f13.net

Here's the short form:

WoWGlider is a program you can buy to run WoW bots. Blizzard does not like this. They claim their Warden cannot stop it, so they are suing the makers of WoWGlider to stop this program.

• If Blizzard wins the case, the world goes on as we know it.
• if WoWGlider wins the case though, there's an implication that automated botting is legally acceptable, not covered by EULAs or not enforceable or something of the sort.

I imagine this will take some time to sort out.

Given the legally-tenuous nature of this sort of discussion, I am not providing links to WoWGlider nor any other bot programs. However, I think it's ok to link to the Slashdot article about it (http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/02/19/172205.shtml), since there's where I read it.

The reason I mention it here, to people who've already likely read the Slashdot or numerous other pieces about it, is to ask what you all think about automated botting in the general sense?

Similar to RMTing, I imagine there's three ways of thinking about it: 1) It's fine as long as the bots don't get in my way/it's in a PvP+ area; 2) it's wrong and kills gameplay for everyone by breaking that magic circle; 3) it's illegal and exploitive and on those grounds alone should be banned by the company.

To me, it's not the right way to play the game and the company has every right to stop it. However, whether it is truly illegal or not is questionable. You can use WoWGlider to play your character 24/7 or you can hire four people to take 6 hour shifts and achieve the same goal. What, really, is the difference besides cost?

What the practical difference between a bot and an anti-social, kill stealing retard gamer?

And why does this topic seem to have parallels to the US' illegal drug policy/war on drugs?

It makes sense for Blizzard to file this suit.  If it turns out that WoWGlider does have a negative effect on the game, it's good to try to stop them now as opposed to later (when there may be certain defenses against their action based on their prior inaction).  If it's prohibited by the EULA, it makes sense to actually enforce the EULA.  Hell, you could argue that keeping an account logged on 24/7 is beyond the scope of the service agreement, I guess.  Or at least, that doing it via a bot is different than doing it manually.  There was an anti-spam case where (IIRC) Compuserve basically said that spammers had committed a tort against their servers (trespass to chattels, I think).  There could very easily be a similar argument here, although I would imagine the EULA is a more direct route.

To sum up, game company wants to prevent people it perceives as cheaters from cheating.  Film at eleven.

Good for Blizzard.

Should be interesting to see how it works out.  But like illegal music downloading, probably isn't going to stop much.

Just bite the fucking bullet and let me make/buy a max level character already. Most people, I assume, bot because Diku levels are retarded and they dont want to grind.

Blizzard has precedent for EULA on their side, plus big scary corporate lawyers.
WoWGlider guy has whatever cash he managed to get from a forum full of cheats.

Blizzard will bleed this bloke dry, then snap him in half.

WOWGlider is a tool similar to Gameshark, a mod chip, BitTorrent, YouTube, DeCSS, or a crowbar. The people making the tool aren't actually using it (though I assume they had to use it in order for them to create it).

That being said Blizzard will claim it's a DMCA copyright protection hack and therefore illegal plus whatever else they can pull out of their asses. Blizzard has a history of winning their lawsuits like this one so WOWGlider is fucked.

 What's at stake is not whether botting programs are illegal - a patently ridiculous assertation IMO - but rather, does a company have the right to say what goes on in their own sandbox?

Saying botting programs are illegal is the same thing as saying that a homeowner can't allow cheating or handicaps or something like that during a poker game in his basement.

However, saying that a homeowner has no right to enforce any rules he sees fit to impose on his cardplaying buddies (by ejecting them from the house, for example) is another thing.

I think they are on pretty solid DMCA ground though.  There is no significant legitimate usage for WoWGlider like, for example, there is for a crowbar.  The question is whether Blizzard's ability to regulate what happens in their sandbox extends to a program expressly written to work with (against?) their software.

It doesn't   You can make a weak, albeit legitimate, argument that drug use affects only the user.  Bot use affects all users of the game.


Most of the bot users aren't grinding xp as much as they are farming cash/ quest mobs.  If it WERE just xp, then the argument that they're only screwing themselves out of the level/ quesitng experience is somewhat valid.  That's not the case as soon as you have 3-5 bots keeping an area clear of all monsters so legitimate users are getting hosed.

Blizzard will turn up with their EULA and a stack of WoW's account cancellation questionaires with "Botters ruined my gameplay" given as the reason for quitting; and the WoWGlider bloke (who, don't forget, sold his program to its users) will lose his shirt, his house, and the soul of his firstborn.

I could argue that machinima could be a legitimate usage for it. Theoretically you could use WoWGlider to record a movie on an EMU server (which would be a second third party tool Blizzard would be suing if it had a public face).


I think what the application does is insignificant. It could be as simple as making WoW run in a window (which it probably already does but for example EQ didn't originally) or stretching the application across three screens or translating joystick commands into WoW. The question is can Blizzard stop a third party from making a compatible tool. Time and time again courts have found that Blizzard can do that.

In the broader technological arena, courts have found that you CAN make compatible printer cartridges and garage door openers regardless of what fake chips the company puts in to claim a DMCA violation.

Yes, please.  I'm only not botting my druid because I don't want to be banned.  If Blizzard said this was OK, I'd bot him to 60 in a heartbeat.  I want to do outland with him, not comparitively boring and uninspiring (and not to mention poorly itemized for casuals) old world content for the umpteenth time.

The difference is that you have to expect and accept that people will get in your way and/or annoy you in an MMO. A bot is very different in that it doesn't have to sleep/eat/etc and you can't commmunicate with it. Even a kill stealing asshole is a person interacting with you, albeit in a negative way. A bot is just an unsanctioned NPC that gets in your way.

All the irrelevant MMO baggage aside, how is Glider different than say Getright which can be used as a helper app with a web browser to download an entire website for offline viewing or resumable downloads of large files? Or any one of the nine billion apps that work in conjunction with MS Office products to do stupid things that Outlook or Excel should already do as simply as using the Sort by: tabs, but MS still refuses to include after a decade? Or even a pop-up blocker, ad blockers, or using a home file to websurf without dealing with ads? In many cases you're violating terms of use by viewing a website and preventing it from serving you it's advertising - and unlike the dubious claim that botters are costing Blizzard XXX dollars, not viewing a website's ads while using it's resources absolutely costs them real money and denies them their revenue stream. How is that any different than using Glider, except that it actually does cost the person money?

As much as we all dislike botting, you should be rooting for the Glider guy to win if you don't want to keep using software produced by gigantic development houses and only in the way they want you to use them. I like the idea that no matter how big a software package can be, independent developers can make them more user friendly if the original developer can't or won't.

Glider NEEDS to win this.

if u don't like to grind. don't fucking play it.
It's as simple as that, instead they wanted to bot and undercut legit players selling prices without so much of a sweat and claims they're 'helping' the server. bullshit.

That has nothing to do with the discussion. It's about the scope, authority, and enforceability of EULA's and DMC, as well as the legitimacy and legality of separate, 3rd party software that's designed to work in conjunction with another software package - but without the permission of the original developer.

But thank you for bringing it down to the "BC MAED ALL MY TIEM AND TIER# STUFF WORTHLESS> STUPID CAUSALS AND THERE QQING BROKE WOW" level.

edit, nm context, I guess.  I still think it's a bad test case and not ZOMG must win!

Nope

Bob, normally, I tend to agree with you.  At the same time, if you think that Blizzard winning this case is the ultimate victory in some epic battle against abusive EULAs, then I think you're either overstating for effect or utterly mistaken.  EULAs are abusive because of plenty of existing precedents and the utter fuckedness of our copyright laws.  This case going in Blizzard's favor will only add to an already impressive array of cases that strenghthen the EULA in general.  However, since EULAs are essentially contracts at the end of the day, courts still treat them on a case-by-case basis.  This means that one EULA is not every EULA.

Hence, it's not a ZOMG must win kind of thing.

Right, for me it's more a case of not wanting another EULA/DMC victory. I realize EULAs aren't universally enforceable any more than say, a tenant lease. As clearly defined as tenant rights are in each state, individual landlords get away with murder due to ignorance on the part of themselves and their tenants, or just plain breaking the law and counting on their tenants not knowing any better. I see EULAs and DMC being abused in pretty much the same way, and this case could be used as a building block in a lot of other circumstances that have nothing to do with Botting and MMO's. I'm not a lawyer, but the foundations this would go into help building is one I'd just as soon not have another brick in. When I asked what the difference is between this and the other stuff, I was seriously asking. To my unlawyery eyes, a ruling for Blizzard in this case would apply directly to any of those and open the way to say... Gator suing Adaware and Spybot for removing their advertising that was legally installed as a condition with freeware that a user was using. Same with about a billlion webmasters suing makers of pop-up and ad blockers - myself included in the webmasters. If I think it will work I will sue every company making anti-ad software just to try and drive some of them out of business with the idea that less anti-ad software available means I'll be able to serve more ads.

I don't think it's ZOMGworthy, but at the very least I think it would be unhealthy and opening up some doors that should stay shut.

The difference is those are all done through published APIs or protocols and/or the EULAs don't expressly forbid reverse engineering. Or if they are not the publishers could go after the developers just like Vivendi did in the bnetd case. In that case the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Vivendi's position that bnetd violated the EULA (which they agreed was valid) and the DMCA. However the 8th Circuit is apparently reverse engineering "unfriendly" unlike the 9th Circuit which is where Blizzard is located so Vivendi intentionally moved the case outside of the 9th so they could avoid that Court.

