Hello, I am a professional MMO botter that is currently on hiatus awaiting a new viable market. You can ask me anything not relating to my personal identity or specific details on how to write a bot, but I will get the basics out of the way here.
How did I get started? Towards the middle of World of Warcraft’s first expansion, “TBC” (or in 2008 for people that had a life at that time instead) my best friend started using a bot to farm for his main account. It really bothered me that he was gaining an advantage for free, and not receiving any punishment for it. Eventually it bothered me so much we began to drift apart as friends, and at one of my low moments I reported him. Not to worry, because nothing happened. Thats when I gave up and joined the dark side, and our relationship (and my bank account) has been pretty solid ever since :)
What is a “professional botter”? Well I am self-proclaimed, but I began to consider it a profession shortly after Diablo 3 released, as my profit margins became good enough to live off of. Previously I had run bots for WoW and Diablo 2 mainly to supplement my main accounts, as well as some extra spending money. At the time I first started botting Diablo 3 I only had 3 machines to run it on, 2 of which could handle an instance of VMware, for 5 bots total (note that I could run 50 Diablo 2 bots with the same machines). I made 4 figures in the first week. Thats when I decided to take a gamble and go all in. I invested ~$5000 in VPN licenses and new hardware that weekend, and set out to really try my hand at botting. It was great gamble, netting nearly 7 figures by the 3 month mark. At that point I hand 75ish accounts running through multiple IPs each finding ~$300 in RMAH-able (Real money auction house) items per day.
Is it immoral to bot in an MMO? Short answer: Yes. When I bot I knowingly break the EULA to make a profit. The more difficult question is, how immoral is it? I guess it would depend on each person’s moral compass, but I feel it goes somewhere between pirating games and dealing marijuana to adults (where it is illegal), if that helps. I don’t consider it cheating, although I know that is a popular comparison. I rarely cheat in games that I play. I did have an aimbot in Diablo 2, but throughout my adult life I have mostly enjoyed the challenge of fair games with low RNG much more than the empty victory cheating gives. In WoW / DIablo 2 I used the bots to keep my gear up to par with the others I was competing against without having to spend money or farming at what would convert into 10% of minimum wage. Instead I opted to bot to keep myself competitive. I consider my later exploits slightly different, however I am still unsure of exactly how wrong it is when people clearly would rather pay money than farm in these games, and also when it's clear the game devs are okay with it. Heres a story that might show some insight into my point of view:
The last WoW expansion I played was Cata, and there was a raid called Bastion of Twilight. My raid group managed to take down the last boss, but he didn’t drop loot, so we opened a ticket that said “The last boss in BoT didn’t drop loot”. Exactly 60 minutes later we got a response. It said “Thank you for reporting this activity, we will look into it”. Thats when I realized Blizzard filters all reports with the word “bot” in them and throws them away. Shortly afterwards I went on vacation, and out of morbid curiosity I started up my bot, set it to run nonstop, and opened a ticket that said “I am botting right now. I am bored of your game, so I am just going to have this bot flying in the exact same circle around this area farming for the next week”. When I got home my bot was still farming, and my ticket had been closed. “Thank you for reporting this activity, we will look into it”. My account still works to this day.
What is the barrier to entry? To bot you just need a computer and internet, but to make a profit you have to invest. I had no programming knowledge before I started botting. I am self learned, and have written my own bots since Diablo 3. It was much easier than I anticipated, and it can really be learned from scratch with time (and maybe some elbow grease). The issue most people have is with sustainability. I have 5 figures worth of computer parts sitting in my garage getting more and more antiquated as time goes on, just waiting for something worth my time. Also, MMO markets are a complete gamble. Exploits combined with bots, detection, etc. By the time I stopped botting Diablo 3 I had gone through hundreds of keys. Thats a lot of money in D3 keys alone, even from third parties.
Market viability, or, is it worth it to bot, and how does botting make money? Most of the time, it really isn't worth it. The profit that botting video games in this market nets is abysmal. At the moment botting in WoW nets you less than the electricity the bot costs to run. The only way to make a profit is to bot in bulk (hundreds of times more than I have ever handled) with a self made / free bot. The best time to bot an MMO is at launch, or the launch of an expansion if it changes the currency in a major way (the newest WoW expansion did nothing to change its viability). When FFXIV: ARR launched I was ready with all my resources I had built up through Diablo 3, and it turned out to be equally successful, more so if you are purely looking at time invested to profit ratios. This happened because I discovered a major flaw in the games economy.
Fleece was an important resource that only dropped off of sheep, which only had 7 spawn points in the whole world. I set up bots at every spawn point on every US server, and the profits were insane. My friends still jokingly refer to it as “fleece money”. They eventually patched in a bunch of extra spawn points, but by that point the market was saturated with bots farming the normal way, and the in game currency had plummeted in value. (This isn't the only game I have single handedly forced patches / hotfixes in. Ill add a list at the end, as these are my proudest achievements in the gaming world.).
