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Fauxtool
Oct 21, 2008

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
This thread is about breaking all the rules to gain an unfair advantage over the squares that play honestly.

:siren: I have permission from Cowcaster to make this thread :siren:

What is hacking, cheating, botting and exploiting?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlm12rcMtBQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpAXQCf-wEo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4zBx0cG3Ak
Hacking and cheating generally involve downloading a 3rd party program that alters your game files in some way. It can do useful things like let you see through walls or even fly in games where everyone else has to walk.

Botting is where you run programs to automate parts of the game. Bots are very complex these days. You can have them level a character for you. They can grind for rare drops. There are even bots that will have you use your abilities at the perfect times in the perfect order for max dps better than any human could do. Even Dota2 and LoL have a last hitting/deny bot. To some people, putting a heavy object on your keyboard to auto-run and keep your character from going AFK can be considered a bot.

Exploiting is different, it involves abusing the game engine or the game's poor coding to do something not intended by the devs. An example could be pulling your ethernet cord in the middle of a trade to cause the items to dupe. Another common one in MMO's is to find a quest monster with an instant respawn timer and killing it repeatedly for loot and easy xp.

I'm going to use the blanket term "cheating" when talking about any of the above activities.

Is this safe?
I cant speak for every country, but in the US its perfectly fine to modify any of the files on your computer however you want. You own your computer and everything on it.No individual players I am aware of have ever been targeted legally by a game company, only the cheat makers. It may not be illegal but it is against the ToS you agreed to when you signed up to play your game, which brings me to my next point.

Why isnt everyone doing it then?
That's because you may get banned from the game you are playing. People rightfully take offense when they encounter a cheater. Cheaters can do things that are frankly unfair and ruin the spirit of competition.

That seems bad, why would anyone do it still?
For me, its about money. Using cheats and bots let me farm up huge amounts of in game gold in various different games to sell to players that dont want to farm it themselves. Most recently I did it in Archeage to the tune of over $3000 in 1 month's time. Before that was Diablo 3 for much more money. My older brother bought a brand new car and paid his rent for a year with money from exploiting in Star Wars Galaxies when that game still hot.

I'm interested, how can I become a dirty cheater?
The most common way is to pay for them. The people making cheats work hard to constantly fight to stay ahead of the anti-cheat tech. If they werent profiting they wouldnt be doing it.

If you find a cheat on Youtube with a link to a site that wants you to fill out some surveys, its not real. If it's free, its probably not very safe or good.

A reputable site will have a public forum with a paid members only section. There will be 24hr live chat support and they will accept paypal.

Good sites I have had success with are
https://forum.aimjunkies.com/
http://hags-club.com/news/
http://www.artificialaiming.net/forum/index.php
https://www.thebuddyforum.com/
http://www.mmoviper.com/
http://www.mmominion.com/portal.php
These are not affiliate links, they are not paying me to promote them.

On the sites you will often see something like this

A list of the hacks they provide and their current status
"Undetected" does not mean its undetecable, it means there are no bans reported with the most current version of the hack.

Some basic Do's and Dont's for cheaters
  • Do feign ignorance or just dont reply if you are accused of cheating. What you arent saying cant be used against you.

  • Dont tell anyone using the game's chat that you are cheating. Chat logs will be pulled if you are suspected of cheating and you admitting that you cheat will expedite your ban.

  • Don't use the most popular site for your hacking needs. When hacking becomes an issue for a game, they will always go after the most popular cheat first and ban those players. That is your hint to lay low for awhile.

  • Do pay with paypal to ensure that they wont steal your CC info and so you can get a refund if it doesnt work as advertised

  • Don't go overboard with cheating. If you fly around in a FPS headshotting everyone through walls you will get banned even if the hack hasnt been detected. If you teleport around in an mmo turning in 100 quests per hour you will get banned

  • Do things that are feasible. Its okay to leave a bot unattended for 4 hours farming crabs on a beach, a sad lonely person could feasibly do that. It's not okay to leave it unattended for a week, nobody would do that and its a red flag that something is off.