Edit: is is

Actually, it's a subject that I plan to work up a law journal article about during the month of March, largely because I think it's timely.  One big issue is that even though most of these cases end up in Federal court, that's because there's diversity of the parties, not generally a federal question.  What sucks about EULAs is that since they're largely governed by state laws, you get a widely divergent body of cases that depend entirely upon the laws of the states in which the cases are tried or the laws of the states indicated in the EULA "choice of law" clause. 

ETA -- Basically, since contracts can trump things like the DMCA (which is what the bnetd case is partially about), it's not really a federal issue, but a fucked up polyglot issue of federal and state laws with slackjawed yokel judges adding their own spins depending on their understanding of technology.  The list of stupid court cases goes on so long it's ridiculous.  Want to know why we have EULAs?  It's partially because of a case (full name escapes me, but it's Peak v. someone) that basically says that loading an OS or other software into RAM is a copy with sufficient permanent fixation to be a copy within the definition in the Copyright Act.  So, we need the licenses or else we'd all be committing massive copyright infringement simply by using our computers.

Trippy has some good reasons above this post for why this won't be a major brick in the wall, but quite honestly, I think most action regarding EULAs will come from the financial services industry.  The simple version -- major data breach, fin. serv. corp is held liable in a class action, that corp then goes after its software vendor.  Somewhere along the line, I think we'll see EULAs start to crumble.  But that's a whole issue that gets into how software is made, etc.

Personally, I think that there's a lot to reform in the world of EULAs and the DMCA, but it's a whole longass post that I don't have the time to write right now.  In March, though.....oh yes.

I was always under the impression WoWs design would encourage botting.

This is probably because I've usually felt the next step in diku evolution would involve more of the game doing the work parts for you.

Yup. Irrespective of actual legality, if Blizzard wants to stop you in a corporate civil law case they'll simply crush you with their wallet. You could be totally within your legal rights (which WoWGlider isn't according to both EULA and DCMA) but that doesn't matter when legal representation is costing $3500 USD a day and Blizzard is snowing you with affadavits and writs.

And it's worth it for them to do so, as it scares other people off from attempting the same kind of thing, and cuts down on the customer service hours they pay people to investigate botters.

Seriously I've done a 180 on botting in the last month.  I used to just lump it with all other forms of cheating and therefore assume it was lame as fuck.  However, I've come to realize that the only people crying about it are craftards and carebears, I am neither therefore I dont give a fuck about any of the so-called "issues" surrounding botting.

Also I am thinking of coming back to WoW and will definitely bot my way through much of the boring mid-level grind, prob from 2X to 60 for the most part.  I just want to take part in some of this arena action and small group instance stuff I've been watching over friend's shoulders recently doing the fedex quest dance for a month is not my cup of tea.

I wasn't really planning on using glider anyways though since you're very limited in what you can program the bot to do, there are better options out there for people willing to actually get their hand's dirty setting up the bot itself.

I can't see where it is any different than buying a pre built toon myself. Of course as long as my neighbors do not put junk cars up on blocks in the driveway or decide to raise goats in the backyard I could give a damn what they do either. I play these games for the social aspect so botting would ruin it for me.

Since there's no real doubt that WoWGlider is gonna lose this case (leaving botting mostly to goldsellers with the talent to write/share their own programs) so I don't particularly care. Yeah, 30-50 drags ass after you've done it 3 times, but you either had fun those first couple times or you're just punishing yourself because you're an addicted retard. If you don't have guildies or friends to twink you to 60 then well, sucks to be you.

Sorry, I pick options 2 and 3 from the OP. Fuck cheaters, and fuck these WoWGlider kids.

Though honestly, trying to read their forums for about 5 minutes was sort of amusing. The amount of angst and crying on the internets was palpable.

I've never had a problem with botting up levels. My last guild had 5-6 people who botted up to 60 and I knew it but didn't care. What I don't like is when people use them to farm up resources at level 60 because that does affect me if enough do it. WoW doesn't have a botting "problem" I don't think because it's not very widespread, but if it was allowed I have a feeling the game would get very unfun whenever you needed to go farm. The economy would also be totally shot because every time you need to restock potions after a week of raiding you'd have to compete with the money botters can pull in.

I've never played Lineage 2 but everyone I know who's played it said they couldn't stand the mass bots and farmers and that it ruined the game for them. That's what I don't want to see in an MMOG I play.

Another problem is that the endgame of WoW is extremely consumable heavy. Setting aside whether you enjoy raiding or not when you put the entire "point" of playing at the mercy of gold farming bots you have a very bad situation.

Obviously WoWglider will get crushed,  but how fundamentally different is it from some of the some of the hundreds of allowable interface mods that could be said, depending in the situation automate game processes and could be argued give an unfair advantage to the user?

The obvious reply is that the bot is an external program, but the interesting thing is, does it run by firing macros and  timers  already allowable by the game (which ui mods take advantage of),  or does it simulate key strokes that only be done by a user pressing keys on the keyboard.  If it is the former then I guess the maker of WoWglider could argue in theory that it is a variant of some of the allowable UI mods.

The WoWglider guy is an old friend of mine.  We go way back to the MUD days.  A very gifted programmer, to be sure.  Though his Street Fighter 2 skills were always somewhat lacking (My Guile > His Blanka).  :P

Haven't talked to him in years, but from what I understand from what people have told me (we share a family connection now), he's pretty sick of this whole deal and would rather just wash his hands of it.  But he won't because of the popularity of the software.

Personally, I think the boilerplate MMO EULA is crap.  Someone mentioned if you don't like it don't play.  Well, I myself always read the EULA thoroughly these days before I start a game, I refuse to break it.  Was tempted to play Eve, but they have the same EULA.  To me that's a really sad state of affairs when a gamer has to read a 7 page legal document to decide if they want to play a game, to make sure they won't inadvertently cheat somehow.  To me, you don't want bots in your game, make a game that can't be botted.  Otherwise STFU QQ more, nub game publishers.

Can someone educate me?  Is WoW glider simply a specialized clicky macro program or am I missing something deeper?

It plays the character for you. Put him in a mobile-bag-of-improvement laden zone, and move him every few levels. You can could 'glide' a character to 60 in a week.

That tells me nothing about the mechanics of WoW glider.  Is it a script program?  Is it a modified clicky macro? 

I've made a number of macro routines for many mmog's, some text based, some mouse based, but all were able to play my character for me given a set of prexisting conditions.  The mechanics of this program will have a lot to do with how it's treated in this case.  If you played UO or ATitD in the past, you'd know how easy some of these scripts are to create under the right conditions. 

I don't know how the backend worked. I never used it. It's a layer on top of the game, a very sophisticated layer that moved the mouse and clicked the keyboard for you. I don't know what it's input was, whether it looked into the guts of the game or did visual palette-matching on the screen.

I believe it had things like waypointing, pathing, auto-targeting/killing, so you basically pathed out a rough circle in your selected kill area and it would wander around like a guy on a rail, killing anything within targeting range, chasing it, but eventually going back to the rail. This made it quite clear visually whether the character was botting, since you could watch it behave in a very particular fashion.

I don't read em for games.

It's pretty easy to figure out what is cheating and not cheating.

I don't think it's so easy.  Many games will allow attended macroing (due to the needs of the handicapped etc.) but will not allow unattended macroing.  The language in the case of the exceptions can often be vague.  I think that the growth in this industry, especially that induced by Blizzard, will make for some very interesting legal matters.  Regardless, I expect that in most cases the battles will simply be settled due to attrition rather than fought to a conclusion. 

Blizzard has control over what the UI allows, and can (and has) removed functionality from it which they deem unwanted (see: decursive).

They have no such control over botting programs.

If I can leave my character sitting in the undead field in WPL and kill 1/3 of the mobs there, getting a purple item every other day plus making 30 gold in Runecloth and 50 gold in item drops daily. That really seems like it is good for me. Why should I care that I'm monopolizing 1/3 of the spawns? I pay my fee to play the game the way I want!

Granado Espada (I now want to say Espadrille everytime. ><) is the game for you!

This thread makes all the bots sad. (http://eq2flames.com/images/smilies/robot-sad.gif)

Green text aside, there are MANY ways to avoid this happening in the first place that go beyond simply banning macro bots.

  Whose basement is it in the metaphor?  As I see it it's not the player (I paid for the game I can do what I want) but rather Blizzard’s (house rules: no botting.  Don’t like it, go next door to Lineage II).  Blizzard must protect their game’s rules, that’s all their game is.  If you go to a boxing ring with a knife you get in trouble, it's a game and therefore there are inherent expectations.  Or to make a less obviously illegal example, if you kick someone in a boxing match you could get kicked out of the sport.  I use boxing as an example because it has rules which define it as a sport: no hitting below the belt, no grabbing/holding, no kicking, etc.  If you don’t play by those rules you shouldn't be allowed to compete.

  This is the true problem, an MMO is not its scripted single player quest lines, it is its endgame.  Players should be able to use the leveling process to learn the ropes of the game to begin with or simply jump into the 'endgame' and perhaps fall back on them for soloing opportunities.  The problem is many companies still don’t truly understand that it isn’t the journey, it’s the destination.  The endgame needs to be the primary focus of the game and not the insipid lore drenched FedEx missions or economically irrelevant bunny killing quests.

  To put it another way, the best way to eliminate third party development is to internalize or make irrelevant the processes they perform.  Outside program runs spell check on you browser's text windows, add that functionality to your browser.  In a much older example, there was a hack for AOL who, way back in the day, made you queue up all of your downloads, so files would be downloaded before you shut down AOL, and while they were downloading you were online (and paying for it by the minute) but couldn’t browse. Someone figured out a workaround that would allow you to download and surf at the same time.  AOL eliminated the problem by eliminating the restrictions while downloading.  Point is, third party developers are often times pointing out some process a program should or shouldn’t have, and should not be considered to be simply exploiting a program.