As you can see, mindlessly botting without paying close attention to the games economy will net you significantly less money. When most people think of botting in MMO’s they think about player characters grinding monsters in a given area nonstop, but that is only the case half of the time, if not less. Smart botting means finding weaknesses in a games economy and automating the exploitation of that weakness.
In Archage for the longest time the best way to bot involved killing 0 monsters. You did starter quests that granted special coins, and used those to buy an item that didn't even work in the game, but sold back to vendors for much more than it should.
Predicting changes is also important. If you have already gone so far as to invest thousands in game licenses you should feel compelled to do some research. I have seen upcoming patch notes that were just shy of saying “Item X will be worth 10 times as much after this patch goes live” yet item X would not go up in value on live. Every single time. I made 500% on an investment in archeage once, just buying up shards before a patch hit, then reselling them for five times as much. All in all, you have to consider Electricity, ISP, VPN, game license, computer parts, reseller cuts, and taxes. Most of the time after all of that you are going to wind up in the negative.
What are the positive and negative impacts botting can have in a game with a unified economy? The negatives might be obvious but I will go over them anyways. Botting greatly devalues the in game currency, and thus devalues the effort of farming. It sucks knowing that you can spend 10 hours grinding gold in WoW like a speedrunning master, and have it be worth less than working minimum wage for an hour. This is most impactful on NEETs and children (people that live off of their parents and have little or no income, and can spend 70% of their waking life playing). Adults with jobs may find that as opposed to spending their valuable time off of work grinding for hours on end they could instead eat leftovers and use the money they were going to spend on pizza delivery and do literally anything else with their life. Some people don’t enjoy the aspect of mindless grinding for hours on end, but enjoy the competitive experience that comes after that barrier (for the record before botting I was more akin the former than the latter). Another positive is that botting can fix bad game development. In archeage there was a resource that could only be gained from grinding monsters for hours on end (those crystals from earlier), and was essential to max level play. Botting brought the prices on that specific resource down so that anyone could be viable at max level without weeks of nonstop monster grinding. the general opinion of bots that farmed this resource was positive, as it allowed the “middle / lower class” players to compete with the elite on a much fairer playing field. The negativity arises when bots are doing things that the players want to do themselves. I caught a lot of flak in FFXIV:ARR for the way I went about botting. I used my own undetectable bot to lock down the spawn points, and had an intelligent defense for accusations.
No way to disprove this statement, and it in of itself does not break any rules. The end effect was me having control over half of the games crafting economy for several weeks.
Why haven’t I been stopped? Because it is impossible to stop botting. Bots that read the actual information being relayed to your screen and react by emulating the mouse and keyboard are impossible to detect through software, period. The only way is to manually be in the game and watching. Add that to the fact people can own as many copies of games as they want, and it becomes impossible to manage at a reasonable cost. The only way to stop botting is by requiring a copy of a birth certificate / passport (which means SSN or your countries equivalent) and a second form of ID to create an account. This would drastically reduce the amount of available accounts, and a GM force that monitors the game could be staffed at a reasonable price to the consumer. This is the only way I have ever been able to think of to stop botting, but comes at a reasonable price to the consumers privacy, and cuts people without (easy) access to this information out of your customer base. The cost of processing these accounts could be offset over time by starting with a cheaper / incentivized preorder that progressively GAINS value over time (retroactive for earlier preorders of course), along with an explanation as to why its happening (transparency will be key to any game that attempts this). A move like this will need to be bankrolled, so small studios just won't be able to…. maybe Blizzard in the future if they go for another MMO. Until this happens bots will exist even if the software used is perfect, which I have never seen. Injection based bots exist for every game due to the fact a perfect anti-cheating program doesn’t exist in the first place.
Other stories of forcing Devs to patch games
In the Cataclysm expansion of WoW there was a raid called firelands with tons of slow moving elite monsters that dropped epics. With a combination of skill and ingenuity I manually gathered every monster in the raid and killed them at the same time using recently changed skills. Mid way through clearing the raid’s trash for the Nth time the monsters sped up and ran me over. I got a simple “:)” whispered to me from a GM.
In the TBC expansion of WoW I discovered how to pull groups from chests as a rogue, then circle back to the chests, vanish, and loot them before the monsters got back, then walked out and reset the dungeon repeated many times until a hotfix came in several days later.
In D3 I figured out how to become immortal on a wizard, and used it for most of my bots until it was fixed months later after someone I told about it made a video that went viral :(
I used the same method to farm chests in SWTOR, which left the chests empty but still in the game world, which was eventually discovered and patched due to outspoken players on the forums from my server.
I broke archeage in so many ways it would take a whole post for itself, lets just say that game was a mess long before I got there.
Anyways, I know this was a long read, and if anyone bothers to read it and still has questions I will answer them here ~6PM EST tomorrow, or 24 hours give or take. Thanks for your time!