Open Letter to Online Game Developers: Allow Bots | Hacker News Reader

Open Letter to Online Game Developers: Allow Bots

aerique.blogspot.com

16 pointsaerique32 comments

Why not just create a personal bot trainer? There are lots more ways to accomplish what you need without developers allowing you to use bots.

The idea is silly really, it's like asking Infinity Ward and DICE to make Aimbot/wallhack servers for people to practice their AI skills. This would ruin gaming experience for those who don't participate in botting or AI programming. For what? A couple thousand sales? It's not worth the headache.

aimbots and wallhacks aren't AI though - they're cheats.

Bots that farm, hunt, gain xp ect. while your are away are cheats. Automated actions with no effort from the player is cheating.

Then the game is too simple. Rather than hunt down bots, they should make a more interesting game. The bots are a symptom, not a problem in themselves.

Too simple for whom?

I know I've been interested in and enjoyed many games that could be effectively botted - including some where you farm / hunt / gain XP.

Saying that these games are 'too simple' and shouldn't exist sounds a little arrogant, no?

Most of the games which end up fighting tooth-and-nail trench warfare against bots are just boring games. I don't think expressing that opinion is arrogance, per se.

Take games like minecraft or first person shooters like TF2, for example - there isn't a bot problem there for the most part (cheaters perhaps, but not bots), but farm and grind games like WoW or Farmville are rife with it. This is because WoW and Farmville are fundamentally pretty boring, but people want the shiny loot at the end.

'Boring' is subjective. There are millions upon millions of people who genuinely enjoy Farmville or WoW. I personally can't wait for Diablo III to come out, which will almost certainly be farm & grindy.

There exists a subset of games with large, engaged audiences and a user experience that is weakened by the presence of bots. The appropriate thing to do in this situation is ban bots. Whether you're interested or not in that subset of games is irrelevant.

Boring, but addictive. Without the brain-hook of watching your stats go up, would you still be that interested in playing Diablo?

Just think of all of the other types of games that might be made instead of the umpteenth iteration of UO/Everquest/WoW/Diablo. UO was released 15 years ago, and we still have the same fundamental game.

Bots break games, period.

They break game play, economies, immersion, etc. If you want to sand box them in a special server fine, but don't even think of unleashing them on the general population.

Bots break games that consist of doing the same thing over and over , are easily scriptable, and depends on false achievement to addict players (you've just wasted an hour clicking here and there repeatedly - have a cookie).

So no big loss there.

Actually - bots make such games interesting and demanding again.

What's the actual advantage to the game? Why would a company want to create a research server for people to perfect their bot programming?

One never knows what could come out of it. At the least they sell a couple of hundred or thousand extra accounts.

People are ingenious. I can imagine bot hunting parties or a person trying to crash a bot. It would be extra time spend in the game for the companies.

edit: btw good question, thanks!

I really like this idea. I don't have much time for gaming anymore, but something like this would be a selling point for me. I could write such a game off as an academic exercise.

There are a lot of AI/ML techniques you'd have to know or become familiar with. I imagine the competition to build the best bot at any given task, or best all-around bot, would be quite intense.

Someone please make this game.

I reckon Notch's games[1] would be the perfect fit, for zones like the OP mentions. A place for the "little Coder" to learn ML/AI etc

[1]: Minecraft or 0x10c etc.

Agreed. I don't really play games anymore, but this is something I'd do. Also, I'd imagine it's possible it'd help the companies with things like their bot detection schemes.. the checkbox gives them something of a control group.

someone could make a Game specifically for bots.

Having actually played games where bots are not allowed, I have done both of those things or similar (killing bots, making them get stuck in loops, getting the killed, teleporting them or otherwise making them get stuck, .. just about anything to screw with them) and seen plenty of people doing them.

I do not see how making bots legitimate would really be a factor in this type of behavior.

I can think of 2 aventages - you don't need to waste effort fighting bots anymore, and you can encourage some players that wouldn't want to play your game otherways.

Is this worth it is another question.

After the bots are perfected, what will stop users from using them in game along side unsuspecting players?

No one. The developer has not put much effort into fighting bots anymore. And now that the AI is so real, there would be no way they would catch bots gaming the system.

If we get strong AI thanks to that, I wouldn't worry about breaking some games. Bigger problem for humanity would be where to hide Sarrah Connor :)

The main reason I don't allow bots in my game is cost. In my game, the speed at which the game advances is only limited by the speed of the players, and bots can play thousands of times faster than a human.

Just a few aggressive bots could easily double my hosting expenses, and right now I'm not even profitable just with humans playing it. Bots can't offset their cost by being shown ads like humans can.

Hey, I see in your profile that you're the creator of warlight!

I hope it will get picked for the AI Challenge some time.

Thinking out loud and putting all realistic implications aside, for farm and grind games like World of Warcraft, it would be very interesting to see an anti-bot policy turned into an actual game mechanic; one that pits the noble, rule-abiding players against the evil bot cartel by offering achievements, bounties, or rewards for successfully reporting or disrupting bots.

My personal take on this is that if your game is going to suffer because of bots (assuming that they're not cheating bots, and are bound by the same rules as the players) then your game is broken and/or stupid, and the choices that your players are making are too simple.

Remember the Sid Meier quote about games being about making interesting choices?

EDIT: Since I'm getting up and downvoted willy-nilly, here's my blog entry where I go into more detail (using Farmville as the example): http://blog.oarsum.com/post/255516489/cheating-and-game-desi...

Too simple for what? Plenty of first person shooters are enjoyable and serve their purpose as entertainment, and any added complexity to hand-eye coordination would give a bot an advantage. Even an example of the genre that allowed for extensive team-based strategy would be unbalanced by a bot that automatically aimed and fired (even in a non-cheating way.)

