r/2007scape • u/CRAZYSPOOKYSCARY • 3d ago
Other Official Policy Update from RuneLite’s Adam re: ‘plugins with paywalled functionality’. They are No Longer Allowed, exceptions will be made for programs like Spotify & current plugins with paywalls are Grandfathered in.
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u/AllieOopClifton 3d ago
There's a Spotify plugin?
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u/GrumpyThumper 3d ago
it replaces all of the in game audio with Dance Monkey
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u/LostSectorLoony 3d ago
Just tried it out. It's pretty cool. If I didn't have a multi-monitor setup with room for spotify on its own monitor I'd definitely use it.
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u/Knappsakk 3d ago
Spotify ran I.C.E. ads(might still be). Fuck them
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u/ANGEL-PSYCHOSIS btw 3d ago
i mean regardless its still shit, just download your music
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3d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/BadFootyTakes 3d ago
Some, yes, and there has been drama about them overusing others resources and it's causes an issue with the wiki team and runelite and the community.
For the employed, dw, won't affect you, they are preventing further slop.
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u/infinitay_ 3d ago
Since this is the top comment, I'll reply here because I feel like it could mislead people.
Some, yes
When OP is saying yes to RuneLite having plugins "you had to pay money for," they are referring to the plugins submitted by random developers onto the Plugin Hub - not official RuneLite plugins. RuneLite has always been free to use. It's just that some people started creating freemium plugins where you had to pay to unlock full capabilities.
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u/dvtyrsnp 3d ago
Using the example from the OP: The plugin to interface with Spotify would be freely downloadable, but the external Spotify account would still be paid.
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u/Scotteeh 3d ago
From my understanding, the plugin itself was free and downloadable via the plugin hub normally, however it had functionality in it that wouldn't work unless you paid.
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u/ClintMega 3d ago edited 3d ago
Lots of AH plugins that are shilled by youtubers have this going on too.
Edit: -AH +GE :)
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u/Linumite 3d ago
What does AH stand for in this context? I can't figure it out
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u/JNolen4 Maxed 3d ago
I'm assuming he is using AH to mean AuctionHouse instead of GE for Grand Exchange. Prob a WoW player
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u/Linumite 3d ago
That would explain it lol thanks
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u/ClintMega 3d ago
I've been playing wow the past 2 weeks and it has completely changed all my acronyms somehow.
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u/GeebGeeb 3d ago
Was giving OSB vibes if having to pay for things.
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u/Regular_Chap 2277 3d ago
Funny thing is that Orion was almost universally loved despite it's 2€/mo subscription or whatever it was.
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u/WhyNotAthiest 99 Trees 2d ago
At the time it was well worth the $2 a month because of the very basic clue helper, no more looking up every step on the wiki or googling and finding 1 off reddit post explaining the solution when the wiki was missing info on it.
Obviously RL is 100% better but there wasn't another comparable product at the time and membership also didn't cost $15/ month. RL doing everything OSB did and more while also being free is why it ultimately won out. Same logic should be applied to the plugins in question here, if they are superior products someone will just create a free version for themselves and share it with the community so they don't have to pay for it and if not then the plugin was probably shit to begin with and not worth paying for at all.
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u/BadRSTakes 3d ago
Reasonable take. Can't wait for AI bros to tell us why this is bad.
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u/TMiyoshi 2d ago
Losers with free time pay nothing to make their plugins, my token-centric workflow can't recoup its costs now. This is a bad thing for everyone and will stifle so many great plugins such as 10000 unique GE price checkers.
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u/DarkRonin00 3d ago
Good step. But phase out the current paid plugins as well. Spotify is an exception (didn't even know this was a thing, but sure.) The rest can be phased out, there's no reason to have a middle ground here.
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u/Easy-Ad5437 3d ago
Adam 1210, thank you for the update. This is great progress. Assuming you are reading these comments for feedback please consider simply removing them entirely, no grandfathering. It is absolutely fair to just smack them all down. They should have never existed to begin!
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u/witchking782 2277 3d ago
Flipping plugin also needs to be removed.
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u/Zodros 3d ago
Which one?
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3d ago
[deleted]
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u/Killjoy4eva Farming is underrated 3d ago
Your right, everyone should just vibe code their own GE pricing application. Make osrs.cloud/Flipping Utilities shut down their backend and have everyone with zero understanding of APIs hammer prices.runescape.wiki. What could go wrong?
