A Request for Clear and Broad Rules Communications - Letter to Lost City Team

2004Scape
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To all Lost City players:

Please consider signing this petition to the Lost City Team

Sincerely,
Author, Editors and Signatories of the LC Community

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Many accounts were banned for behavior that was recently permitted, and suddenly disallowed.

Are the signatories aware that this is false? The de-clarification of the macroing rule did not actually constitute a macroing rule change. We still use the same criteria internally as we did before the page was updated.

If you are using an AHK script that provides an advantage beyond what is possible with WMK, that’s always been against the rules.

Likewise if you are using an AHK script that is entirely within the capability of WMK, there’s no way for us to tell the difference. They’d be exactly the same. AHK used in this manner was always permitted, and is still tacitly allowed by the updated text.

All the old rule text did was point out some things you had to be aware of in order to ensure your AHK script was emulating WMK properly. We thought we were doing the community a service by very clearly defining the parameters.

However, we found this confused more people than it helped. In some extreme cases, the rule text, along with any other possible scrap of information that could be (mis)interpreted as being favorable to macroing, was used against us – maliciously and in bad faith.

So that rule text was removed. But nothing has actually changed behind the scenes. That’s all that happened!

I understand the complaint here is about communication. But if nothing was materially different, what was there to communicate?

The notion that accounts were suddenly banned for previously-permitted activity is false. I can see how that conclusion was arrived at (via amplification of loud voices in community echo chambers) but it’s false nonetheless.

The rest of the points are solid, we’ll take them into consideration.

I just want to make it known that nobody woke up one day to find themselves banned for behavior that was wholesale allowed the previous day. If you believe this, you are either choosing to remain willfully ignorant, or there has been some mistake on our end (rare but possible – submit an appeal!).

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This is a passion project. Its privately owned and ran. Your change petition is not even suitable for toilet paper. If you want to stay and play do so by following the rules. No one especially the team behind lost city owe you or anyone else anything.

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Are the signatories aware that this is false? The de-clarification of the macroing rule did not actually constitute a macroing rule change

Thank you for the correction, we’ll make sure to give you editorial credit in the next draft :stuck_out_tongue:

Jokes aside, I still don’t think that there’s a strong case that de-clarification and non-communication of the rules is a positive thing

There are still some key issues with the rules:

  • Mousekeys allows some things you would likely ban for, like >108 logical pixel jumps are possible and mousekeys has a ‘double click’ function. I think if someone were to use these features they would likely be banned, even though the rules state plainly that wmk features are allowed. I genuinely do not believe the rules, as written, match the rules as enforced

  • This is minor, but there still is no clarification on if holding down a key is considered a macro. Obviously, we all know that it is not allowed under certain circumstances, but I do not at all understand the adversity to stating this plainly

  • Finally, and maybe most importantly, the auto-typer clarification completely got removed. It’s pretty silly that there’s a list of parameters required to use an auto-typer but that the parameters are not publicly communicated to the playerbase at all.

I don’t think codifying a clear and consistent set of rules and having these rules accomplish what they need to is the gargantuan task that it’s being made out to be. If you feel that people are trying to “out-lawyer” you on rules, the response should be to write better rules, not worse ones

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there are also bad actors in the community spreading BS saying you are still allowed to abuse AHK, i think it would be better to just tell ppl to not use AHK at all.

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My account was banned the morning the rules changed on April 15th. (?) They were that ahk was allowed if it was emulating wmk, to nothing but wmk. I was permed after using a script I had previously been using. My appeal was denied.

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46 signatures!!! maybe if we get 50 the mods will change their minds

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Bans aren’t handed out on the spot, they’re intentionally delayed to demotivate botters from trying again. Feel free to send an appeal, or share your script for a public smackdown

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Make Lost City Great Again!

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The video referenced as showing how to use AHK and follow Lost City rules by Pawz is member only on his channel, pretty hard to use as evidence of the rules suddenly changing if no one can watch it. Would be interested to know what he said as it does seem like it was clearly defined at some point that only WMK functionality could be implemented, and there was a post in the dev Discord that outlined exactly what that meant.

