Are bots just for farming?

That’s simple. You buy another copy of the game. Set bot to farm bounties. VM or another PC. Time to time you join your bot to get loot. Restart. 100% safe. Primary account is pure, if bot account will be banned (doubtful) you buy another license. Rinse and repeat.
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One thing I don’t understand, and maybe someone can explain it to me - what is the purpose of bots? I know what they are but why? I don’t see how money can be a factor. What kind of satisfaction is gained by having a program play the game for you? I play solo for the most part so bots and leaderboards don’t affect me at all, I’m just curious as to why?

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Here is just a few reasons why. Personally, I don’t see the point in doing it either, but remember, not everyone has integrity.

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No, bugger all to do with bots, and plenty to do with you people’s entitlement issues requesting the stupidest mode ever that already exists.

Many of your problems will be solved by exercising some common sense once in a while.

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Whilst the player is asleep / at work the bot runs Nephalem Rifts and Bounties. This allows the player to run non-stop high level GRs (as they have lots of GR keys available) and do lots of reforging in the Cube.

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I realize that, but why is what I am asking. What’s the point? If you don’t want to play the game for the fun of it, what’s the point? What enjoyment are they getting from it? Sorry, I just don’t ‘get’ it.

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Some players only really enjoy high level GRs and/or leaderboard pushing. Botting rifts get them enough GR keys to fish for perfect GR maps. I don’t really get it either.

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Some people are just made differently from you or I. Look at the PhD frauding that has been exposed over the past few years and ask yourself why someone who is fairly intelligent would simply pay someone (or a group of people) to write his/her doctoral thesis?

The person walks around for years, the kind of person who includes academic qualifications in his/her e-mail address. And it is all based on a lie because that person never earned it.

But while this would clearly bother you, me, and other people, the fact of the matter truly is that some people just don’t have that sort of moral compass. They’ll use all sorts of rationalizations to justify this, like: (i) it doesn’t affect you; (ii) I could have done that anyway; (iii) the system encourages people to do this, and so on.

But it is all COPE for pathetic individuals trying to cheat a system - any system, not just this video game. From aim and wall hacks to map hacks to botting etc., some people are just - in a word - pathetic.

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The only way is to have the bot makers shut down and closed permanantly

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But what if the bot maker is based in a country that laughs at US lawsuit?

You mean like the US has ripped up all agreements and put in tariffs and threaten war when they don’t get their way and laugh at the rest of the world

Competing for the highest leaderboard spots, with like-minded people that are likely to make use of every possible advantage they can get.

As long as theres no ban waves, almost everyone on top will be using those because almost everyone on top does.

Outside of the leaderboards I dont really think many people use bots right now because there really isnt much they can get out of it.

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Dude easy that wasn’t a attack on you. Let’s not get political here. You must admit that there are countries that don’t care about a lawsuit from a US based company. I’m looking at China where everything get pirate copied. Not even a big company as Apple can do anything about it. Do you seriously think blizzard can do things apple can’t?

And please keep war out of the discussion. No one wants war. I think it’s utterly crap to threaten with war.

Btw the tariff goes against USA as well. You know that right?

Would be like someone paying a person to run the Boston Marathon for them, then 10 yards before the end, they take over and they holler ‘Look at me! I won the Boston Marathon!’…

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Some input on the stuff brought up in this thread. (Since most people seem to avoid the topic, there isn’t any harm in discussing what they are able to do, we aren’t breaking rules long as we aren’t giving names/links to find them etc.)

Or are they advanced enough to actually push high GRs too?

Yes, they are fully able to play every part of the game completely automated. (Rifts, Greater Rifts, maximized EXP farming, 1-4 man groups, bounties, gob farming, etc.)

in such a way that you would need to be at the keyboard and verify that youre there

Wont change anything. Anything added to the game to attempt to require input can be botted/automated. There are tons of ways to inject input into another window/process without it being detected or able to be seen as ‘injected’ input. Along with the ability to write your own filter driver to inject directly into the keyboard etc. Tons of games have tried various methods of this, such as random CAPTCHA’s while playing, trying to detect injected input with simple methods available, etc. but it’s all bypassed shortly after implementation. It turns into wasted time/development on things that don’t work for detecting bots. That time is better spent on server sided detections.

I was just thinking if the game could detect that youre spamming back to back rifts, not looting anything and at randomly spaced intervals on the hour or two it would tell you in a message while in town to do some random action that would be easy for a human to do, but a lot of effort to program it to do.

You will land up with thousands of false positives doing this because not everyone plays the game the way you do. Not everyone stops and picks up every piece of gear, or even any gear at all. Not everyone goes out of their way to kill a goblin if they hear it, or to pick up every pile of gold etc. Players/groups that are focused on exp/paragon do exactly what you are saying, spam rifts back to back as fast as possible to be as efficient as possible.