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u/Anyny0 3d ago
Hey folks!
I make Flipping Utilities, which might be one of the very first freemium plugin on RuneLite, and figured I'd jump in here to provide more context from a plugin developer's perspective.
Flipping Utilities launched over 6 years ago as a passion project: The community wanted more tools for flipping, profit tracking and a better experience in the grand exchange, and the plugin was born!
It’s easy to forget that behind free plugins are maintainers paying with both their wallets and their personal lives. Between paying for servers, databases, and dev tools out of pocket, most developers running plugins with external dependencies, like a website for you to see your data, are actually operating at a loss. Add in the endless hours spent troubleshooting bugs, managing communities, and getting paged overnight to fix crashes, and it quickly becomes unsustainable without a plan.
Multiple times I’ve considered quitting the project but at some point, I figured I’d make the best of both worlds: Keep a strong base of features for free and open source, and let power users subsidize the project everyone.
With this income, I could now afford to invest much more time and effort into the project: Hiring other developers, giving bonuses to the mods within, purchasing better hardware, and much more. This also let me afford to donate actual money to the community: I’ve personally donated thousands of dollars to RuneLite, the Wiki, and other projects that I found interesting and were losing money like Wise Old Man and Bot Detector.
This brings us to today, and the era of AI: You’ve seen the problems RuneLite and the Wiki are facing. There is a lot of money to be made in RuneLite plugins and Runescape-related tools, so there are strong incentives to start selling services, but there are also some real costs associated with running these projects for whom the bill could be split.
I’m not sure how I feel about the whole situation: This makes it so it’s trivial to make a better plugin than my own, one I’ve spent hundreds of hours on, but makes it easier for everyone to build the amazing plugins they’ve always wanted.
Making everything free would be great, but bring me back to a state where I would not be justified into spending that much time and money to keep things running, whilst keeping a freemium front feels unfair to the community who has built so much of the resources I’m leveraging for my own success, and who now have access to better tools than ever before. I will take some actions to better provide to everyone, making all of the features within the plugin free, and work on improving the free offerings on the website and discord, but it doesn’t feel like enough.
In an ideal world, there could be a collective of developers who built the best plugins for free, with a common fund by the community to pay for the actual expenses, splitting the time and maintenance burden across multiple humans and having scope larger than ever before. But as we’ve seen with the wiki, even with thousands of contributors and Jagex support, it still required ~$40k from Cook himself to be loaned for infrastructure costs, and the patreon experiment did not raise enough money to be sustainable.
I actively welcome contributors, maintainers, and any fellow devs working on cool stuff to team up and collaborate on any project! I’d love to migrate to a community and open source model if we can make it sustainable. Reach out to me to chat!
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u/iskela45 BTW 2d ago
Yup, I know in this thread its trendy to make blanket statements, but I don't really see an issue with you doing your thing and contributing back to the ecosystem even if there has been a tide of bad actors recently. You seem like a cool guy.
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u/JohnFruscianteBR 2376 2d ago
It’s easy to forget that behind free plugins are maintainers paying with both their wallets and their personal lives. Between paying for servers, databases, and dev tools out of pocket, most developers running plugins with external dependencies, like a website for you to see your data, are actually operating at a loss
First of all appreciate your comment but this excuse could have been used by Runelite itself to add paywalls long time ago. What's next, watching 30 seconds ads to unlock the plugin? Gotta cover operation costs right
If you need to make money off a plugin to be able to keep it working, it shouldn't be a plugin in runelite to begin with
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u/SufficientFig9889 2d ago
What a ridiculously out of touch statement. You have zero clue what you are talking about to make such generalizations towards open source maintainers. Actual clown shit.
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u/Mahizzta 2d ago
Well, then you just don’t get more features or must wait days for crashes to be fixed. We all know you’ll be crying then “why is he so lazy?!?!”
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u/SpitnTheCannonsMouth 3d ago
Apparently i've been living under a rock because I have never come across a paid plugin and I have a lot of plugins lol
What are the big ones people are using that are the problems?
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u/cautiousweasel 3d ago
It's literally almost all GE-related plugins, usually flipping. Someone is taking the data, processing it some sort of way, hosting it on their own server, and asking for some subscription money if you want to keep benefiting from it.
Yeah it's kind of lame, but I also think 99% of the people who use RuneLite could not name a plugin that involves paying, because the 1% that is paying is because they want to basically be spoonfed a way to game the system and I don't really think it's wrong to want to charge money for that kind of stuff on behalf of the people running those systems; there is obviously a market for it.
