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.

“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.

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.

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 played EverQuest on the PS2 using a modem in 2003. Performance was fine.

The algorithm is very cheap to run for a client (linear first, then diagonal to target, stitch together as many of these as it takes in the fewest number of hops), as they have full map data downloaded. For 2k concurrent players on mid range 2004 hardware (you have to remember they had kind of old school tech even for the time, though I'd love to be proven wrong on this), and with all the other interactions that needed to run before the next game cycle, I think they probably decided it was better to be clientside.

It's also possible they could have made it work, and it would have been a technical win, but just didn't need to since they had an MVP.

Validating that a path on a grid doesn't move through impassable objects is definitely much cheaper than running a pathfinding algorithm, especially on 2004 hardware. You'd have to make those checks as well in order to run the pathfinding.

It's a trade-off, especially for longer paths, especially when you count the cost of server RAM cache misses.

It is. Code snippets in the article are JavaScript as well, while only ever mentioning Java in the article

Oh Britannia, how you were so amazing before the Tramel/Felucia split.

[flagged]

The other comments hit the big ones (didn't have to download, had a free tier, didn't have significant irreversible character choices, had meaningful solo or quasi-social activities, etc), but I think a major contributing factor was it appearing on miniclip.

It was free to play when that wasn’t a popular financial model for games at the time. The memberships were also much cheaper than WoW and accepted different payment methods that would be more available to minors at the time.

It's free and you could play it in the school library, for one. Also it came out a few years before WoW.

As a kid, I didn't have a computer that could run WoW, nor would I have been able to convince my parents to pay for the subscription. I suspect most of the popularity was from kids in a similar situation, probably playing it on library computers when they should've been studying.

MapleStory was also quite popular back then for similar reasons.

Besides what everyone else said, it was a pre-WoW style sandbox MMO with a lot of freedom at the time. Those have their own appeal.

They were two very different games and target audiences, with the incidental commonality that both are MMOs.

in addition to what others said...

2004 runescape, now "old school runescape", which is actually successor 2001 Runescape "Classic", were both playable in a browser.

and my (parent's) PC couldn't even install, let alone run WoW. despite me trying with all my might.

so I'm sure I wasn't alone.

it was absolutely magical to me.

I was going to say a comment about “back in my day”; but your account is from 2011, so you should know what video gaming was like in ye olden era. Did you mod in a Mew, or 256 Masterballs in Pokemon Red with a Game Genie? Why not? How about doing some weird stuff with Missing No?

What about loading in some rare items in Diablo 1 on your local save and them importing them into Battlnet? especially before Diablo 2, 1.10?

How about Early Minecraft - we’re talking Beta days. Did you test out those X-Ray block packs that helped you see diamonds?

Cheating literally only matters when there’s a PvP or leaderboard or whatever glory-theft that comes from it. It’s only really shamed on when it hurts other people’s gameplay experience - like screwing with a leaderboard at the “low pain” end and ruining a multiplayer experience in the middle end. For everything else, it’s an experience modifier or a difficulty slider for your own private game experience. Lots of games nowadays add in those difficulty sliders directly or add sandbox modes where there used to be “cheating” that stuff in.

I think this is both a fair cultural observation and one that's a bit excessive. I think people regard it as a point of pride because it didn't necessarily harm anyone, and because that experience was one of their pivotal early programming challenges that has a tangible return and that they had relatively high agency over. I look back on my time as a player of WoW during the Glider days as one where I was largely pissed that botters were ruining the economy for actual players, but I look back on my time in RuneScape as one where I was completely fixated on running my little factory and not wanting to actually play what was kind of a boring tedious game. I'm not proud today of having scammed people when I did, but I was proud of having a modicum of ingenuity and figured out how to exploit various things in the system. Real world trading, like many rules, isn't inherently immoral, but deliberately stealing money or items from people is.

I highly doubt I'd have ever given a damn about programming if I hadn't tried my hand at Scar scripting as a kid for both RuneScape and Neopets. Simultaneously, I also scammed people and ripped off friends in various games, but that the two activities were mutually exclusive and I was just an asshole. I'm glad I got to explore the worst part of myself in a sandboxed environment rather than taking it to any serious level.