anyone got a bot maker for games?

[teh noobshow]

if anyone has a bot maker for games please post the link

[jwenting]

no, we're not going to help cheaters and PK'ing lowlife thieves.

[MattEvans]

Psh.. it's not so serious.. a bot isn't necessarily bad. IMNSHO, there's no such thing as 'cheating' in a computer game.. It's like 'cheating' in reading a book by looking at the last page first. It only really hurts yourself. Oh yeah.. w/ regard to online tournaments, ok, ok. Don't cheat in a tournament, you'll get found out and blacklisted anyway, or just lose respect in w/e gamerz community you're a part of. For MMORPGS? Hey, the real world has gangs and murderers and fraudsters, so I guess, if there are people who play that way in an MMO world, they're a feature!

But anyway, on topic: No, no idea where to find a bot maker. It likely depends what game, since there's rarely such a thing as 'generic'.

[uchiha doujitsu]

Im new to game development. what is a bot or a bot maker?

[jwenting]

a bot is an illegal (usually) plugin for an online game that allows people to cheat.
It will play for them, allowing them to for example do repetitive tasks for days or weeks on end that build up a character or the character's wealth without the player doing anything.
Or it enhances the player's reaction time or perception of the game environment so he can spot prey (iow, other characters to kill and steal from).
Or (the third major kind) it allows the player to play several characters at the same time, so he can control an entire army all at once and again use that to attack other players and steal from them.

The only legitimate bots are run by game companies themselves during testing of games and to combat player controlled bots.

[Narue]

>a bot isn't necessarily bad.
I beg to differ. In MMOs bots encourage farming and can severely damage the game economy and balance.

>IMNSHO, there's no such thing as 'cheating' in a computer game.
Once again taking my experience from MMOs, bots are almost always in violation of the EULA as a form of cheating. Violating the EULA is an illegal act as well.

>It only really hurts yourself.
Perhaps if you're the only one playing the game and the results have zero effect on others. That's as silly as it is rare though; bots are generally used to improve one's standing in multiplayer games.

[MattEvans]

I dont think cases of this have ever been put through a court ( I may be wrong, but it's not critical to my argument ). Just because a EULA says something is illegal doesn't actually mean that it is... A publisher can put anything in a EULA, and a EULA is totally worthless if its proved to be overly restrictive or untenable. A EULA is un-inforceable in many countries; lots of these 'cheaters' are offshore in countries/jurisdictions which might not even respect a game's copyright let alone a usage agreement.

As I said previously, I do think of these people as a feature, they're a minority, interesting on a level, and the companies controlling servers + the publishers seem to be able to deal with it, and do put sufficient measures in place from the very beginning ( security is a good thing to consider from the beggining! it's the responsibility of the publisher to make sure that they can keep control, or at least make it difficult to cheat. Relying totally on legislation is .. well, a pretty poor approach considering the worldwide stage ).

I think that the 'real' law should stay well away from computer games. I don't want to be legally liable in this world for my actions in a virtual world. That's the whole point of a virtual world!

That is my personal opinion on the matter, as a player of various games in the past, and as an amateur developer now. I don't feel obliged to back it up or argue it as 'teh correct way'', but I don't really mind doing so =P.

[Narue]

>Just because a EULA says something is illegal doesn't actually mean that it is...
No, it really is. Violation of the EULA constitutes violation of a license agreement, and a license agreement is a legally binding contract. Allow me to point out the logical fallacy in your argument.

1) An EULA can be overturned in court and,
2) An EULA cannot be enforced everywhere therefore,
3) Violation of an EULA is not illegal.

The error being the assumption that the EULA would be overturned in court or that all violators are in a location where the EULA cannot be enforced. The fact is that your two cases are exceptions rather than the rule, and if you remove the exceptions, your claim is silly. Violating an EULA is an illegal act that can be prosecuted however the creator wishes. This could be an actual lawsuit or it could simply be termination of services.

