I'm resurrecting this thread after 15 years because the option to create a new thread does not seem to be available to me. If I could, I would post this as a new thread.....
I'm resurrecting this thread after 15 years because the option to create a new thread does not seem to be available to me. If I could, I would post this as a new thread.....
I am going to assume you are not a bot yourself:
Welcome to the forums!
Thanks!
Know any game developers, or any MMOs with egregious botting activity?
Botting has no effect imho. You guys just can't stand that the botter make all of what you 'achieved with hard work' in your mmo look meaningless.
This is prolly the truest statement regarding bots I have ever read.
MMO's and not just MMO's but games in general are ment to be nothing more than a way to waste your life. All in all it is pretty meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
I play MMO's just out of boredom and I really do not like to hike and bike, so my hobby is games. Nothing more than something to pass the time between the hours of when my kids go to bed and when I go to bed.
***That being said there are a lot of people that someone got it stuck in their heads that the game is life. These are the people who honestly think someone botting for money is affecting them.***
The game mechanics are crap, therefore the game is boring and tedius, so people invent new ways to get what they want, without actually having to be there.
People get mad, because they have to "work" all that time to get what a bot gets with no effort.
Who really cares though, it's a game. You are suppose to be playing it to have fun or to work for a goal. The bot is not affecting either of these.
If they do affect these then refer to the lines between the *'s.
Games are meaningless (albiet fun) waste of ones life. A bot has no life to waste, just don't get made at the bot for that.
Once again, I'm replying to a post from 15 years ago, from someone who last posted in April 2010: because there are plenty of people who still feel this way. There are people who claim "no one really quits because of bots", despite evidence like the upvoted YouTube comments that I linked; because in their mind, no one SHOULD quit because of bots, and they have not bothered to look for (or take note of) evidence that contradicts their assumptions.
Bots are essentially a form of cheating.
In single player games 30 years ago, it didn't matter if someone cheated. This was true whether they were built-in cheats, or unintended exploits or hacks of the game. When I was about 7 years old in ~1993, my oldest brother or dad showed me how to hex-edit the saves for the single-player game Dark Sun: Shattered Lands to get more HP and so on. I also learned how to duplicate items within the game by exporting characters from the current party.
Cheats like this didn't affect other people because the games were single player and there was no social media.
Now, unintended cheats even in single-player games can affect other people because of streaming and social media. Like the famous cheat to get better luck with drops when speedrunning a popular game in single-player mode. This had big repercussions when people learned that the cheating had taken place.
But with MMOs, you don't even need social media to affect others by cheating. Massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Pretty much every word here shows why cheating is bad. Bots are not role-playing. Multiplayer means it affects other people. Massively multiplayer means you're encountering strangers; it isn't just your friends who know and don't care that you cheat. See: Dunbar's number, "a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships": "Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150."
Even for people who don't inherently care about the rewards one gains from playing (or botting), when botting is against the rules in a game it is bad because it represents publicly flaunting the rules. If people break the rules in one way, they are more likely to break rules in other ways. To use DND terminology, not everyone has a Chaotic alignment, so rules matter.
Some people might view this example as unrelated to botting, but suppose a game had an ability or command that you could use, called "torture a kitten". If you press this button, an animated kitten briefly appears and your character tortures it. No real kittens are being harmed, and this button does not affect any other characters in the game: but it would still be something that most people would dislike and they would not play a game with this button.
With botting, games other than Progress Quest (which is only botting) do not explicitly allow it. (I think if they have 'progress when not playing' mechanics, they don't actually keep your character in the game world.) But when bots are extremely visible in an MMO, the user begins to think that the company implicitly is allowing bots, because they find it hard to believe that anyone could be so bad at identifying and banning bots, so it becomes like the "torture a kitten" button: condoning an objectionable behavior, even if it's "only a game".
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