Seems to me that allowing macros would be the acid test for any mmog.  If you allow them and few people use them, you'd know that a) players would rather experience the content than have their computer play it for them and b) that your in game mechanics are built in such a way as to make macroing difficult/impossible. 

Give me more dynamic games with fewer treadmills in the place of content.  Then you no longer have to worry about macro bots.

The whole idea of mmorpg is based on grind. That's what differs Q2 from WOW. If it doesn't have grind, it won't get people addicted and if they're not addicted, there is no bloody way they'll keep paying 15$/month.

Another curios thing here: mmo devs are non-stop moaning how it's impossible to make new content fast enough for players to digest, yet somehow single player games doesn't have that problem. Eh?

What are you talking about?  A single player game doesn't have to have ongoing content that lasts for months and years of playtime.

But for the money you pay for it, it only have to last for month or two.

Singleplayer games get 2-3 years to develop, test, and polish content that will only last a measurement of days in most cases. Even something like Baldur's Gate I only got maybe 2-3 weeks of content (back when I was time starved with school and having to share) originally. I've gone back to it a number of times and racked up a pretty large /played, but that doesn't help the MMOG that wants me from now until eternity.

True, but for $15 a month and potentially more shouldn't the consumer expect at least a modest amount of new content monthly?  It's a subscription.  We should be getting more than just database storage for that $15.  If the consumers demand more, they're more likely to get more.

No kidding.  Now how much development time do you think that game took? 

Awesome, it's like 1997 all over again.

Wheee.

And yet people here bought Vanguard and are likely going to buy LOTRO.  We're the "hardcore" consumer and you won't see a damn person here voting with their wallet.

I can't believe we're having the MMO v. Single player game discussion again.  /facepalm

Edit: Heh, interesting stat:

Estmiated total /played time in WoW: 1200 hours
Longest it has ever taken me to beat an RPG in the past 5 years: 80 hours

This is why dynamic and user created content is all that really matters.  The current mmog's development cycle is like jumping out of a car going 60.  Yea, your technically running at 60MPH for a second or two before you eat pavement, but it doesn't matter how much training you do before hand the best you can hope for in that model is not to bleed to death after the fall.

You realize that a large majority of the posts on this site are little more than a rehash, right?  We discuss this stuff out of both frustration and a hope that something will eventually change.  So far we've been mostly disappointed.

I vote with my Wallet. I refuse to buy Vanguard, and I probably wont buy LOTRO. Nether game should be rewarded with my money. I think it will be very hard for me to spend money on any MMO until they can improve on WoWs level of polish, or they actually innovate, like say Conan is looking like it might.

I also refused to buy Battlefield 2142 due to the spyware. I really wanted to, since a bunch of my friends play it, but I wanted to vote with my wallet. If more people did, maybe we wouldnt have this shit constantly pushed on us.

Yah, a tad too much hyberbole in what I said.  It's just maddening though that there's a lot of ivory tower types that continually rail against the industry and its practices.. and then buy something they know is flawed, shitty, and sends the wrong message to the people making these games.

Anyhow, botting.  Yah. I wonder what makes it so repulsive in diku's compared to sandboxes like SWG or UO.  I don't really, but I'm trying to rerail this ridiculous derail.

So tell me, how am I supposed to determine the quality of a game for myself without buying it?  I bought Vanguard because I wasn't in the beta and wanted to see what it was about for myself.  I demonstrated my disdain by cancelling my sub after the first two weeks.  Apparently that isn't good enough?  Am I supposed to blindly believe in the reviews I read and assume that there's some magic reviewer out there that has exactly the same gaming tastes as I do? 

Really? Crap I haddn't noticed that at all over the last 8 years. Huh.

However, rehasing things like "I pay $15 a month, give me a single-player game every month" does seem silly.


Personally, I find it wrong in sandbox or diku, but hey that's me.   In fact, it's probably worse for sandboxes because you can hose their economies much easier.  DIKUs have gone the instancing route, so even though world-spawns might be monopolized, you're not screwed out of ever seeing an upper end item because of some bot.

In the end it's up to the game companties to decide how much they want to enfoce any prohitions against it, though, and that's the complaint I see Blizz having against Glider.  It might not be the route they're going to use to win, but that's got to be the initial  spark that spurred the suit. 


No, you're ALWAYS going to have to worry about macro bots so long as there's user input and players willing to buy their way through the game.  You're always going to have the guy that wants that edge in a competitve game, or wants more cash in a Diku, or wants to monopolize some market in a sandox. 

There is no way you will ever make things too difficult/ impossible to macro or program a bot for.  If you did, then there's no way a human can play it.  The best you can hope for is making things incredibly arcane and complex, however then you'll quickly get to the point it become a bigger pain in the ass to the legitimate users than the botters and then what's the point.

If I had said that, I'd agree. Take a look at what I said again and see if I made any sense.  I expect content additions for my $15, not an entirely additional game's worth of content. What's silly about that?


I disagree.  I think that it's possible to make content that's interesting, dynamic, and random enough that predicting outcomes to the point of making macros would be difficult.  I also think that people buy games to play.  If the "play" is fun, they won't want to macro unless you've instilled some system which rewards it.

I agree with what you said.

So in other words. Adding in the "whole game"?

?

The endgame if a lot of games is crap, I'd rather that *not* be the focus.

Because in places such as tunnels, dungeons, quest areas, etc where there are static spawns a couple of these idiots camping in a NO PVP area is bad news.  They can basically bottleneck a whole lot of people who might need to do something in that area.

The worst example I remember is from Asheron's Call when bots first came out there. Dungeons became empty tombs because you'd go in there to find 10 macro bots killing all the mobs, and the more high level dungeons turbine made the more bots showed up.

I don't mind UI enhancements that make the game more fun or centralized to play, but I absolutely hate bots that play the game and do everything for the player.

If the endgame is crap then your just playing an expensive and poorly paced single player game.  The endgame is what true game remains when the four years of premade content is burned away in the first few months.  The only reason to stick with a title once you have gotten to the top level (or gotten to the top two or three times for you die hards) is the endgame.  The endgame is the MMO.  If you don't like that it means the game sucks!  The fact that MMOs have gotten better and better at delaying your realization of that fact is not game design, it's fraud.

Lots of people will cheat in multiplayer games where there's no persistent achievement so playing can only be it's own reward.  Beating the other guy is so much more important that having a good time or being challenged.  Though that's obviously a subset of all macroers/cheats.

The only problem with everyone saying "If the game is fun, no one will automate" is that you will never make a game that has progression which is always fun.

People are going to automate. The best thing you can do to fight against it is have a strong community which condemns it, while simultaneously making it very likely for the user to get banned (first offense perma-ban).

To eliminate botting of the kind we're talking about you'd need to remove farming and grinding entirely. If an activity can be done over and over again for any gain then people will bot it. You'd have to either remove advancement or have advancement be ala EVE where you just gain it over RL time or you'd need to make it quest based. No mobs could drop money or anything that can be used at all for that matter. Mobs would in effect have to become pure roadblocks instead of the loot/xp punching bags they are today.

I'm not saying that's bad, but it's a drastic change from the status quo.

Or maybe you could design a game that's challenging enough that it takes more than four lines of scripting to beat it.   :-P

That's what I've been hinting at.  Damn you for saying it more concisely.

Better PVE AI?

I would just assume that making combat be based off of reacting to the mob's actions would stop afk botting. Only reason people can do it now is because you just hit 2 over and over and over ...

May I point you in the direction of Lineage 2 bots "L2Walker" and "L2Superman", two programs which can run entire 9 man parties in such a highly organized fashion that they make actual players look like chumps. Both even include scripting languages (though superman's sucks tbh~) for writing your own custom scripts to move your train of automatons between town and your hunting spot without actually needing to do it manually, sell crap to stores, ignore certain loot (can't pick up those heavy useless arrows if you're going to be farming for 2 weeks without turning the bots off!), and other crap.

Automation is big business, especially with the RMT industry in it's current state. I know you were half joking, but really it's not entirely a design issue. Design plays a role, but if you make it more complex, the bot programmers will find it that more appealing to automate it and sell it to the farmers who will want the leg up on anyone doing the work manually.

Edit: What I'm trying to say is, preventing automation is not a good reason to make major design decisions. It's going to happen anyway. Theres certain systems that just beg to be automated which should probably be avoided, but you're not going to stop automation just by designing the game in a "fun" way. It won't be fun for everyone, and even if it is fun, some people will cheat just to cheat or be ahead of everyone else.

I don't think it would be possible to create PVE combat that would be impossible to bot. You could bot any of the the current fighting games, you can bot chess, you can bot FPS games. All of them are WAY more difficult than current MMOG combat, but they are not immune.

I already said this.  EVERYTHING can be botted.  EVERYTHING.  The only exception I used to think was out there was FPS games, but even in that I'm pretty sure I was mistaken.

There is NO way you an come up with enough unique situations that they can't be botted.  Like I said before, it would become too byzantine or too much of a pain in the ass for legitimate players long before it was for the scripters/ programmers.

The closest thing to a solution is what Cal said, and I wouldn't call that much of a game.

Most people would even bot in real life if they could. When the first intelligent (enough) robot arrives then most people that can afford something like that will never ever work for money/do the housework etc. Hell most people would even break all of the rules if they knew they wouldn't be caught. There was once an anonymous questioning for a study. People were asked if they would break certain rules if they knew for certain that they wouldn't be caught. Most people asked even considered capital crimes like robbery or murder. Rules and their enforcement is important because without them you will only get the bad kind of anarchy.

