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The problem with old MMOs (so many damn cheaters)
TheScavenger
Member EpicPosts: 3,321
Asheron's Call was my first MMO. However, only a few, very small tiny fraction, of players didn't bot (not just macroing, but actual botting). I can probably count them on both hands.
Pretty much the entire playerbase bots. New MMOs ban this (except for Darkfall), as they should. It forces everyone to "cheat" to keep up, and...why even play if all your doing is botting the whole time?
I guess you will argue "so we can get to max level over night"...then I say...Turbine (or any other company) then might as well make everyone max level. Then there is no reason to cheat. Seems stupid to have everyone level, if they are just gonna cheat to max level overnight.
I would love to play AC or some other old MMO, if there wasn't so many damn botters and cheaters.
Old MMOs seem to have this problem far more. UO this was a huge problem, dunno if it still is...AC has the most cheaters I've ever seen in an MMO, even more than UO ever was. I know SWG had tons of botters and cheaters. I remember seeing huge groups of players botting near and around cities.
What is it with these old MMOs where everyone cheats? New MMOs no one does, and the few that do are usually banned rather quickly. Old MMOs the developer doesn't do anything. And old MMOs there seems to be far more cheaters anyway, than what new MMOs have.
My Skyrim, Fallout 4, Starbound and WoW + other game mods at MODDB:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/skyrim-anime-overhaul
Comments
When players see others do better, the conclusion is often "how can that be, they must be botters/cheaters"
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
You haven't played Asheron's Call. Anyone that doesn't cheat either leaves, or joins the cheaters. Literally pretty much the entire playerbase cheats.
UO, there was botting to raise skills+stats, and people would leave their bot on. A while ago, probably 2-3 years (never felt like going back), when I said "I don't want to macro/cheat, I would rather earn my skills normally"...everyone I told that to, seemed really surprised. Now its been a while, so maybe the devs feel differently...but I remember everyone botted to raise their skills to master level.
In SWG, there was tons of bots in the cantinas and out in the world fighting mobs.
Darkfall has the same problem, tons of botters.
It seems to mostly plague older MMOs, and ones that are more sandbox in style.
My Skyrim, Fallout 4, Starbound and WoW + other game mods at MODDB:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/skyrim-anime-overhaul
Its blindingly obvious to see a bot staying in an area and repeatedly killing mobs (or harvesting resources) in the same area for weeks and weeks. Or whatever task the botter wants automated to raise specific skill(s).
My Skyrim, Fallout 4, Starbound and WoW + other game mods at MODDB:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/skyrim-anime-overhaul
You might be right, or it may be that most players don't feel the need to. Either way, there are still a lot of players that do know how to and do.
I did play SWG and I did see them, I see them in games now, but it is not uncommon but not terribly common either. There is a minority of people botting, but they bot a lot. I did not play AO but I would still bet it is a minority of the population.
Just to make sure we understand each other, dual/triple... boxing is not botting.
Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
MMOs are and always will be easy to exploit and there is incentive to do so.
One of the problems with old MMORPGs was their gameplay was so simple and rewarding of tedious repetition that they could be botted. You could certainly bot a bunch of monster farming in WOW, but botting the game's bosses at the high end of progression would be extremely challenging*.
(*Still possible of course, but let's face it: there is almost nothing in gaming which can't be automated by a determined AI programmer. We live in an age of emerging digital intelligence. Robots have a better success rate at Captchas than I do.)
It's just generally bad game design to reward players for doing something tedious for a very long length of time. AC1 was guilty of that; Darkfall even more so. You wouldn't think games after Oblivion would repeat the mistake of rewarding players for sprinting and/or jumping nonstop everywhere they travelled, but well...Darkfall is a "special" sort of game.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
No, boxing alone is not botting. However, if a 3rd party program controls any actions of characters, that is botting.
Interesting.. I played UO for over 5 years and never once saw someone cheat. I wonder where you got your information from. Macro'ing.. I guess. Even macroing magery in the early days could take months macroing. It really didn't matter in the long run due to skill and attribute caps. You would catch up to the veterans eventually.
I wouldn't even say then.
Say your using a program like Isboxer. 1 key, 1 action per box. So say your playing wow and using a hunter, and druid combo. Pressing the # 2 key causes your hunter to shoot arcane mark, and your druid to cast moonfire.
3rd party pogram - not a bot.
You must be there at the computer, that is the difference between botting and boxing. If you are not there, there are no actions being done.
If you can leave the computer and your character still carries out pre-scripted actions. Thats botting.
Programs like Isboxer are allowed on most MMO games precisely because it is only 1 action per key press per character and you are required to be at the computer still.
SWG had a built-in macro language that let you easily code simple bots. Even with that after a while I wanted to find third party program that would let me automate grinding crafting skills. I am normally against third-party botting but SWG's crafting interface was designed by a sadist.
Ultima Online problem was riddled with macro-botting. Hell it even had in-game macro creator. Whole concept of sitting in a mine and endlesly mining was well stupid for a game. Yeah even taking into account it was game with strong virtual world simulation elements.
Solution would be to make mining interesting - so in example - make mining resources vein depletable and with randomized stats - so mining would be about searching resources veins through game world, also maybe in remote or dangerous places and act of mining itself would have to be relatively short, but maybe costly? Anyway even if you want to make mining attractive only to part of playerbase and not to all of them (so you don't have 90% population crafting) - you still have to make it attractive and make people actually PLAY while doing it. You have to wrap time-sink aassosiated with mining in gameplay wrapped.
