We’re delighted to be able to announce that we’ve finally triumphed in our 2-year legal battle with Impulse Software, the developers of the iBOT RuneScape botting software.

Their statement on their websites sums it up very nicely:

“Farewell,

We (Mark/Eric Snellman t/a Impulse Software) have owned and operated the websites www.rscheata.net, www.impsoft.net and www.oembots.com for several years. We’ve been developing and making money through these websites from botting software called iBOT that works exclusively with RuneScape.

We’ve been involved in a lawsuit with Jagex in the US regarding the legality of this software and our actions for the last two years.

Recently, judgment was entered in Jagex’s favor at Court on every count in the case. We have to pay Jagex a significant sum of money, although we are not allowed to say exactly how much for legal reasons. We are also prevented by injunction from doing a number of things in the future, including developing botting software, helping other people develop or use botting software or talking about Jagex, the lawsuit or RuneScape. If we breach any of the conditions of the injunction (such as by developing new bot software or helping people cheat in RuneScape) we would have to pay Jagex at least $1,000,000.

Throughout the course of this lawsuit, we’ve come to understand the harm that botting does to RuneScape and Jagex. We’d like to apologize to Jagex and to all legitimate RuneScape players for the damage and harm iBOT has done.

In the next few weeks our websites, domains, code and customer details will be passed over to Jagex along with details of all those people who we know have developed scripts for iBOT and sold or re-sold those scripts.

We also won’t be going near Jagex or any Jagex game ever again. In fact, we’re prohibited from playing RuneScape or any other Jagex game ever again as a condition of this case ending.

Shortly, all references to iBOT and Impulse Software will disappear from the internet. We’d encourage all of you who have scripts or iBOT to delete them and certainly not to try and use or develop them. We’ve not been able to fix them anyway following Bot Nuke week, but if you did manage to get them working again, you’d be open to the same claims Jagex has made against us.

Mark and Eric Snellman – trading as Impulse Software”

Obviously, this is a big win for us, but it’s also just one of the latest initiatives in our ongoing offensive to permanently stamp out botting and gold-farming in RuneScape. First and foremost, we’ve remained dedicated to this cause to provide you - our esteemed community - an enduringly great game, and we’ve no intention of stopping here.

We remain committed to our ongoing work to ensure that the successes of Bot Nuke Day are never undone by staying a few steps ahead in the arms race with the remaining bot developers and gold farmers. We’re already well underway with our next generation of anti-botting software called Optimus, which is going to be released shortly, and we’re also currently developing ways to remove the remaining screen-scraper bots from the game. We’ll also be continuing to fight gold-farmers on every front.

The team has been dedicated to eliminating the last of the performance issues experienced by some users since Bot Nuke Day, and we will shortly be releasing an update intended to resolve these problems. We’re also planning further improvements to game accessibility and performance in future updates this year.

Have fun!

Cheers,

Mark Gerhard

CEO & CTO