With OSRS coming to Steam soon and 2020 coming to an end, let's focus on some problems OSRS currently has. Some of these problems like accounts spamming their websites or whatever, may be a huge turn-off for new players. With OSRS coming to steam, these topics are more relevant than ever before in order to sustain growth in the player-base. Let's take a look first at the current situation and problems OSRS copes with on a daily basis. The following problems are not in the order of priority.

1) Botting & Goldfarming

One of the biggest problem OSRS currently has, is the massive amount of bots and goldfarmers with thousands of killcounts across every single boss. This ranges from Zalcano, to Zulrah,to GWD, to TOB and COX. For example, there is hundreds of bots runnings every day at Zurlah and barrows with killcounts upwards of 10-50k. Obvious low level total levels go hand in hand with these accounts, who are mostly wearing rag gear such as mystics.

The same goes for non-bot goldfarming accounts. Highscores are filled with a monstrous amount of goldfarming accounts. For example Godwards dungeon. There are accounts with thousands killcounts of Kree'arra, all following the same names "account*numers*". These accounts are made to farm armadyl on a daily basis.

For TOB and COX it's the same. Highscores are filled with accounts around 1800-2000 total level, which gives them the minimum requirements for dragon slayer 2 and Western diary so they can use elite void and the best ava's device. For example, out of the current top 150 COX highscore, which are accounts with more than 4k COX kc, around 90 of them are owned by gold farming accounts from Egypt, Venezuela or other 3rd world countries who sell their gold as a living. This is simply getting absurd. If this does not break the integrity of the games, then I have no idea what will. There are players who compete for boss highscore ranks for bossing in the same degree as people who compete for XP. Cheaters in any shape, way, or form, should not be tolerated.

2) Phising/Scamming/Autotyping bots

The massive amount of spam/advertising/phising/scam accounts on highly populated areas across RuneScape. You cannot hop worlds without seeing "2b for" and "120m for your DHCB". The same goes for bots spamming their gold-buying/selling websites or bots advertising discords where you can buy services. We know it's hard to battle these accounts on your own. But let's be honest. We, the players, are willing to help. Players moderators can easily help by muting these accounts. So we need more player moderators. We don't need more content creators being players moderators. A lot of them are Ironman anyways, who barely visit highly populated areas where these accounts stand such as the Grand Exchange. When a player moderator mutes one of these accounts, they get muted for one hour, meaning they can still run for 23 hours. The time an accounts gets muted by a player moderator should be increased significantlyas well.

With OSRS coming to steam very soon, we can expect a lot of new players. So let's take a look from a new players stance. You enter a new game, and the first thing you see is other players/bots spamming shady websites where you can buy gold or where you can win certain items or where you can level your skills automatically. Not knowing anything about the game you think: "well this might be interesting." "These people wouldn't be there if it was not allowed, right?" They then proceed to take part in any of these shady things, resulting in their accounts being hacked in the future or getting scammed for buying gold. These are a big turn-off for new players.

3) Account Security & Customer Support

Account security has been a problem as well. Combined with the lack of player support your subscribers can get is simply unacceptable at this point. People are sometimes dependant of a reddit post getting blown up to have any form of player support. Not being able to log in from your account, resulting in your hard-earned items being stolen is one example.

Earlier this year you've promised us more account security options. These have not been delivered so far. More than once we've been asking for capital letters being available to use in our passwords. The reasoning why we do not have them thus far is because you've said that most hacked accounts happen due to keyloggers. However, if it doesn't hurt, then why just give us our capital letters in our passwords.

The same goes for people spamming login details which results into people getting locked out of their accounts due to the "too many loging attempts". This needs to get investigated as well. Saying that it is not a priority because not many people have the problem should never be a reason to why this doesn't get priority. Sometimes it feels like you seem to forget that we pay money to play your game, and we work hard for our in-game items. Having them stolen because appeals don't get handled on time is extremely demotivating.

4) The official OSRS Client is outdated and not new-player friendly

Very soon, we can expect a load of new players coming to visit OSRS due to the game being released on Steam. These players will most likely start to play the game on the official Runescape client, which is currently outdated and not very user-friendly. Most of the current players use a 3rd party client to make the gameplay more smooth and user friendly.

Being dependant on 3rd party game clients should never be the way to go. New players won't have any idea that there is a more user-friendly client the moment they start to play the game. Even when they get to know that there are other clients, apart from the official client, there are websites that offer 3rd party clients with the intend to put malware onto your PC the moment you download that client.

Let's be honest here, without the use of 3rd party clients, a lot of players wouldn't even bother playing the game on the severly outdated client. If Jagex cannot offer a proper and user friendly client then we have to do the next best thing, which is making new players aware of the options they have.

Make these new players aware that there are other clients and where they can get this up-to-date client, without getting scammed or hacked.

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