Kind of an overblown issue that just appeared to the public in the past day. Considering the trajectory of AI programming though, not a bad idea to make a new stance about it clear from the developers of the client.
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u/_Arthur-Dent_ 2d ago
Pay real money to bank stand, gain no xp, and just get a meager amount of gp for a plugin doing literally all of the work for you. ❌
get 84 sailing and 91 fishing, trawl with 9 other people on your boat, gain xp, and make upwards of 30m gp an hour for no additional real currency on top of sub fee. ✔️
Do these people even want to play the game?
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u/CRAZYSPOOKYSCARY 3d ago
For me anecdotally it was looking for a GE tracking plugin. I’ll take some blame for not doing better research beforehand, but I searched GE and downloaded a bunch to see which one tracked my GE sales and purchases the best. (Maybe having a 👍👎 clicker on each plugin might be worthwhile. Or even just active user count)
A lot them were pretty much useless unless you subscribed to a monthly plan to get all the features, including some that I don’t want to pay for like “ai predicting / suggesting tool for items to merch”. It’s like paying to be in these pre buy groups for pump and dump cryptos. Except instead of doing it off platform, there’s a jagex supported in game paid plugin.
And the one I was using for the lite free ge tracking ended up paywalling that feature a week or two ago out of nowhere anyways.
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u/DM_ME_UR_PUBES maxxed gm iron btw 3d ago
you can check active user installs if you right click and go to the plugin page
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u/SpitnTheCannonsMouth 3d ago
Interesting, truly the first time I've heard about this and it's nice to know so I don't accidentally download one of those.
I didn't realize you could check active user installs like someone else pointed out.
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u/DivineInsanityReveng 3d ago
Agreed and hope they add user rating to plugin hub submissions and even maybe Steam-esque flags for them.
I want to flag plugins as "Duplicate" and note what plugin does what they're doing already. Or what game setting does what their plugin does, in worse situations.
Have the ingame sidebar plugin hub filter out things with large downvote ratios, or with certain flags (duplicate, out of date, poor performance, fully AI coded etc.)
For your desires i think "Flipping Utilities" is the only one you need. Tracks all your previous histories and your return / loss, and is one of the oldest plugins of this sort (made like 5 or 6 years ago). I think it has a paid feature tier but idk anymore as ive not played a main since 2021.
All the price checking and tracking? Just use the wiki. They're all sourcing from that anyway, and if they aren't they have WORSE information than the wiki.
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u/KShrike Shrikegon 3d ago edited 2d ago
Not kicking down the paid flipping programs has me raising an eyebrow.
edit: A lot of people claiming I accused anything. I just said it was weird. I don't believe there's some conspiracy or whatever. I just would like some consistency.
My eyebrow raise is that I just think paid flipping programs are gross because it would seem that there's a financial incentive to invest money into a plugin to flip in OSRS, which I would imagine is a likely way for RMT gold to be generated.
I don't think all the bs accusations such as "Adam is getting a cut" and so on are even close to having a base. Calm down. I especially do not think think Adam is malicious. I imagine that if he were to do a blanket ban on all of the paywalls he'd need to set up some grace period before activation since he'd be screwing over a lot of longstanding apps.
Anyway, that's enough of that from me.
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u/zo1d Bottom 1% Commenter 3d ago
I imagine Adam wants to avoid sweeping, knee-jerk policy changes. In my experience, he has always approached things with more deliberation. I'm personally against paid plugins, but it makes sense to approach this diplomatically given that RuneLite gave them the green light in the first place.
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u/iskela45 BTW 2d ago
Could you consider just assuming Adam is acting in good faith? If he was in this for the money he'd have quit ages ago. There are retail workers that pull in a lot more than what RuneLite's Patreon does.
Don't drive away heroes like Adam or Cook from this community.
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u/DivineInsanityReveng 3d ago
Not everything is a conspiracy. Imagine you're a user of this plugin, and you login tomorrow to find out the thing you paid some money for doesn't exist now because the platform separate from them went "not allowed now".
I'm hoping he reviews this approach and decides on a "you will be eligible to run till the end of the year but if any paid feature remains after then you will also be removed".
Give them time to adjust, if they can't afford the service they offer without paid tier users, then they can opt to take it down. Most of these are just wiki-API sourced junk though.