We all want the shineys without doing anything for it be it game or RL and if we can break rules while doing that we will. An online game that doesn't consider that is doomed from the start.

You can bot FPS games. In fact the first MP bot I came across was the "auto-aim" bot for Quake. That one you had to move manually but it would aim for you automatically, you just had to hold down the fire button. The early versions had some sync problems so it would fire "backwards" instead of spinning the character around if the closest target was behind the person so you would see lightning come out of the players ass and stuff. It was a small step from there to creating bots that could navigate on their own.

It's like computer security, though.  Anything can be broken into.  The point is to make it difficult enough to bot that your botters drop to an acceptable percentage of the playerbase.  We'll disagree about what's "acceptable" and whether making it "difficult" negatively affects regular gameplay, sure.  Certainly, botting tools are very sophisticated.

The problem with that is that the tools are already there to bot. There's no need to have more sophisticated tools/methods to combat any increased "security" through complexity. All it would require is a more complex script to combat the change, and you can't change your game mechanics all the time or you piss off the real users. So once it's cracked, that's it. Forever.

I don't know about that. If you cranked up the XP, cash, and loot rewards for questing in WoW you could axe monster xp and drops entirely in the outside world. Of course you'd have to deal with the hole that was once dropped crafting loot (essences, etc), and you could no longer demand farming timesinks through repairs and consumables for raids, but the 1-70 game would be unchanged for anyone that doesn't grind all the way.

EDIT: Argh! I fully intended to copy+paste this into an edit of my other post but forgot and double posted. :(

Isn't wowglider a commercial program? That will likely be a factor I'd think.

Not really. bnetd was free but copyright infringement is copyright infringement even if the infringer isn't making any money off of it.

I think it's hilarious a diku derivative that by all accounts offers absolutely 0 innovation is bringing a copyright case against a company that didn't copy a single line of code.  Further, they lacked innovation so bad in that round they even had to copy the obviously flawed business model and end up with the same old anti-EULA problems.

And I don't think it's about difficulty or random content or anything like that.  It is purely about the grind, about repetition.  That IV they've stuck in all of us feeds their subscription model.

For all the perma-ban advocates that recommend L2 as an alternative... no problem with that, but don't be supporting a contract interference case with that argument.  And keep in mind, L2's EULA is the same as WoW's.

Bashing TEH GRIND is hip and all, but calling the business model of one of the most lucrative products in the history of the entertainment business "obviously flawed" is teh stupid.

I can think of about a thousand things to say, but slog said it already and better.

However, I wanted to ask:  do you really thing WoWGlider is doing something innovative?  There have never been botting programs before?   :roll:

Well, I'm glad it's still hip.  Not my motivation at all, given my household has www.runescape.com blocked at the firewall level.  I suppose obvious was a bad word to use because obviously it isn't obvious to the junkies nor the dealers.

As for copyright and bnetd... totally different case.  They actually copied the server and modified it, and allowed for copies of the client.  WoWGlider copies nothing, nor does it enable people to bypass the fees Blizzard charges.

And MDY isn't bringing a DMCA charge against anybody, so their innovations are irrelevant.

I know that a lot of people think this is going to be a slam dunk for Blizzard/Vivendi.  I don't think its a slam dunk at all for them.  In fact from the research I have been doing I think they are going to have a hard time proving a DMCA violation.  First off, it is worthy to note some of the facts of the case:


1.  MDY industries filed suit against Blizzard for a summary judgement.  The purpose of the summary judgement was to head off an impending lawsuit and effectively slam the door shut to any future law suit by getting a court to stipulate that Blizzard's copyright was not being infringed upon by this program.  You can see this here, I took this from MDY's forums:

http://www.wowglider.com/legal/Complaint1.pdf


2.  The plantiff which in this case is in fact MDY claims that their product doesn't break into any of Blizzard's server or architecture at all.  What it claims in fact is that it operates at the permission of the owner in the owners own personal computer.  I feel this disctinction is important because my understanding of the DMCA law is that previous precidents are based upon altering a chip which was already imbedded in a product.  This subsequent alteration allowed access to the product.

If the plantiff is right (I think its also worthy to note that Blizzard denies this claim on the grounds they they do not have evidence to support the claim), then I really don't see how Blizzard has any leg to stand on.  Blizzard's response can be found here:

http://www.wowglider.com/Legal/Feb_16_2007/AnswerAndCounterclaims.pdf

I know if I was a juror I would have a hard time buying the arguement of Blizzard that other software providers are bound to Blizzard's EULA.  That is in fact what Blizzard seems to be alledging here.  I can't buy it because, WoWglider if it is as advertised doesn't touch their machinery or hardware.  It in fact acts as a superuser and uses the processes of the computer to manipulate the process that Blizzard themselves gives the players access to.  Furthermore a precident for Blizzard in this case it would seem to me would place liability on Firewall, antivirus, and surf control software that ran alongside and blocked soemthing that Blizzard didn't like.  What if a firewall decides that warden is a virus or a malicious program and shuts it down.  Does this now mean that the firewall manufacturer is now liable because Blizzard's process is a process that was not deemed legitimate to the firewall?

I just don't think this case is going to be as clear cut and dry as most people here think it will be. 

Halfased reaction to those filings: Blizzard's tortious interference counterclaim (count I) looks pretty solid to me.  I don't know enough about how Glider works or copyright law to (even halfassedly) evaluate the copyright infringement counterclaims (counts II & III).  I don't know nearly enough about the DMCA to halfasedly evaluate count IV, but the text of 17 USC 1201 (a)(2) http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/usc_sec_17_00001201----000-.html looks pretty damning for Glider.  I'm not sold on the trademark infringement because I don't think it's confusing to consumers, particularly in light of the fact that Glider openly admitted that its users could be banned by Blizzard for using it.

OMG add "tortious" to spellcheck.

True. But it is fairly trivial to design a game that is not worthwhile to bot. Botting relies on a linear relationship between the hours you grind, and the amount of loot and experience you obtain. There is no reason at all why this relationship should be linear. In fact, at one point in the WoW beta, they had “rest” code that severely limited experience gain after a certain limit.

Suppose your code reduced experience gain as you approached 24 hours of grinding a month, and made it negative thereafter. People could play for much longer than that per month, but grinding more than that would be pointless. Botting just wouldn’t be worth it in such a game. Of course you would lose the people who grind large amounts every week. But I think you would retain almost enough casual players to offset that. And you would save huge amounts on content development.

I can’t see that happening though, because most MMOGs are designed by people who like grinding. A non linear time/experience curve seems “unfair” to them. But it is purely a design decision, not a necessity. And it is that linear curve that makes botting worthwhile.

It only matters regarding how much money they can rape you for. You can only claim vicarious copyright infringement if the infringer profited.

The Blizzard counterclaim is weak. Their entire claim revolves around the fact that they think Blizzard only authorizes users to copy WoW into their computer’s random access memory in conformity with its license agreement. If the user is not committing copyright infringement by executing WOW through WOWGlider then all of the other Blizzard claims fail. You can't have contributory, vicarious copyright infringement, or a circumvention device without the initial copyright infringement.

As far as the trademark claim goes I think it is bogus as well. WoW is not a registered trademark. WoW is not displayed with a (tm) by it on any Blizzard material that I can see which would give weight to it being a service mark. Additionally, they contradict themselves by claiming that MDY states WOWGlider violates the Blizzard EULA and then that the use of WoW in WOWGlider causes confusion.


Best part of the counterclaim:
Use of WoWGlider impoverishes Blizzard...
Oh the humanity! Think of the starving children!


That being said I still think Blizzard is going to win.

You don't need to prevent botting altogether. You just need to make a game better so it lessens the compulsion to do it.

But it's NOT just better AI. That's a strong part of course, but you need to also, as has been said, remove the grind.

Kill-based XP is the root of botting. It drives the grind. If the entire game was based on quest-advancement with NO XP rewarded per kill, then you'd have the latitude to make better AI, more dynamic, change things up.

The other thing is alt-characters. Players get pissy when they can't play the game the same way through twice. So making mobs smarter would mean someone having to actually WANT to play through the game again as if they were playing the first time. The answer here is to reward them for their FIRST completion of the game by letting them roll high-level alts.

Finally, loot. For soloing and small groups, mobs can be dynamic. It'll piss people off who like predictability, but the game we're talking about here isn't for the WoW/GW crowd anyway. So you make mob behavior better and adaptive AND scale the quality of the drop appropriately.

You can't really have 40-person raids though unless every boss encounter is against many multiple mobs or something. 40 people constantly trying to learn and adapt to a learning/adaptive AI is a recipe for scores of wasted hours and pissed off players. But raiding isn't an activity with mass-appeal anyway.

Sweet, I was hoping someone would link to court docs so I didn't have to go looking for them.

Now I have some recreational reading for later.

I agree completely.

People who play WoW 1-60 and find it fun obviously havn't played a decent RPG recently.

Of course, Dikus don't just have problem with levels. There's also the whole gear dependence thing too.

I hope Blizzard loses. Maybe then we'll see some game companies try tackle the problems with Diku instead of trying to rehash for the moneyhats.

Clarify, please. With examples.

That pie IS awfuly high up in the sky there.

Yes, Kill-based XP is the entire root of Botting.  That's why nobody botted in UO, or developed those aimbots.

So long as there's any type of advancement, and any type of persistance you're going to have bots because some segment of the population will say "that's boring."   Hell, so long as there's any type of competition it's going to be out there to varying degrees.  The more popular the game, the more bots/ scripting programs you'll find.

