In the previous video I showed you a dumb design decision of a Guild Wars 2 Trading Bot author, who decided it was a good idea to leak the API keys from all bot users. These API keys can be used with the Guild Wars 2 API to get all character information https://loganomotorsports.com/.
I have written a small script that has collected data on all active bot users along with their wealth, for the past three months. And so I wanna have a look at this data and also talk about the threat model of botting in MMORPGs Before we get into the data, let’s talk about botting itself. I try to approach this topic as if I would design an MMORPG and I’m well aware of the threat that somebody could hack the client or automate and bot certain aspects of the game. For me MMORPGs have two major concerns they need to control in order to have a healthy game. One is the player satisfaction. This is purely subjective, it’s about feelings players have that are often completely separate from reality. And the other one is keeping inflation of the ingame currency under control. If you ever played a game with rapid inflation, it’s basically unplayable as a new player and it’s just a terrible experience. And there are many many game design decisions that you can make that affect these things. For example a very typical thing games do is to have a gold sink. That means there are very expensive luxury items that just pull out masses of currency or items to fight against inflation. Items can become character bound so they are removed from the economy and much more. So what does this have to do with botting. So when most people imagine botting in an MMORPG game, they imagine bots that run around, kill monsters to level or collect items and gold. So why is this bad for agame? First, with each kill, gold or items are generated out of thin air. More gold available in the economy, can lead to a higher inflation. And because botting can be scaled to hundreds, thousands or even way more, this can really destroy the economy. This is the main reason why botting is so bad for a game. Another issue is, that when regular players encounter botters, it has a negative emotional effect on them. They feel cheated, maybe even their kills get snatched away, they can’t buy stuff anymore because of inflation and they can’t find real players to chat and go on adventures together. So if we design a game to defend against this threat, what can we do? Should we invest into obfuscating the client, making the network protocol super complex, implement or buy scanning solutions that behave like anti-virus software trying to identify bots or hacking tools through heuristics? But those are all terrible solutions, because they are expensive and ineffective. A dedicated botter can always bypass those locally running scanning tools. It just slows them down and maybe prevents simple people from doing it, but professionals, that earn money from botting, they will find ways around it. Much more elegant solutions are solving this through game design. For example Guild Wars 2 doesn’t have a concept of kill, experience, loot or resource stealing. Everything is shared. So players wont have a bad experience with bots stealing their kills. You can also design your game and server logic in a way that you completly don’t trust the client. For example let’s say you have a dungeon and at the end is a reward. Instead of spawning the reward chest at the start and having closed doors preventing access, you can have a mission timer or different checks before the server spawns it at the end. Thus if sb has a client-side wallhack or even control over the communication protocol they can’t just access the chest rightaway. You can also implement more complicated boss fight mechanics that require dodging and positioning, so that bots have to be really really smart in order to farm it. You can also make a lot of resources account bound, so that a lot of the good loot can’t even be traded or sold by the bot owners. You can also have instanced MMOs, because then bots can do everything without ever being seen from players, thus it helps against a bad perception of the game. It’s kind of fun trying to think of systems that make bots less effective to protect the game, isn’t it? But what about a trading bot. Because this is a little bit different. I claimed earlier that the ingame economy, mainly the inflation is a crucial part to keep a game healthy. So how does a Guild Wars 2 Trading bot affect the game? First I have to explain how the tradingpost works. When you have an item you can list it for a price. Listing an item costs 5% of the price you choose. That is paid right away. Then if somebody buys the item, another 10% of the gold is taken away. Basically you have a 15% sales tax on each trade. And placing a buy order does not cost anything.
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AuthorProfessional writer, coffee lover, gambling analytic. Use to play at Casinoslots https://casinoslots-sa.co.za/ Archives
March 2019
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