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u/F-Lambda 1895 3d ago
It's probably because people have already paid for them. Delaying banning them a month to allow people to cancel.
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u/moose_dad 99 3d ago
They havent been a problem and they dont drain the wiki of bandwidth because they werent vibe coded.
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u/peperonipyza 3d ago
Isn’t this new development mostly due to huge amounts of vibecoded plugins people are flooding them with and trying to sell? Seems like keeping the paid ones before this wave, at least temporarily, seems reasonable.
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u/Chez225 3d ago
I doubt there's a link. Its likely just complicated to ban things people are already paying for. That being said, they still dont belong. Adam should still ban them, but he should set a timeline so people paying have a heads up on when to cut their subs.
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u/BalmyBadger 2d ago
Well, one of the issues is that there are plugins which are very well made and genuinely respect a paid model quite well. No core features locked behind a paywall etc, just well thought out extras and qol to help the devs pay for it.
It's the wave of money grab AI slop that is the real problem.
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u/Acid_Comes_With_Rain 3d ago
Now the already grand fathered in paid plugins can reap more cash, cause there can be no more paid adversary to them.
Not even forcing them to publish the server side code bits of their plugins to conform to open source standards is hideous.
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u/vtecdohcter 3d ago
Its a good start but...
ALL paid plugins need to be stopped.
If its not fair to "stop the paid plugins who have users and admins" then its equally not fair to decline any submissions for further paid plugins.
Either accept all paid plugins or stop all paid plugins, there is no half ground here.
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u/Berchanhimez im btw 3d ago
Give them a “phase out” period if you want to. Make it a few months if you want to give people the opportunity to fork or create a new, no paywall version before removing them completely if they refuse to remove the paywall.
But yes, there should not be any grandfathering.
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u/DivineInsanityReveng 3d ago
Yeh i hope this is the adjustment to the approach.
"You can exist until the end of the year. If after that point you still offer paid features, your plugin will be removed".
That way they have the chance to ask Claude to remove the paid part of their website, and then their plugin can continue to exist. Or they can decide that running a wiki-API sourced front end for GE data isn't worth costs to them, and they can pull it down.
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u/naniganz 3d ago
I mean he literally said “for now”. That doesn’t sound like they’re going to have them around permanently and it makes sense for existing plugins that people are using to have an opportunity to change/update.
It’s not uncommon to have a grace period for existing things when a new rule pops up.
So I agree they shouldn’t be allowed at all, but I think they know that.
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u/aryastarkia 3d ago
I like the Spotify plugin and I hope they keep it. Maybe a rule like if the primary use of your platform is via the runelite plugin you can't charge for it, idk it's a slippery slope but I don't pay for Spotify for the runelite plugin, I've been a subscriber for years and the plugin is a nice bonus
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u/SlightHill 3d ago
True. It just creates a monopoly for the grandfathered ones
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u/dayv2005 3d ago
And allows them to expand as well with continued development and users.
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u/Mental-Permit-599 3d ago
100%. A two-tiered plugin rule system is not fair to anyone.
If someone can write a 1:1 clone of a plugin that’s already published, there should be 0 reason it can’t exist on the exact same plugin hub.
Either allow them all or ban them all.
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u/StinkButt9001 3d ago
ALL paid plugins need to be stopped.
I don't really agree. For example, a plugin that depends on the developer hosting and providing an external service that the plugin relies on. It's reasonable IMO to charge a fee for that service.
The alternative is that the service being provided would just never exist and I don't think that's the best outcome
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u/wozzwoz 3d ago
The plugin depends on runelite hosting it providing its service. Runelite personnel are the first people who should be paid, if they arent, then neither should the wonky flipping plugin developers. They could perhaps share profits with runelite
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u/Acid_Comes_With_Rain 3d ago
The alternative is that the devs conform the open source intentions and not only publish client side of their plugins but also server side code so I can host it myself to make it work.
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u/hydrated_purple 3d ago
Genuine question. What is wrong with paid plugins? Why shouldn't people who develop plugins be compensated? Why must it be free?
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u/Wan_Daye 3d ago
lol. do it off runelite then. make your own client instead of piggybacking
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u/Zamutax splash.... 3d ago
then get banned for not using a jagex authorized client. smart.
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u/Xelisk 3d ago
Because anyone and everyone can vibe code a plugin in no time at all and start charging for it.
