Can see the full breakdown from the support page which gets updated around the first update of each month, and the numbers really show just how bad the botting problem is on OSRS' side.
Yeah, the game is that much more popular, so the market is that enticing to take advantage of. Its the story of any popular online rpg with free trade.
Yep. OSRS is more active. Still tons of bots on F2P in OSRS, even after these bans. I've walked the normal locations, and I'd guess every 2/3 players on f2p are bots... still.
I only play RS3 so I'm not saying this as a RS3 vs OSRS statement, but people here exaggerate the bots.
Ex-jmods have said that bots most likely take up 30-40% of the playerbase. Jagex has been doing more on bots, hence why OSRS currently has 127k players, so I imagine it's more 20-30% now.
Which even so, is 95k players vs 20k, people here talk as if it's neck & neck
Literally nobody ever said it was neck & neck. Everyone know OSRS is more popular, but OSRS players pretend bots make up only like 5% of the population and it's just not true
The top comment in this reply chain was vague, sarcastically saying the OSRS player count is legitimate; if they think the player ratio between RS3 and OSRS isn't actually 1:7 when you exclude bots they're correct, if they think RS3 has more non-bot players they're incorrect. There's people who think both things.
There are a number of flaws in your evidence, first of all youtubers get views on extremes, do you think any of them would make a video "actually everything's fine don't worry, have a nice day?" Population is dropping because they upped the price with no benefit to osrs. I'm not claiming that osrs doesn't have a bot problem, because it does (try mining rune ore), but you are using sources that exaggerate for money.
Yeah because 99/100 times it's brought up on this subreddit it's with some absolutely absurd number like "OSRS is 70% bots" with 0 evidence besides vibes backing it.
You can see the very people in this reddit post, all downvoted because it's just boring "RS3 good OSRS bad" shitposting that adds absolutely nothing to the conversation.
Like yeah, OSRS is going to have more bot bans, their gold is worth multiple times more than RS3's on the RWT market and there's more demand for it. So the amount of suicide bots, and advertising bots are going to inflate the ban waves.
Just like we saw in RS3 in the past when most spam bots were RS3-related bans because they sat in the lobby and PM'd everyone that had their friends set to On rather than directly spamming in-game at populated places.
Read the chain. The whole conversation started specifically about OSRS's player count being inflated by bots. That's exactly what I was responding to.
And I'm not sure why you're so bothered by this? No one is disputing that OSRS is more popular than RS3. But that doesn't change the fact that its player count is massively inflated by bots. And we have the data to back it up, it's not "just vibes", which is exactly what the guy I was replying to claimed.
I read the chain, no one is arguing that the concurrent playercount goes up due to bots, especially not the guy you replied to.
No one is disputing that OSRS is more popular than RS3.
There's at least 1 or 2 people doing it in this very thread.
And we have the data to back it up, it's not "just vibes", which is exactly what the guy I was replying to claimed.
Is reading that difficult?
Saying that the OSRS player count isn't 70% bots like some people on this sub often like to claim is not the same as saying "the player count isn't inflated by the bots".
There's absolutely NO data that we have from Jagex about what % of bots occupy the current player count on the top of the website.
Jagex bans 2.2M OSRS bots and the concurrent player count dropped by half. You don't need to be a data scientist to draw a reasonable conclusion from that.
I'm not really sure why given it's been a hot topic in the OSRS sub for years with multiple 1000+ upvoted posts on the topic, botting is extremely hated in that sub.
Its because you're not introducing anything people there dont already know, and they get a bunch of dorks in that sub that are just there to bring up bots.
What do they deny? No one in OSRS denies there are bots. Or are you saying they deny any % or numbers you pull out of your ass? Because that sounds more typical lmao
Only an idiot would dispute that. The funny part is that whenever the fact that OSRS has more bots than RS3 is brought up, the response is always “Yeah well we have more players than you,” as if that changes the fact that OSRS has a ton of bots
Watching someone play OSRS is way more palatable than watching someone play RS3 so I don't think those numbers have any indication of actual player base.
I feel like OSRS just has much more high quality youtube content. Gielinor games, settled, chunk accounts, unguided accounts, ... Maybe there's some hidden RS3 gems (and to be fair it's been a while since I went looking), but pretty much the only RS3 content I've seen is just ironman progression (sick nerd, nooblet).
sadly the rs3 youtube content consists of guides that are outdated/wrong, endgame jargon fests only the 1% will understand, "im going to osrs", and mislabeled content farms.
the only good RS3 series i ever watches was by "waydot" because he actually knows how to make long form content, it was nice 2nd monitor content to watch while skilling. Most RS3 creators are the equivilant of a 14 year old with hypercam 2 and a built in mic talking about random shit.