"Adaptive AI" will solve nothing, I can adapt my bot, too. Complete lack of predictability in AI behavior will get you a smaller playerbase than AC2.  That's sustainable, right?

Loot can be unpredictable, we've seen that since Diablo days.   You even see it in WoW, it's no big shakes if all 'uber' drops become unpredictable.  It DOES however, drive the incentive to bot up even more as while now it's once again time-invested = better drops it's completly untied to an area or an instance or anything else that lets you have some population control. 

If all advancement came from unique quests then the ability to bot advancement would be at least as much work as just going through it normally. I could make a bot that leveled up in WoW solely through questing... but why? It would take forever to just input all the waypoints. Then there's going to be tonnes of holes where what do I do if X person isn't there atm, and how to handle shitty deathtrap caves and whatnot, especially if someone has semi-cleared it a minute ago and it's all respawning? Maybe it would be worth it for a professional leveling service, or maybe you could write it and sell it, but the casual market would be destroyed utterly. I am an alt-aholic and a powergamer but I won't even write down the good quest progression for myself because it would eat up too much time, let alone write a questing bot as I go.

I think the only reason you'd do it Cal is if you planned to sell the bots to people ;)

Well, duh. But like I said earlier, this is not about preventing botting altogether. There will always be some who automate simply because there's a chance they can do it.

The point is to design games that drive down that compulsion (and/or its impact on players) down to a statistically irrelevant level.

You cite UO, you grinded the same way there for the same thing. Instead of 1 linear level progression, you managed 7 or more. Same difference, even though the terminology is different. Grind to advance to unlock abilities. AND they had loot drops.

Yea, sure, and this happens all the time in games with GOOD AI. It probably does happen all the time, for the 4 or 5 people who now consider it the height of challenge to spend all their free time trying to get a bot to game for them when they could be gaming.

When I think "adaptive AI", I think PvP. We all know MMORPG class ability sets are fairly limited in any given situation. But I'm trying to imagine dozens of bots running around a WoW BG. If someone could do that, they deserve the accolades. If that's happened already, I'd love to know about it.

But that's my baseline: when you can't tell the difference between a mob and a player. Maybe that IS pie-in-sky.

You guys do realize that the game itself is bots right? You can't make a video-game un-bot-able because all the NPCs and mobs are just bots themselves. It's just a question of who has better bots.

---

WoWGlider will probably lose. Just as Kazaa and Napster lost. Kazaa has legit uses but was geared towards copyright infringement. The tricky thing here is that the people making Kazaa didn't copy anything, they just allowed users to.

Same deal here. The people making WoWGlider aren't breaking the EULA, just the people running it. However WoWGlider is clearly made to break the EULA. The question I suppose is does making something to specifically break a EULA compare to making something to specifically allow music piracy?

Given the history of DMCA crap, I'm guessing the answer is yes. Nowadays you don't have to break a law yourself, making it possible for other people to do that is enough.

Which is why class action lawsuits against gun manufacturers always win - oh sorry guns are real not bits in a computer, my mistake!

Darniaq, I was with you until you lumped GW and WoW together.  I think most of the things you are describing pretty much could of been part of a Michael O'Brien design spec.  This is ArenaNet's reason to exist.

With the exception of the dynamic content theme.  RPGs really are media, wether it is 1 person or 2000 people consuming.  Some people enjoyed watching StarWars a thousand times.  Some people simply grind XP as a habit.  But for most, watching the movie once is quite enough, as is leveling once quite enough.

Players are the only way to have truly dynamic content that isn't cheesed somehow.

4 or 5 people and the height of challenge, huh?  You set the bar too low with the WoW BG, sir.  Let's think rather along the lines of taking over all of Eve, solo.  Teh SmithCorp vs Zergers R Us.  :P  Tempting, really, just to hear em cry to heaven, but that EULA is there to prohibit success.

Somehow through all of this reverse righteousness I still dislike the HL aimbots.  It seems different, probably because of direct competition, precision balanced mechanics and the ability for players to balance the numbers instantaneously.

Here's the thing.  Suppose Glider wins, botting is now an industry and more folks will be selling bots that do exactly this because there's profit in it, just like RMT.  In fact, I expect it to happen in that 'grey area' more and more regardless of the outcome because enough people have now heard of Glider and botting to get that bright idea.  "Oh crap, you mean instead of just making it  and keeping it to myself I can SELL it, and let OTHER people worry about getting banned?" /facepalm

Which of course, Darniaq mentioned.



Nothing's fun forever, everything gets repetative.  Two adages we've covered many times before.  Which means you also know the other one, people play LONG after they've stopped having fun.  If botting is in any way demi-legitimized I don't see it going to any statistically irrelevant level, but instead becoming accepted in the same fashion as RMT has been.  In fact, I predict shortly we'll have someone on these boards arguing about how good it is for the genre with the same fervor some folks argue for microtransactions.



I don't believe it's only 4 to 5 people at all.  It may have been when scripting and such was much more complex but the tools keep getting simpler as people take previous bots alter them, then release them.  There were entire macro libraries just for legal WoW Add-ons, so I've no reason to believe that there aren't for bots as well.

As to a dozen bots in a BG, if there were enough reward to it, it would happen.  I wonder if it doesn't already, since the faction and Honor-grinding services have taken off.  You don't get honor just sitting there, but the price is so low I dobut even the chinese sweatshops can't keep people doing it for the time investment.


Good point.   So if the NPC Ai ever could achieve what Darniaq's proposing, there's nothing to stop a 3rd party program from achieving it as well, except time and the programmer's determination.

Client-side bots can never do the same things as a server-side bot. A server-side bot has access to information that the client doesn't have and a server-side bot can be made to do things (e.g. teleport to a new location based on some sort of server-side trigger) that a client-side bot can not.

Agreed. I was never under an illusion that you'd be able to stop somebody from making and selling a bot via pure mechanics, you could only get rid of the casual botters. The more work it takes to construct the bot, the less worthwhile it is, or the less casual appeal it has due to the extra pricetag it would require. Right now a bot is comically easy to build, which makes even winning the case not so much of a big deal to Blizzard. If they win this they still have all the small bot communities and all the people casually making things like fish bots (my old guild used one a guildie knocked up in half a day). If they win, all the next game has to do is make it inviable for the casual market and go after any big fish that pop up.

It's going to be interesting how it turns out though. Like you said if they lose it's just going to be open season for botting regardless of what anyone does.

Maybe I should be rooting for WoWGlider to win then. If computer bots are allowed to do what human bots do now, only more efficiently, it might spark demand for a game in which grinding 60 hours a week isn't the road to victory.

No, it'll just kill development of MMOGs in favour of Second Life-alikes.
Have fun with that.

The intarnet sky is falling!  The intarnet sky is falling!

... or produce more games like Mount and Blade where dynamic character interaction >>> autoattack. 

Bots do more than just get xp though.  They can gather resources and loot corpses for items and money.  They could even be used for something as simple as going from Point A to Point B, ala macro-walking back in the MUD days.

Loot is going to be as much or more of a driving factor than xp if it has any significant bearing on character performance.  When botting gives you the ability to be start your own little RMT company it is also going to have an influence.

If botting will simplify the game in some fashion, someone will use one.  The more payoff it gives, the more widespread it is going to be.  And these people consider it a challenge.  A game can never be patched so fast that someone won't be able to code around it.  Designing against bots eventually hits a point of diminishing returns.  Companies are all about getting the most effect for the least amount of resources, and once design limits are reached, discouraging people with legal action becomes attractive.

The point you make here is good with one exception:

WoWGlider has one use as a product: breaking the WoW EULA.  It is not possible to use a copy of WoWGlider in a way that does not break the WoW EULA, thus there are no legal uses for it.  For the developer, maybe it was orginally an exercise or test of programming skill.  But once he started selling it, it was a product that was impossible to use without breaking the law.

Guns could also be considered an engineering exercise for the designer/builder, but when sold, they have plenty of uses that are not against the law(depending on your exact location, of course).  Lawsuits against Remington for damages caused by some lunatic shooting someone are just as valid as lawsuits against Boeing because some nuts flew their planes into a building.

I'm all about personal responsibility.  If people are breaking the law or your EULA or whatever, ban/suit/prosecute THEM.  Suing someone else because the people actually breaking the law are hard to find, or because the real cause is something you can't prosecute (people are broken) is a cop-out.

It's difficult to find good real-world analogies, because so many real world objects have multiple uses.  A software tool like WoWGlider only has one use, and that use is not legal, according to the terms of the WoW EULA\Service Contract.

To me, I'd attempt to reach a settlement with WoWGlider with an NDA that added some code to the software making it detectable by Blizzard... then wait, and ban those using it.  Have the financial portion of the settlement hinge on maintaining the NDA.

Alternatively, have a few spare coders at Blizzard create something similar that worked better, sell it for less, and then later nab everyone using it.  Over and over again, so that you see people buying these things and then getting caught by Blizzard.  It'd ruin the market for them.

As a (somewhat technical) side note, most of these things function by starting the game process themselves, so they can get hooks into the DX interfaces for the keyboard and mouse, possibly even memory space.  Is there not a way to tell who your own parent process was?  If it wasn't %SYSVOL%\Windows\explorer.exe, you've got a potential problem?  Heck, just send that info to Blizzard, let them collect a list of names and investigate.  The names of common Windows UI mods like ObjectDock or Dashboard, etc would  be filtered out, and what's left would be suspect.

--
Alkiera

That was my thought especially when people were talking about bots in FPS games. Um. HELLO? Fuck aimbots, ever played BFanything or UT200anything in SP mode?

Ya that's an awesome mmog. I think I'm still subbed to it...no wait, hang on...

