The future of MMORPG botting

[XOHOMEP]

Hi everyone! I feel like discussing rather... abstract matter. Sorry in advance for poor English.

I'm a botter for about ten years. I started to bot for money in 2007, as soon as Burning Crusade addon for WoW was out. At first I was using Glider, then it was taken down in 2009, there were other bots, but it didn't last for long anyway. My income has dropped from initial $3.9 per hour per window/character ($30 for 1000 WoW gold, 130 gold / hour) down to $0.6 ($3 for 1000 WoW gold, 200 gold / hour) in less than 3 years, so I decided it is not worth my time anymore. But, of course, another equally important reason to quit was Blizzard banning my toons every 1.5-2 months - I just grew tired of replacing banned accounts with new ones.

I took a year or so long break, then moved to another game - EVE Online. The same thing happened again, just this time it took 5 years for my incomes to drop from $1.8 per hour per toon ($20 for 1 bil EVE isk, 90 mil isk / hour) down to $0.44 ($4 for 1 bil EVE isk, 110 mil isk / hour); and again the thing which irritated me as much as game money devaluation was CCP (EVE creators) banning my accounts 2-6 weeks after creation, i.e. sometimes like 3 days after toon have started to bot (without even a single RMT transaction).

This time break was longer (well, I've earned more money), but the time to return came anyway. Now I want to know: what other botters think about perspectives of the "industry" of botting, genarally? Are CCP just some kind of exceptionally paranoid bastards, which created a completely unique "neural network"-algorithm to reveal botting characters by "patterns", or such trick becomes rather common nowadays, so their "anti-bot robots" are going to make botting obsolete rather soon? I.e. what do you think: is there any point to start over at all (not necessarily using this exact bot)?

[D Bolter]

Welcome to the forums buddy!

[manko]

bot will all ways be a round, as people wish to be the best and noty have to work for it so there will all ways be a need for it, tho iv not botted for a income in years (last time was 2012) but when the gold turned to under $1 for 1m it was pointless for me iv all so botted on other games the best one being mafia wars (myspace not facebook) and i stopped that when they closed down myspace one and they started to sell items that were better than the dropped items. but that was a good game i love to bot and RWT on tho i only had about 40+ accounts and never had one banned but all so was only getting $300 to $700 a week from but thats still good to say i just started firefox up and turned my bots on.

 

[DaCherry]

Botters take money from the companies one way or another. Jagex for example loses an extra income that would have come through bonds; you have to understand that these companies will do everything in their power to remove any competitors - even though it's a free market.

As long people can make more via gold farming than their minimum wage (in their respective country) then botting will continue. Deflation is the only reason people can make more money botting than they'd do through a real job. So if your question is whether botting will eventually not be profitable then I'd say no, unless the governments directly try to combat it (which they won't).

[jesenican]

so far im only "botting" with mouse recorder, 0 bans if you use it smart, and there is tons of ways to make money with it perfectly

[manko]

19 minutes ago, DaCherry said:

Botters take money from the companies one way or another. Jagex for example loses an extra income that would have come through bonds; you have to understand that these companies will do everything in their power to remove any competitors - even though it's a free market.

As long people can make more via gold farming than their minimum wage (in their respective country) then botting will continue. Deflation is the only reason people can make more money botting than they'd do through a real job. So if your question is whether botting will eventually not be profitable then I'd say no, unless the governments directly try to combat it (which they won't).

botters make them more cash then normal players do as most botters have 10+ accounts all with members (or a sub to the game) and when they get banned they buy more mebers or subs (or full accounts or CD-keys)

[Theorems]

51 minutes ago, jesenican said:

so far im only "botting" with mouse recorder, 0 bans if you use it smart, and there is tons of ways to make money with it perfectly

Works fine on runescape but not newer mmo's that do not involve clicking the exact same spots over and over.

[XOHOMEP]

Well, I understand that we are direct threat to games owners - because we don't let them to RMT themselves as well, for example. Actually, I would have even compensated this loss some way... say, I would not quit if CCP agreed to, say, "tax" me (for example, if they flagged my botting accounts to pay 5x or even 10x higher monthly fee for each of them). It would been hard to pay, say, $150 for each account instead of normal $15, but still each window made me about $250-280 montly at the time when I quit. BUT!!! they didn't agree to (and yes, I've sent them private messages from banned accounts) - they prefer to just ban, and this sucks major @$$. So my main question stays as the following: how do you think - are they (not just CCP, but game developers as a whole) going to ban us more and more often as they develop more and more "clever" bot discovering robots? Or rather CCP are some kind of exception, and you can actually bot in other games for years?

Edit: and no, I don't mean just clickers (clickers won't make you lots of money because you can click in just a single window per OS, while virtual machines make it incredibly slow). I mean REAL bots - which read game client data, inject into it and send commands into each client separately, both clicks and keystrokes, or rather use direct commands (i.e. simulate game client).

Edited April 14, 2018 by XOHOMEP

[RDM]

Welcome, I used to bot WoW as well burring MoP. I had 2 accounts running 24/7 mining Ghost Iron Ore which was about 1500-2250G per hour for both accounts. Gold was selling for $1.25 per 1000 if I remeber correctly, which is around $60 per day. Ended up paying for the ‘06 Mustang I had at the time.

[Joliter]

Botting will never die, but whether it'll be public or not is a different question.

[XOHOMEP]

1 hour ago, RDM said:

Welcome, I used to bot WoW as well burring MoP. I had 2 accounts running 24/7 mining Ghost Iron Ore which was about 1500-2250G per hour for both accounts. Gold was selling for $1.25 per 1000 if I remeber correctly, which is around $60 per day. Ended up paying for the ‘06 Mustang I had at the time.

I'm sorry, but it sounds totally unbelieveable. I've been still farming when WoTLK was out: gold prices have gone extremely low (10x lower than at begin of BC, as I've said above), but it wasn't much easier to farm gold - my toons were getting just 1.5 more than in the previous addon. OTOH, getting "1500-2250G per hour" means farming much MUCH later, when it became easy to farm... but then again, gold prices have gone extremely low by this time. Right now gold is sold at $0.07 per 1000 by shops, so I assume they buy from farmers at $0.04 at best - it's pretty damn far from $1.25 per 1000, you see. Look, if it was as easy as you say, every botter would have "06 Mustang" or so... but in reality you farm with 8 windows at the same time, trading gold and replacing banned accounts with new ones for years, 16 hours a day, without any weekends or holidays, and earn just some $50000 or so (during all these years total).

Though, this is not my point. The real question which bother me is not "how much do you earn if they don't ban you", but rather "how often do they ban, and does this frequency increase as time goes by?"

[Mahdan]

2 hours ago, Joliter said:

Botting will never die, but whether it'll be public or not is a different question.