Before I start this is not a ban appeal but yesterday probably 100 people got banned for using AHK I guess last week it was added to the rules and almost everyone I have spoke with including myself didn’t know it was banned I have even seen the owner saying it was allowed in discord. Now my issue with this ban wave isn’t the ban itself we broke a rule so we should be punished but all of these bans was perm a simple two day ban or even a week ban would have got the point across and a in-game message should be added when major rules are changed.
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Not sure about the AHK situation me personally I would never do it at all just to be safe, there’s just no point. I did want to mention though there is people going around in-game apparently reporting people when they don’t answer them or are not speaking in game for botting, it doesn’t necessarily mean someone is cheating/breaking the rules if they don’t speak, they might not wanna speak, some people just do their own thing.
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IMO if a new rule is implemented or changed, there should be a cooldown period where the bans are temp ones.
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I agree. I don’t like AHK at all, but the way they so quietly and unceremoniously changed the rule is not right. There needs to be a very visible warning when rules are changed.
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It wasn’t quiet though, you had to accept the disclaimer on the play window and they added a notification to the rule change with links to the update.
AHK and any other scripting software is playing way outside of a players means and IMO warrants permanent character ban. just my two cents
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Could you clarify exactly how your AHK script worked?
• What did each hotkey do?
• Was it a strict one key-press → one in-game action, or did a single key fire off a whole sequence (e.g., move the mouse from point A to point B andclick)?
• Any loops or timed repeats involved?
Knowing that detail helps everyone judge whether the permanent bans were truly warranted or if a shorter temp ban would have made more sense.
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We need a new “whining about bans” section of the forums…
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I don’t remember seeing a warning for the rule change. Maybe I forgot. If so, then that’s my fault. I agree fully that AHK should be against the rules. I’ve never used it nor have I really been tempted to.
I’m curious what the language of the notification was. Maybe I just dismissed it thinking that the original “please read the rules” message had returned.
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I’m using the launcher and the red warnings don’t appears since I accepted the first time. Don’t use AHK, and check manually the rules everyday.
I agree with the cooldown.
The dirty little secret is that the rule hasn’t actually changed. It’s been de-clarified on the rules page, sure, but internally we’re still using the same criteria as before the change.
The only people affected by this are the ones who were breaking the “old” rule too.
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Since there is another discussion about this same topic, and you essentially brushed off my previous post about this same issue, I have a handful of questions:
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You stated, in response to my previous post about this same issue, that you didn’t actually read all of my post, but instead just read some of it. This was apparently sufficient for you to conclude that some of my post was written “in bad faith”, but you never expounded on that or identified any allegedly bad-faith arguments or points in my post. What were those bad-faith arguments I allegedly made? If you could actually identify weaknesses in my rhetoric or argument, I wouldn’t imagine it would be too difficult to address it directly.
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Why don’t you or whomever is in charge of writing/publishing the rules page just write a very clear rule-set that addresses edge cases on the actual rules page, similar to the one I proposed in my post about this topic? Why do you and/or the mod team/staff believe it is better to inaccurately convey the rules to the player-base at large unless they are willing to comb through the forums or Discord searching for clarifications? It’s difficult to evaluate intentionally obfuscating the rules for the sake of confusing the player-base as anything but maliciousness, incompetence, or laziness.
Very worrying if people are getting permanent ban for minor things like autotypers or simple rebinds (Click X to press Left Click once), without players this project is nothing and will die and be forgotten.
Also I dont think you get banned for using AHK for simple things like rebind keyboard clicks, but rather use it to gain unfair advantage to use AHK as a Bot.
Do you know what those people got banned for? Probably not
My personally that’s exactly what I got banned for I made a press F1 script to skip the chat at the range guild which seemed harmless to me but since it clicked two chat messages instead of one I got banned over it the mods said it was semi botting apparently. And and a lot of people I spoke with including rank #1 fletching got banned for similar stuff or dropping fish for example while barbarian fishing. And that little pop up on the client yes I seen and clicked out of it probably like everyone else did thinking it was nothing I have been playing since the f2p launch and spent a lot of time training my pure I just don’t think a perm ban is fair for hardly doing anything wrong a simple warning that it wasn’t allowed or even a two day ban would have stopped me from using it at all.
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It was stated in the original clarification which was removed from the rules page that anything other than a 1:1 key mapping would be considered macroing.