Point being, there are still latency and hardware restrictions on what can happen in a MMOG unfortunately.

No.   :-D

There is a difference between breaching a contract (EULA) and breaking the law. I can breach EULAs all day long and not break the law.

How come latency is a problem in MMORPGs but not (as much anyway) in other server hosted online games? Is it because when you play a MMORPG the speed of light becomes slower? Or because that's a BS excuse without any technical justification?

Uhh, simple math?
100,000 X (bandwidth per user) >>> 16 x (bandwidth per user).

Not to mention fd_select(addr) or whatever the syntax is (been a LONG time) x 100,000 takes a bit more time overall than x 50?

Bandwidth != latency.

If Margalis was responding to squirrel the point is is that the twitcher the gameplay the less suitable it is for MMOGs where latency can be unpredictable depending on the number of people around you at any given time. There are, of course, ways to cheat, like doing the calculations on the client instead of the server like PlanetSide does which saves you the round trip time but that wouldn't work if you had blocking and other such mechanics in the gameplay. Even in PS there are lots and lots of times I've fallen over dead after having gone behind cover thanks to their client-side hit detection system.

Edit: extra words

Persistance.

Latency isn't physically any better or any worse in MMORPGs, but the heavy commitments inherent to character development make latency (and other lag) particularly emotionally taxing. Every once in a while a long game of Starcraft might be decided by a hair-tearing bundle of lag during a climactic mutalistk rush, but usually it's just a quick game and if the latency goes south you back out and find a new one. In a Mount & Blade MMORPG temporary high latency means your favorite knight can't block anybody, or that your archenemy is literally impossible to hit.

Sure, you could leave the game and wait it out, or go grind some less latency-intensive activity... but while in Starcraft you can try more Starcraft because you wanted to play Starcraft, you came online specifically eager to go to the tournament with Sir Castic, and you can't just find a less laggy tournament for him.

I had no trouble with latency or lag trying Planetside, for example, because I honestly cared very little about either the war or the life of my particular soldier. There was always another base or tower to try to attack or defend. I observed latency and lag, of course, it just wasn't a problem.

If the bandwidth is greater than the tubes can hold, packets will be delayed and can functionally behave the same as, or worse than, a high latency connection under the right conditions.

I would think graphics lag is more likely to be a problem than bandwidth in this day and age, but theoretically it could happen, and isn't entirely far-fetched with some of the shoddy coding we've seen in games.

Thanks Trippy - i was a bit snarky but this is really what I was trying to say. Bandwidth as Stephen defines it compounds the issue(s). If you have a Mount & Blade type game you have to ensure 2 things:

1. - It can scale. This is what Stephen is referencing I believe. 64 + client connections is vastly different from 1500+ and persistancy means you can't trust the client software, particularly in DIKU/Achievement based MMOG's. We're just not there yet.

2. - Latency. Anyone remember the days of HPB's (high ping bastards?). Compounding issue 1 is the fact that in twitch/response based games people with faster gear and connections have inherent advantages over others - in orders of magnitude greater than the current advantages enjoyed by current hardware/network disparity.

End of the day - we're not at the point where un-trusted client/server MMOG's can have persistant 2000+ player worlds with Mount & Blade combat.

EDIT: Speeling

In CS before we got broadband I found it easier because you could round a corner and kill someone before you showed up on their screen. Client side detection is so dodgy when it comes to low ping it's rediculous. I also remember a game, and I'm not sure which one it was, but people would deliberately slow down their connection because it would give them an advantage due to client-side wankery. It might have been CS.

Please, enlighten me as to exactly how one would go about makeing a game un bottable? From what I understand, many of the bots out there are reading info directly out of the memory spaces WoW uses, and feeding back responses in the same way.  Given that the WoW guys already have their Warden thingy in an effort to try to prevent this, what other suggestions would you offer?

heck, im also in the camp of: Play the game yourself or dont play at all.  letting an automated bot run your character to farm or grind or whatever will just lead to bad places.

Dumb question here:

Does the latency/bandwidth needs truly need to scale to 1,500+ concurrent users if the game is heavily zone based where each zone is a separate "connection"? I'm not sure how to ask this, so I'll go with examples:

• Shadowbane- This was by-and-large all persistent, so you theoretically could have every player on a server in one space.
• Guild Wars- The only persistence are the public-spaces for chat and trade. Everything else is instantiated.

So now I look at Planetside vs Huxley. PS used zones but had a pretty high cap on how many could be on an island. Huxley seems to be focusing on smallish 64-person battles with a persistent world for chat and trade (and lobby/matchmaking, etc).

To me it seems like if you enforce a rigid cap on the number of people who are allowed into a battle, you could get around the latency/bandwidth issue by designing a system where each zone was a separate, err, "computer" or "IP" address or something where you don't have all of the bandwidth for the entire game or even just the entire server trying to fit through one small hole.

There will still be moments of lag and high-latency play just because of the way the internet works: a temporarily slow connection between the player and her ISP, slow connection between two random routers somewhere along the way to the game server, a denial of service attack in Hong Kong, a butterfly flaps its wings in Paris, France. If it is absolutely critical to the player's happiness and mental state that their character dodges incoming fire by getting behind a rock, one of these days they're going to be furious and unhappy. In a game where one death can make you lose more than an hour's worth of loot or experience, lag burps really ruin your day.

There is a limit to how much this can be soothed on the technical side. The rest is purely psychological, and requires a game designed to make failure less critical.

Well, there have been lots of good ideas posted in this thread.

It does seem very odd, doesn't it, for someone to pay $60 for a gme, $35 for an expansion, $15 * x for subscription... then on top of that add $25 to buy a bot to play the game for you.  What's the point, why bother with spending anything at all?  That's the reaction most people have at first when you tell them about this.  And that's the way it should be, technically: there shouldn't be a point to botting.

So if MDY wins Blizzard will start selling the ability to have your alts max level, for $25.  The vast majority of WoWGlider's business will evaporate, and the avatar business will decline heavily as well.  They may go further and start selling coin, at which time the grey market RMT business will take a nosedive, as well as the vast majority of WoWGlider's remaining business.  After that, the rest of the people who use WoWGlider (all 5 of them), can be banned.

I have a couple of questions.

Has anyone here ever quit WoW because they couldn't finish a quest or farm enchants for the nightly raid or whatever due to bot obstruction?  I ask this because I only know one person in the world who actually plays this most-lucrative-entertainment-product-ever, and she said she's never seen a bot in WoW, much less had a problem.

What percentage of the population needs to have broken the EULA before it becomes apparent the problem isn't human nature, it is the EULA itself?  The point about community being a defense is a good one.  That's what happened on Steam servers - it wasn't tolerated by 999 out of 1000 players and people ruled their servers with an iron fist.  This is different though I think the percentage against is a lot lower.

I don't see a difference between a bot and someone who plays 40+ hours per week, or a paid farmer.  To me this case is about who gets favored.  None of the above, if you ask me.  But I also believe none of those types should be persecuted, either.

How would M&B combat be unbottable in any way?

In the WoW cancellation questionaire, one of the reasons for cancellation, as a subheading under 'Harassment', is "Botting". I don't think that would be in there unless it was an issue.

Every game is bottable to some degree, even games like poker.  The question is: would you go to vegas and have a computer play your cards for you at the poker table?  The key to limiting/eliminating bots is making it inefficient, undesirable, and dangerous.  Hell, make the game so fun and engaging that players won't want their computer to play the game for them.

I'm sure you can think of 1000 ways to accomplish this without me listing them.

I admit that I was providing a smart ass answer, but a lot more goes into things than you'd think off the top of your head.

I will concede the point that bandwidth != latency (and in fact I wasn't making that point, although looking back at my short answer I can see how it seems like I did). Here's the logic chain that (hopefully) summarizes what I was getting at:

Assumptions

A: what players think is latency, lag, and performance/responsiveness is made up of a metric ton more factors than they are even aware of.
B: Many games even now still use client side hit detection, or at a minimum proxy/imposter based hit detection.
C: Non MMOG fps games are commonly peer to peer, while MMO games are by definition Client/server based.

Definitions:

1) Latency: single trip average time of information transfer between a sender and receiver. In some cases players assume round trip, but there is a hidden cost of server side processing time and possibly event saturation that is added in that makes it a non-network deterministic delay.
2) Lag: a user subjective broad based term used primarily to indicate an unsatsifactory state of blocked waiting for information. This is mostly used to indicate "network" lag, but in reality nowadays is primarily due to either cpu overload, or blocking data transfer from the hard drive. It does of course still apply in not a few network situations.
3) Responsiveness: how accurate and fast the control object (usually an avatar) is to user input.

First and foremost for the short answer I gave, the "game design myth" (my term) that ping is the end all be all to how good a player can be at an FPS is not nearly as supported as the end user experience indicates. I certainly agree that there is always going to be a delay between event generation (user input) on a client, and event resolution on a server, followed by authoritative updates from the server to each client, but ping is not quite as big a factor as it used to be, and certainly not measurable as a human experience at the 10-50 ms level.

What is measureable is a combination of several things:

--client side hit detection. In this scenario, a game is going to allow a user to actually directly apply a move input to their copy of the simulation, create a projectile, and determine it's game changing result (authoritative) before anyone else knows about the instantiation of the projectile. As has been noted in posts above, this combination of scenarios actually quite literally makes the worst ping player one of the most successful, since no one can respond to the projectile created before it's collision is resolved in many cases.

