rwt real world trade this is something
that has plagued the runescape community
since
nearly its inception as of today these
operations have never been more
sophisticated i know personally of an
individual seller that's doing more than
twenty thousand dollars a month
but that's just one individual there's
websites that are run by teams of people
and if i had to guess they're doing at
least a million dollars a year in profit
for lack of a better word these
secondary markets were
not always so complex and while it's
easy to get great insight into how they
operate today
what's not easy to get insight into is
how they operate it in the earlier
era but today that changes at least for
the period between 2005
and 2012. i interviewed somebody who is
running a gold selling operation
during that time period and through
their story we get some great
insight into how real world trade looked
back then
this is of particular interest because
in 2008
real world trade and the negative
consequences that come along with it
got so bad jegix felt they had no other
option but to completely remove free
trade from the game
this was a huge blow to the player base
and many attribute it as the worst
update to have ever occurred and as
you'll come to see the
gold sellers got around it it didn't
solve the problem and in fact
one might even say it made it worse i
think you're going to really enjoy this
one we have a lot to talk about so
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so the person i interviewed is alex
hager i get to say his name because he's
out of the runescape scene and now he's
public in the fitness scene but when he
was a teenager he was running the
website rsmillions.com
and here's a little teaser of the setup
he was using to operate that
you can see the amount of computers and
monitors that he had
we're going to talk about that more in
depth but first let's get a little
history of how he first started playing
runescape
and what led him into this gold selling
operation so
i started playing when i was like five
because my brother was about five years
older
and he was getting into it with his
friends and like i wanted to do what he
was doing
anyway they eventually stopped playing i
kept playing but as time went on
i ended up getting perm banned on
my main that i'd had for so long because
i'll never forget i was in lumbridge
chatting with one of my friends and they
used to say this like tip of the day
like this best when you blog in
item scamming is fake watch out for
these people or whatever and like
everybody saw that
so i was joking around with my friend
hey i'll trim your bandos
and then i got permanently banned for
item scamming
and i never even traded a single person
was it was that like the turning point
kinda yeah so from there you know
investing so much time having the same
account since i was
i mean i guess with the rs classics but
she knows but maybe six or seven
and at that point i just felt really let
down and truthfully i had done
bannable offenses previously i that
one scar was it though like orange yes
yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah skyr the the
early botting tool see those days are so
long so my memory is a little spotty
there
but i had gotten banned for short
amounts of time for stuff like that like
macaroni mine or whatever
but my final permanent ban came from
something that like truthfully had
anybody been there
they'd be like well this is ridiculous i
kind of had it coming with my with my
prior offense but
at that point losing the main losing all
the progress i'm not trying to invest
that time again
and so i just bought basically all of my
accounts from here on out
and it was around seventh grade
where i had really gotten into body
eighth grade came around i really got
into body and i was making a lot of
money on the game
and then my dad he had like some old
parts laying around
so he had like old graphics cards old
ram
so i basically compiled everything i
could
and i had 17 of his really shitty
15-inch
dell monitors connected to a few
different pcs
and then a couple other computers but
they were mostly all
really like bad computers and i would
run
bot on them doing like a few different
bots and i wanted to see like how much
money i could make because i thought
about starting like a gold farming
service
so i registered the domain
rsmillions.com
and started building an html site but i
had no [ __ ] clue what i was doing
so i asked my friend that we like played
runescape together his older brother
that i was also friends with
was like a software developer in the
same high school i was going to
or like going to go to because it was
like the summer going into freshman year
now and
he ends up building my site at the time
like
obviously it's like super archaic
looking now but at the time i'm like
damn this looks
sick the site was ready i had set it up
with paypal
i had this live chat software it was
like you had live person and all these
other ones
that i couldn't afford because i'm like
funny this [ __ ] with like my birthday
money
so it was the only free live chat
software i could find and of course
there were watermarks all over the place
but i didn't care
at that point i sold i could be mistaken
but i think i want to say
it was something ridiculous like i sold
my legos like i had a ridiculous lego
option and i sold them all for like 860
865 bucks something like that and then
my friend that helped me with my
site told me a little bit about building
a computer encouraged i did it
and then i went to new way learned all
about it built my own computer
then like aggressively overclocked it
and i was like all right
this is gonna scale my business from
nothing to
maybe this could be something without
any lag whatsoever
i could run about 40 to 50 bots so
being all of the computers together i
could run
about 70. so i had about 70 bots running
every day 24 hours a day no breaks
whatsoever and then i set up
like 20 of these accounts at ge
and have them all doing auto typers
promoting my website and of course you
have to like type it differently because
they wouldn't allow you to say
com so i had all these bots running and
ge and then my other bots basically
them and done pure s in like were 90
mining
you know just from pure essence i had
some killing green drags
and i had a couple like main accounts
doing
