Old School RuneScape players revolt after new big money owners say bots are fine, actually, devs furiously walk it back and say they banned 7 million bots last year

Old School RuneScape developer Jagex is trying to quell player discontent after a strongly negative reaction to comments about the proliferation of bot accounts seemingly made by the company's new owner: CVC Capital Partners. 

CVC bought Jagex earlier this month for £900 million, a splashy acquisition that, naturally, caught the eye of the Financial Times. A source close to CVC told the paper that «bots are part of the RuneScape ecosystem, they just are,» and went on to say that the goal was «a sort of equilibrium of players and bots» in the game. «If a player is sufficiently committed to pay for three accounts, and have an account and two bots as part of its ecosystem, then so be it,» said the FT's source.

Players took that as an indication that—so far as CVC was concerned—bots were going to be left to get on with it so long as their owners were paying. As is the case in pretty much any MMO, bots are a persistent problem in OSRS, with automated accounts easily out-farming, out-trading, and out-performing the game's human players—nabbing spots on the game's hiscores table—in a way that's both frustrating and despair-inducing. Hearing that Jagex's new owner's philosophy was essentially to throw in the towel sparked a community uproar.

A thread on the OSRS subreddit titled "'Bots are basically okay' — New Jagex management" quoted the FT article directly, and attracted nearly 3,000 upvotes and over 1,000 comments. They're all, well, pretty much of a piece. A representative comment from user Thaloman_ reads «I guess everyone's worst fears are basically confirmed,» and told a story of how they had stumbled across an obvious bot that they reported to Jagex multiple times to no effect. «The [bot] account is now maxed, and I certainly won't be,» surmised Thaloman_, «Not spending hundreds of hours of my life doing something that people can do in basically 0 hours without consequences.»

The reaction in the Reddit thread was fierce enough that Jagex moderators had to step in