Don’t worry, its crossed all our minds at one point or another. So do hacks and dupes really exist? I know from personal knowledge that less than a year ago, botting was a very prevalent.  Players began looking for RuneScape cheats or RuneScape hacks. Some did have luck cheating in games such as RuneScape, which lead to even bigger ambitions, you can read about an example in our other article about the dark side of runescape cheating. Let me say that bots did in fact exist at one point, but now selling gold in RuneScape is nearly impossible. All the major runescape gold sellers have now shut down, but this cost jagex many many players.

There are however legitimitate ways to leveling up and obtaining items, many players began to look for RuneScape tips, RuneScape money guides, RuneScape quest guides. Many of these players prevailed and these are the types of players that didn’t get banned. So to sum up this article, bots and dupes DID exist at one point.

RuneScape Bots came in all types and sorts. There were Auto Miners, Auto woodcutters, and so forth. In general, there were many different ways to automate your character and make money. To not get in trouble from anyone, (especially jagex), i am not going to go into detail on what other existing programs there are that are still being used.

Some of the older players, well maybe even recently started RuneScape players can recall the massive amounts of bots patrolling woodcutting spots like behind the lumbridge castle, or in edgeville. Massive scale botting was done by companies like “Lewt Gold Supplies” in free worlds since they did not have to pay for membership. Here’s a lowdown on how it worked.

Bots Collect Supplies ( Yews, Ores ) -> Dump at nearest bank -> Repeat -> On a periodical schedule, transfer all collected supplies to a main account -> Sell Supplies -> Get gold -> Sell for USD or other currency

As you can see, they were making a lot of money with this. Believe it or not, many many many players actually went out and PURCHASED runescape gold. Yup, it was cheap, and effective. Only problem was, jagex tracked all gold trades, or they said they did. Either way, people got banned and yeah, you could imagine the chaos.

All of this eventually led up to the horrible trading system we have now, the introduction of the grand exchange system and the stop to pking.

Some of you may not understand why PKing was removed, well let me explain. As people started to realize that jagex were banning RuneScape accounts, gold merchants decided, well. Lets go ahead and pretend that you killed me! So these players would carry the sum bought by the customer into a secluded place of the wilderness and then let the customer kill the seller for the gold. This is how drastic gold selling became as Jagex got tighter and tighter.

The trading system was also set to being limited the way it is now for a reason. So people don’t scam the old way. Obvious right? That’s where the Grand Exchange came in. It was the replacement to the trading system. People could make money exactly the same way they did before, except they wouldn’t know who or what they were buying or selling to.

There were many limitations to this system though. People could no longer give each other RuneScape presents or even a decent free give away. Everything was simply. Well in communist state.

Recently however, due to a big community uproar. Jagex seems to be devising a replacement to PKing. Although much information of this has not surfaced. There is a post on RuneSociety Forums discussing this. You can view it here.

Earlier on in RuneScape there were also other client based hacks which Jagex fixed right away such as a Stat Changer.

This post was simply written to tell some of the new RS players about the previous RuneScape, the one they were never a part of. It was not intended to induce cheating or anything of the sort. So don’t flame me ;]