[sparkie]

I used to be on the side of cheaters, but mostly for fun. Was never funded but could have made profit from it. I know several people who went in that direction and made good money. As teenagers with no qualifications, getting a blue collar job wasn't really an option.

Attempts at protecting a game client from reverse engineering are mostly a waste of time. These protections can be beaten faster than they can be developed. Once a hacker has reverse engineered your wire protocol and cryptography your game client is just one of potentially several.

Has probably changed a lot over the past decade or so, but the developers at the time were wasting their efforts on tightening their software clients rather than using AI, honeypots and other techniques on the server to detect and ban bots. I recall offering to work for a couple of the companies whose games I had developed cheats for, but they rejected me right away without even an interview.

One of the issues is: MMOs are often very repetitive. The actions of your real users are somwhat bot-like to begin with. This means bot developing isn't that difficult. Adding randomness to the behaviour of the bot can make it look like a regular player. I suspect there are some differences which some well trained neural networks might be able to classify, but you need to be really careful of false positives because anything which gets in the way of regular players enjoying the game will lose you customers.

[jv22222]

Interesting. For the cheaters, how does the business side of it work?

[sparkie]

The revenue is mostly from selling in-game money and rare items which are farmed by bots. There are many trading websites you can use, just search "buy WoW gold" for instance. (I just looked and this market looks incredibly saturated compared 15 years ago).

Selling the bots themselves was an option, but people can just reverse engineer your bot and redistribute it. The bot typically ends up posted on some public forum and becomes a target for the developers to patch against. Also, the more people who are running the bots in game, the less profit you are going to have from selling your items because they're more abundant, so it is better to keep it confidential and just have many accounts farming.

Before the bots were commonplace, there were Chinese "sweatshops" where people were paid scraps to play the games for 20+ hours a day in horrific working conditions. Would hear stories like "man dies from playing MMORPG for 36 hours straight".