What to expect from botting?

Oi guise, I haven't really introduced myself. I'm Sparky. I used to bot with Epic bot years ago and when that great bot bust of 2011 happened, (and one of the founders went to work for Jagex, I believe) botting wasn't a thing anymore for a really long time and I kinda walked away from the whole game. Well, I'm back and since I've found this community, I've been lurking around here, beginning to believe that I have what it takes to set up a gold farm.

I have been learning how to leverage free and inexpensive VPS/cloud products to increase the number of bots I can run so I may start building a small army of farmers to earn some side scratch. The hardware is confusing, but I'm muddling my way through it and I'm getting there.

I know the first thing to expect is the ban hammer. Sooner or later, it's coming. I get that. And so people use mules to hold the gold that the bots are earning, or so I'm led to believe. Those mules do the RWT, if I'm not mistaken. I also realize that providing void armor services, powerlevelling, fire cape services, account sales, or even questing services are likely a safer alternative to just farming the gold, but skilling takes gold to be done fast enough to be done efficiently. (i.e. for a customer)

But I'm looking at RS3 and if your bot makes 2m/h, that's likely to be approx $.50 per hour botted, at 4m/USD prices. Is that a pretty accurate understanding of the situation? That seems like one would need quite a few bots running for quite a while before seeing any real money. I know people are loathe to provide too much information and oversaturate their own methods of money making so I'm not expecting someone to come hold my hand and announce exactly what they're doing, but feel free to reply here or PM me with anything that I'm not understanding properly or anything that you think might help head me in the right direction with all this, cause I'm still not sure what all I don't know yet.

And to all the authors out there- thank you for your effort. If nothing else, I enjoy watching my character putting in the work I would never actually do on my own.

~SPX

Sorry for the wallotext. I talk too much IRL too. ^_^

 

Thank you for the information. I'll keep those numbers in mind. I was definitely thinking retail, but perhaps I see those bones a bit high.

I'm not opposed to o7, the only reason I focused on RS3 is because that's where my main is. I have a gilded altar and demon butler to power level other accounts, provide combat or skill assistance, etc.

Again, thanks for the realistic numbers.

 

OMG it was RSBuddy. Thanks for the fix.

Time isn't an issue- I have the time. Bonds won't be either, given the cost of RS3 gold. For hardware, I am hoping to leverage VPS services along with virtualization (Lubuntu guest OS's for light resource usage, though I am considering a custom Puppy build just for this) and VPN/proxies. As far as the outside world is concerned, they should look like 100% unique computers with their own individual IP's, hardware ID's, and Jagex cache folders.

My main concern is the bots. I want custom bots. But that means paying for that service, which will likely be a significant investment. I have some good ideas, I think, and I will need custom work done to make that happen. So far as I can tell, that will probably be the largest single investment I make. I'm not broke, though, so some investment isn't a problem once I get my bearings on what I'm doing here. I'm going to continue working on it until I get something running. I really appreciate everyone's input.