Mark Gerhard created a news article on RuneScape’s homepage stating that Jagex will be releasing their “most formidable bot-busting weapon” in RuneScape’s history on the 25th of October 2011. One can say that Jagex are being a bit too ambitious, or you could say that maybe they are trying to reassure players who have had enough of bots.

Bot Nuke Day on the RuneScape Homepage

Let’s get down to what we know will happen on the 25th…

Codenamed ‘Clusterflutterer’ (if only you knew what I thought that said the first time I saw it), this prevention technology will effectively stop reflection bots from working. What is a reflection bot, you say? Lucky for you, I’ve done my research!

Reflection bots apparently read incoming packets sent from RuneScape’s game servers to your computer which allows them to determine where certain objectives are. For example, if you were in Draynor, the packets would indicate the location of a Willow tree, thus allowing the bot to find the Willow tree and play the game for you.

Most who have done their reading would know that there are not only reflection based bots out there in the world of RuneScape – there are also injection bots. These bots use a more complicated way of manipulating the way RuneScape behaves.

Injection bots use code already made by someone else that can be injected into the client, changing various areas of the game. For example, an injection bot can change the colour of a certain rock or read item codes to figure out what is what. However, these are easier to detect, so Jagex sees reflection bots as a much higher risk to RuneScape.

Though many have said that injection bots will not be affected, Jagex has stated that they will be affected just as much as reflection bots, which leads us to think that RuneScape may very well be ‘bot-free’. But for how long?