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by Frotag 359 days ago
I've botted in a few MMORPG games and the appeal is that it's basically a new perspective on the game. Also makes it more of a technical challenge than a test of mechanical skill or free time / patience.

It still feels like a game in the sense that there's progression and rewards for progression. For example, learning how to read cooldowns means you can make smarter macros and double your income / cut kill time by half. There's even different "build paths" in that you can choose to go the memory reading build (fragile but reliable), network sniffing build (less fragile but expensive), or computer vision build (easy but unreliable and expensive).

From a technical perspective, the appeal is having an excuse to try out new stuff like SAT solvers, rules engines, or whatever ML thing I just learned about. It's also a good exercise in all the math and data structures + algos stuff I've learned but never use at dayjob. Optionally, building a UI to manage the bot is fun for the same reasons, an excuse to try out new frameworks / design choices / etc. It's basically another programming job but without the icky business / customer considerations.

Though I do agree that cheats in any PvP scenario is pretty lame. It has a much bigger negative impact on other players, and it's not as much of a puzzle (mostly aimbot and pathing). In comparison, PvE games are usually social and unless you're running a swarm of VMs, you're unlikely to affect the economy or otherwise inconvenience anyone.

2 comments

Can't edit my comment anymore but for anyone that's played Factorio, it feels a lot like that. Both in the way you slowly switch out hand-fed systems for automated systems that build on each other and in how you get a unique base (bot) out of it in the end. Plus there's something exciting about beating the game in a way the devs didn't envision and one that other players haven't.
It's a technical challenge for the script kiddie making their own hacks, but from what I gather most PvP cheaters nowadays are paying (!!!) a subscription for their cheats.