If its running all that stuff and looting theres no way it wouldnt be completely full stash in a very short time, and if it does loot, it would have to know what to keep and what to recycle, it seems insane to me to go to such lengths for what? bragging rights? i dont get it?

Just like a human player who knows what items they are after/need/want, a bot has the ability to be configured to keep specific items, junk others, and salvage whatever. Bots also have the ability to be configured to only keep primals, stop when stash is full, stop after a certain amount of time / rifts are completed, stop after a certain number of deaths if things are not working properly etc. All of which keep it playing like a normal human.

Bots can also tell what items are on the ground before they are ID’d. Along with if the item is ancient or primal before ID’ing it too. (Simply put, botting is more efficient.)

idk, anything in game that made you do a random action in town like go stand by the blacksmith and press your potion button, would require so much tedious coding that it would never get implemented at this point.

You are really over thinking how things work and how much code it takes do this. Not much at all. Once all the needed information is found and mapped out (ie. movement data, movement functions, use slot/item functions etc.) this literally turns into 2 lines of code to do this (move and use a potion). There is nothing tedious about this kind of stuff when it is what you do daily for work, it is easy, fun and enjoyable to do/make.

The only thing I could see would be to put a cap on daily play time like WoW used to have with xp gains(rested bonus) but obvioulsy even capping it at 10 hrs per day would have lots of people arguing against it

This was attempted before in various games and always met with massive negative backlash. Telling people how often they are allowed to play a game/use their computer is not something that will ever stick in the western world. (One of the more recent big names that tried this was the v1 launch of FFXIV.)

it just sucks that people have to suck, this is literally why we cant have nice things.

There are plenty of things Blizzard can do to combat bots. The issue is not the botters/bot developers, it is Blizzard not spending any time/resources on this game to make things better. Both on the cheating aspect/side of things as well as the actual game play. The game is so heavily neglecticed and it shows in so many ways. (Need we remember BlizzCon last year?) We see maybe 1 ban wave a season if we are lucky. And often times it goes multiple seasons without one. This is Blizzards fault for not caring.

From the sounds of it, banning does nothing because they just get another account.

Correct. Bans mean nothing in this game because there is no value to a Diablo 3 account like there is in other games such as WoW. Your achievements, progress, additional items/space, etc. all mean nothing and hold no value. It means nothing to be banned because you can get back to the same position as you were before fairly fast. Paragon is the only thing that holds any value and even then, with botting it’s so easy to get it doesn’t hold value either. Reason why you see basically nothing sold for this game because a D3 account is technically worthless. A game like WoW has actual value in things like vanity related items, rare mounts/pets, rare achivements, past achievements that are no longer possible to get that people hold dear. It costs money to play WoW as well so there is a time based value that goes into an account. D3 has none of that.

Think of it this way. You can be a casual legit player on D3 for years, reach paragon 4k, full primals on your favorite classes, and so on. However, a bot can do the same amount of work you put into the game for years, in a matter of a few weeks. Time does not translate the same to actual value on this game.

105s … bots can get paragon 5000 in maybe just a couple days…
that isn’t possible, but yes they can climb paragon levels more quickly then human players.

Bots can do much higher than that, and they can also run 4 man groups very efficiently. So yes, they can get that kind of paragon very very fast. Couple of days fast, no. But a few weeks yes. Time taken would vary on some factors such as luck with gear upgrades, build setup for the group, and how long the botting is setup to run daily. (24hr/day is easily banned so no one generally does that.)

That’s simple. You buy another copy of the game. Set bot to farm bounties. VM or another PC.

This is basically what a lot of people do. ‘Legit’ leaderboard players do this all the time. Nothing new, been going on forever even before seasons/leaderboards.

One thing I don’t understand, and maybe someone can explain it to me - what is the purpose of bots?

There are a lot of different reasons people bot. Not everything is because of leaderboards or wanting to be #1 etc.

  • People bot to keep up with their friends.
  • People bot because they only get so little time to play per week, it helps them feel like they are not falling behind.
  • People bot because they may have a disability that makes it hard for them to do certain parts of a game.
  • People bot because they use it to pay bills. (Selling items, gold, accounts, etc.) [Not this game specifically but in general.]
  • People bot because they don’t have the time to waste trying to get something specific that a bot can assist with while they do other things in real life or another game etc.
  • People bot to automate repetative tasks that are boring. (Dailies, leveling, etc.)

And so on. There are a lot of little niche reasons that can be said for botting. Not everything is about ruining the game or being #1 on a leaderboard. I’d say that accounts for very little of the reasons why people bot in any game in general.

