Confessions of a RuneScape Botter: Why I Quit & How Much I Made
I’ve been playing RuneScape since shortly after its launch — back when it was just RuneScape Classic (RSC). It was a fun way to kill time after school, long before social media took over our lives. RuneScape was both entertainment and socializing for me, connecting me with people all around the world.
Soon came the bots.
In the early days, most of the bots were simple, and Jagex — the game’s creators — had no way to detect them. It wasn’t a huge problem because not many people botted. Eventually, Jagex started cracking down, though, issuing bans to those sneaky enough to try.
I wasn’t one of them. Not yet, anyway.
Most of the early botters used bots to avoid having to grind skills — because, let’s be honest, anyone who has played RuneScape, especially RSC, knows it could take an entire year or more to max out just one skill back then.
I didn’t start botting until RuneScape 2 (RS2) came out in 2004. My first bot was a program called “Shite Compared to Auto Rune” (SCAR), which was a simple program to execute scripts (The program is still around today BTW). The scripts were simple — like mining and banking ore at the Mining Guild — but they worked.
The biggest issue? Random events.
For example, the Drunken Dwarf would attack you until you died, and the Mysterious Old Man would put a box in your inventory that duplicated every minute, filling up your inventory space. You’d wake up dead in Lumbridge or trying to mine a rock with a full inventory (or both). It was chaotic.
Still, I left my character botting overnight and soon enough, I hit 85 mining. That was a big deal back then. Not many people had reached that level, and it unlocked one of the best money-making methods: mining runite ore.
So, naturally, I started making lots of gp, RuneScape’s in-game currency.
During the day, I’d manually mine rune, making millions of gp. At night, I’d let my bot run, mining away while I slept. Pretty soon, I had more gold than most veteran players.
And what does a 13-year-old kid with tons of in-game gold do? Sell it for real cash, of course.
Each million of gp sold for about $5. We didn’t have fancy PayPal back then and I was 15, so I’d get payments through money orders or cash in the mail (wild, right?). Now, you’re probably thinking $5 doesn’t sound like much. But remember — I was 15 years old in 2004. Making $50 a week from playing an online game felt like striking gold.
By 2008, I had joined the military and stopped playing RuneScape. Part of that was life getting busy, but Jagex didn’t help by launching the Evolution of Combat (EOC) update. The update turned RuneScape into just another MMO, stripping away what made the game special. The player base took a nosedive, and so did my interest.
Fast forward a few years, and Jagex tried to fix their blunder by releasing Old School RuneScape (OSRS). It brought back a lot of players, including some new ones. But by then, I was 23, had kids, had been to Iraq, was in college, and there was no way in hell I was going to grind a character from scratch again.
Cue the bots.
I did some research, found a reliable botting client, and got to work. I botted my character up to max stats, but when I tried playing the game for real, something was off. The social aspect — the thing that made RuneScape great — was dead. It had been replaced by a bunch of edgy kids who never outgrew their teenage gaming phase. It was exactly like in 2004 but worse since they’re all, y’know, grown ass men now.
I wasn’t feeling it.
That’s when I had an idea: Why not bot for real money? It’ll get me through college and my kids would want for nothing.
At the time, Jagex’s anti-cheat system was a joke, and botting was still a niche market. It had potential. I quickly built a bot farm, running over 100 accounts killing Dust Devils.
How much did I make? Not much — just about $12,000 a month from doing practically nothing.
And the farm lasted for years.
Since I wrote my own scripts, I made sure each account used different gear, had random stats, and botted in various locations, avoiding detection. With the profits, I invested heavily in the stock market — one of the reasons I eventually became a millionaire.
But then COVID hit.
COVID caused a massive influx of botters. People lost their jobs or started working from home, and there was this one kid advertising in on YouTube as some sort of magical money maker, so botting exploded. The market became oversaturated. At the same time, Jagex finally got their act together, improving their anti-cheating systems. Now you need proxies and a bunch of other measures. Profits took a nosedive.
I went from making $12,000 a month to less than half that in just a year. And it kept dropping, until eventually, I was barely scraping $1,500. Worse, I was spending more time managing the farm — replacing banned accounts and tweaking scripts — than I was enjoying life.
It wasn’t worth it anymore.
So, I quit. I had better things to do, like writing, training large language models (LLMs), or running my own business — a business that I started thanks to botting. All good things must come to an end, right?
And the big question — how much did I make in total?
After some rough calculations, I figure I made about $1,164,000 over the course of 11 years. Not bad for a side hustle that required almost no effort, eh?
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