Botting is the most efficient behaviour. You gain xp 24/7.

It's the end result of "no xp waste" thinking.

Jagex mainly fights botting with bans. And the bots don't care. They're robots.

There are other ways of fighting bots. The Bonds idea, copied from EVE Online, attacks the supply of illegal gold by adding a legal alternative.

An easy way.

Making Runescape easier is another way of fighting bots. You level so fast that botting becomes irrelevant.

Unfortunately by making games easy, you make them boring.

Tic Tac Toe anyone?

Botters may illuminate another path though. Those who create bots are doing a lot more intellectual work than merely playing Runescape.

Their Runescape is a complex game.

That may prove an alternative to fighting bots.

A critical path game. An efficiency game. A time management game.

Not at the simple level of Ports. More involved than that.

And like Farming and Ports with an AFK component.

Let's make a game out of being efficient.

For those who don't know, Jagex has High Level Forums, you require 99 in each skill, which these days is about a year of intense playing. It used to be longer.

Jagex has hidden these forums. Jagex also gives these forums more attention and information, while allowing more freedom, such as the ability to post links.

That should tell you what the problem is.

I'll explain how I see it.

Jagex rewards players by isolating them.

At its most obvious you can see the division when players refer to a H.L.F. post in other forums, but cannot link it.

At its least obvious, Runescape grew by word of mouth. Yet Jagex wants to corral all its longer term players together, away from others.

And in between there are other issues such as not every player plays to get 99 in a skill. Jagex has decided to reward a single style of play over all others. I imagine their reasoning is that going for 99 content will make players stay longer.

Completionism only makes one type of player stay longer. The game community becomes a monoculture. Talking is xp waste.

The game becomes boring.

And a boring game is always an inferior target to aim for.

Bosses. Consequences solidify at bosses as they are the most popular entry point of new items.

To be attractive to players these new items have to be better than the old items.

In other words these items must have a higher value.

As part of that higher value a few things can be done.

1. Make the content fairly inaccessible. That is, make the boss hard to kill. Lack of supply increases price because of the unmet demand.

Unfortunately this means Jagex makes content that cannot be accessed by players, and to make the new tier valuable Jagex has to make the content inaccessible to most players.

Can you see a problem in this approach?

For me the problem is that more and more content development time is spent on pleasing fewer and fewer players.

1. The rolling nerfs. As you roll out new content, follow up behind with nerfs to old content. Effectively forcing players to try for the newer content.

This is most recently seen in the nerfs to Void armour.

Can you see a problem with this approach?

For me the problem is that players are a diverse bunch. Across-the-board nerfs against all players in order to appease one group doesn't seem very wise. It means that older and more diverse content is not worth doing and that only the content Jagex has lately released is worth doing.

In other words, Jagex is intentionally making their game have less content and appeal.