the implements the like two million hour
ones at the time i can't remember what
it was
so yeah it was just all the bots were
doing a variety of things law running
whatever any bot that i could get for
free and then some of the paid scripts
from like powerbot
and i did this for a while like i
wouldn't say a while but
this is how it went on for a while it
was all of these accounts 50 accounts
running all the time and they were
almost never getting banned honestly
almost never
so this part i think is kind of neat so
here i am like i'm in
high school but i would be in class on
it was either my android phone or my
iphone at the time using
teamviewer doing a vnc connection
to all of my bots to make sure they were
running properly so
i'd be literally in the middle of
[ __ ] like history class and i would
log in if an account had like logged out
or something or they had to do an update
i'd log
into all those accounts so like at
lunchtime that was my time to just get
all of those accounts going
so the interesting thing here is that
this highlights the real battle
jagex was having with botters pre-2011
that is here's alex at the time he's 13
years old and he's running a bot farm
with 70 accounts with software he
downloaded for free
on the internet if we look at footage
from the game back in this era we can
see the game is completely flooded with
bots and that's the real problem that
real world trade ends up causing i want
to do a whole video discussing the
factors of why it's damaging to
runescape but
this is one of the reasons anyways
things got so bad with bots that jagex
decided as a way to combat them they
would completely remove
free trade from the game the idea was
that if players can no longer trade
amongst each other
they would no longer be able to buy gold
from secondary markets which would stop
all the destructive activities that
those services were perpetuating within
the game
in hindsight this update was a huge
mistake number one
jagex lost many of their players people
didn't want to play on a game where they
could no longer freely trade
and number two let's keep listening to
alex to understand how these gold
sellers
beat this update so i i'm not some rs
villain i was just a kid
i thought to me that was being an
entrepreneur at the time i was thinking
outside the box
and so something happened with my
motherboard
and i had to get a return and my dumb
ass like not
properly doing all my paypal fee
calculations
i was making a lot less than i would
have liked
and i wanted to get my name out there so
i was offering prices cheaper than a lot
of people i was charging like 49 cents a
mill which is common now but at the day
everyone else was charging like 1.29 so
it was really easy to get customers but
then
i think it's during when my computer's
getting fixed
i think it's during that process that
free trade hits
and that kind of makes me like really
demotivated because at this point
it's like all right how do i recover
from this and so
power leveling is how i did most of it
and then i just did my gold right have
to make the gold on their account which
i think is what the competitors were
doing too
so alex spotting directly on the
customer's account was not an uncommon
practice after the removal of free trade
it meant the update was only halfway
successful sure it removed the bulk of
the bots but it also removed the bulk of
the legitimate player base
they hadn't tackled the real issue of
being able to accurately detect bots and
ban them within a reasonable amount of
time
they're still not perfect at that but
it's gotten much better especially in
recent years anyways having iterated got
his motherboard fixed what was the
ultimate demise of alex's operation
the ultimate like demise of the whole
situation
i get an email and it's supposedly
from jagex and it's basically a cease
and desist
it says you are it says basically you
aren't being sued but can
discontinue all like operations if they
continue
legal action may be taken and until
like six months ago i always thought
that was legit
the email with that godaddy account is
expired so
everything i have in there i can't find
you know i still have the old paypal
from it so there's some like bits and
pieces
of things i can find but that specific
email i can't
and i remember searching that because i
was like i wonder if anybody else got an
email like that so i could find what
that looked like
and i didn't find anything but i did see
some people on forums saying that like
wouldn't be legit i really have no way
of knowing because i can't go back and
look at it but
all of my life i thought that was legit
maybe they emailed me a link and it was
something on their website
that i can't remember but i do remember
getting some sort of email from jagex
but looking back
maybe i don't know i don't know if
there's something you know that i don't
yeah there's no way to really confirm
but i know during that time that they
did take down a really large botting
website
yeah so i wouldn't be too surprised if
they actually did send out a bunch of
cease and distance letters to all the
gold selling websites but whether they
would actually end up
pursuing that legally probably not i
mean it's pretty easy for them to shoot
an email you know especially
when they're trying to actually like
crack down on it so that was the end of
alex hager's gold farm on runescape but
i hope it gave you some insight into how
things used to be
it's really interesting to look at how
things have changed since then
as jagex has now gotten better at
banning bots more and more of the real
world trade
market is funded by account hacking
fishing
luring and of course the two big ones
third party gambling websites and the
dual arena those last two
are really like a circle on top of that
we only briefly mentioned it but alex
was into power leveling
too and back then it was done by bots
but nowadays it's done by real people
in places like venezuela where a dollar
goes a lot further
anyways a big thank you to alex hager
for talking to me about his experience
i'll link his stuff in the description
below he didn't ask for a plug but i
want to give one to be nice
if you're into fitness maybe you're
looking for a fitness program you can
find all his links in the description if
you enjoyed this video
consider subscribing and i'll catch you
guys in the next one