Bot, a natural response to game design flaws?

[Gunba]

Yeah, people who use bots are really terrible human beings. How dare someone automate tedious and repetitive tasks? You're just being lazy and you should have to participate in unexciting artificial content grinds like the rest of us. What gives you the right to access enjoyable content without first putting in hours of hard work? Do you think this is a game? People who bot are clearly the idiots here.

[Naxere]

I used to be strongly anti-Botting before this patch. Now, with the sheer amount of Honor/Conquest it requires to upgrade your gear, I still wouldn't do it myself, but I can't say I blame someone for taking that route.

[Coombs]

I understand hating bots for economy reasons, mining bots and dungeon bots are bullshit for that reason. I, however, find bg bots to be okay. When I played and botted for arena I would literally watch my bot cap more flags, out dps most, and kill people who were obviously not bots. When the player base in battlegrounds is that fucking terrible, then it becomes more of an inconvenience for people to actually play in them, and botting is a great way to get the tedious gear and then just do arena like most people who pvp want to. Add bg gear to arena and I guarantee the vast majority of BG bots disappear.

[jaakkeli]

Bots mostly exist to farm things that can ultimately be turned into RL cash for the person using it, or for people to automate the parts of the game that they don't want to play for the purposes of stroking their epeen. (The people with actual skills don't need to, it's trivial to get the basic honor or dungeon gear

Well that's the whole problem. It's so trivial you can make a bot do it! In real life, if a job is so simple and repetitive that a robot can do it we usually put a robot on it and let the people who used to do that job find better jobs.

I don't bot but I personally don't object to botting. There are interesting sub-games within this game (like arena) which require you to first do a long, mindless, automatable grind (like honor) before you can properly participate. I'd happily pay extra subscription money if I could just skip leveling and gearing up characters and just go raid or pvp. It doesn't matter how good a player you are, it still takes a long time to grind to 90 and gear up, and to me it's all completely uninteresting gameplay that I would rather skip.

---------- Post added 2012-11-28 at 03:09 AM ----------

Their were bots running dungeons in WotLK. Your ignorant if u think otherwise.

My account got hacked in early Cataclysm when I quit playing and according to people in my real id whoever got it was running TBC raids and instances nonstop 24/7 on my paladin ie he was certainly a bot. When I got my account back and asked for item restoration I ended up getting a *ton* of TBC crafting materials that I didn't have before, mostly obviously botted cloth and enchanting materials. (I did make a ticket about it and the response was basically "we don't care, keep it".) The hacker-botter even paid for my subscription while this was going on.

I suspect the biggest problem they have in banning bots is that a lot of bots are being run on hacked accounts and anyone banned for botting could always throw in the "it's not me, I got hacked" card. Sure, by examining all the activity you could deduce whether someone is bluffing but that would be an insane amount of manpower.

[Kujako]

Botting is for when you think "I dont want to play the game, but I still want to PAY to play the game".

[Deleted]

I actually understand botters,my natural response to the huge honor grind that turns into a nightmare if you like to play different classes is doing low level pvp.
you lvl your character to 60 in a few days,questing is very quick which makes it less boring,a few bgs and dungeons later and you can actually pvp without a gear disadvantage,not only that,you actually outgear others if you throw gems/enchants into the mix.

all this to say people dont like the gearing in pvp and will try to find others ways to it and its kind of understandable.
in pve this is not a problem,from the start you can upgrade your gear by doing dungeons at your ilvl,lfr at your ilvl,and so on.
in pvp you start off getting blasted by players sporting the gear you know you're not getting any time soon again and again,it can be exciting to gear up on your first char,but for alts you only start to think off skipping to the real game.

[skitz0129]

Bots aren't related to game design in the slightest. Not even a little bit.

People cheat in everything, and when it comes to gaming, the bigger the game the more cheating technology develops and the higher interest it holds amongst those cheating communities.

[Deleted]

The game has made it much easier for bots, in many different ways. Cross-realm dungeoning & BG's and the non-personal nature of it make it easier to get away with botting. Simplified heroic content makes it harder to detect bots. By way of example, you won't see many bots doing Deadmines Heroic because the end boss is pretty complicated (for a bot, anyway).

Bots were always prevalent in BG's, but it's gotten worse lately. This probably relates to the game being new still, when there is more gear to farm.

There are many ways to prevent bots: the most common ones we tend to talk about is using tools to detect and ban.

