RuneScape cheats

Over the past three years, players have attempted to find many ways to cheat in the MMORPG RuneScape. While cheats are generally not discouraged in most games, cheating in MMORPGs is usually highly discouraged, as cheats give the cheaters an unfair advantage over other players.

When Runescape first opened, cheating was rare, but gradually rose to an all-time high, and was rarely prevented. However, when Jagex introduced the RuneScape members service, the additional cash revenue meant they were able to start enforcing the rules better, and they implemented many macro detection routines. It is nearly impossible to hack RuneScape by any method, so the most common cheating technique is to create macro programs to gain an unfair advantage over other players in the game. Cheaters used these programs to automatically play the game for them, and gain levels on their character while they were not playing.

An earlier popular program of this type was a 'clicker macro' which looked at colours/text on the screen and worked out where to click. Notably the "AutoMiner" (by Nicholas Sherlock), which allowed users to automatically mine and automatically bank items by navigating to the bank and talking to the banker, and then automatically return to the spot they came from. The "AutoMiner" is no longer being maintained, and with further measures from Jagex (detailed below), eventually became ineffective.

Jagex responded with some workarounds, such as shifting the screen by a few pixels in a random direction every ten seconds or so. This meant cheats that always click on the same spot on the screen will miss the target after a few minutes. Other counter measures included automatically logging the user off after 3 or 4 minutes of standing in the same spot, making the minimap's compass display have only a loose relation to the angle of the map being displayed and making the minimap rotate a little bit at random to discourage cheats that can examine the minimap for specific details for navigation. Some clicker programs were even able to operate despite these measures, so Jagex made a very controversial change. Users found themselves becoming "fatigued" while doing any task that might be automated with a cheat, and were required to type in a mangled word to recover from their fatigue. In RuneScape 2, Jagex got rid of fatigue, and went with a "random event" system, where monsters would appear while mining, fishing, or burying bones. There was also another set of random events that would happen at any time (one being a Mysterious Old Man that would teleport you if you did not talk to him.)

Another attempted cheat was to manipulate the communications protocol directly and try to create a program which sent gameplay instructions directly to the server. This was much more effective than trying to examine the screen, but after a while Jagex fought back by randomly changing the communications protocol to make it harder for communications-based hacks to operate.

While cheaters were writing such programs, a number of flaws in the RuneScape code were discovered. Whilst the RuneScape server attempted to validate all external input, a few severe mistakes in the server code allowed some users to trick the system into giving them items, duplicating items, and killing NPCs which were supposed to be non-fightable. All of these attacks were a result of mistakes in Jagex's server code. They should not have been possible, but were at least fixed within a few hours of the problems coming to light.

At this time, there are no publicly known methods of "hacking" RuneScape.

There are a number of sites on the internet that still claim to offer cheating tools. However, users should be extremely wary of these sites, since they are generally not what they seem, and the programs they offer normally either:

• Contain a keystroke logging progam designed to steal the users RuneScape password and hence their items.
• Use 'clicker macro' style techniques as described above, which are now detected, and would probably just get the user's account banned.
• May even be more sophiscated, designed to be a type of spyware, loading with Windows automatically, and even replacing system files.

It is recommended that RuneScape users do not try to hack others, though some people do experience that some of their items went missing or their password and the recovery questions had mysteriously changed.