The widely anticipated follow-up to Optimus, a bot nuking platform launched earlier this year, failed to launch in July because developer Jagex plans to turn it into a more permanent bot screener system instead of a one-off eradicator.

"It's not going to be an update where pew-pew all the bots are gone forever; it's a whole new system which will be constantly running," said RuneScape moderator Emilee of the Optimus platform sequel after a fan criticized the developer for slacking on its bot removal duties.

It was back in May when Jagex rolled out the original Optimus bot nuke which led to a noticeable reduction in bots by allowing the development team to "introduce anti-bot measures seamlessly, regularly and without reducing performance heavily."

While Jagex closely guards the specifics on how the Optimus platform works, YouTube user rswillmissit noticed that the idea is to clamp down on whole bot families instead of individual accounts.

"Jagex gather up bots to ban them all at once," rswillmissit said in video that also shows the basic anti-botting process at work. "They don't go straight to reset. Instead they trace the bot to find the owner and ban all their bots at once."

Player speculation also suggests that Jagex pushed back its Optimus platform sequel because of adaptive measures taken by botters to escape banning.

Injection and reflection bots "recently made several advancements in their system and as such, Jagex had to push back" the Optimus sequel update, said forum poster Elven_Ashwin.

Elven_Ashwin explained that injection and bots proliferate through their exploitation of the Java code in RuneScape.

"Jagex can only fix this by changing the code heavily OR getting off Java, which would require a rewriting of the applet. However, lots of people use Java, and getting off Java could result in a loss of compatibility for many of us," explained Elven_Ashwin. "What Jagex is working on is to rework the code so that the bots will be at bay."

Aside from injection and reflection bots, the Optimus platform sequel is also rumored to go after colour bots which detect colour/pixels to operate. There is lingering doubt though among players that this certain type of bot can be eliminated by Jagex.

"It's common belief that in no way can color bots be stopped (just slowed down) because they work/play in the exact same way humans do," said Villavu.com forums user YoHoJo.