--server side hit detection (some MMO style)--in this case, instead of allowing the user input to directly create a game changing projectile and resolve it's collision on the client's time scale, the client generates a move event that is networked to the server that includes information about the pressing of the trigger. This information is then transmitted to the server (with the latency involved in the trip), processed at the network layer, then the event layer, then the processing loop, the result of that triggered event creates a projectile, which is then processed authoritatively in the game world. Additionally, that projectile will then be networked back to all clients in an observable range (normally called the scope), factoring in the single trip latency again, followed by network layer/event layer/processing loop delays at the receiving client's simulation, finally resulting in the new projectile on each of the client's simulations. Finally, this object will now do the following:

--interpolate between the last 2 updates sent by the server
--extrapolate if/when needed based on the last receieved update, and last received trend information (velocity, etc) if an update is "late"
--respond to a later server sent network event to indicate a collision/destruction based on the authoritative server simulation processing.

In this case (Server Authoritative, no client side hit detection, MMO style) ping rate --does-- matter, but it's my contention that the other factors involved in an MMO scale game over-ride simple ping rate/latency due to a lot of factors:

--total amount of bandwidth to process--even with huge server systems and amazing network infrastructure, it simply takes time to iterate over all packets that arrive. Since games are using UDP (which is a good thing), the games have to implement their own application level ACK/NACK of packets/events, so that takes processing time per arriving packet, as well as simply the total mass of events that must be processed each game loop cycle. These scale totally differently than the total number of events that are applicable in a small number of players style game,and even more so in a P2P networking architecture vs a Client/Server architecture.


This topic is hugely more complex than even what I've posted above--we haven't even begun to discuss the fact that by definition (and direclty due to latency) each and every simulation (server, and each client) are in different timelines, and in fact may be in multiple time lines at once (I'm talking semi-quantum branching type stuff here, at least as an analogy)--if an update takes 50 ms to get to Client A, and 500 MS to get to Client B, by definition the server, Client A, and Client B are all in different times. Integrating this dichotomy into a playable multi-player experience is a very involved process.

Networking is more than 40% of the Boot Camps I teach every few weeks, and it takes at a minimum 8-10 hours to cover most of the challenges....and my assertion originally was that ping is just one of the very important factors, and one that games themselves have by evolution mitigated extensively, and it's no longer as important as it used to be. In addition, the nature of MMO vs Small Multiplayer has quite a few factors that mitigate latency as well.

You bet your ass I would, and I'd wind-up winning quite a bit more than losing.  This has been done before with very large degrees of success, which is why it's illegal to do so in casinos.

PS: I think I've linked to this before, but Jason Booth (was at Turbine, not sure if he still is) wrote a very interesting article about dealing with latency from a game developer's perspective--specifically about the timeline dichotomy that latency introduces:

Fast, Secure Interactions in Latent Environments (http://jbooth.blogspot.com/2006_08_01_archive.html)

It's more about AI than event handling, but pretty interesting.

I guess that's the difference between me and many gamers.  I play games to have fun.  While winning is fun, it's not the game to me. 

On a side note: computer programs are successful in poker largely because most people are bad poker players.  I doubt a computer could win the World Series of poker, but who knows... maybe I'm way off on this one.  Vegas hates anything that closes the odds gap between the player and the casino.  I think they are against this sort of thing in poker because it would chase the fish away.  The house gain in poker is all about the rake, so they don't have to play the odds. 

If IBM could program a bot in 1997 to beat Gary Kasparov in chess (http://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/), then I submit that it's possible to program a bot to beat any game.

Stephen Zepp provided great thoughts in terms even I can understand :) But I did want to respond to one thing:

But this happens already, no? And probably with even MORE such moments because afaik in normal FPS competitive play,  it's still individuals that do the hosting, with all of the variables associated with p2p connections.

I only make this point because I wouldn't want MMOs to be held to any higher standard than which players in such relevant other genres already accept. Heck, I just want MMOs to reach those standards.

This is precisely what I was talking about.

While Vegas tries to pretend that the reason folks go there is to have fun, most folks choose Vegas over, say, an equally expensive Carribean Cruise because they're dreaming of hitting a jackpot or a great game and coming home with a big pile of money. Sure there are great restaurants and shows, but there's a reason you've got to walk past three hundred metric tons of slot machine to get to them. Using a computer to play the game for you in Vegas is a great way to make a lot of money (and/or get in big trouble).

Using a computer to play for you in the basement with Lenny, Doofus, Carl, and Sharkey on Saturday night is just a great way to be an asshole. Using a bot may take away some of the fun of the game for you, but it has the potential to take away a LOT of the fun for your friends.

Comparing MMOGs to poker is also worthwhile in as much as most folks only play either for the shiney. The only way to win is to step away from the table. Until MMOGs are as much fun as games people enjoy even when there's no money on the table, they're going to have folks eager to cheat to get the phat virtual lewtz. And this is the internet, so ruining the fun of other folks in the game only feels as bad as cheating some random tourist in Vegas, rather than potentially losing friends around the table in the basement.

Professionals don't make a living off the World Series of Poker. They make a living largely because most people are bad poker players. I imagine the computer would manage pretty well in the World Series, but just like any of the masters at those tables, whether it actually won would be a matter of luck.
The problem with moments like this is qualitative, not quantitative. MMOs are held to a higher standard because they have been designed in a way that inspires a higher standard. They won't reach the FPS standard until their options are as bland, identical, and disposable as the ones in the average FPS... and in my mind that would be a step in the wrong direction.

The problem here is that chess is a fully determinstic game, with a very simple rule set, very limited game world, and one that can be fully evolved to a win state each and every game turn given enough processing power.

I can't mathematically prove it, but I'd suggest that given the non-determinstic nature of mmo games, it's not 100% possible to create rule based AI that can handle any game.  Sure, we can create rule systems that can approach win states and adjust, but there's quite a bit more research needed to be "AIftw!".

That's what I was trying to emphasize in my poker analogy.  Thank you for wording it more concisely.

I was rather shocked at the sheer amount of effort that goes into something as simple as synching clocks (well, it's easy if you have a master clock -- I'm talking getting four or five computers to agree on what time it is without a master). It's not surprising that something like an FPS shot cycle would be considerably more complex, especially if you cannot fully trust client-side information.

I see your point.  However, I think that if you restrict the scope to a certain activity in a certain part of a certain game world, things become a lot more deterministic.   

Also the exercise may be infeasible due to the amount of work it would take (I imagine IBM has more resources at its disposal than the WoWGLider guys) but it could still be possible.

The other issue, Jayce, is the input medium. With chess, the boundaries of the problem and the input/output mechanism is very straightforward. It becomes a number-crunching game (if you want to brute force it) or sophisticated guessing code. Entire books have been written about it, but our little MMO bot is much easier. The problem shifts to the input/output mechanisms. A (sophisticated) botting program is going to need to create a sense-think-act feedback loop; somehow receive data from the target program and then act on it. Only the most rudimentary bots would work without it (UO Macroing programs, where you walk in a circle, press these keys at this interval.) MMOs are very tricky, because you have to intuit your sense data, and the 'act' part is relatively simple -- often just a keypress.

There are basically three ways of getting information in this regard. I'll talk about each in turn.

1) Sniff the data stream

This is traditionally been done with things like EQ radar, setting up some sort of proxy to grab the data coming into and leaving your computer. Because a lot of information is server side (to prevent the next issue), you may be able to get enough working information to use this as your input and create a bot feedback loop. I don't know that it's ever been done in practice, generally this is used for spoofing and additional information that gives the player an upper hand.

2) Look at the running program in memory

SoftICE or another debugger lets you look at and edit the game during runtime. This is the most versatile, the most common and the most dangerous (to developers). If the data can be found in running memory, and it isn't encrypted, it can be read. Often it can't be changed, as the server does sanity checking, but since everything that's displayed on your screen is somewhere in memory, this makes it easy to get at. It makes the most sense for WoWGlider and other programs to use this method to keep track of where your character is in the game world. Developers counter this by obfuscation and encryption, but it's essentially a cat-and-mouse game.

A simple example of using this on output as well as input would be that WoW program that let you fly around the world. The WoW devs made two mistakes - the first was to leave the unencrypted X, Y, Z location axis of the player sitting in memory, and the second was not to do any sanity checking server side of the client's reorted location. The program simply changed those values in memory, and the server didn't do any sanity checking, so the server accepted it and you were suddenly somewhere else. Do it very quickly, in small increments, and you can outrun the deeprun tram (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKomlvqW7qs).

This was heavily used for farming reagents in the early days before WoWglider. It's also been used endlessly for 'trainers', programs that give you infinite lives and such in single player games. Remember GameShark? That falls in this category. So did some of the old memory resident cracks for dos games.

3) Read the game output

In this, the bot attempts to pretend it's a person and only recieves input that the game would normally output to the player. The most common things that fall into this category are the pallet matchers. I personally used this one for my ffxi fishbot, since it was the most easy. It works best on static text; With some clever coding you can do pretty well. You look for a specific color, or collection of pixels with a specific color or color range, and once you detect it, you can do something. With enough sophistication, you can read text , status boxes, things like that. It falls down when trying to create a bot that walks around, because you're pretty much unable to reconstruct location from a 3d rendering of the environment. You can cheat and use overhead maps (hit M, scan for your location, adjust) but you generally end up falling down pits and get 'stuck'. Remember botters walking in circle? It's becuase the act is out of sync with the sense. The program thinks you are in a different location than you actually are.


Let me give you a hypothetical example. I've been playing planetside recently, so I'm going to use that. Let's say that you want a combat edge over another player, and have decided you want a way to have it automatically both use a healthkit and turn on your personal shield when you take damage. Output on this is easy; all you need to do is transmit F1 and then F2 keypresses.

