Third-party training consists of the practice of a legitimate RuneScape player "outsourcing" playing to a third party (other than JaGex). It involves a legitimate player (a user) paying another individual or entity to repetitively play in the former party's stead in order to increase the skill levels of the user's account.
Background
Edit
(see History of macro-related events)
Prior to December 2007, it was discovered that many "bots" were actually individuals manually gathering resources and crowding out legitimate players on RuneScape with the intent to sell in-game commodities to impatient players for real world currency. JaGex initiated several ammendments to RuneScape which eventually slowed down the pace of real-world trading so as to be unprofitable.
However, this was not the end of the story. A casual google search indicates that the parties involved in the provision of these services, however, have diverted away from real-world trading to offering third-party training services to players who are too impatient to level their skills manually on their own.
This practice is extremely difficult to detect as:
- No macro was used, as it is a wholly labour-intensive process as opposed to using an automater.
- JaGex may be unable to tell the difference between a legitimate player's account being used by a casual person and by that of a "training specialist", since the latter party can log on and off at intervals to fool monitors at Jagex that the account is being used in a normal manner.
- Any attempts to locate a user's location would result in an infringment of universal privacy rights as well as the violation of 'Personal details' under Security. It remains to be seen how JaGex will respond to this problem.
Rules broken by third-party trainingEdit
The use of third-party training services violates Honour, specifically real-world trading and account sharing. Third-party training allows players to advance levels at a possibly inhuman speed, thus giving them an unfair advantage over players who may have chosen to play fairly.
