What kind of games are impossible to bot?

[Vampiregenesis]

I was making research yesterday in order to see if this bot pandemic on wow exists on other popular games too. My first target was CS:GO and FIFA since these games are very popular and you can sell stuff there. To my surprise, there doesn't seem to be any full automated playing bots there. There are some hacks and aimbots on CS:GO but nothing for fully automated gameplay like in wow, same goes for FIFA, there are some sniping bots for the AH there but nothing that automatically plays the game for you. There are even some MMORPG such as bdo and PoE where fully automated bots exist but aren't as effective as they do in WoW. They aren't competitive enough.

In fact, in my research, I realized that only wow and some older games such as L2 are hit by this pandemic and bots are ultra-effective there. I suppose there are other MMORPG or MOBA too where bots thrive but I didn't research it much. I personally looking to switch to a bot-free game. I have been thinking a lot about it lately. Now, this got me curious and I'm trying to expand my knowledge on this subject.

My questions are:

1. Why there aren't any full automated bots on CS:GO? Are fps games safe from bots?

2. What kind of games are safe from bots and which ones are more vulnerable to it?

3. Do you think the option to open multiple clients of the same game on one PC aka multiboxing makes it much easier to bot a game? EG. In bdo you can't do that.

4. Does it take a lot of resources and time to create and sustain a competitive bot? so these developers wouldn't bother with a smaller game than WoW because it's not worth their time?

[Mysterymask]

1. Well compared to wow there isnt a grind in fps's and you dont get rewarded when you lose. In wow and the like its either a tideous grind a bot can easily do..or in pvp bots its just as effective to lose 1000 games you arent playing vs winning 100. In an fps...you are basically an AI bot and you get nothing when you lose.

2. Fighting games...the delay makes bots pretty unusable and other players make them ineffective. Console games are also pretty bot proof simply due to the fact its not a pc.

3. Not answering dont know

4. Realistically yes. There has to be a want for it and a way to profit from it. Fall Guys had a bad bot problem and i think still does. Also adaquate cheat protection is an ever going battle.

[lokithor]

My questions are:

1. Why there aren't any full automated bots on CS:GO? Are fps games safe from bots?

2. What kind of games are safe from bots and which ones are more vulnerable to it?

3. Do you think the option to open multiple clients of the same game on one PC aka multiboxing makes it much easier to bot a game? EG. In bdo you can't do that.

4. Does it take a lot of resources and time to create and sustain a competitive bot? so these developers wouldn't bother with a smaller game than WoW because it's not worth their time?

1. Can't speak abouut CS:GO, but apex and CoD have aimbots. not fully automated where you can just afk it though

2. No game is "safe" from bots. If theres enough money to be made someone will make one.

3. No not really, just look at WoW. There are bots for BDO btw

4. not true, hell UO and Lotro still have "bots"

[Calfredd]

4. not true, hell UO and Lotro still have "bots"

Let's not forget Runescape which is plagued with bots especially for fishing. I'd say Runescape is definitely smaller than WoW.

[Chaelexi]

I was making research yesterday in order to see if this bot pandemic on wow exists on other popular games too. My first target was CS:GO and FIFA since these games are very popular and you can sell stuff there. To my surprise, there doesn't seem to be any full automated playing bots there. There are some hacks and aimbots on CS:GO but nothing for fully automated gameplay like in wow, same goes for FIFA, there are some sniping bots for the AH there but nothing that automatically plays the game for you. There are even some MMORPG such as bdo and PoE where fully automated bots exist but aren't as effective as they do in WoW. They aren't competitive enough.

In fact, in my research, I realized that only wow and some older games such as L2 are hit by this pandemic and bots are ultra-effective there. I suppose there are other MMORPG or MOBA too where bots thrive but I didn't research it much. I personally looking to switch to a bot-free game. I have been thinking a lot about it lately. Now, this got me curious and I'm trying to expand my knowledge on this subject.

My questions are:

1. Why there aren't any full automated bots on CS:GO? Are fps games safe from bots?

2. What kind of games are safe from bots and which ones are more vulnerable to it?

3. Do you think the option to open multiple clients of the same game on one PC aka multiboxing makes it much easier to bot a game? EG. In bdo you can't do that.

4. Does it take a lot of resources and time to create and sustain a competitive bot? so these developers wouldn't bother with a smaller game than WoW because it's not worth their time?

Sports games do not really have bots. As similar to fighting the delay in and reaction time would not be good. Bots work in MMO's because they have a grind and time sync to them and a slow reaction time is not overly costly. You can get away with it when you are farming mobs, crafting mats, etc. This is why Bots were easy to kill in PVP cause they are not able to handle the fast actions that players will do.