They're really struggling with ai made plug-ins and I guess they hope this will curb the submissions slightly.
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u/Mahizzta 2d ago
Then don’t use such plugins. If they’re horribly sloppy they’ll just die out and if they’re actually providing a good service that is worth money people will want and buy it
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u/Xelisk 2d ago
It's not about users using them, it's about the Runelite devs reviewing them. They review each plugin submission and the sheer volume of submissions since AI became mainstream is making it extremely difficult for them.
Here's a good write up explaining it all.
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u/Mahizzta 2d ago
No that’s two different issues entirely. There’s a difference between freemium and premium apps. To my knowledge, very few plugins don’t have a working free version. And that is also what the rules previously said: no pay-only plugins.
They’re using AI to review plugins now. They don’t have enough manpower to manually go through all plugins.
But regardless, removing freemium plugins isn’t going to stop a high influx of ai generated plugins. However, the problem is temporary. There’s now a spike in new plugins because AI has gotten really good at creating them, but runelite plugin reviewers haven’t developed the proper tools to handle it. As soon as that is done, the problem will be much smaller.
People complaining about new plugins are just silly. They’re very clearly trying to separate old plugins and new plugins and then somehow old plugins are inherently better. But this is Reddit so muh ai is always bad. It’s peak Reddit behavior.5
u/Metalona 3d ago
Primarily because of the precedence it will set.
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u/Prof_Hentai 3d ago
What precedence? That people are allowed to charge for their work and time, and upkeep/run-costs of live hosting services? I would say that's a pretty reasonable precedent.
The RuneLite devs can control their market however they wish, but let’s not pretend that paid plugins are inherently automatically evil because they cost money.
We all want less slop, but we're not willing to pay our devs. People need to pick a lane.
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u/Rapid_Fowl 3d ago
We don't need to assume they're all evil. I respect it when runelite devs say no. Plus if they want to create a paid service they can create their own platform/launcher without using runelite as free advertising, nothings stopping them.
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u/DivineInsanityReveng 3d ago
The best tools we have aren't locked behind subscriptions. The wiki is free. Temple and WOM is free. Runelite is free.
They all have patreons / ways to support them. But their feature set is enitrely free.
Plugin devs can do the same thing. Have a donate link. People can and will support you for GOOD WORK. But ultimately make plugins and features because you WANT TO and you want to use them. Not because you think you deserve to be compensated.
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u/BuffKangaroo_390 3d ago edited 3d ago
Short answer: because modding/plugin developing is a hobby/passion project, not a job.
Longer answer: It goes against the spirit of the game to start charging for things that arent apart of the original game. Modding /plugins are a shared hobby, not a commercial industry.
Also, modding/plugins still fall under a companies IP, they're essentially making money off of Jagex's IP because their plugin/mod doesnt work without the base game to attach to.It also disincentives Collaboration since everyone would be trying to make money, they will gatekeep code/designs which doesnt foster a helpful community.
Its not like people shouldnt be able to make money off of mods/plugins completely, but they shouldnt be paywalled, they should be strictly donations only.
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u/stumptrumpandisis1 3d ago
Because Runelite was created to be free and undercut OSBuddy which had premium plugin bullshit. Why can't we just have something that is entirely free for all to use? Does money need to infest everything?
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u/MrJekyyl 3d ago
Cause this is how you get runelite cancelled. As soon as money comes into it some suit is gonna see that at Jagex and ask why they aren't doing that. Just don't provoke the beast when you don't have to
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u/DivineInsanityReveng 3d ago
"Hey if you appreciate my plugin you can donate at this kofi link" is all plugin developers need to use.
If you are submitting a plugin to an open source piece of software with the aim to make money, you're silly.
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u/bhop_monsterjam jam on through to the other side 2d ago
I think grandfathering old plugins for now is fine. It allows them to think things through and not just kneejerk for the mob. There's no actual downside to taking a bit more time to discuss it amongst the team.
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u/Weak_Abalone8911 3d ago edited 3d ago
They need to remove them all. The grand father in stuff is bull shit.
Edit: whoa people support some paid plug ins but not others?
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u/DivineInsanityReveng 3d ago
I think plugins like "hey spotify works with runelite, but you need paid spotify" is fine as its not the actual plugin dev going "how cools this plugin? but you need to pay me $5 a month to use it", its just the integration itself.
Same with the Text to Speech thing, thats the plugin dev going "i made this work with runelite, but you might have to pay for tokens if you use it a LOT because its got a free limit". Its not a feature lock.