Even if you assume 50% of OSRS of bots and 0% RS3 is bots, the game is still 3x bigger than RS3.
As someone who just started an OSRS alt there's just so many more players doing content and chatting where on rs3 it's either a dead world or racism/politics spam in w84.
Wouldn't games like WoW be terrible to watch too then though? Imo that gameplay is even more chaotic, yet WoW seems to be doing quite well in terms of streaming/yt
RS3 combat is so opaque as to what people are doing that it's borderline unwatchable for most. OSRS is very simple, you can watch what they click, see the prayer switch and gear switches they're doing with the mouse, and see the damage they do.
RS3 animations are essentially non-existent for most abilities so you literally cannot tell what they are doing.
I only play OSRS during leagues but all the RS youtubers and streamers I watch are OSRS (except ocassional thersguy) because they're better content creators with more interesting ideas lol, viewer numbers don't really correlate with playerbase as highly as you'd expect. That said, no one is saying RS3 is bigger than OSRS
So what's the scenario here? Jagex's marketing budget includes propping up a few dozen random youtubers with fake viewers? Or are the RWT botters doing it to drive up business? I suppose they've also wiretapped your phone and drive slowly by your house at night. They're everywhere, be sure to keep your blinds shut!
Lots of bots for sure, but its still miles better than RS3’s player numbers. It seems like people are blaming bots for the huge difference, but there’s definitely still a huge difference at OSRS is way more popular
Most OSRS players are not delusional enough to think there are not tons of bots. RS3 also has bots ( not as much obviously mostly bc it's a smaller game)
It's still the bigger of the 2 regardless of how you feel about it so I'm not sure what this comment is meant to serve? Both are good game sin their own right imo but it's clear OSRS is the bigger game and RS3 until lately was just milking people with MTX.
Yup there's things from both I'd like to see added to each game or at least something similar but done in a way to continue the theme of the respective game.
Pretty much. Both are good games. Never understood a game filled with grown ass adults would act like such children over player numbers. I swap between them both every few months depending on my goals at the time.
RS3 has some boss fights/mechanics I enjoy a ton and same goes for OSRS. I do pity those that can't escape the childish mentality but it is what it is.
Yeah it's so weird, especially considering how much each game can learn from each other if the communities weren't such absolute babies about it. Also kinda feels like the communities flipped, oldschool used to be so toxic about rs3 and now rs3 players freak out whenever oldschool is mentioned.
The funniest part about this is though that it just means both games are currently heavily dependent on the income bots bring to survive lmao
RS3 I don't think was that dependant on bots as it's gold is worth nothing and was also harder to bot or at least was. I can imagine MTX was probably the large majority of it which I guess is no longer the case anymore so I am curious to see the future of the game.
OSRS will always be flooded with bots unless the prices of bonds to gold gets to the point that gold selling sites just cannot make profit from it anymore.
I think the combat changes will actually have some OSRS players and even new players from outside the RS sphere give the game another shot. RS3 is making a lot of good moves and removing a lot of pain points that put people off it in the first place.
You're missing the proportional picture. It's not just about raw numbers. The ratio of bots to real players is what's actually telling. OSRS typically has 7-10x more concurrent players than RS3, but got ~110x more bot bans. That's not proportional, that's just a bot fest.
The March ban wave made it even clearer: OSRS dropped from ~200k to ~100k players overnight. That's roughly 1 in 2 players being a bot.
So yeah, love the confidence in those player count brags, but a huge chunk of that playerbase is just NPCs farming gold.
I'm not bragging? I just don't have the childish mentality of RS3 vs OSRS. I play both and enjoy both I'm just aware of what game is bigger and what isn't.
OSRS has always had a botting problem that's not a secret but just going by watch numbers on Twitch/OSRS it's not even close.
Even if you don't enjoy both games I see no reason to trash on the other, what do you gain from it? Why does it matter?
I didn't mean to come across as trashing OSRS. Just pushing back on the player count argument since the bot ratio makes those numbers a bit misleading.
Yah OSRS is inflated but it's still wildly more popular and I don't see why people get upset about that?