To say that bots aren't related to game design is to miss the greater scope of what game design is really about.

The way design is relevant is this: If you design a game that is not particularly challenging, yet requires a lot of time, you're setting it up to be botted. It is very easy to farm heroics and BG's for gear, but it takes time. The problem is not designing around botting, it's doing so while making the game enjoyable to play. If all gathering nodes were removed and ore/cloth/herbs rewarded through genuinely challenging daily content, the botters' impact on the economy would lessen. That doesn't make it a good idea, because players would hate it.

To design around bots, you need to implement some form of filtering that makes it harder for bots to succeed, yet at the same time not alienate or displease your playerbase. Put simply, this is not easy. Historically, we've seen things like 5-instance-per-hour cap. That's an example of a game design change which made botting harder. Blizzard right now seems to be taking a rather hands-off approach when they design, either deliberately ignoring bots or just neglecting the problem. The example of upgrading ilvls through farming gear is going to make botting even worse: bots are going to gear up faster and further, and start polluting the LFR's.



To preface anything wondering, in my view the answer is not to roll back to vanilla and remove the dungeon finder.

[skitz0129]

There is literally no relation to botting and game design.

If a game is popular, people will cheat in it.

For people that design bots and other methods of cheating software, this is a hobby for them. This is what they enjoy.

It's very easy to find the communities online that discuss and enjoy cheating in games. It's absolutely nothing more than that and 10000% not related to game design.

[AeneasBK]

Your title is the opposite of the case surely.

Botting is a result of a game having so few flaws people will *pay* to progress in it.

Yes I know not all bots cost anything, nevertheless, a lot of bots are designed to make gold for selling, so even if the bot you're using is free, that gold that L'il Jimmy buys was most likely acquired by bots or hacked accounts (or both :P)

[stuck4cash]

The only way to stop botting would be to remove all the compelling reasons people play in the first place.

That's not true either. The other ways are to make it not viable or pointless. Technically both of those might be impossible (with the current design at least). I know Jagex has tried with Runescape quite a few times but I'm not sure on their success rate.

[Mirishka]

"Thread: Bot, a natural response to game design flaws?"

No. Bots are the 'natural response' of lazy fucking wankers who don't want to put in effort or time but reap the same rewards. Period.

If you believe its anything else, you need a new brain.

[Mifuyne]

I use my fishing one aprox. 4 hours a week while watching shows/doing other stuff on the PC.
Whilst it has the option to do anything really, I do not wish to use it in any other way.
With over 30k casts thrown out legit and completed salty - the thought of having to spend hours on fishing just for feast mats to help out my guild annoys me -
especially due to the fact fishing has not changed a bit and is no longer fun for me in any way.

Have mixed feelings about bot users myself tho.
Surely I find myself a tad lazy but not a outragous cheater.

[Lassira]

Any boring repetitive task will eventually be automated, even if it's inside a game. Blaming it on "human laziness" is hilarious, if it wasn't for this "human laziness" we wouldn't have most of our inventions.

To quote a great woman --

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention — invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.

You probably won't ever see challenge modes or heroic content botted because it's not repetitive, and it's not easy. You see BGs get botted because they're boring, frustrating, and easy. Something most people just don't want to deal with.

If they made arenas give honor or the ability to queue for rated BGs(that team balance etc) by yourself, you'd see a dramatic decrease in people botting for honor.

But hey, Blizzard does no wrong and their system that was implemented 6(7 now?) years ago is still fresh, new, and fun right?

[Barnabas]

Hello, I'm here to talk about the worst "problem" WoW players face today: Bots. This tool was very popular amongst PvPers, but today we can even see a few running heroics and even raids. Players from Europe and USA complain about this problem, and the appearant lack of action by Blizzard is making the problem worst. But, why do players use bots in the first place? Think about it, you are playing a game (an activity that occupies your mind, and makes you have fun), but instead, you put a machine to do that for you, illogical? Maybe not.

The gaming philosophy has changed. Back in time, games were designed to be fun and quick. Think about Mario Bros. you have a challenging enviroment, you have to overcome everything, otherwise you will have to start over again, and in the end, you finish the game. After that, there is little you can do, of course you can find secret levels, beat the game faster, but the game won't last many months, so you buy a new game.