Option 1 seems a bit of overkill, but you'd set up a proxy server and look for indicies of someone hit you. I don't know what planetside data transmissions look like, but I suspect you could find health changes in there somewhere (an 'I hit you' packet, for example).

Option 2 is easier. Hunt around in memory for your total health. Watch that value. When it changes, you know you're hit.

Option 3 is just as easy. Because your health is in a fixed location in the screen, and is even represented by a bar, it's trivial to have a program watch pixel location X, Y, and do your keypress when it detects a change. (you'd still have to deal with loading screens, but you can just put in a 'don't change if it turns black' clause.

Now, that we've got the background, you can see that 'act' is only a third of your sense-think-act bot AI model. Of course, most agree that thinking (http://cs.brynmawr.edu/~dkumar/UGAI/planning.html) is the more sophisticated trick. But we're diku here, it doesn't take brains - just time.

In WoW it's even easier, as you can build an addOn that pulls a lot of data (legally) from the client, such as your location, the distance to a mob, managing targetting, etc.  You can basically re-write the majority of the WoW UI out to a computer-readable format, and then have your process (the 'think' step) send commands either via an addon, or via DirectX calls, or otherwise faking input to the process.  Way easier than say EQ1, where you only have the text logs, and your image-matching.

--
Alkiera

Not really. All the "serious" online PC FPSes are client-server based and have been since Quake. E.g. all the id-games from Quake on are client-server, all the Unreal (Tournament) engine games, all the Half-Life/Source engine games, all the BF games, and so on. And not only are they client-server but they also typically run on dedicated servers -- i.e. with no client running on them as well.

That's the way autoaim bots used to work (I haven't played FPSes competitvely in a long time so I haven't been keeping up on the latest bot trends). In online shooters (and also MMORPGs) in the data stream you receive regular updates about all the dynamic objects in a certain radius around you. This means that if somebody is behind you the server still sends you the exact position information about the person even though you can't "see" him/her/it on your screen. If you stick a proxy between your client and the server, though, the proxy can detect that somebody is behind you and alter your command stream back to the server to adjust for that -- e.g. by having your character turn and head shot the poor bastard. It doesn't have to be somebody out of sight either. If somebody is above you or to your side the proxy can automatically determine the optimum firing angle to hit that person since it knows both your exact position and facing information and the exact position and facing of the target.

A lot of that information has since been denied user addons - specifically range - as well as the ability to move the character via addons or macros. Whatever wowglider does, it's done outside the context of what the client offers to the end-user.

This is not as much of a problem now that the world has epoll (linux) and kqueue (freebsd).  Of course you still have to *process* all those data streams, but bottlenecks in just handling the socket io events are not a serious issue in modern unix variants.

- Q

But these are still user-hosted servers right? While that works for that clan and whatever tournament they are in, it's not something that seems equally accessible to everyone who chooses to play that game.

I invite correction though. I know less about FPS games than I do sports :)

Warcraft3 uses p2p netcode... as does homeworld and most other RTS games.

There's a whole ecosystem of FPS servers out there. There are servers that players setup and either make public or private (password protected). This is the most common type. Then for some games the game publisher will setup public servers. And there are "game server hosters" that will rent out servers that support various games. BF2 servers were/are mostly hosted in the later fashion cause EA restricted who could host servers that generate stats to prevent modifying the code and altering stats for people who play on them. You can setup your own BF2 server but it won't be able to send stats back to the Borg.

In any event there are many many publically accessible FPS servers out there for people to play on. In fact there are so many out there for some games that it causes my ancient router to throw up its hands and stop accepting packets cause it can't handle that many incoming connections when I try to refresh the server list (it overflows its NAT table of something).

No WC III uses client/server netcode, where the "host" starts off as the server though that can change if the host drops out. StarCraft used p2p which is why if one player was fricking slow everybody was slow.

Some examples, as of right now there are 142,811 servers online that are tracked by Steam (http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=stats&cc=US), and there are 4,555 BF2 servers as tracked by bf2tracker.com (http://bf2tracker.com/serverlist.php). Note that those aren't all publically accessible servers but it gives you an idea of just how many dedicated FPS servers there are out there.

Just an FYI on the way WoWglider works. As written by bhodi, a bot is basically sense-think-act machine, or in computer tersm, input-logic-output.

Input:
Glider receives the input by reading the memory of WoW. All the data it gets comes directly from WoW memory. It can "see" everything in your visual range, it can see all the details available to the client. Are you in the global cooldown? What is your current x, y, z location? What is your health and mana/rage/energy? Etc. It utilizes pretty much everything a real player would utilize and grabs the info directly from memory. There's nothing that it can see (I believe) that a player doesn't have access to, either with the basic Blizzard UI or through the use of legal UI modifications. There's no ShowEQ going on here, just basic input required for understanding the world around you.

Logic:
There's two main parts to the logic. One is the navigation. Glider uses a waypoint system. You put it into "waypoint capture" mode and run around the world where you want the bot to go. As you're running it will record the coordinates of your location and add them. You either create a loop where it just goes from the end point to the beginning or a wander and back where it will go to the end then reverse and go back. Very basic stuff really.

The second is how to actually play the game. It has custom created rulesets for every class which tell it completely how to play that class, at least as much as the bot needs to know. For a mage it knows to pull with the spell you put in bar #3 or whatever, it knows to frost nova when the mob is close to you, it knows to back up and cast some more, etc. It has a very well made and complete ruleset for every class and it's actually quite amazing how much time and effort has been put into making it play efficiently at every class in the game. There's also many settings that can be changed for each class, an example being as a rogue to only use "Kick" when your target is casting and under a certain percent health. The purpose being if you're grinding on healers that heal themselves at a set health to interrupt to heals.

Output:
The output differs from other current bots (bots created using innerspace for example) and previously well known bots in that it uses full uses keyboard and mouse commands. This is the trick that makes it much less detectable than the other bots. Most other bots directly manipulate the memory of WoW to input commands, the process being called memory injection. Glider is pretty much indistinguishable from a human player because it presses keys and moves the mouse. This also means you can't really use your computer to do other things while botting.

Some of the biggest bots in the past, most notably WoWsharp, used injection for output and this was their downfall. Blizzard was able to find ways to detect this direct memory manipulation and automatically ban people engaging in it.


As a side note, bots made using innerspace today are undetected still despite using injection methods of output. This is due to the creation of something called ISXWarden which is basically a tool for mano-a-mano against Warden: Blizzard's main tool for detection of cheating. ISXWarden basically goes in and takes out Warden's capability of detecting the memory injection and then the bot itself can do whatever the hell it pleases as long as it doesn't set off any server side sanity checks.

Glider recently contracted out to the creator of ISXWarden to manage the security component of the bot. Basically, the creator of Glider was tired of playing cat and mouse with Blizzard and wanted to focus more on the featureset of the bot rather than dealing with the cold war of beating WoW's security. This will see a shift from a one time payment of $25 for the program to a monthly fee in order to cover the cost of ISXWarden.

To go even further back, this switch to using iSXWarden dates back to massive ban wave on November 14th, 2006. On that day Blizzard let drop the hammer and they seemingly had found a way of automatically detecting Glider versus all previous bannings which come as a result of player reportings of botters. Two weeks before the ban wave the creator of ISXWarden reported a new, unknown version of Warden being run by clients and with that he predicted something big was in the works. This change to Warden flew under Glider's radar and subsequently ended up with thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of his customers being banned.

Now that I think about it, Halflife DID have a filter for servers that allowed cheats.  So my overall view of the tolerance is skewed by being sharded to the non-cheater side off the bat - I clicked it once and never looked at it again.

And I suppose if all players were using the same aimbot it would be a valid game.  A different game, but balanced, nonetheless.

While it is impressive (I've seen the priest vers. of Glider-botting) it is also sad.  It makes it clear just how lame pve is for anyone who was still pretending pve activities have any redeeming factor.  The priest version goes something like:  PW:S, Mind Blast, SW:P, mind flay (can be set to skip if you are not in range because mob is a caster), then you just set a # of seconds that you want the bot to wand before it casts mind blast again.  Done.  I played a priest to 60, that is exactly what I did every time I ever solo'd.  That is pve.  A set order of hotkey presses, with two actual choices (move into range for mind flay, how long before you nuke a second time).  Are there types of pve that require more skill within WoW?  Yes.  But the vast majority of the solo content that everyone jizzes about can be done by a bot, no problem.

Remind me why its a bad thing if some program lets me skip that?  Outside of game economy concerns, -which are meaningless to my enjoyment of any mmo- there just dont seem to be any.

Hence why so many of us opt for pvp-centered games.  Humans are much more interesting and dynamic opponents.

Anything, with any ruleset is going to be similarly limiting.

Or are you going to tell me that UO MDKs were somhow more than just using a few predetermined skills faster/ better than the person on the other side of the screen, because that'd be wrong.  You're not going to Jackie Chan up a wall, pick up that chair, break a leg off and shove it through some guy's skull.  It's just not happening, because the rules dont allow it.

I can tell you that 8v8 in DAoC is significantly more dynamic than any PvE encounter I've come across.  Yes, the number of skills are the same but the different permutations in their use is quite large relative to any PvE encounter you could design.  PvP requires a much more dynamic use of tools and could not be scripted as effectively as any PvE encounter. 

Humans are much more creative in the use of tools than AI.  At least for now. 

You saw the part where I said two choices right?  Two.  That is solo'ing w/ a priest.  Two choices and only one if the mob isn't a caster mob.    Yes rules limit options (thanks Capt. Obvious) but drawing the conclusion that therefore fighting a human opponent involves a similar amount of variables as a crappy foozle AI opponent...

Not so fucking much.