>I think that the 'real' law should stay well away from computer games.
Most software has license agreements, and violations of these agreements have been taken to court. I don't see how a video game license agreement is different from any other software.

[MattEvans]

If a EULA gets overturned in a court, or if a little niggle in the wording prevents the EULA being upheld, or equally, prevents it being considered applicable with regard to creating(?) the intented restriction, going against those things in the EULA that would result in actions being 'illegal' ( by breaking a legally binding agreement ) wouldn't actually be illegal. It's not really a logical falacy, it's a consequence of a -- completely possible -- set of events. Rare, perhaps; but since it seems they use this kind of clause in their agreements ( as in, restrictions on means of play not as in restrictions on copyright infringment and illegal distribution ) more as a threat than as a legal tool, it doesn't seem to have come up enough to have been really tested in a court.

I think it is quite different from protecting a copyright or restricting distribution. They push agreements on us as uneducated people, we're not lawyers, we don't really want to have to think about these things. It has the potential to pull consumers into legal problems on the whim of a publisher and criminalizes laughable things. I just don't really think that's the way things should be, and I'm pretty sure that many people ( thinking purely as 'consumers' ) have that view aswell.

[Narue]

>It's not really a logical falacy, it's a consequence of a -- completely possible -- set of events.
It's a logical fallacy because you've derived a hard conclusion based on the assumption that those events have already taken place. To remove the fallacy you have to prove that those assumptions are true, or alter your conclusion to allow for the alternative where those assumptions prove false.

[MattEvans]

If I'd made a blanket statement like "A EULA never has any legal power", then yeah, you'd be absolutely right.

I didn't really make that statement though; my point is that something they put in a EULA isn't always gonna be upheld, and they ( producers ) do flirt on the line between tenable and untenable when they put restrictions on the way a consumer 'is allowed' to use a product.

[jwenting]

tough luck kid. That license is a legally binding contract, period.
If the company issueing that license chooses not to take you to court for violating it because that would be too expensive (or in the case of US companies in EU courts futile because of the hostility of the EU towards the US rather than the actual law) that doesn't change the legality of that contract.

And quite besides legalities, using bots is uncivilised behaviour, it's childish, it's extremely selfish in that you're ruining other peoples' enjoyment of the game for your own entertainment.
It's second only to PK'ing in the level of immediate annoyance it provides, and probably worse for the longterm destruction it does to the game economy and society as a whole.

People using bots are scum and rightly treated as such.

[MattEvans]

Ah, you know what I said -- with regard to legality -- I wont repeat again. With a bot specifically, I fail to see how it can even be a violation of the terms of use of a service/connection, since a bot is usually a modified client.

With regard to morals, no way! PKing is a sin, now? It's a game! people who get worked up about being killed in a game have gone way wrong in the head.

[jwenting]

modified clients are against the TOS of most if not all online games, point proven.

yes, PK'ing is wrong. It's murder. And that's against the rules of any game decent people play.
Noone's talking about PVP combat, we're talking (and you know it) about people who murder others by either attacking players with far lower ranking then them and/or luring players into areas where they'll surely be killed.

But you've shown your true nature as a PK'ing cheating pirating (no doubt) lowlife, so there's almost certainly no argueing with you.

[MattEvans]

Client is an entire machine not necessarily software. Lets think of a Half-life 2 / Counterstrike cheat ( not a bot, a cheat ) replace opengl32.dll with an opengl32.dll that ignores requests to enable the depth-buffer -- this means you can see through walls. Nothing in a EULA could possibly cover that. ( this is a real cheat ). A bot could simply modify information sent between the game and the server ( a modification at the client end, say I want to get a better latency handicap; this doesn't require changing the software, just changing what the computer says ). You find a EULA that actually has words to categorically prevent me inspecting and/or changing what my computer says on a network... See ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EULA#Enforceability ) for some of my prior statements w/re. EULAs in another persons words, and no, I very rarely play online games.