[Cosmic Janitor]

In theory no game is safe from botting, some are just more challenging. The biggest limiting factor is probably what kind of information your bot gets access to. If you can for example directly parse network packets and turn the data into sensible information to process (like a 2D map with positions) then you have a way easier time than when you need to create an abstraction layer or two when dealing with actual visual rendering data. From there it get's more difficult when you have to deal with complex surroundings on multiple vertical levels, etc. There is a whole field of study dedicated to (autonomous) pathfinding, the tools they've created work in theory for virtual worlds as well as they do in reality if you can get enough sensory data to work with.

In general you will probably find less bots on consoles, since not every kid can download a bot and run it locally to grind some currency while on the shitter. While not impossible to overcome, you encounter a rather massive hurdle here that requires at least a certain level of (M/E/IT) engineering to overcome, which is usually not worth the effort for most people, other than academic exercises.

Running multiple clients just makes botting more attractive, since there is an incentive to maximize a certain aspect by gaming a rule in the game itself (x charges per gathering node). All this boils down to is just a discussion about why people bot in the first place. In the case of WoW it's because you can turn materials into gold and gold into cash. And the last part of that equation can be substituted with "time = money", to expand the pool of potential reasons even further (like fishing bots, which are mostly a thing because people hate fishing).

Like the previous part, it mostly depends on why someone wants to bot the game in the first place. You will surely be less likely to find someone botting a smal game with 2 players, unless one of these 2 happens to be someone capable of making a bot. If that is worth it depends on the aforementioned factors, this is a case by case thing.

There is also a discussion to be had about how bots work with an economy. In large games you can substitute bots with chinese farmers as well, afterall it is supply and demand problem. Dealing with a bunch of those isn't exactly pleasant either.

[Vampiregenesis]

1. Well compared to wow there isnt a grind in fps's and you dont get rewarded when you lose. In wow and the like its either a tideous grind a bot can easily do..or in pvp bots its just as effective to lose 1000 games you arent playing vs winning 100. In an fps...you are basically an AI bot and you get nothing when you lose.

2. Fighting games...the delay makes bots pretty unusable and other players make them ineffective. Console games are also pretty bot proof simply due to the fact its not a pc.

So, a MMO fps game such as destiny 2 is no different than a MMORPG like wow? Do you think there would be bots on MMO fps games if there was a casual mode to farm and sell stuff? Is it only the competitive element that makes them unusable? That raises another question though, why are there so many bots on LoL considering it is a competitive game? I suppose they are using them for leveling only and they are good enough to be carried up to maximum level?

As for consoles, I heard that the diablo3 community hates them because there are some hacks there. Of course, that may not have anything to do with botting at all.

What do you think about PvE complex mechanics like dungeon/raid bosses? is this something bots can handle? Can they only handle trash mobs with extremely predictable mechanics or no mechanics at all?

Anyway, thanks for the answers guys.

So far what I get is that competitive games, complex games, and console games are safer from bots. Smaller games might not be safer if there is an RMT market there. Of course, there is a less chance to meet bots on smaller games if the company is putting enough effort to keep them away.

[GnomeEU]

There are no bot proof games.
Botting is simply reading a games memory and then acting on it. If you find the address where enemy starts casting a spell you can interrupt the spell the nanosecond it starts casting.

In fps you can write a bot that kills you every time before you even notice it entered your screen. It can calculate perfect shots and kill you 1 ms after seeing you on their screen (in memory)

Console games are not safe from bots, just because you don't have a keyboard doesn't mean you can't attach one and start hacking. Just because you don't notice bots doesn't mean they don't exist. Maybe it's not lucrative to bot those games?
PoE has bots for everything, but it's mostly a single player game. So you don't notice and you usually don't buy currency for real life money.

Botting in wow is lucrative because in the end you can sell gold for real life money.

There is no single boosting community that doesn't sell their gold for real life money.

3.
Just because you can open a game only once doesn't mean you can't read and edit its memory.
If you find the address where the game limits only one instance you can open every software multiple times.

4.
It takes a lot of resources, but for most hackers it's a hobby so they don't care.

The best way to stop bots is giving players lots of stuff to do.
If the bot has to grind reputation for a month before it becomes competitive then you can ban it for a month before it does dmg.

If you want a bot free game then play single player games.

[kranur]

Don't think any game is safe from being automated. But based on what it needs to do it can can easily get to the point of not worth bothering.

For example you can create a bot in WoW that does actual pvp and tries to counter and kill other players but it's not really worth it to put the time to write the logic for it only for blizz to change the gameplay or find a way to make it unusable.

