Every now and then people will talk about how WOW or another game has a lot of “bots” instead of real players. By this I assume they mean that some computer AI client is playing the game instead of a real user, sort of like the AI program “Stock Fish” playing chess instead of the real live Chess World Champion Magnus Carlson.
First of all, is that what it means or are they talking about something else?
If it is I wonder, how is this possible. I know that Second Life has “bot” players but then the whole idea of Second Life is that it’s a virtual world where players are suppose to build things. Lots of interfaces are published so players can animate and control things. It’s a goal.
But does WOW allow that? Is the client server interface from the player to the game server published so that anyone could write a program to allow their own AI code access to the game as a “bot”?
And if it is, does that even work? Chess is a very controlled game with a simple set of allowed moves per piece that can grow exponentially into many possible games but what you can do is still limited to 6 types of pieces on an 8X8 board.
It would seem that writing an AI program to run a “bot” in WOW would be far more complex because of the far more complex board not to mention the “bot” would have to understand what a quest was asking it to do, how to get around numerous obsticals or how to get through the mobs to get to a boss.
From what I understand there is the bot program. Then people write the tasks for the bot program to run. Like mine this map, kill these mobs, follow this path in pvp and kill stuff on the way.
I know nothing about coding, but back in MOP I used a bot and it was pretty smart. It would run around and herb and mine all the nodes, and it knew all the locations. It would also run a basic rotation and kill things if they attacked it.
You can program you computer to enter your character to active them to to appear in certain spots in the game to mine a node and repeat doing this that is a bot. With AI that is no problem.
If a AI could enter gd and talk for 18hrs that sure can hook it up to bot a game.
That is what I used. I made a lot of gold and level’d several characters too. I used to run it like 24 hrs a day and never got caught, I guess I stopped before the ban waves lol.
I’ve thought about running one for callings. I don’t play enough to care at the moment though. That alone would pay for the sub, but idk how on top of banning they are these days. Not that I would care that much if I got hit with one.
Blizzard does not allow it (no gaming company does). When you get caught it will be a minimum of a six month account suspension on the first offense, 12 month account suspension on the second offense, an 18 month account suspension on the third offense and a permanent account closure after that.
Ok then I don’t understand how it works. I thought someone said Blizzard provides the bots and you give them instructions on what you want them to do. If that’s the case, why don’t they just disable their bots?
If it’s not the case then do people write their own C++ or Lisp AI programs and have the program log in and play the bot? If so, is the interface user / server interface published? If so seems all Blizzard would have to do is change the interface then only their client would work.
They (Blizzard) have a program in use called Warden. No one but Blizzard knows how it works for obvious reasons. Warden collects the data on the bots and when they collect enough of it they do a ban wave on the bots to maximize the number of bots they ban at once.
The problem is that new bots get developed and the botters return and the cycle starts all over again.
I get that. I was just wondering how it all works and why Blizzard can’t just “pull the plug” on the “bots”.
The internet is set up in a client/server relationship that sits on the Internet TCP/IP backbone. Browser clients and Apache type servers would be one type of client/server internet application. Video games like WOW have their own game client that uses the TCP/IP backbone to access their own WOW server.
But if that WOW client/server protocol is private then how would someone writing a “bot” be able to use it? Even if it was reverse engineered it seems all WOW would have to do is change their client server protocol to stop the “bots” from working.
If I had to guess, it’s because bots can mimic user inputs.
The bots are actively designed to not be detected (cause y’know, people aren’t gunna buy a program that’s guaranteed to get you banned), so it’s not like the programs themselves actively advertise to Blizzard that they’re running.