It seems like the righteous and just way to deal with bots in Old School RuneScape: slaughter them in the PvP Wilderness zone and take their stuff. Unfortunately that act of meting out justice on goldselling bots has had an unintended consequence, as players have shared multiple claims that those same bot accounts are abusing the MMORPG’s report system to initiate bans on legitimate players.

This month has seen an uptick of accusations on YouTube and in multiple Reddit threads that provide details and evidence that human players were slapped with temporary bans shortly after obvious bot characters were wiped out in the Wilderness. Multiple replies to these threads also share similar stories.

The prevailing assumption is that goldsellers are abusing OSRS’s automatic moderation tools by spamming ban reports to the point that players get slapped and goldsellers walk by scot-free, which in turn is transforming the Wilderness – and its lucrative bosses – into a gated community for a so-called “bot cartel.” Players are further reporting that revenant caves are beginning to suffer a similar fate.

So far there hasn’t been any official word from Jagex about the matter, as the studio is currently fixated on its Sailing skill beta, but the arms race against bots has been an ongoing matter for many years now. Some players are also holding out hope that Jagex is working on a major solution that will clean the Wilderness out. Until we know more, it would appear that the goldsellers are on a winning streak right now.