[Squigglyo]

As a Programmer who taught himself coding by making Runescape bots (every skill at the time, random events, sliding puzzles, quests, etc)

Theres also a big difference between 'Hacking' and 'Botting'. Hacking is cheating, doing something in game that normal people cant do. Botting is automating it, doing the same things a human can do, just without the human.

No game is bot proof.
I could make a bot to play litteraly any game. Anything you as a person can do, i can replicate in some way.
Making them smart however is the hard part. Not impossible though, just would take a lot of time depending on the complexity of the game.





To answer your questions
1. Why there aren't any full automated bots on CS:GO? Are fps games safe from bots?
FPS games are definitly not safe from bots. The AI is litteraly a bot. it wouldnt be hard for someone to create an FPS bot, it just needs someone outside of the game to create the exact same thing.
It would take me less than an hour to make a bot that moves to a specific part of the map, camps and shoots when it sees something on the screen. Making it more complex and capable of 'thinking', would probably take a week or two. Making it capable of winning? Few months of testing.

2. What kind of games are safe from bots and which ones are more vulnerable to it?

Slower games are easier to bot. Most things in Runescape require you to click, wait, click, wait. Warcraft crafting bots, fishing, auction house sniping, etc all easy.
Faster games are harder, but still fairly easy once you have a base for a bot going. Again, AI is basically botting, so any game with an AI is a game that someones internally made a bot for (or machine learning did).

I cant pick any genre that would be 'hardest' to bot, cause they all are easy. They all would follow some basic formula of 'do this, then this, then this'. Its only when you have them versing actual humans then it gets harder.

3. Do you think the option to open multiple clients of the same game on one PC aka multiboxing makes it much easier to bot a game? EG. In bdo you can't do that.

Easier? No
it just makes it more convenient to do it multiple times.

4. Does it take a lot of resources and time to create and sustain a competitive bot? so these developers wouldn't bother with a smaller game than WoW because it's not worth their time?
A 'competitive' bot takes a lot of testing. Creating it is the easy part, making sure it is good and able to adjust to every scenario however is what adds complexity.
Bots exist in WoW mostly to gain gold.
Bots exist in other games to help people get ahead however the game needs it.
For botting to exist in a game you need 1 of 2 things. A bot coder who plays the game and starts out botting for himself, or someone who hires a bot coder. Its either self interest or money that creates bots.

[Mysterymask]

Console games are not safe from bots, just because you don't have a keyboard doesn't mean you can't attach one and start hacking. Just because you don't notice bots doesn't mean they don't exist. Maybe it's not lucrative to bot those games?

Console games are SAFER....a ps4 has more layers of protection than a PC. If the system finds out your running a bot or you fuck with the firmware sony bans you from their online and thats that. With a pc you have one layer to deal with versus xbox switch and playstation naturally having 2.

And yes bots do exist in consoles do the suprise trade in pokemon sword and shield for a bit and youll get a lovely shiny perfect legendary with the unchangable name of the site that makes and sells them. Though go into anything online with that and youll be banned in an instant. But in the grand scheme of things they are extremely rare

[bloodmoth13]

any game with a grind will make botting attractive.
There isnt any point in botting competitive games unless you are unlocking stuff. Couldnt imagine botting a FPS what would be the point?
Mobas could use botting if only to unlock everything, but bots in those games are extremely detrimental.
If its a cheat bot that outskills opponents with perfect ai then i could maybe understand it

[The Butt Witch]

Pretty sure you can't bot in Rust. I mean why would you anyway?

[gaymer77]

There are plenty of MMOs on the PC that are free of bots and that's because they use an anti-botting software that must run before the game itself launches and disconnects you from their servers if the program gets disabled. They tend to be a little on the annoying side when you go to load the game but they're virtually bot free. As others have mentioned, fighting games tend to be free of bots too because of the nature of game play. It can be done but it also requires the game itself to be less PC intensive as there is that anti-botting program that has to run in the background at the same time as the game itself.

[Vampiregenesis]

As a Programmer who taught himself coding by making Runescape bots (every skill at the time, random events, sliding puzzles, quests, etc)

Theres also a big difference between 'Hacking' and 'Botting'. Hacking is cheating, doing something in game that normal people cant do. Botting is automating it, doing the same things a human can do, just without the human.

No game is bot proof.
I could make a bot to play litteraly any game. Anything you as a person can do, i can replicate in some way.
Making them smart however is the hard part. Not impossible though, just would take a lot of time depending on the complexity of the game.





To answer your questions
1. Why there aren't any full automated bots on CS:GO? Are fps games safe from bots?
FPS games are definitly not safe from bots. The AI is litteraly a bot. it wouldnt be hard for someone to create an FPS bot, it just needs someone outside of the game to create the exact same thing.
It would take me less than an hour to make a bot that moves to a specific part of the map, camps and shoots when it sees something on the screen. Making it more complex and capable of 'thinking', would probably take a week or two. Making it capable of winning? Few months of testing.

