“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

When I get really bored I create a new account for fun. I normally realize it’s a waste of time and stop after about 6 hours of clicking trees or ores lol. However it’s always cool to see it’s still there and normally changes quite a bit every time I go back to it. Skills go to 120 nowadays for example!

Games that aren't fun are work. Axie, from all accounts, looks like work.

On the flipside, there are tons of regulated games that are both fun and allow users to flex their niche knowledge, like FanDuel (sports), BigBrain (trivia), and so on.

Just because Axie is a poorly designed game doesn't necessarily invalidated the larger point that jobs and income are changing, and gamification of skills is an interesting trend that is likely here to stay.

> Botting in general was the wild west in this game from about 2008 - ~2014.

There’s a weird, secret history around Runescape botting that I really hope gets told in full one day.

Essentially, the biggest and best botting client from the 2008-2011 era was Powerbot, later rebranded RSBot. It was written and managed mostly by some CS student from the UK, who went by the handle Jacmob, and used some bytecode editing + reflection to bind game objects directly, meaning that it allowed full interactivity with the underlying game, rather than just a simple image recognition and mouse control framework.

During this era, Jagex (makers of Runescape) made some big efforts to combat the botting. They started using obfuscators to make reverse engineering the bytecode harder, and reworked the handling of all String objects internally to mask them. There were more efforts, of varying success, but without fail, this one guy would have the botting client (and by extension, the whole botting ecosystem) back online in a week or so.

Flash forward to 2011, and Jacmob starts teasing something big for his RSBot 4.0 release: a “web-walking” API that would allow script writers to input any two positions on the world map, and have the botting client find them a path there, navigating through buildings, portals, teleports along the way. This was going to be an absolute game changer - script writing required insane attention to detail, trial and error, and tedium to navigate the world map in a slightly-randomized/hard-to-detect way. And yet a week or so before the big release… boom, another big effort comes from Jagex to stop the injection clients: the Great Bot Nuke of 2011.

This was different from the prior attempts by Jagex. Radio silence from Jacmob and the RSBot team, which was weird given the pending release. As the dust settled over the following weeks, it comes out that Jacmob, King of the botting community, has become Mod Jacmob, employee of Jagex, with very little fanfare both then and ever since. RSBot 4.0 was not to be.

Jacmob left the company several years later, but led their efforts through 2014 to combat botting, with great success. There’s very little information publicly available, but I strongly suspect he was using the obvious strategies of looking at probability distributions for click positioning on game objects and delays between certain behaviors to spot automation.

Jagex’s operations have grown much sloppier after his departure, but the scene has never returned to its former glory pre-2011. One nerdy, talented, quiet figure was responsible for so much of the Runescape community’s development - and yet you’d never know it without having been there yourself. Quite a world we live in.

(@Jacmob, if happen to read this - can I interview you pls Edit: this is all from memory, I’m probably bungling the details in quite a few places.

One could also argue that if the developers did that, the market value of the digital item in question would drop. The value that the buyer receives is grounded in the large time investment required to acquire the item in the game. Even though it is completely artificial, it makes the item more scarce and therefore more desirable to other players. I totally agree that the fact that this power is in the hands of the developers, though, makes these types of NFTs far from the decentralized digital goods they are claimed to be as pointed out by the author.

Yeah, I sold stuff in Ultima Online much earlier than 2005. Lazy research in this article.