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| - We are aware of these activities and have teams in Player Support dedicated to both catching the rule-breakers and removing the websites they operate from. We also educate our players about the hijacking risks of purchasing power-levelling services, put in place game changes to make it harder to do, and continually improve our detection methods so we can identify the culprits quickly and accurately. AFK (away from keyboard) training is as much a breach of our rules as Macroing. Both methods of training allow a player to increase their levels in a way that they would not be able to do themselves and that provides them with an unfair advantage. We review each and every case of bug abuse on an individual basis. That’s because a bug abuse offence can range from a graphical glitch, which doesn’t particularly affect the game play of other players, to PvP bugs that give an unfair advantage at the expense of many. When it comes to appeal, the evidence that originally supported the offence is reviewed and checked thoroughly. We can’t discuss the decisions made regarding any specific account here. If you feel your offence was too harsh, please appeal it. Phishing is as much of a threat to us as it is to online banks and other large organisations. Preventing phishing is one of the key motivations behind the ‘advertising other websites’ rule, which we strongly enforce. We work closely with a wide range of web hosts to have such sites removed swiftly. Phishing is a criminal offence and we pass the details of these individuals to law enforcement agencies, and the parties responsible could end up in Jail. If you spot a dodgy site, please post it in the ‘Contact us’ section of the forums. I can’t comment on your friends’ accounts, but it’s very sad that players get sucked in by the lies on cheat sites. They use these macro clients and believe that they can get away with it, which is simply not true; the gains really aren’t worth the risks. Players can see what offences can be appealed by visiting the ‘Appeal Bans and Mutes’ section under the ‘Help’ menu. Private servers are illegal. The law is very clear in this area and we will continue to force private server owners to close their operations - through legal action, if necessary. If you know of one, please report it in the ‘Contact us’ section of the forums and we’ll do the rest. We cannot share information regarding how we detect macros - to do so would compromise the systems we use and make circumvention easier. However, the macro detection systems used by Jagex are among the most complex in the games industry and we can detect any and every form of macroing in the game. Many people seem to believe that with anti-ban features they will never be caught, but that simply isn’t the case. We’ve yet to see a macro that is even partially good at going undetected. The decisions we made were by no means made lightly. We weighed up hundreds of options before deciding on our course of action. Often, gold-farming operations are linked to organised crime. The gold farmers were paying for their memberships with stolen credit cards - not necessarily stolen from you, the players, but cards cloned in some fashion somewhere in the world. These card details were either passed on to such operations or sold to them, and then used for RuneScape membership. An innocent person might be in a café in Belgium buying a coffee for their girlfriend on a Friday night. They don’t play RuneScape, and have never heard of it. Their card is cloned. By Sunday, that card has been used by a gold-farming operation thousands of miles away to purchase RuneScape credit. Limiting cards to three accounts would not help - they would simply obtain more stolen card details. We hold evidence on every account banned for macroing. As such, when you appeal a macro offence we still check said evidence; however, showing it would compromise our detection methods, which are among the most sophisticated in online gaming. Basically, we don’t want to help the cheaters. As to the automated reply issue, it’s been a long held view that a Jagex bot checks offence appeals before denying them and sending an auto reply. That simply isn’t true - at least, I’m not a bot and I check them! :) What actually occurs is that we see the appeal, we assess it against the evidence and then come to a decision to grant or deny the appeal. In either case, a reply is generated by our systems. Our focus is to clear offence appeals as quickly as possible in order to get people back in game with minimal interruption. It would be simply too time intensive to reply to every appeal with a personal message. Having said that, Mod Kelvin does look a bit like Data from Star Trek; does that count as a Jagex bot? :) No, autotypers are not allowed. They are generally misused, and by spamming the chat window they hinder people’s ability to communicate with each other. To type automatically you would need to use a piece of third party software in conjunction with RuneScape and this is against our rules. We do already have an in-game solution - it’s called Quick Chat and is available in the chat window. There are even hot keys that make it easier to use, and there are buy and sell options.
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