Ok, I only have a limited knowledge of what bots are, that they play the game for you. Is it possible for someone to use on bot on sites such as Pogo? I was playing “Boggle” when someone joined the game with about 1 min left and filled their hash marks, which tracks the words you make, in about 30 seconds.
Moved Cafe Society --> The Game Room.
In principle, a bot could be made that plays any game a human could play, by intercepting the output from the screen and hijacking the input from the keyboard and mouse. In practice, some could surely be done more easily than others (depending on exactly how the input and output is handled), and some games are inherently easier for computers to play than others. Given that Boggle is a game where it’s very easy for a computer to beat a human at (since it can look up everything in a dictionary nigh-instantly, and exhaustively consider all possibilities), and that Flash games probably don’t have much security in place to make things harder for bots, I think it’s probably safe to say that that’s what you saw.
For something like Boggle, it’s probably not even necessary to create a full bot that actually automates the playing of the game completely. It would be pretty trivial to write a little program that would look up all the possible words for an entered Boggle board. At a guess, I’d say you were likely playing against a human with such a helper program, as opposed to an automated bot.
Yeah, there are a number of cheat sites that do precisely that. You enter the letters in their form, and it instantly spits out every possible word.
Anyone ever figure out the point of playing like that?
I’ve always assumed that it’s people who get a kick out of just being the “winner” at any cost, and that such people probably had an inadequate upbringing (because they need to feel validated by “winning”). This is probably grossly over-simplified folk psychology, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong :).
I can understand the challenge of writing a program that does such a task and then testing it once or twice to see if it works, but not beyond that. It’s like cheating at solitaire - although I do sometimes cheat at solitaire (with real cards, I mean, not on the computer), it’s only for the satisfaction of putting everything into tidy piles - I don’t count it as winning the game. Perhaps these people just have a greater element of that, but that’s no reason to mess up other people’s games.
What about bots for games where progress is measured like Modern Warfare 2 or World of Warcraft? It’d be nice to wake up in the morning and find I’m a 2nd Lieutenant with all kinds of weapons and kill streaks unlocked.
Regarding WoW - Blizzard likes to ban accounts that run bot programs. They also encourage reporting of anyone who seems to be botting.
Another way on WoW is to buy powerleveling, where someone else does the hard work of leveling your character, getting you gear, rep, honor, etc., if you send them real money. Of course, this means you have to turn your login and password over to some stranger, who might well instead strip all your characters of anything of worth, reset your password and security info, and use your account to scam others.
There used to be app called glider which hooked into the WoW client in a way that allowed for these interactions to happen. Blizzard banned it. Funny thing is, a lot of people quit because of it. Well, perhaps quit isnt the word. They werent really playing anyway.
As far as automating a game, well, its no different than automating anything else. Granted, there’s not usually a command line, but you can use a bunch of tools to perform scripted actions. For instance, I use autohotkey to control GUI apps not designed to be scriptable. I could easily do this with an online game. I would just have to scan the screen area for the pixel or pattern Im looking for, or grab a screenshot of the text and OCR it, etc. I can then send keypresses or mouse clicks to the application.
So, if I walked north and see a goblin (pixel/image detect) or detect being aggrod (OCR maybe), I can send a key that will send fireball. I do this over and over until I detect a corpse. Then I loot it. Then I go north again. When I see a signpost I know that Im at the end of the trail and I go south. When my inventory gets full I have it email me. When I see another signpost then I start going north. Let this run for a few hours and you’ll gain a couple levels.