But what if the bot maker is based in a country that laughs at US lawsuit?

This is a common reason why a lot of bots are not shut down usually. Or that developers will base their business out of other countries, host their stuff on servers in regions that do not follow US law etc. Companies can still send C&D/DMCA take downs and attempt to ‘scare’ the developers away, or attempt to work with the local law enforcement of where the developers live, or host their stuff. But it all depends on the laws in said areas and if they will cooperate.

There are a lot of other legal aspects that come into play with things too regarding taking down a bot and such. The company has to prove damages, losses, and so on. Along with proving malicious intents, breaking of copyright laws and such. While some situations/cases are easy and open-shut, not all are. Bots can be given away free of charge, which will make it harder to prove certain aspects of damages, or profiting off the name of the game etc.

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At this point, a lot of people are botting on D3 because Blizzard has shown time and time again they don’t enforce their own rules.
They don’t stand by their own EULA and ToS.
They don’t stand by their previous actions taken against certain things.

Look back at how they handled a lot of the exploiters in the past by giving them a slap on the wrist, or top end streamers getting away with botting/cheating. The biggest reasons that botting is so huge in D3 is because of Blizzard.

Rules are not enforced. There are no resource put into the game to do anything positive for it regarding the botting.
We see maybe 1 ban wave a season.

All in all, it’s basically a game that invites botting/cheating because you have very little reason to believe you will get banned.

(To anyone that wants to scream ‘omg hes a botter!’ because I actually gave answers, look at my profile. I don’t play. I quit a while back when Blizzard showed how they are not doing anything for this game anymore besides milk it for money. Then BlizzCon last year was the nail in the coffin for me. Waiting for D4, although my hopes are so far in the negative for that already with Blizzards name behind it.)

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Really good reply. Props to you for taking your time and being fair with your answers.

I want to add I think alot people bot to even out the RNG ontop of RNG ontop of RNG ontop of RNG ontop of RNG and so on in D3.

Great super through post Atmos0s, the community thanks you for your good deed, and I’d like to say that anyone who wants to add to this discussion should make sure they’ve read and understood it.

I’m curious what you think about the optional real ID verification solution I proposed in the ban wave thread. I won’t restate it all here, but basically you grant people rather than accounts a verified status and then revoke it for a set long period of time if they’re caught cheating on their verified account to end the problem of license re-buy. Unverified play can remain as it is but verified players would be separated from all unverified players in all ways, including the server they’re on.

Please stop bringing that up in various threads and keep it to the thread you first suggested it in, which already gave you plenty of feedback as to why this idea is terrible. There’s just no way people are going to submit passports / social security numbers and so on to play a game.

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The only way that I think that might lower the bot population would take an overhaul of this game. It would take better game design that would less the need to bot. Make the game more enjoyable to play would also help. It is those repetitive tasks that bots run. If there is more fun for the person playing them than having a bot do them would help.

Further if the overhaul had it where there wasn’t infinite paragon. A system where you had a cap on progression. Maybe even having to re-roll to try out new and fun builds could help. This would mean an expansion which is not likely to happen.

meteorblade, I absolutely will not stop bringing it up until I am shown how and why it won’t work to solve the problem for all of us. I have the right to ask anyone anywhere, particularly those who haven’t even been asked, about the idea especially when the conversation is germane, as this one is.

Also your perception of the other conversation is false IMO. Every point has been argued and refuted by me time after time, with little to no substantive rebuttal from my detractors. Just because expressions like “hey you might have a point there” or “okay I think you’ve convinced me” are the rarest sorts of posts to see on a game forum doesn’t mean I haven’t changed minds.

To your specific objection, as I believe misscheetah posted in the banwave thread the game companies really already have the identity info they need to do what I’m talking about. It doesn’t have to be SSN. whatever the community finds acceptable and the gaming companies hold sufficient for the task will do. for example airBnB uses a picture of you ID and a picture of you along with furnishing your credit card transaction as proof of identity in the U.S.

A program to program, game by game solution won’t work. For proof take the fact that it hasn’t in 25 years, if nothing else. To the OP and to all those out there who think this is the way it has to be i say, there have always been people committed to the idea that an existing problem can’t be solved until it is. It used to be if your heart stopped you just died. “don’t try and change it bro it’s just the way it is” and then someone did. History is a tapestry of different versions of that same story.

Even if you won’t go the extra step for this solution and consider the possibility of cross company collaboration to stop all cheating in this way it still works on a company by company basis as well. If you let cheaters cheat infinitely then you have an infinite problem. If you identify and exclude them you at least have a mountain to climb, and that is a step forward.