crime Pre-School.

So that’s where I come in, I was one of those older teenagers who was sort of running part of the show. Most people tended to stick to the traditional auto-bot method of obtaining mass amounts of virtual currency. Some hardcore hacking also occurred but it was very rare and mostly obsolete by the time I entered the scene. I was able to create a new form of cheating which involved the discovery and exploitation of natural flaws within the Runescape game engine, this ability came from my extensive understanding of the game engine as I played the game rather excessively from the age 11-15 until I made the transition from a regular player to a cheater. At first, I simply used my skills to advance my character within the game, however when my main character was banned I got a little more devious in my intent and began finding exploits with real life profit in mind. At the time I was 15 and experiencing some serious problems in my personal life, and as a result I had to ride my bike 5 miles to the public library every day to search for exploits on Runescape. I recruited some old friends of mine to help me, many of which proved to be invaluable accomplices throughout the rest of my Runescape cheating career. Our first major breakthrough occurred when we found an exploit that allowed us to do many amazing things, the most important of which involving the ability to rapidly duplicate an item (glory amulet) that could be sold for a relatively large amount of virtual currency. Needless to say we got a little overexcited, and a group of about six of us began a round the clock operation to obtain as much money as possible. This ended up being a very stupid idea, as the game maintains an economy and market that function much like the market in the real world…. we ended up flooding the market with an excessive amount of this item, resulting in it’s value being reduced by about 50%, which as far as I know has not fully recovered to this day, two years later. Within two days Jagex had become aware of the problem and we all woke up one morning to find our accounts disabled. Fortunately, we still had some bartering room, as Jagex had no clue how the exploit was preformed and needed information. What ensued was an online interrogation of sorts that resulted in one of my friends accounts being spared in trade for the exploit while the other five accounts remained banned (the reasoning behind this was very personal and complicated, but it was my own choice). Having been arrested and interrogated before in real life, I can say that it was very similar in some ways, which makes this whole thing rather amusing. I felt pretty bad about getting all of my friends accounts banned, so in an effort to make things up with them, I decided we should form an organized group so we could really get back at Jagex. A website was created where we would share information about our projects with the general public and encouraged other Runescape players to find their own exploits using information we provided. Within a week we had 200 members. A sort of hierarchy began to form, I was at the top along with the founding members right under me… we had certain people assigned to certain things, one friend of mine was assigned to maintaining the bulk of the website, another assigned to assisting me in the main exploitation discovery, etc. We found several more extreme exploits within the course of a year, and we got more and more careful and organized about it as we went.

I turned out to be quite the business man; I began selling the gold we made on the largest Runescape black market site and ended up becoming the number one gold seller for a period of time. The whole thing was kind of pathetic. At first I would sell small quantities to individual buyers, and I’ve got to tell you it was like dealing with 12 year old heroin junkies. About 75% of the people who contacted me were simply trying to rip me off using obvious scam techniques while hiding behind the internet’s wall of anonymity, and most of the legitimate buyers were simply pathetic. I had some customers who would spend $500 on virtual currency simply for personal use, it was ridiculous and perhaps the most disgusting waste of money I have ever seen, I felt like I was dealing with junkies… I even had to talk to a few parents who were buying this stuff for their kids, which was absurd. Eventually as it became increasingly difficult for me to hold onto virtual currency for long periods of time without getting banned I had to sell the gold cheaply in bulk to resellers, who simply made their money by buying the currency and reselling it to individuals for more. This sort of hierarchy is ridiculously similar to the way drug dealing works. Eventually I became a moderator on the black market site which allowed me to maintain connections with several other powerful figures within the cheating scene. I would maintain a list of who owed me favors and this sort of thing and it came to the point where I was practically like a kiddie mob boss, without the violence of course.

Our setup lasted for a good while; it turned into a game of playing hide-and-seek with Jagex. They would always be attempting to ban our accounts and find our exploits to fix them and we would always be taking new security precautions and all these sorts of things, finding quick ways to sell mass amounts of gold and the like…. There would be some nights where I would make $1,000 in a matter of hours, and I mean going through the whole process of attaining the gold, finding a buyer for all of it, and selling it and getting it into my bank account, and that’s only counting the gold that made it through. It was not uncommon for us to have accounts containing 500M-1.5Billion banned before we could sell the gold. It got to the point where we actually caught multiple Jagex employees spying on us inside the game. The bigger we got the more the drama escalated, and it was like being part of some epic mafia movie or something… it was all very entertaining for us, and I know Jagex had a few laughs over it as well despite all the trouble we caused them. Eventually Jagex said enough was enough and after ignoring multiple lawsuit threats from them and subverting multiple attempts to have our website shutdown, I finally had a legal invoice Fedexed to my front door telling me I had to shut down my site or they would sue me, with which I decided to comply. In the end, we had 3,000 members on our site, well over 100 Runescape accounts banned (at least 50 over level 110) for exploitation and gold trafficking, and had managed to accumulate a total of perhaps $50,000 between our senior members, about $10,000 of which I took home personally.

In retrospect, the sociological ramifications of all this are what interest me the most. I still can’t get over the type of realistic environments that were being created and participated in by all these kids, and how similar everything was to the real world. It was like someone had taken the world and scaled it down into a virtual playground for kids, with the good, and the bad all perfectly intact, and Jagex as the ultimate authority equivalent to government. I’ve kept up with many of my old connections from the cheating scene and it’s interesting to see the direction that many of them have gone in (including myself!). Some got involved with credit card and PayPal fraud and money laundering, some got involved with online black market drug trade, and at least one probably got involved with homosexual porn sites, haha. Granted plenty of them also went in successful directions as well, such as attending prominent universities and running legitimate websites and such. Just keep in mind we’re still talking about people who are mostly under 20; I’m only 17 at the time of writing this. It’s really easy to see how the Runescape cheating scene could lead to more serious things, I have it on very good authority that the same types of anonymous online payment methods we used for Runescape gold transactions are the same ones used by real life criminals for money laundering, stolen PayPal accounts, drug exchange,and the like…. and apparently the communities in those circles are very similar in nature as well. Another thing worth mentioning is that the Runescape cheating community is essentially run by a very small group of people (most of which were extremely intelligent and often very mature for their age), the rest of it seems to be composed of wanna-be Runescape thugs that don’t really do anything significant other than participate in the gold exchange and auto-bot programs.

As of now, I do not regret anything… it was perhaps some of the most fun I could ever imagine having online; I learned so many valuable life skills in the process, and met so many people who will probably still be friends for years to come. I feel that my actions were no more immoral than the actions of Jagex which have caused so many kids to become hopelessly addicted to their game, much like many others MMORPGs (World of Warcraft, anyone?)… I have personally seen people’s lives significantly hindered by these types of games, and between the ages of 11 and 14 for me, mine was one of them. I encourage everyone who reads this article to evaluate the deep concepts that these sorts of games hold and how it applies to you, as a player. There is nothing wrong with playing games and there is nothing wrong with cheating in games, it is human nature to strive to be the best, and cheating is just one of the many ways that aspect manifests itself. It’s really easy for everyone to paint a black and white picture of good vs. evil in these scenarios, and I’m supposed to end this paper with some spiel going into how you shouldn’t really cheat in Runescape, but the fact of the matter is, people who cheat will cheat, and they’ll find any way they can to do it. So just take the information in this article for what it is and think about how it pertains to you, because, fun and games aside, all of this stuff is much more serious than it seems….

[erick]

wow lol

[Hazbo2]

thats all copided and pasted