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10 Tips for Writing Gaming Bots

Apparently it’s out. I’ve been botting games for years. Botting is my way of coping with an addiction to games. I simply cannot help myself. I start playing a game and I just cannot stop. And that’s where bots come in. Over the years I’ve found a number of ways to write bots. It started with easy little web scripts and has now morphed into a full blown SWT library framework that spans multiple games, multiple platforms and runs around 20 instances from my home network at all times.

But when you start writing bots, you enter into a new kind of game that is a game in and of itself: how not to get caught. Developers of these games mostly hate bots. Other players mostly hate bots. Even I hate bots when I encounter them in the wild (or Wildy according to what game you roll with). Most consider using a bot akin to turning to the dark side, and writing them to be synonymous with being the evil emperor. And with everyone out to get ya’, you have to be careful. Here are the top 10 tips and tricks to not get caught that I’ve picked up along the way:

1. Never bot using your main

Addictions hurt ourselves more than they hurt others. We often get attached to our main character. So be good to yourself, have a main that you play when you want. You can convert a bot to a main later, but bots get banned. So don’t bot with your main and make sure to keep the equipment from different characters separated.

2. Never bot when you can impact the user experience of others

Our addictions hurt ourselves, but they often hurt others even more. If you are coping using bots then do not harm the user experience for others who likely have a healthy relationship with the game by stealing resources that they need. The way I like to handle this is by telling my bots to simply log out of the game, or run away and do something different any time another character comes close to me. If there are no other players (or moderators) to report you for botting then did it happen?

3. Think Globally, Act Locally

The economies of these games can be very complex. When your bot flaps its wings there very well may be a tsunami in Deepholm or Varrock. The impact of botting is actually the foundation for many a global economy in many a MMORPG, whether the creators want to acknowledge it or not. But not my bots. My bots use or destroy all of the resources that they consume on a quest to either stockpile Millions or Billions of gold or (way more likely) to earn massive

4. Do not bot for too many concurrent hours

Sure, you may have gamed for 20 hour stretches. But you can’t do it too much, or you start looking a little like Bela Lugosi. Chances are, if you’re writing a bot to play a game for you, you’re on a road from addiction to functional addiction. Don’t expect your bot to do something you couldn’t. Again, it’s about mimicking human behavior here…

5. Do not use a bot to improve the same skill for too long

Improving a given skill becomes repetitive. It gets boring. Humans have to work on different skills after 4 or 5 hours of laboring mining for gold or throwing fireballs at orcs. It’s just the way it is, we’re human. But a bot does what you tell it to; over and over and over until it runs out of memory or you tell it to stop. Therefore, if you want to mimic human behavior then tell your bot to stop after it’s been running for a good 4 to 5 hours. I usually like to write bots to run my bots. These little controller programs will instruct the character to train one skill for a random interval somewhere between 4.5 and 5 hours and then to move on to another skill. Since many skills are dependent on other skills, this often makes the most logical sense (ie – you have to mine gold before you can smelt or smith it).

6. Account for random events

Developers of games do not want you to bot. It just so happens that there are a lot of bots running loose in any game (yes, even the silly Facebook games). One of the main ways that the developers try to catch you is by introducing random events. If your bot gets stuck on too many random events then you can pretty well assume you’re close to getting banned. I usually address this by having my bot pause, run special mini-game bots for the random events and then upon completion of those bots, unpause. Most games will have a maximum of 10 of these random events, with the most annoying part of solving them being waiting for them to happen. But if you find that your bots have high ban rates then this will help to keep that in check!

7. If you buy or download bots, make sure they’re from a trusted source

One word: virus. Next time I hear a Windows XP user complain about getting a virus ’cause they downloaded shady software from an untrusted source I’m gonna’ pop. Do you really think that bots aren’t someone grey area stuff as it is. But addicts know the blame game. Just don’t blame the author of the malware when you did something stupid.

8. Be social

This is where a bot-net can come in handy. But doesn’t that conflict with the rule of botics #2? No. You might really have a problem when you write bots to specifically talk to bots. When you have multiple bots communicating you have effectively built a bot-net. At this point, if your addiction gets too much worse you may find yourself hitting rock bottom and writing different types of bot-nets for shady and dangerous Russian’s (no offense to Russian’s but if you’re gonna’ harbor them you kinda’ have to own the repercussions).

9. Do not attach your name or typical handle to anything having anything to do with a bot

Do not trade ill-gotten items (you’re kidding yourself if you don’t think that botting is ill-gotten anything) to your main. Do not call the bot CharlesEdgeBot or whatever. Don’t use your email address or anything else that can help to track back to you. I’m not saying you have to go so far as to use Tor to anonymize your IP, but I do… 8D

10. Never, ever, ever tell anyone else that you are botting

When other people see your scores and your gear, they’re going to be envious. Writing scripts can take a lot of time. But so can playing the game. Nothing is going to get someone to report you faster than bragging about how awesome you are, then in a sad effort to pretend that you don’t have a problem, tell them you botted and have them go from envy to anger in short order. Remember, other players can spend months if not years building a character and be way behind you when you are botting. Put simply, players who don’t bot despise players who do bot and will report you. Keep your addiction to yourself and you may just keep out of trouble…

As you find success, you may find yourself going so far as to sell your ill-gotten equipment, gold or even characters. At this point, you have found your way to the dark side. But hey, at least we have cookies…