PC Gamer article on the game cheating industry

[Delterius]

Yeah doing something that doesnt ruin anyone elses enjoyment of the game is certainly 'a new low'.

Oh please, that has nothing to do with anything. What surprises me is that you needed to bot for gold.

 

[Fart Master]

Yeah doing something that doesnt ruin anyone elses enjoyment of the game is certainly 'a new low'.

Oh please, that has nothing to do with anything. What surprises me is that you needed to bot for gold.

I made my gold abusing prospecting / jewelcrafting like everyone else. Your comment just came of as something someone who has never played WoW would say so I went for the '4 hours of collecting herbs' line.
Most of my botting was reputation grinding and honor when a new PvP season started.

Also theres no such thing as 'needing to bot', its just being too lazy to do mundane shit. I bet most people bot while they sit at their computer browsing the internet / watching something.

 

[Renegen]

doesnt ruin anyone elses enjoyment

I made my gold abusing prospecting / jewelcrafting

Clearly it did hurt others, you're just rationalizing it. I was part of early MMOs and having the game world completely empty of any human activity did ruin my enjoyment. MMOs have made some progress given that you botted to Raid but didn't bot the Raid itself, back then these types of social activities were far fewer, not to mention easier to grief. But it's nice you mentioned it, I guess even Blizzard fanboys are just as pathetic and addicted as any other MMO player, just more loyal.

 

[Zeriel]

Yeah, botting was infinitely more destructive in games that revolved around the world itself. (They completely demolished Lineage 2, for example.)

 

[Angthoron]

So that's the mentality of the faggots botting PvP matches when you come in trying to actually win one. OH HEY LOOK FIVE BOTS FEEDING THE OPPONENT TEAM SO NICE NOT HURTING ANYONE, this is exactly why I queued up for the fucking PvP match, oh yes.

 

[Dim]

Fight the evil that is grind. If devs wanted they could add challenge; something a bot could not handle. "a bot could do it " is a good definition of what is not a game.

 

[Angthoron]

Fight the evil that is grind. If devs wanted they could add challenge; something a bot could not handle. "a bot could do it " is a good definition of what is not a game.

Well, thing is, a bot cannot do it in PvP. They get mercilessly killed over and over again, with extreme prejudice from both teams. Their gear is also typically shit, so they die in three hits. Good job when a team actually wants to win but has the system place them with 3-5 wankers like that. "Yeah, but go premade", those types will say, well, excuse me, I already do prog raiding with my guild, and none of us has time to make a fully committed team for PvP. A random BG with a bunch of bots, oh my god it's heavan.

 

[muds_animal_friend]

It's so sad and pitiful when wankers are willing to pay for the ability to cheat in video games.

But it was only £14.95!

 

[Angthoron]

To be fair, the strategy guides for last/new-gen games are way more pathetic a purchase than a game cheat service that offers customer support and frequently updated trainers.

And yet strategy guides are alive and well. Who the fuck buys those? Who would buy a strategy guide for BioShock Infinite? I can see someone buying a cheat to make the HP sponge enemies to stop being HP sponges, but what can a 120-page bloat mag offer me that googling won't give for free?

 

[Drakron]

And yet strategy guides are alive and well. Who the fuck buys those?

Because they are day 1, cheats take time to develop because they need to intercept data to begin with and some people do feel more comfortable with a guide that a cheat engine.

But I do think they have reached the bottom because, lets take FF X were it did show locations, secrets and enemy stats even if the game was linear as hell there was a point, now I think about it the consoles are the holdup of strategy guides, dont say they are "alive and well" because like dead tree publishing they are in the shitter this days.

And there are still games that warrant having a guide, like Dragon Dogma or even Dark Souls 2 because, yes there will be a wiki but not at launch were you want to check what you want to do and cheat engines in Dark Souls is pretty much cheating to win at PvP.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

To me the entitled "gamers" who take multiplayer, online gaming, and gaming so seriously as to be slighted and treat this as a crime/world crisis are just as bad as "cheaters".

 

[buzz]

This is a new low for humanity. I always assumed that cheats and hacks in video games were free things done over the Internet used by bored script kiddies. The fact that not only do they cost money, but they're also bringing a lot of profit to the creators is absurd beyond belief.
B-b-but grinding is hard and tedious. No shit, why the fuck are you playing MMOs out of all games then?
The guys who win money by cheating, like using bots so they can farm items for selling or helping them win in tournaments/bets, those are understandable. A friend of mine got enough money out of Diablo 3 that he recouped his costs for the game and bought a video camera as well.