Basketball can be a very cerebral game, with a ton of so-called interesting choices. Yet, if the opposing team is made up of simple minded players that never miss a shot, you've got your work cut out for you.

That's an incredibly broad statement, even leaving aside FPS games.

MMOs NEED the filler content that can be botted through because otherwise they just wouldn't have the content level to sustain hundreds of hours of gameplay. It's all about pacing, like a feature film versus a TV show.

To be honest, I think you're starting from Farmville, which basically isn't a game, and extrapolating from there.

It's not especially broad, and you can apply the same line of thinking to other games like Starcraft. APS uber alles and all that...

FPSes are somewhat different, but they tend not to have bot problems because FPSes are fun to play, and don't involve grinding. Even then, most of the modern FPSes have some randomness and you can't shoot with pixel perfect precision, so bots wouldn't necessarily have an advantage there.

But yeah -- filler content? botted through? Why would you pay money for a "game" like that? I certainly wouldn't. Even the free-to-play WoW clones are too tedious to play.

The alternative to filler content isn't a better game, it's no game at all. You couldn't make a game like World of Warcraft where the content was all too interesting and varied, so that bots wouldn't work and you wouldn't want them to anyway.

WoW is already one of the most complex pieces of engineering in the world. It's the gaming equivalent of arguing for the Sufficiently Smart Compiler. Strictly speaking games would be better off without it, sure. But you might as well be arguing in favor of fusion power - free energy! No nuclear waste! Etc.

Bots absolutely devastate FPS games. They have bot problems and they're not solved by the games being fun, they're solved by policing by admins. Even if the game has randomness, by god, have you ever seen a bot play? Take a look at this (jump half way through).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Huz5ZROt0j8

A single slice has Headshot! Avenger! Longshot! Execution! Longshot! Headshot! One Shot Kill! Headshot! as quickly as they can come on the screen. A newbie is lucky to get one of those every couple of minutes. An experienced player would not be able to defeat that bot. And this is typical of FPS bots.

And what about chess? If computers get much better, one of the most interesting games the world has ever known is going to be ruined (in places where bot detection is not possible).

Maybe other people are learning from your insights, but I've been a full time independent game developer for 7 years (and by that I mean, if the games aren't fun, I don't eat) and I'm left scratching my head.

That's really just wallhacking and aimbotting - not really an AI as such. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a human doing the pathfinding with a 'shoot them in the head' button. If your FPS allows you to shoot with pixel perfect precision from across the map, rather than a more realistic 'in a general area', or if it's sending information that you shouldn't be allowed to have, then of course people are going to bot it. That's a hack/cheating, and should be banned, but it's more effective to make your game unbottable and not sending information that the player shouldn't know.

WoW is not really that complex or difficult - maybe from a scaling point of view, but you just have to look at all of the clones that have sprung up to realise that it's not that hard. Botting there derives from wanting a shiny sword of whatever like my friend Bruce, but I can't be bothered grinding the same mob over and over for three months hoping that it'll drop.

I play a game called World of Tanks which has a cone of fire mechanism (as you hold the gun still your accuracy improves), along with needing to take cover, work with teammates, help spot enemies, etc. Movement is also pretty slow, especially for the larger tanks.

Bots in that game routinely get spotted and reported, not because they're headshotting people from across the map, but because they're shit - they're just not capable of the strategy or tactics required (eg. they'll leave fields of fire open, won't move when spotted, won't take advantage of terrain, will be out of position, etc.) It's a far more interesting game than "run around like an olympic sprinter and headshot people from the hip".

It's arguable whether there's any type of multiplayer game that doesn't get ruined by bots. As an example, bot chess players are known to be extremely good, so they aren't ruining the game by making it too easy for the human player; but if a human is playing a multiplayer chess game, it's probably because they want to play other humans. So by a bot being on there, it's ruining it. Not only that, but if there are enough bots, then they're going to end up playing each other which is a waste of resources. So my point here is, bots can ruin ANY game even ones where the bots are as good or better than most human players at the game and not simply doing something dumb and repetitive.

Now, there's the reality which is that the only time you have bots on a large scale in a multiplayer game is when there's something to be gained by their use. Whether it's purely farming the game for the benefit of a player while he's at work so he's at an advantage when he comes back compared to people who did not run bots all day or whether it's someone doing it for actual profit; neither is good for the health of the game. Regular players are then being pushed further down the in game economy and scale of power unless they run bots themselves.

And again, there's the issue of wasting resources. For games that don't charge a monthly fee, the proprietors of bots are clearly abusing the system and misappropriating resources of the game developer that's running the servers.

Bots should be stopped with every means possible on every game. And when people are caught running them they should be permanently banned for life, IMHO (not just until they buy another copy of the game in question, which is often how this is handled.)

If you want to make a game that allows bots openly, go for it. I don't think you'll see much success, though.

> Now, there's the reality which is that the only time you have bots on a large scale in a multiplayer game is when there's something to be gained by their use.

...and the game is too tedious to play. Isn't that a sign of a problem with your game - when people would rather script it than play it?

There used to be gangs of players in Ultima Online who would go around hunting down farmers and botters. A pity they didn't put the same sort of energy into demanding a better play experience.

> ...and the game is too tedious to play.

That is not true at all. In fact, the opposite is true, because the bots only rise up as a problem on a popular game. If the game was so boring nobody wanted to play it, then nobody would care about the results of botting.

No, bots are a problem not because the game is "too boring", but because people naturally want to abuse the system and gain advantage via automation. Whether that advantage is purely in the game, or results in real world cash.

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