2. What kind of games are safe from bots and which ones are more vulnerable to it?

Slower games are easier to bot. Most things in Runescape require you to click, wait, click, wait. Warcraft crafting bots, fishing, auction house sniping, etc all easy.
Faster games are harder, but still fairly easy once you have a base for a bot going. Again, AI is basically botting, so any game with an AI is a game that someones internally made a bot for (or machine learning did).

I cant pick any genre that would be 'hardest' to bot, cause they all are easy. They all would follow some basic formula of 'do this, then this, then this'. Its only when you have them versing actual humans then it gets harder.

3. Do you think the option to open multiple clients of the same game on one PC aka multiboxing makes it much easier to bot a game? EG. In bdo you can't do that.

Easier? No
it just makes it more convenient to do it multiple times.

4. Does it take a lot of resources and time to create and sustain a competitive bot? so these developers wouldn't bother with a smaller game than WoW because it's not worth their time?
A 'competitive' bot takes a lot of testing. Creating it is the easy part, making sure it is good and able to adjust to every scenario however is what adds complexity.
Bots exist in WoW mostly to gain gold.
Bots exist in other games to help people get ahead however the game needs it.
For botting to exist in a game you need 1 of 2 things. A bot coder who plays the game and starts out botting for himself, or someone who hires a bot coder. Its either self interest or money that creates bots.

What programming language did you learn and how long did it take to learn this skill? (just curious)

From my research, it looks like "harder to bot" games such as fps, action rpg with inefficient grinds, and console games don't have any publicly advertised bot neither a demand about one. Most games that have bots are mostly tab target mmos with click to move functions and even then the bots are made for the simplest tasks that don't include multiple different scenarios. So in the end, what makes it harder to develop a decent bot is usually enough to prevent bot development and the demand for it unless of course, there are bots out there but are all private and not released publicly.

Could another reason for this be that it's hard to test a bot while dealing with reports/bans/kicks etc? The bot has to endure until you encounter all the scenarios you need to adjust it for. Isn't this a problem?

Overall, I don't think that devs who are involved in botting and RMT are not good enough to see that there is an untapped market for botting in multiple games. If it was possible to create a productive bot there they would do it. So yes, it's possible to bot anything but probably not worth it when it starts to get harder.

- - - Updated - - -

There are plenty of MMOs on the PC that are free of bots and that's because they use an anti-botting software that must run before the game itself launches and disconnects you from their servers if the program gets disabled. They tend to be a little on the annoying side when you go to load the game but they're virtually bot free. As others have mentioned, fighting games tend to be free of bots too because of the nature of game play. It can be done but it also requires the game itself to be less PC intensive as there is that anti-botting program that has to run in the background at the same time as the game itself.

Can you name a few of the most popular ones who have this?

[Cosmic Janitor]

There isnt any point in botting competitive games unless you are unlocking stuff. Couldnt imagine botting a FPS what would be the point?

Have you played one recently? All of them (the modern FPS, like CoD/BF) have awful progression systems that you need to grind through to unlock stuff.

[Squigglyo]

What programming language did you learn and how long did it take to learn this skill? (just curious)

I believe the first botting stuff i dabbled in was in Delphi. Color clickers that could manipulate/replicate mouse/keyboard inputs.

[gaymer77]

Can you name a few of the most popular ones who have this?

That there is the key word in your question. There aren't any. All of the ones that do aren't that heavily populated. If I'm remembering correctly Rift has one and can't remember off the top of my head others who do but there are quite a few but they have never been "popular" games. I think Aion started off with one or got one added later after it passed hands to another publisher or something.

[bloodmoth13]

Have you played one recently? All of them (the modern FPS, like CoD/BF) have awful progression systems that you need to grind through to unlock stuff.

nope, last time i played fps games was when i was a kid playing unreal tournament or doom 2. parents never got me an xbox but i played halo at friends houses or call of duty zombies but otherwise no.

I remember sinking hours into UT without any progression system, it was fun as heck.
I swear they are turning gaming into a lifestyle by forcing grinds in games, im about to give up on wow, been fucking around trying to catch up so i can play along with friends but the new patch will drop before i even get close.
Really doesnt help that im old now and have house/family to focus on.

[Kokolums]

You can 100% prevent botting via an internet cafe where players can login on a machine but can't actually touch the machine outside of the supplied mouse and keyboard. And they do not get access to the internet beyond playing the game. And no access to anything else on the computer but the game.

Of course you must guard against social engineering, so no talking to staff because the first thing a wannabe hacker / botter will do is try to convince staff to give him access to the machine to do x.