For years, any celebration of Old School RuneScape hitting a new player count record has come with a non-trivial asterisk: a chunk of those 'players' are surely bots, or automated accounts following scripted behavior to collect resources, usually to line the pockets of gold sellers.
The bot problem has peaked and valleyed but never truly vanished, with developer Jagex engaged in an endless arms race between bot busting and bot operators. But it feels like it's become especially ugly in the past few months. The bot infestation in the MMO's big PvP zone, the Wilderness, has steadily worsened, and some folks taking matters into their own hands by killing bots have reported that the botters are fighting back by using mass reports to brute-force temporary account mutes or bans.
