The Automation Bot in MMORPGs - These Aren't Your Older Brother's Bots

There are many ways for gamers to cheat in today's massively distributed and social online games. For developers, however, automated playing, also called "botting", represents one of the more problematic methods. The reason is simple: developers know, just as gamers do, that the use of botting programs is motivated not solely by the desire to compete at a high level. Counter-strike aim bots still exist, of course, but the more interesting ones are bots generated from the macro language of the game itself! Such iterations resist software detection, and developers basically have to rely on social methods of detection (i.e. real human players noticing 'odd' behavior).

Automated player agents, also called "bots" or "game bots", are no longer merely "software gimmicks". That's because the difference between cheating in a first-person shooter (e.g. Valve's Counter-Strike) and cheating in a Massively Online Multiplayer Game (e.g. Blizzard/Vivendi's World of Warcraft) is astronomical. The former involves an unfair gameplay advantage. Typical examples include "auto-bots" and/or "wall hacks".1 Auto-bots have been used in games like the World of Warcraft. Their usefulness is a function of their ability to outlast human patience, making them the perfect tool for grinding experience and/or gold. Thus these bots might be used as a service (i.e. a power leveling service) or merely to augment greatly one's earning power within the game.

Considered as a device, bots have implications that extend beyond the game world; it's economic and even social implications cannot be ignored. In short, the use of bots in massively online games spells economic opportunity for those willing to take the risk. As evidenced by the financial, legal, and technological efforts conveyed by game developers and software security personnel, game bots have become the target of increasingly escalated countermeasures. As the virtual currency trading market has exploded in the past several years, quintessentially indicated in the market for World of Warcraft gold, game developers have extended their ability to monitor, control, and maintain their ownership over their "property". Such efforts have been characteristically motivated by financial reasons: automated player agents represent an essential tool of the exchange process (that is, between virtual gold and real money).

While the automation of playing cannot be a priori justified by the nature of the video games in question, it cannot be completely ignored.
In that sense, bots ought to be understood not merely as a motivating factor in the creation of secondary markets and/or virtual economies; we must also remember that this latest iteration (i.e. the automated player agent) is a product of game design and the advent and growth of distributed systems.

AIM-bots typically gives the player a humanely-impossible level of accuracy while shooting opponents. Wall-hacking involves a player using a program to "hack" the navigation points of a game, allowing her access to paths and/or locations she wouldn't normally be able to use.