alt Hacker NewsI wish the author got more into the weeds of anitcheat and how it evolved over time. Jagex was banning bots based on mouse movement heuristics in like 2005. 20 years later and there's some JS framework on the front page here heralding that same kind of analysis as some revolutionary new approach. I can only imagine what the modern anticheat engine entails, especially in the era of LLMs that can reliably emulate a human player. (Some of them can even write quite technical blog posts that almost escape detection ;)
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The evolution for Old School RuneScape was to just make cheating a built-in feature. It only takes a couple clicks every ten minutes to "play" the game.
It's gotten pretty good (finally good enough that you can observe it in the game's macroeconomics), but if you're any good as a programmer then it's no work whatsoever to build something which can bypass it indefinitely.
“This is good for LLM.”
In reality since the new CEO, they have been much more strict with antibotting and they have virtually disappeared from the game. It’s been an incredible 6 months without major botfarms in the game. Botting subreddits have been on suicide watch since.
A large amount of work has been done this year alone to reduce botting to levels i didn't think was possible.
Obviously we only get the details JMods are willing to give away but some of their techniques can be seen in various reddit Smackdown posts like this one from six days ago - https://preview.redd.it/prx0s0qp2hlh1.png?width=355&format=p...
I farmed tens of thousands of us dollars in modern RuneScape by unhooking the mousehook. It worked for decades.
Find call to `SetWindowsHookEx` -> Find dword (`HHOOK`) it returns -> Inject module that calls `UnhookWindowsHookEx((HHOOK)(module_base + hhook_rva));` -> profit.
Jagex has done some interesting things, but without fail, there is a blunder accompanying each.