$300k dollars ... someone could have had a bone marrow transplant with that money.

 

[Cadmus]

Yeah doing something that doesnt ruin anyone elses enjoyment of the game is certainly 'a new low'.

brb collecting herbs for 5 hours so I can afford to raid. At least I'm a honorable man.

lol that's the most retarded thing I've read here, right after saying Skyrim is good.

 

[Dim]

No shit, why the fuck are you playing MMOs out of all games then?.

MMO RPGS. Plenty of MMOs are not about grind and those that are should be destroyed.

There were? are? a bunch of mmorpgs with automation bots built in. Esoteric and asian ofc.

 

[Luzur]

Ah, I remember the good old days of using the bot Kore RO in Ragnarok Online, it had a sleek interface and was easy to use, you could customize your bot any way you saw fit! Tell him where to farm, what items to pick up, how to respond to every single action from other players (you could even customize the reply delay), when to go back to shops. The "game" of scripting the bot was almost more fun than the game itself. Of course, RO was rampant with bots everywhere and the developers loved it because they were all paying subs so the community was terrible. MMOs have certainly come a long way to dissuade cheaters.

say, this sounds like a good idea for a game

Agreed. I've actually been considering making some game based on configuring/programming automated beings like that. I can't seem to picture how the exact game would be without going "hm.. nah, actually that sounds boring" though. But it really seems like there is big potential in the basic concept.

One idea I had was some Dwarf Fortress-ish game with a colony of robots. You would for example configure one robot to go to location X and mine ore until Y% of carrying capactiy, then return to location Z and drop it. Also, if hostile unit is in your view - go immediately to location N (unless robot is armed, in that case fire at hostile unit until some condition is fulfilled)... and so on.

Much "fun" (as in, "losing is fun") from this would be moments like forgetting to add critical checks and commands to their instructions. For example, you forget to tell the mining robot to stop picking ore when exceeding 50% carrying capacity, causing it to just pile more and more cargo, eventually breaking down/overheating/toppling over. Or maybe you have a stationary sentry gun, and you accidentally instruct it to fire at any creature inside its view.

This game could be very simple with a point-and-click interface with very basic instructions (probably organized like a flowchart diagram), or it could be created for more advanced players were you could program the robots through external Lua scripts or something.

Hard to tell how all that would work out though. It could turn out to be just a bland strategy game with a tedious, gimmicky interface.

sounds kinda like Dungeon Keeper.

 

[Borelli]

I didn't even know there are people who pay for cheats. This is so pathetic words cannot describe it. (although it being for multiplayer games is slightly more understandable)

 

[Fart Master]

Yeah doing something that doesnt ruin anyone elses enjoyment of the game is certainly 'a new low'.

brb collecting herbs for 5 hours so I can afford to raid. At least I'm a honorable man.

lol that's the most retarded thing I've read here, right after saying Skyrim is good.

good for you. if you actually played WoW you would know about 50% of high end raiders / PvPers botted. Theres a difference between a hardcore WoW player who goes for world firsts and top arena ratings and some random guy who is happy doing 5 man dungeons for 2 hours when he gets off work.

Being in a top raid guild / arena team while maintaining a job and some resemblance of life and NOT botting is almost impossible.

 

[DragoFireheart]

There's a direct correlation between your status on WoW and what kind of job you have.

 

[Cadmus]

Yeah doing something that doesnt ruin anyone elses enjoyment of the game is certainly 'a new low'.

brb collecting herbs for 5 hours so I can afford to raid. At least I'm a honorable man.

lol that's the most retarded thing I've read here, right after saying Skyrim is good.

good for you. if you actually played WoW you would know about 50% of high end raiders / PvPers botted. Theres a difference between a hardcore WoW player who goes for world firsts and top arena ratings and some random guy who is happy doing 5 man dungeons for 2 hours when he gets off work.

Being in a top raid guild / arena team while maintaining a job and some resemblance of life and NOT botting is almost impossible.

I wonder what would it be like if the game was properly protected against botting so that nobody could bot...hmmm...

Look, I've finally learned how to reply in codex style instead of writing 4 paragraphs explaining the same thing. Can somebody pat me on the cock, please?

 

[Dim]

Autohotkey. Thats the answer to my question. Well it and its forum don't have anything about actual hacking but besides that its all anyone could want.