Today's games have a new design approach, they are made to keep you playing. Think about all the updates, expansions and even subscriptions, it means you will always have something to do in the game, right? WoW is the perfect example, a huge success (even tho declining year after year) for 8 years, you always have something to do in game. So here lies the point of this topic, "something TO DO".

By developing a game following psychology patterns (check the internet for those), you hook the players and order them to perform some task. If you don't believe in it, try to remember that time you were in the main city, with nothing to do, and it came to your mind that it would be cool to raise your fishing skills to max. Of course this is just an example, but WoW is designed to have a huge pool of "jobs" you can/have to perform in order to shine in game or to not die of boredom.

Reputation grinds, gear farm, Honor, Conquest grind, Valor/Justice grind, rare drops grind, etc etc etc. Today in 5.1 patch we see the points been converted into items upgrades, what is it if not an "you have to grind in order to be competitive in PvP/PvE"? Ask yourself, do you run Warsong Gulch because it's fun to play a battleground for over 8 year, or because you have to if you want to have that feeling of accomplishment "yay, I got new gear", andstay conpetitive until the next patch hits?

If in Mario Bros. (example) the journey was fun and the end was rewarding, in WoW the journey is not fun, but you have rewards all the time. Of course there are TONS of fun stuff in WoW, but once you HAVE TO do this over and over again to satisfy your need, it becomes as boring as playing Sonic for the 10x time, it becomes a job. Of course there are some players who actually enjoy the repetition, but not everyone. Players are starting to realize that, as each day more and more players complaing about the fact the grind is terrible and boring. For someone who has been playing for 7 years, I can clearly notice that there are more and more complains about this subject each expansion.

So, you like to recieve items, and would like to be able to kill a player, or kill the boss boss, but you do not want to have a second job in your life, what do you do? Some players cancel their subscription, others employ BOTS.

Are bots a real problem, or a natural reaction to the game flaws? A player wants to have fun above all else, not to have a part time job in order to have fun later, and repeat the process each patch and each expansion. I have never used bots (afraid they will somehow catch me), but I understand the people who use it. Don't you think if the game was designed to be fun, and not a repetitive job, players would enjoy playing it and don't use bots?

So, what is your opinion?

I don't get the part that people are willing to pay $15 a month for something they don't enjoy. Even more for a bot if you choose to pay for one. Even more if you get banned and decide to buy the game again. Couldn't that person use that money to have a different hobby that they have fun doing?

[endersblade]

I use my fishing one aprox. 4 hours a week while watching shows/doing other stuff on the PC.
Whilst it has the option to do anything really, I do not wish to use it in any other way.
With over 30k casts thrown out legit and completed salty - the thought of having to spend hours on fishing just for feast mats to help out my guild annoys me -
especially due to the fact fishing has not changed a bit and is no longer fun for me in any way.

Have mixed feelings about bot users myself tho.
Surely I find myself a tad lazy but not a outragous cheater.

Careful. As many of us have discovered, and ultimately proven, people are just out for a witch hunt. They don't care if we use bots for practical purposes, or if we're straight up ruining a server's economy. It's all the same to them. There's absolutely no reason to try reasoning with these people. If you bot, you do so at your own risk and for your own reasons, and ultimately that's all that matters. Let the haters hate, keep doing what you're doing. They won't be complaining about bots when suddenly WoW isn't interesting anymore, and all the bots migrate elsewhere and suddenly their economies crash because there aren't enough items on the AH anymore.

I don't get the part that people are willing to pay $15 a month for something they don't enjoy. Even more for a bot if you choose to pay for one. Even more if you get banned and decide to buy the game again. Couldn't that person use that money to have a different hobby that they have fun doing?

Because I like having christmas every morning when I wake up.

[cFortyfive]

Any boring repetitive task will eventually be automated, even if it's inside a game. Blaming it on "human laziness" is hilarious, if it wasn't for this "human laziness" we wouldn't have most of our inventions.

So what it is true nonetheless. Laziness and greed. Easy as that.

Careful. As many of us have discovered, and ultimately proven, people are just out for a witch hunt. They don't care if we use bots for practical purposes, or if we're straight up ruining a server's economy. It's all the same to them.

Because it actually is all the same.

[Mifuyne]

Because it actually is all the same.

Please elaborate.

[Deleted]

Bots are a natural response to nonexistant ToU enforcement by Blizzard.

[oplawlz]

Cheating is not a "natural response" to anything. Suggesting it is reveals a fairly significant flaw in character.