Life is Feudal Official Forum

[Shu]

I'm a little torn here. On one hand, I do believe that if you (as a game company) loosen your stance on botting like Bobik did, you're almost inviting people (like me) to push their programs as far as they can get.
On the other hand, as mentioned, I myself wrote some shameful "tools" for WoW a couple of years ago, some of which even utilized the game's own addon system for non-invasive data exchange with my tool's "external" part (as in a separate program). And it's great fun! (The most fun one made my moonkin a one-button-wonder by deciding through various conditions which spells to cast next. Combined with a macroed auto-fire key, this was #1 in any raid's damage meters with ease.)

BUT! This "somewhat-bot" of mine was obsolete as soon as there were almost no new bosses that featured simple nuke-style combat mechanics. The devs went ahead and made the fights engaging and variable enough, sprinkled with more player motion and non-combat decision making, that using my "bot" actually led to worse performance overall, because I became prone to push dmg while being distracted from other important mechanics. ("I can squeeze that starfire in there, sure!" *bam* Caught in insta-gib AE.)

Why am I telling this in full length?
While I absolutely agree that repetitive tasks and "lesser work" belong to MMOs, and especially in a medieval setting, it is entirely up to designing a) the amount of time spent vs. the use of the gained resources (including everything that is crafted from them) and b) the level of engagement and "game" you put into these tasks.
Just basic klicking around is okay during development as a placeholder, but considering the sheer amounts of stuff we currently need, it almost suggests that botting (even the simplest of bots) is somewhat expected and mandatory and part of the design.
With this, I take issue. Greatly.

Believe me when I say that bot-devs are highly driven and very creative. Every opportunity, every ever so small open door, will eventually be used in a completely unexpected way that ends up breaking at least parts in the game. I've spent nights for weeks to get things right in my tools. (I've even made a combat simulator program from scratch (only the numbers, no graphics of course) just to obtain statistics for minor tweaks in minutes, which would have taken weeks to get from the actual game, if at all.) That's the kind of dedication you need to expect. If something is "hard" to do, it does the exact opposite of laying people off. That's what drives us!

The only* way to properly counter this is very thorough design, and getting the numbers and dependencies for crafting recepies just right, and providing mechanics to make it a fun (or at least not excrutiatingly bothersome) and engaging thing to do.
And if I've spent two hours of semi-entertaining stuff manually, you've got to have some other reward as "I'll do this another 6-10 times and will finally be able to surround a small patch of land with lackluster traps".
Sure, this requires sacrificing some "time related realism", but a game HAS to be a condensed experience, because for most players it will only fill a fraction of one's days. I hate the insta-gratification many games these days resort to with a passion, but taking a week for a barely noticable progress just takes it to the other, equally bad extreme.
I don't want things to be easy, far from it! But currently the "time-investment to brain-usage to results"-relations appear not all too pleasing to me. If you get these right, few people would feel a need to use bots, and fewer will sink too much time into making them, since the potential additional gain would be too low by design.

*) Actually, there are other ways. Again, Blizzard as an example with their Warden software that attempts to detect bots automatically. But making such a thing is a REALLY big undertaking, and can easily end up too invasive to your PC if you want to catch external tools with any relevant accuracy. Some automated detection, like the mentioned memory tampering and checking for impossible movements and such is quite welcome, though, and fairly easy to do in comparison. It'll catch the most crude and blatant bots, at least. But all this still only glosses over that there likely are deeper design flaws in the game itself, if bots are widely used.

[Willbonney]

But all this still only glosses over that there likely are deeper design flaws in the game itself, if bots are widely used.

Read all the posts in this discussion, and must say, ya'll amused me quite a bit.

Really the only thing stated here that I can really agree with is the above from Shu, basically if you quit with the annoying and/or repetitive bullspit features, you'll see a lot fewer botters.

Accept the fact that if you program gathering methods that we find lacking, we'll find what we feel is a better way to do it.

So why not just add it into the game? You know, simple auto-harvesting methods that is deemed as "acceptable" and make it so people don't have to use 3rd party hardware or software to do? Ya'll did it with some things (sawing logs/boards/billets over and over until full) so why not with others? Why cherry pick?

As used in earlier example, SWG had an entire macro/botting function built into the game. There were several others at the time who did something similar. It was only due to some themeparks that were released shortly after that this whole anti-botting/macroing crowd sprung about. Before then, in a sandbox style game, it was the way to play, and often there was support in game for it.

[Zhalls]

So why not just add it into the game?

It's already slated to be. The bigger picture has always been stated throughout the development of this game, especially prior to Steam Release, is to create mini-games that help automate the tedium of doing mass gathering and/or production. It's partially added to the game already via the smelter, but there are a lot more things to focus on other than mini-games at this juncture. That said, you'll see it. It's coming.