As soon as a plugin is like "we help you flip on the GE! but to get any actual help you need to pay us" it should be booted into the sun. They're all free-loading off the Wiki API anyway, which means they shouldn't be commercially using it.
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u/Ajreil 3d ago
Agreed. I'm fine with a plugin requiring a subscription to a service like Spotify or Teamspeak because those are established businesses that end users can trust. I'm not giving some vibe coded website my credit card.
It also removes the incentive to grift people because Spotify is getting the money, not the developer.
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u/CRAZYSPOOKYSCARY 3d ago
I think this is a good starting point tbh. This stops the floodgates and they can review the “grandfathered” ones more closely and blamp as necessary.
Gotta give credit where it’s due. If they waited for jagex to act first like some people were suggesting, the situation would be a lot worse with infinitely more paywall AI plugins
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u/AllieOopClifton 3d ago edited 2d ago
Would likely create legal exposure re: reliance etc.
To your edit: It’s not about “supporting some paid plugins.” Existing plugins have users/businesses that relied on the prior policy. Prospective ban + grandfathering is basic transition-risk management.
There is apparently some confusion around here where people are taking "exposure" to mean "winning claims."
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u/Skrrtires 3d ago
Very mature take considering anyone making income from this is not particularly well off and it could bring unintended hardship.
I’m sure this sub will react well.
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u/Emperor_Atlas 3d ago
Making your money off of enshittifying the game for the general player doesn't elicit sympathy.
Flipping plugins can die.
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u/Skrrtires 3d ago
Predicted response as I mentioned but just in case I can get my point across: agree, it sucks, but also I wouldn’t want to disrupt a family’s income around the holidays because some losers pay for whatever flipping plugin they want.
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u/Emperor_Atlas 3d ago
I would point to again, they're making their money off of making the game and pricing worse, with a paid service that should be free, who now have a monopoly on that service.
Its a bad look in every way and at minimum needs a phase out timeline even if we are pretending they're all old grannies who'd die in the winter without it. Which is just such a load of shit its comical.
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u/ltsMeSam 3d ago
Is it a coincidence that since bots being banned, the increase of shitty AI slop plugins behind paywalls are increasing?
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u/lalalu2009 3d ago
People here are now outraged at a years old plugin that relies on the developers of said plugins own hosted services and charges a subscription for premium features, despite being unaware of it even existing until.. Literally now?
Lmao.
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u/Ok-Fill-3770 3d ago
This is so fkin stupid.
You can absolutely be principally opposed to something without knowing it is happening.
This is an analogy, not a direct comparison: If someone is stealing from you and does so for an extended period of time, and you are later informed of this, it would be ridiculous to demand that you shouldn’t be outraged because you weren’t aware of it happening until you were told.
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u/Acid_Comes_With_Rain 3d ago
They should conform to open source and publish all code of the plugin to work.
I can host the server side of the plugin myself then.
What good is open source if you can't make it work with the released bits?
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u/saucysagnus 2d ago
I don’t even know what these plugins are but do they constitute a pay to win model type of advantage? If so, everyone should be outraged
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u/Mahizzta 2d ago
No they don’t. It’s mainly flipping plugins where the free version shows you common data such as buy/sell prices and then the paid version gets access to a website that does analytics to make decisions for you. It’s all based on same data
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u/Fabulous_Web_7130 2d ago
So its a place you can pay to give you information where you dont have to think or really do anything urself. Sounds p2w
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u/Mahizzta 1d ago
No, you don’t pay to automatically win. You gain no inherent advantage except you can do it lazily. But you’re also competing against everyone paying because they’ll be getting the same advice. If you wanna talk p2w look at bonds - totally legitimate p2w with guaranteed outcomes for a guaranteed price
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u/formerlyunhappy 2d ago
There needs to be precedent set though. Otherwise you’ll have new plugins paywalled that aren’t even using some sort of external API or anything which would warrant maintenance costs. RuneLites plugin hub is not supposed to be a plugin market. If devs want to make money for runelite plugins they should add a donation/buymeacoffee link in the plugin settings. I’d be fine with that.
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u/demalition90 K R E A T H 3d ago
Didn't know there was a Spotify that actually sounds pretty cool.
Only other paid plugins I'm aware of is the natural speech TTS plugin which I've been using for ever and only bought a token bundle the one time and haven't run out yet, and flipping copilot.