Of course that's just random general thought made in 5 minutes. Whole problem is how actually design it in detail, programm it, implement into game and make non-easy-exploitable.
From what I know SWG actually adressed SOME of this faults, but problem was it did it only partially and only for some of gathering / crafting / skilling processes and not for all of them. So botting-macroing was still possible.
Games like UO had good general ideas - but they were not translated well into actual gameplay.
I would love to play mmorpg with strong virtual world elements, but it can't be simple repeatabe clicking actions like gathering or crafting in UO (only taming was partially wrapped into actual gameplay, still far from perfect but difffrence between cutting down trees and taming was staggering - one was idiotic mechanical clciking action and taming was simple and not really taht good but had actual gameplay in it).
Yeah I could not play game dependant on macroing / botting anymore.
I think the OP is exaggerating but unfortunately what he says about darkfall is/was true.
I haven't touched the game in ages but I remember the botting, it really was a snowball effect though. A small portion of the population was botting but rather then be behind the people would bot to keep up with them, before you knew it... if you werent botting you were playing or you were doing it wrong.
Play sessions would end up becoming okay I need to farm/buy enough regeants to set up my next afk bot session(s).
I admit that I sometimes create macro's to do things for me. However I do add realistic delays in the macro (often making it slower then when I actually do it) and I always sit at the computer when it's running.
With a game like DF I see no reason to macro though. If however a games UI makes action difficult (like how Xsyon worked) I create a macro. No point messing up my wrist because the developer fail to make something easy that should be easy or making things way to repentative.
DF does it well in my opinion. No need to press a resource every few second or add ingredients to a bleuprint for every one item seperatly. Is it cheating? Well I think it actually is, but I do not create a unfair advantege, beside not damaging my wrists and fingers
Ea don't care
Ea run uo too, so I'm not suprised
This was a huge problem in FFXI that SE took way too many years to try and correct. Botting to us was not so much automating tasks so you could play afk, but more about pocket sniffers and claiming tools. Players will do what they need to do to get gear if the best gear is placed on world spawns.
Botting, which was hugely frowned apon initially, became so common that it was expected in the end game community. People were doing it with no repercussions for so long that it became either join them or quit the game.
I know cheating bothers me a lot,it ruins the entire game design for myself and everyone else.
iwould not be so sure cheaters are banned in other games,those are pretty much hacked accounts that are getting banned.
The FIRST real game/dev to ban cheaters in an RPG was Square Enix,however it took them awhiel to really step it up.They formed a TASK force of real gamers to help look after cheating.They removed tons of cheats and took other measures as well.I have and probably never wil lsee another developer go as far as Square did.
I would however NOT blame older games,it is rampant in all games and you can blame the bragging design for that.That is one reason i do not want to see any Esport ideas in rpg's,it encourages players to cheat.
Aion had tons of cheating,it is sort of new,DF1,there is cheating in all these new games,you might not be good at spotting it.How about Wow?
I have watched Twitch TV WOW where one guy is playing a whole group and you know that is impossible,some guys form a raid on one account.
That is a result of NEWER gaming ,where everyone wants auto scripting and like to call it "ADD-ONS".They are ALWAYS a platform to cheat,make the game much simpler than it was designed to be played.
I might add that one reason you might see less is because of the design.Example browser gaming oir instances where you can't see what the players are doing.Another topic but is a good reason to not have instances.TRhat guy goes int oa Wow instance and has his auto heal bots heal him,you will never see it.He can use a pos cheat ,a speed cheat [which is REALLY easy for anyone to pull off] all and nobody will know it.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
There are a number of reasons. First, older games tended to be grindier, and repeating highly repetitive tasks are exactly what bots are good at. There's no point in having a bot grind experience for you if you're already max level.
Second, newer games have learned from older ones. When the first MMORPGs launched, they didn't necessarily know what people would bot or how much people would bot it. If you're developing a new game today, then you should have some idea of the sort of things that players may try to bot in your game just from what they've tried to bot in other games.
Third, more powerful hardware means that you can implement more security features. Today, the hardware requirements of encrypting all network activity with AES basically amount to a rounding error, let alone some weaker, cheaper way to obscure the network data so that a packet sniffer can see only that there is a packet. 15 years ago, that wasn't the case, partially because AES didn't exist. Even a simple affine cipher to obscure important program data that bots might want to see and exploit would be very simple to do and have an inconsequential performance hit on modern hardware. I don't know if games actually do anthing along these lines (I don't think they do), but it would be pretty easy to implement if you wanted to.
Fourth, when a game has been out for a long time, the company probably isn't willing to invest the resources into new, aggressive anti-botting measures. A game that just launched and has realistic hopes of getting many more new players to pick it up may be willing to put more resources into it.
Yea. There is only a few of things that kill my enthusiasm and willingness to play a game - but that example you mentioned with harvesting bot is one of them.
I dunno.. it's kind of a grey area. I get what you're saying but it's still a 3rd party program performing more actions simultaneously than a player could do without it. Normally that 1 key would perform 1 action with 1 character. With the program, 1 key will perform 1 action with 2 or more characters. So, the program is still controlling the characters the player is not.