What is Bot? It is a software that operates as an agent for user or another programme or simulates a human activity. (TechTarget)
How Bot Works?
Botting in MMORPG is unethical and is a form of cheating, where players use the bot software to replace them from playing, such as auto-leveling (auto-training). Those who use bot software can even stay away from playing for more than 24hours or even weeks because the bot will do all the jobs! Unless there is a new patch (games update), there is no timeout for bot to do their jobs, they will keep leveling, kill mobs (a term in game similar to NPC enemy), do daily quest, if the players character had run out of potion (HP, MP), the bot will automatically go back to town and reload it; the bot will act as a real human being, for example, it will automatically sell the loots at town when the inventory is full, go back to the leveling places if PK-ed by other players, auto log off when detect GM nearby.
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| Silkroad's Bot |
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| CabalSea's Bot |
Why Bot?
Finishing a quest in a game play is fun, but repetitive doing so is boring. For example, a daily quest that require you to kill 100 mobs (a term in game similar to NPC enemy), if you have bunches of this kind of quest to do, will you get bored? Just imagine you sit in front of computers and killing the mobs, keep killing after another, and keep repeating doing so. Furthermore, bot is relative cheaper way to help earning (farming) in-game gold/currency than hire ‘gold farmers’ for doing so. (As I mentioned, the bot will automatically sell the loots when inventory full and go back hunt from mobs again in the mean time gaining XP too)
How Bot Company/Creator Earn Money?
They simply earn by selling the bot software. For example, (Cabal Rider) http://www.cabalrider.net/sg/sg.html is a bot company which aim at CabalSea players, at cost of $13.50 = 30 Days usage. Similarly, there are tons of online games throughout the world, which then provides opportunities for this so-called bot company too to earn money from those players.
Challenges for Online Game Business!
Bot brings serious negative effect to online game business:
(1) Server traffic is overloaded: Like previously in Silkroad online international, approximately 90% gamers are ‘botters’. Even the game has several servers, all servers are full with ‘botters’. So for those honest players, they hardly logging in to the game, regardless day or night. They have higher chance to log in, only when the time right after the server maintanence, or right after new patch updated.
(2) Inflation: Botters can perpetually farming gold, 24hours/7days/52weeks. It can easily cause inflation in the game, where the large amount of circulating gold made every in-game item prices goes up and those honest players can’t afford to trade with other players anymore.
(3) Duplicate: A player who uses bot software to auto-leveling his/her characters in the same time also auto-leveling other characters. This is the process: Firstly, register many different accounts, and then log in to the game. Secondly, create different characters and different names. Thirdly, select one of the characters and start botting! Fourthly, command other characters to party up with the one which are botting, and following the botter to leech experience. In the end, all characters reach the maximum level in a same time, and for them this is their beginning of the game play, for e.g. to PK the honest players, low-level players, disrupting and dominating the server is their ultimate objective!
(4) Hard to detect players from using bot: It is hardly to detect players from using bot, because a lot of bot software designed to obey the game’s rule. For example, one method use by online gaming company to check whether the player is botting is through the ‘quiz’, the quiz will pop up in random time to ask the players to answer a simple question, if the players didn’t respond or click the wrong answer, then the GM will consider this players is botting (after several time of failing to answer quiz) and start investigate this player, by starting a conversation with the player to see if the player is at the keyobard. However, this does not work, some bot software is able to detect this quiz and can answer it correctly, and even, it is impossible for GM to eliminate botters thoroughly, because normally an online game only have few GM (3 to 5).
(5) Motivation of honest players to continue playing in MMORPG will be affected by botters and thus switching to other MMORPG which has lessor botters or even no botters.
How The MMORPG businesses overcome these challenges? We seek for your advices! Thanks!
References:
Mitterhofer, S., Platzer, C., Kruegel, C., Kirda, E., May/June 2009, "Server-Side Bot Detection in Massive Multiplayer Online Games", IEEE Computer And Reliability Societies, viewed 01 Oct 2010.
Definition of Bot, TechTarget, viewed 01 Oct 2010.
CabalRider, viewed 01 Oct 2010.
Form my opinion, i think the creator can give special rewards for those who caught and report the person that are using bot program. As a mmorpg gamers myself i have seen people that use bot program. It easily been spotted as their avatar just stand at same place, attacking the same monster with spell skill. Normally those spell use is with splash damage so that they can get more monster at one time.This will make us honest player hard to farm as when the monster is re spawn it is kill by those people in just a few second.Also creator can consider of creating more event that have limited rewards on certain time of the day according to the GST(time) of the country so that the gamers will have to play manually enter those event at that period of time and deliver the quest provided. The contest must be different each times(collecting stuff,killing different monster etc) so it will be hard for those people that create the bot program to catch up with as once they figure out the way to bot the event, the event will be ended and new event will be introduce so the bot programmer will have difficulties to catch up with it.Furthermore creator can also allows button which enable the honest gamers to report for people that use bot programs. etc A is using bot programs. B realize it and click the button report. C and D also realize it and clicked the button report.With the report accumulate of 3 person get by A will causes A transaction or action been pause and remove from game server until further investigation is done. Those who report it get some kind of honest rank in game (the avatar have shinning lights like an angel etc)
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ReplyDeleteWell, there are many ways to overcome these problems in the online game. One example that can be seen would be Blizzard. Blizzard, a well known game developer company for creating Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo and the MMORPG game World of Warcraft (WoW) have come out with an "anti-cheating" tool called "The Warden" (De Paoli, S and Kerr,A 2009). According to De Paoli, S and Kerr, A (2009), The Warden is downloaded on the fly from Blizzard servers onto users' client machines and it runs approximately every 15 seconds. Basically, this is a tool which cause the server to detect any cheating code that is use in the game client or you could say that it prevent players from using and cheating code like botting.
ReplyDeleteFor example, the Warden can be operated as a sort of spyware, scanning the player machines. Also, the Warden searches for code on the users’ machines and compares it with a dictionary of WoW know cheats code, which is maintained on Blizzard servers. Thus, we can see that game developers too create "anti-cheating" tools is developed to encounter these problems in order to maintain their systems as well as keep their players for having a fair play in the server.
For me, I would say that there would be an easier way to overcome these problems. One way would be easier features for players in the game. For example, the online game can have an auto-hit feature for players so it would make it easier for players to continuously hitting the monsters for leveling. This would definitely reduce the amount of botters as well as making leveling not so boring. This is just my opinion. Thanks!
References:
De Paoli, S and Kerr, A, 2009, The Cheating Assemblage in MMORPGs: Toward a sociotechnical description of cheating, viewed on 10 October 2010, http://www.digra.org/dl/db/09287.23190.pdf