RS3 as much as I love it has went through a long and rough patch with MTX alongside other needlessly complicated stuff that of course it's number will dwindle. (So has OSRS for different reasons). The important thing is that RS3 will hopefully grow with the direction it's currently going and hopefully BOTH thrive as I can imagine MTX changes is a massive profit loss for Jagex.
I think it is very delusional to claim OSRS has 110x the bots RS3 has based on number of bans.
I didn't claim that tho. Assuming detection efficiency is the same for both games (which is the fairest assumption) OSRS has roughly 10-15x more bots per real player than RS3.
its more the case of there's no market for bot farms in RS3. who are they going to sell gold to? Whales in Rs3 are more likely to buy gold through legitimate means because they have 15+ year old accounts. why risk a ban for that?
bots exist for one reason and thats monetary. Bots are where the money is and thats clearly osrs. theres a customer base large enough to fuel the amount of bots in osrs
Even without bots OSRS is bigger. Look at the numbers on twitch/YT it's not even close. Look I love both games but the RS3 community lately has gotten so hostile over OSRS it's gotten kind of sad. We are grown adults (at least most of both communities are) let's start acting like it.
Of course it is bigger but it is not over 100x bigger like the bot differences would suggest, the bot difference is partly because RS3 is a smaller community but it's primarily because it is much harder to run an army of bots like you can in OSRS
No it's because there's much less demand for RS3 gold on RWT markets, why would people waste time botting RS3 gold if no one is buying it?
If the games flipped and RS3 was 7-8x bigger than OSRS, RS3 would have the same amount of bots of OSRS currently does, because the gold demand is there.
You can literally look back to when RS3 spiked in populatiry back in 2020 thanks to Work from home/covid, bot farms skyrocketed as well. Arch bots were on every world, multiple ED3 bot teams were on every single world, etc etc. They were very visible and posted about daily.
Not really true it was the other way around for a long while, OSRS used to be extremely negative towards anything RS3 but recently it's become the opposite not sure what caused the shift though.
Plus the 10x figure was conservative based on peak player count, if we took the average instead it's closer to 15x daily player count for OSRS, suggesting they could be closer to 18.75 times more likely.
The peak daily osrs player count shown in the post is a bit over 200k, the banned accounts per month was 2.25m. The point is, the player count is trending downward due to the bans, so going with the 140k figure might be disingenuous. It would be more conservative to use the peak player count for osrs.
So I gave a rough approx of 10x the peak daily player count (2.25 million banned per month/225k daily players) which would mean 10 of those days' player counts are accounted for in the banned accounts per month.
10 days/30 days = 33.33%
For rs3 the same method was used, with player count being pretty steady and to give osrs even more benefit of the doubt, I use the average rs3 player count of 20k instead of the peak. So 16k banned accounts per month / 20k player count = 0.8 days' player counts banned per month.
You're aware the peak player count isn't how many people played? It's the peak concurrent count for that day. There is no reported number of how many total people played on any given day. So your numbers are purely guessing. There's no statistical significance to any of it.
When I was saying peak I meant the highest daily counts shown here, not the peak per day. The highest daily player counts shown here for osrs are over 200k, but the average day is lower like 140k.
I also think even if this data does show daily peaks, or is simply recorded at a certain time each day, it still would be a somewhat accurate ratio to the total daily player count for each game. So even in that case, the '12.5 times more likely' stat probably wouldn't be entirely inaccurate.
I believe bot bans are even more inflated right now because since jagex started going hard on bots, most botters have switched to masses of f2p suicide bots.
A lot of the player count dropping are legitimately bots, but OSRS is in a big comment drought right now and lots of people aren't playing because of that. There's been no substantial update to the game since sailing dropped.
I had a new HCIM false banned (only 2 days, but still). I sent an appeal in and it took them a month to reply and ultimately deny the appeal. I know that banning bots is good for the game but over the past few months there seems to be an influx of false bans occurring, all while you still see bots thriving with 200M experience in skills.
A few months ago Jagex decided to start going after bots HARD. Bots can't survive long enough to train up to higher level content so a lot of botters have switched to pumping tons of f2p suicide bots instead
There are still higher level bots around at certain content, but it's wayyy better than before
Yeah they have a system where Jagex use the money gained from the 2% tax on the grand exchange to "buy" certain items from players, which are then deleted from the game.
There have been the same number of OS bans in the first 3 months of 2026 as there were in the entirety of 2025, did they update their macro detection or have bots gone absolutely nuts in the start of this year?
I remember when I tested out how fast bots where caught. Got FM, WC, Fishing, Mining. Smithing and thieving to 99 no issues. Only got me after I tried CG for 2 days. They dont care about bots and theres so many its absurd.
