Old School RuneScape is winning its long fight against MMO bots

Old School RuneScape has long suffered from scripted bot accounts that generate gold for a gray market, causing congestion at popular in-game areas and wild swings in the trade economy. For the first time in a very long time, an extinction-class meteor seems to have hit the bot armies: two OSRS experts, SirPugger and FlippingOldSchool, say bots have been annihilated.

The change follows a renewed crackdown on botting and real-world trading by developer Jagex under new CEO Jon Bellamy, with harsher punishments and improved detection tools supported by more internal resources. SirPugger, who has tracked large bot farms for years, bluntly states, "RuneScape No Longer Has a Bot Problem," and notes, "I've never seen the caves so empty and I don't think I found a single bot," of one popular Wilderness PvP area.

That tightening appears to be having measurable impact: updated account security numbers show over 8 trillion gold, roughly two-thirds of the 2026 total, was removed from OSRS in April alone through bans and other account action.

osrs, bots, botting, jagex, jon bellamy, real-world trading, gold, bot farms, account bans, detection tools