The TTS one I can't imagine anyone having problems with because it's literally just using an existing TTS service and telling the user to pay for that service themselves. Literally 1:1 to the Spotify plugin
The flipping plugin I can see if it's putting a strain on some other service like the wiki but if they're not then the only reason people are wanting it removed is because they want less competition while flipping. Flipping is literally rent seeking behavior which any economist will tell you is parasitic to an economy and the only benefit is liquidity. If there's less competition there's actually less liquidity so if the only reason you want to kill the flipping plugin(s) is to make flipping harder then you literally don't care about the game you only care about yourself. Me personally I'd rather sell my loot instantly and let some mercher get a 10k profit than have my shit sell slowly and a mercher makes 100k in profit
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u/coreyhh90 This is why we vote no to PVP 3d ago
Honestly, I thought Adam was being reasonable but you've convinced me that all paid flipping plugins should be axed immediately. Thanks for helping me understand.
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u/DivineInsanityReveng 3d ago
The flipping plugin I can see if it's putting a strain on some other service like the wiki but if they're not then the only reason people are wanting it removed is because they want less competition while flipping. Flipping is literally rent seeking behavior which any economist will tell you is parasitic to an economy and the only benefit is liquidity. If there's less competition there's actually less liquidity so if the only reason you want to kill the flipping plugin(s) is to make flipping harder then you literally don't care about the game you only care about yourself. Me personally I'd rather sell my loot instantly and let some mercher get a 10k profit than have my shit sell slowly and a mercher makes 100k in profit
These plugins paywalls tend to be absolutely garbage features that are essentially looking at FREE information from the wiki and going "this good buy now, this good sell now" and thats it.
The fact people think that needs to be paywalled for.. accessibility? What? if its free to access MORE people access it.
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u/demalition90 K R E A T H 3d ago
Yeah it's just a tool using some kind of algorithm or maybe machine learning to sort through free and public information. Not worth paying for and a human looking at the same information will probably get a much higher return anyway
I have no strong opinions on it one way or another because there's a million other plugins and probably also standalone programs that do the same thing. I'm just saying I don't think it's hurting anyone unless/until it comes out that it's putting a strain on someone else's API like the wiki team or etc
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u/Maleficent-Bat9352 3d ago
Flipping copilot is way more then just a flipping plugin, but it's behind the scenes.
I assume it does not put much pressure on the wiki, since all the data comes from he's server, which I assume means he caches it and serves it server sided.
It's a pretty rad algorithm he made, no clue what he does exactly but it does profit.
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u/demalition90 K R E A T H 3d ago
Yeah I think he's getting flak because he used the word copilot which has AI implications and it's flipping which a lot of people don't like just in principal.
I've tried it out and yeah it profits and it's never lost me money but it's also not all that great IMHO. I tried it for a few hours across a couple of settings and cash stack sizes and I got like 500k/hr pretty consistently. I could just kill vorkath 4-5 times and then AFK for an hour and make the same money
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u/Ok_Increase7404 3d ago
THANK YOU ADAM -
send the vibe coders back to ground zero
They don't even deserve API access at this point lmao
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u/Haxxtastic 3d ago
So they're unwelcome unless they're rich enough to be welcome. If I want to listen to Spotify, I'll open Spotify.
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u/ereh_yeygerr 3d ago
Smack down the existing ones too. If they want to make money, they can do it outside of RuneLite.
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u/MikaelaSama 3d ago
There is a plugin start with the letter M, paid ads on instagram to feature it and locking features to subscribe, The creator feels like he build something but its all AI with basically no effort and he think he is the programmer of the century. 🤣
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u/monkeysCAN 3d ago
I'm OOTL what plugins are there that you have to pay for? I didn't even know there was any.
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u/pilantratogashi 3d ago
I don't think flipping plugins should be summarily kicked out either, but they could be given a very reasonable time (like 1 year) to adapt and to not have any of its users waste their money (I'm assuming there could be up to 12 month subs in these plugins). It's still a stain on the plugin hub to have these around without any regulation at all.
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u/saxolol 2d ago
Excellent choice and I commend u/adam1210 for this & his whole stance on Runelite.
As many will know I was one of the biggest anti osbuddy people from the original days, especially on rs forums.
I have never once said a bad thing about Runelite because Adam understands what a client should be about. No unfair advantages.