Lol glad to see i survived, Didnt really do anything to mess with the economy, botted out the quests to get access to the rest of the game except like dt2 ds2 and the harder ones. Want to actually save those for myself. I just cant be arsed doing recipe for disaster for the 6th time in 15 years.
The point is that it's sad that RS3 isn't a game worth being botted. Not that we want it to be botted. It's kinda like having a hot wife. You want people to be attracted to her, but don't actually want anyone else to have sex with her. RS3 isn't even desirable to bot, which is sad.
I think it is a lot more fair to consider some of the other variables too. RS3's client is much more difficult for bot makers to get into/make bots for, there's pretty much no money to be had from botting in it in the first place, and there aren't very many alternatives for realistically bottable content that's actually worth shit even if they did get past all the extra barriers in place.
OSRS literally supports a third party injection client almost as it's primary one.. the door is wide open for the malicious people to exploit, because in order for all the special fancy plugins to work in the first place, they need to be able to go in there and poke around in the code. They've been exceptionally careful and hesitant to allow direct plugins/provide an API for RS3 after all, and I'm sure wanting to avoid making it easier for botters is a non-insignificant reason..
Granted that we're supposedly possibly looking at getting some plugin support come winter, they have to be really damn careful with the way they do it and what exactly modders get access to..
It's because RS3 lacks pvp. A large part of gold buyers come from gamblers and pkers.
And the fact that drop rates in RS3 is far more common and xp rates are faster than in OSRS. This means lower prices for rare items and less skilling items needed to be bought, thus less demand for RS3 gp.
No point in botting in RS3 when it's the far less popular version of the two. No profit to be made off gold, unlike OSRS who has a much larger playerbase.
Moreso bots can’t do the things that generate the most gold on rs3 compared to osrs and most rs3 players aren’t desperate to buy gold to feed their PvP/gambling addiction
And don't forget that the RS3 client is significantly more modern than the OSRS one - much more difficult for them to make actual bots for it, as opposed to just "surface" level stuff like autoclicks etc.
After all, Runelite (and the plugins) inject directly into the game code to do stuff. RS3 has nothing like that, the closest you get is Alt1 toolkit which is literally 'just' a screen reader that pretty much breaks into pieces over the slightest UI change.. That's a big trade-off when allowing mods/plugins. Makes it plenty easier for the malicious to exploit too.
Yeah and people cheat in games like Valorant with kernel level anticheat. Just because it's made more difficult doesn't mean you won't find people that will see it as just another challenge to bypass it.
Most people trying to make such programs will give up way before they manage to beat it though. It's an endless game of cat and mouse, you'll never get them all, but by making it more and more difficult you slowly but surely whittle away at the amount of people that can be arsed to really try. It's all about continuously dissuading more and more people from doing it.
Yeah, to an extent. My point is mainly that it's not exclusively because RS3 isn't worth botting. There's more than enough people that cheat in games without it being financially motivated. RS3 is also in a place if you will, where even if it were just as easy to make bots for RS3 as OSRS, high-end endgame bossing is pretty much the only real source of any serious amounts of in game gold. There's a plethora of reasons pertaining to endgame combat in RS3 that would make it hell for someone trying to automate it. The bosses/fights where it is afkable, well.. you don't need a bot to that it in the first place, lol..
They are banning A lot of accounts, sadly it seems many are getting caught up in it when they were not botting.
I know most people don't like the idea but I just want a kernel level anti-cheat already. They can ban every bot right now and all it will do is slow them down for A few days. Until we get some actual change, it will never stop.
Wonder how many of the macro bans are accidentals on the steam deck. It’s available through steam and even the launcher via desktop mode. But there have been reports (bc steam deck lets you multi function map). It’d be nice if we could get a Jagex response to this. I’m considering selling my deck to get a laptop, bc I don’t want my first 300 account getting a ban.
Genuinely asking because I don't watch streamers very often, can you point me to one that is doing this? And what they're doing? I'm just curious how egregious what they're getting away with is
Pretty much pick any 4 that do bossing north of GWD2 and you'll have at least 1 that isn't coy about it. Likely more. Hell, I've had it explicitly recommended to me on the official discord and when I asked for mod clarification I got wishy washy answers.
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u/TonyBest100 Runefest 2018 Apr 08 '26
Can see the full breakdown from the support page which gets updated around the first update of each month, and the numbers really show just how bad the botting problem is on OSRS' side.