I’m not opposed to more clarity from devs/mods around rules, it took overall too long to determine with certainty that old journal stalling wasn’t bug abuse, for example, but I’ve also seen a few of these “my AHK script ban was allowed before” people that have shared their scripts get shot down on these forums for obvious abuse of the rules. IMO both autotypers and AHK should be fully banned but I understand that AHK posing as WMK is basically undetectable and I sense that’s why it was given a carve out (that and non-windows systems should still be allowed basic accessibility tools).

Change.org is stupid though and they can’t have my email address. Hope y’all get the clarity you’re after and hope it doesn’t suddenly allow a slew of macros into the game.

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#If GetKeyState(“Capslock”,“T”)

1::Click, Left
return

2::mousemove 1250,1000,0,
Return

3::Click, Left
return

4::mousemove 1300,1000,0,
return

5::control

E::mousemove 250,950,0,
Return

R::Click, Left
return

#If

That was the script I was using. I was discussing on Discord about my script after I was banned, and I found out that I was using something referred to as absolute cords, which isn’t allowed, and that my pixel jumps were too great. I had never written AHK scripts before this, nor knew about the rules surrounding AHK use. I thought if they were 1:1, it was okay.

I sent an appeal and was denied. I now know (lol) that my scripts were pushing the limits, and I’m not trying to hide that. But I felt that a permanent ban was harsh.

Edit:
Perhaps I should add that I don’t know if I was banned on the spot the day the rules changed. But I had assumed such because of the timing of my ban.

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Yo guys, this is just a chill private server, don’t waste time trying to bot, using autohotkeys or whatever

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This is the reason they changed the rules :sob::sob::sob:

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all scripts should of been banned from the start, on some real shit, y’all played yo self for playin with fire hahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahhahahahaahahahahahahahahh

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Rebuild the Wilderness Wall!

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Yep…

…specifically the type of situation described here was the reason the wording was changed. We are trying to prevent these types of misunderstandings.

We would rather you be entirely frightened away from macroing by “unclear” rules versus lulled into a false sense of security by seeing “acceptable” macroing guidelines bullet-pointed. In retrospect, listing out what players are “allowed” to do with macros seems insane to me. Jagex has never done this and probably no RSPS ever has either.

And the above example is also why I don’t necessarily agree with this. Nobody on the mod team is counting pixels. There have been maybe two or three cases total where that was required to determine wrongdoing.

In (I believe) all of those cases, we decided slightly bigger relative cursor jump distance wasn’t a big deal. The most famous case was probably Lytta who caught a temp ban for using some shkd scripts on Linux that were extremely similar to WMK on Windows, and were within the rules. (this is public information buried somewhere in Discord)

Scripts like the above example are a far cry from simply jumping >108px. We understand regular mouse speed can be set higher in Windows, and thus WMK at max speed will jump the cursor a bit further. The scripts we hand out bans for are nothing like that.

The vast (and nearly exclusive) majority of cases are people running afoul of AHK’s scriptability and lack of safeties or limitations. It turns out that asking for players to “just make AHK the same as WMK” is a pretty tall order.

Hence the change to the wording. Players shouldn’t be using AHK, full stop. Sooner or later they will script something that trips the banhammer.

Legitimately not a bad idea, it would definitely have been more authentic to disallow all forms of macroing. Cat’s out of the bag though, and this was one of the rules we adjusted in the name of accessibility. We didn’t want to discourage high-level play and it seemed silly to expect people not to use macros at all.

I like to think we’ve at least punished fewer people under our chosen rule than we would’ve, had macroing been wholesale prohibited.

The crux of this entire issue, I suspect, has less to do with the rules themselves and more to do with the punishments meted out and their length.

If you believe the length of your punishment is unreasonably outsized in comparison with the transgression, please submit an appeal. Even if you have had an appeal denied in the past, that doesn’t mean an appeal for the same punishment will be denied in the future.

I’ll stop short of making any promises as things like this involve a lot of internal consensus-building but I do appreciate the communication from the community’s end. I understand we/I probably come across as abrasive sometimes – if not in words, then in actions – but I promise it’s in only in the name of expedience and brevity. We don’t get a kick out of doing this.

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