I’m not talking about 04scape (I’m clearly aware it’s not allowed now) but my understanding in general for ahk (runescape) is you could use it as long as it’s click to activate and not fully automated like for dropping fish and I did a google search I guess it was finally banned/enforced in 2017 for osrs only.
They were clear, 1:1 key remapping. Nothing else. When people like you started making massive posts about that clarification they removed it again. AHK is basically not allowed unless it is copying the function of WMK, which is very, very limited.
Why is that hard for you?
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While I think it’s obvious this stuff shouldn’t be allowed, instant perma ban is too far and will kill the population of the server. Just drop it to a 48-hour at risk of longer or permanent bans for repeated use.
Keyword “were”. They were clear (albeit not as clear as they could’ve been; see my previous post on the matter). They aren’t anymore. That’s my entire critique. Why is that hard for you to follow?
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Mainly:
- the part where you purposefully used faulty logic and wilful ignorance to imply that all software (including browsers and operating systems) beyond OS accessibility tools was against the rules
- the part where your proposed macroing rules were several paragraphs longer than all the other rules put together, virtually guaranteeing that no reasonable player would ever read/understand them, and looking ridiculous to boot
I covered this in my post on your thread. We tried the “just write a clear ruleset” approach and it had the opposite effect. Every single solitary bullet point we clarified was contested to no end. It was exhausting.
Your solution is five times longer and thus would be five times worse. Imagine answering a constant stream of questions about every line of your macroing ruleset, several times per day, most often posed by abusive players with banned accounts.
Taking issue with the “inaccuracy” of the rules is a problem with your perception, not a problem with the rules themselves. Again: the macroing rule has not changed, it is the exact same rule only stated a different way. If you got banned after the page was updated, you’d have gotten banned before the page was updated!
Nobody is required to comb through the forum or Discord. If you’ve got a question you’re welcome to ask, and those questions most often get posted on Discord or the forum. That’s all. The rules page says to use the player message centre for these types of questions, we prefer that, but I’m fine answering in public too.
If, after all this, you’ve still got an issue to the extent where you’re seeing malice/incompetence/laziness where there is none, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m comfortable throwing up my hands, deeming you a lost cause, and moving on!
Back on-topic:
This is incredibly reductive, and was not why you were banned. Your script searched the screen for bitmaps and clicked them. That’s the textbook definition of a bot. It doesn’t matter that it was a very small bot, or that the bot was bound to your F1 key and required human input to start it up. It’s still a bot, and it was still against both versions of the macroing rule.
This is exactly why the macroing rule clarifications were removed. Something you read on our rules page probably indicated to you that this was allowed. You were mistaken, but it’s ultimately our fault for providing an overly-verbose rule that was capable of being misinterpreted in this way. That’s fixed now.
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I see where the misunderstanding comes from. Since you didn’t read the entire post, you didn’t see that my argument, which made only true statements, alleged that a literal interpretation of the rules as written implies that utilizing any software (including browsers and operating systems) while also utilizing the mouse keys software that comes with your operating system would not be allowed. That is not a result of wilful ignorance; it’s simply a consequence of logic, and the reason why those desiring to be precise take care to word their sentences properly, and rather than being offended, they instead take note of critiques and issue corrections. There have been multi-million dollar lawsuits won over far, far less.
Why would it guarantee that no reasonable player would ever read/understand a rule-set if it is longer than one or two paragraphs? Do you believe that reasonable people are less capable of reading or understanding things than unreasonable ones, or simply less willing? If so, why?
I believe there is pretty significant evidence that the reason why writing an allegedly clear rule-set didn’t work out well is because the previous rules as written were unclear. My clarifications rectify that issue. There would be no need for questions, and every question could confidently be answered with, “As long as you follow the rules as written to the letter, you are fine.” If people did follow the rules as written to the letter and still managed to create a script that you or your team did not deem appropriate for the game, you could then update the rules to reflect that.
And no, there is no problem with my perception. The rules as they are currently written say exactly what I implied they say in my original post. There is a pretty clear reason why, shortly following the publication of the revised rule-set, the majority of people believed that rebinding keys at all wasn’t even allowed anymore (including myself), and why there were and are so many clarification requests regarding that: the rules were written inaccurately.
The rules as they were previously written did not imply at all that bots of this sort were allowed in the game. The only thing the rules update did was ensure that people who want to use software that currently is allowed will not know that they are allowed to use it unless they get some verification from a moderator on the forum or the Discord server.