I'm a firm believer that skill issues aside everyone should be on an even playing field, I still think all of Runelite's stuff should be integrated into the official RS client rather than Runelite and I hope that the plugin hub comes to OSRS client eventually and does this - but Runelite is as official as anything these days with how integrated it is into the official launcher.
When there's imbalances there it becomes a very, very slippery slope down a hole that is not healthy for the game or it's players. We have seen it many times before in just about every game and I can't think of a single example where it's actually turned out good.
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u/zefal12 3d ago
Great start, but the existing ones need to go too. Giving a grace period to let developers remove paid features and make users feel like they havent been screwed cause they paid for a month in advance is fine, but these aren't good for the health of Runelite or OSRS.
Also (potentially?) hot take: OSRS would be much better off if flipping/merching clans/apps/etc was straight up bannable. Jagex will never do it because it would be an enforcement nightmare, but large-scale intentional market manipulation of the in-game economy is an insane thing to just freely allow in an MMO. Makes the game worse for normal players and encourages RWT.
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u/SyrupSame2105 3d ago
You can't ban flipping... Its literally just buying low and selling high. The game fundamentally works on a high and low price system (Instant buy and instant sell). Take Combat Bracelet 4's for example, if I slow buy at 11900 and sell at 12400, why the fuck should that be bannable?
These arent clans flipping, that's such an old thing that doesn't exist anymore. People can manipulate prices themselves with the 3 hour g.e mid price changes done recently.
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u/zefal12 3d ago
Individuals flipping is fine, thats obviously not what I'm talking about. Coordinated manipulation by groups of people is entirely different. Historically this was done in clans, now its done in discords and via apps/plugins like these.
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u/SyrupSame2105 3d ago
Bro these apps and plugins don't do coordinated merchaning and flipping to control the price... Youre speaking out your ass. Merching clans back in the day also dont exist at all anymore, its just not feasible to do that when people are manipulating things themselves, why do you think Jagex just updated the limits on butterfly jars...
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u/Tall_Top8563 3d ago
they should make a point and remove spotify
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u/ComfortableCricket 3d ago
The point is not to stop a plugin like that, but stop people sloping up plugins tryongbto make money from them.
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u/CEOofGeneralElectric 3d ago edited 3d ago
I think this is generally a good move. I do use one of the paid flipping plugins (which I won't name so as to not advertise), personally. For context, the primary paid features I use are live in-client price graphs and highlighting of my G.E. orders when their price moves outside of the bid/ask spread. It's not some kind of nefarious market manipulation.
I do think stuff like this should be phased out entirely, because I don't think you should be able to pay for an advantage. I do hope that plugins like this keep existing though, when I'm actively flipping I have most GE slots full on three separate accounts and manually monitoring the spread would kill me.
I hear that other plugins hold your hand entirely and tell you what to flip and that sounds rather miserable and over the line of what I think is reasonable for a plugin to do... That's playing the game for you, and having a plugin tell you what to trade does raise concerns surroundings market manipulation. It would be fairly easy for the plugin developer to manipulate and make bank; I've gone down this machiavellian daydream before, too. I just don't think such a plugin should be legal, paid or otherwise.
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u/DivineInsanityReveng 3d ago
FYI those plugins source their data from the FREE wiki API, and are breaking the Non Commercial licensing agreement for doing so.
If they're not doing this, you're using WORSE information than what is available for free on the wiki (and that is integrated natively into the price lookup on Runelite).
Please just look into "Flipping Utilities". I have no idea why people think these sorts of plugins need to be paywalled. They're conning you rofl.
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u/IceMaverick13 3d ago
Flipping Utilities is the plugin he's describing.
He's just describing the paid feature set of it.
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u/RushPuzzleheaded7635 3d ago
Jagex better slap adam up the side of the fucking head regarding the GE flipping services.
This is fucking ridiculous. No grandfathering it is not an acceptable response.
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u/alynnidalar 2d ago
idk if you're not aware of what flipping is but it just means buying things off the GE cheaply and reselling them at a higher price, this is a very normal thing to do and there is no reason why Jagex would prevent people from doing this. These aren't plugins that buy and sell for you or anything crazy like that, they just are looking at the publicly-available item prices.
In this specific case, the problem is poorly-made flipping plugins that have some paid features, but that's still not really a Jagex problem and it's not against ToS.
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u/H3X4RY 3d ago
Great change. Its absurd to pay a third party for a plugin in an officially supported client