  • Don't use the same name on cheat forums that you use here or in game. Anyone can sign up for a free account on those sites and see the names of people that bought cheats and match them to names of people cheating in their game.

  • Do make a new game account to cheat on, no cheat is 100% safe. If you do get banned, you want it to be something you are fine with losing.

  • Don't cheat in high traffic areas. Its generally okay if one person sees you do something odd, its when multiple people notice something and you get reported to GMs by more than one player when you get investigated.

Please feel free to ask any questions or share tales of bad things you have done.

Fauxtool fucked around with this message at 14:26 on Nov 20, 2014

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Fauxtool
Oct 21, 2008

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
Cheating in single player games

One of the easiest tools for doing this is called Cheat Engine
Get it here http://www.cheatengine.org/downloads.php

To use it, start up the game. In this example ill be playing borderlands the pre-sequel

Once you are in game start up Cheat Engine

Select File > Open process

It will display a list of currently open processes like this

Select the game you are playing (borderlands)

Now its set to edit the values in the game, let's do my money

As you can see my $ is currently at 248. Using cheat engine we are going to see where in the game the $ value is stored so we can change it to anything we want.

First is to input the current value (248) into the "value" field like so and the hit First Scan

you will get a list off all the things in the game currently showing a value of 248, not so helpful with this many possibilities

Lets see about shortening that list

We need to change our $ value in game so I'll buy something cheap and put it down to 222

Take that 222 and input to Cheat engine and hit Next Scan

Much better, only 2 possible addresses this time.

Ill repeat the process until it the amount of addresses stop going down and all thats left are the ones where my $ is stored.

right-click the value right next to the addresses you found and select "Change value of selected addresses" and put in the amount you want. I did 100,000

Now in game I have $100,000

you can do things like god mode and infinite ammo very easily in the same way.

Its very simple and can be done with just about every game and even some poorly coded multiplayer games

If you are real lazy you can download files where someone has found all the values for you called Cheat Tables. They can be found in Cheat Engine's forums
http://forum.cheatengine.org/viewforum.php?f=4&sid=546205a33ef7f66f75290bc11a675fa6

Fauxtool fucked around with this message at 05:44 on Nov 21, 2014

Notorious R.I.M.
Jan 27, 2004

up to my ass in alligators
Edit: wrong thread

Notorious R.I.M. fucked around with this message at 14:37 on Nov 18, 2014

Delamore
Jan 11, 2008

Monocle Man
Now that it's far too late to make money off Diablo 3, I don't suppose anyone who made a solid bot for it wants to explain the methods they used?
Even with a terrible homemade bot you could make money off Diablo 3 as long as you were willing to manually update the prices. From what I heard some people had taken it as far as gathering price data from the auction house and then using that to decide if items were underpriced rather than entering it in themselves.

Alot of goons posted pictures of bot filled storage boxes so I assume most were relisting the items manually, did anyone reach the point where they were automatically pricing and relisting their items using a bot?

edit

If you're as interested in this as me, the last pages of the Diablo 3 item trading thread had tons of cool information goons posted just before the Auction house was removed from the game, trying to dig it up now.

Delamore fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Nov 18, 2014

Fauxtool
Oct 21, 2008

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Delamore posted:

Now that it's far too late to make money off Diablo 3, I don't suppose anyone who made a solid bot for it wants to explain the methods they used?
Even with a terrible homemade bot you could make money off Diablo 3 as long as you were willing to manually update the prices. From what I heard some people had taken it as far as gathering price data from the auction house and then using that to decide if items were underpriced rather than entering it in themselves.

Alot of goons posted pictures of bot filled storage boxes so I assume most were relisting the items manually, did anyone reach the point where they were automatically pricing and relisting their items using a bot?

edit

If you're as interested in this as me, the last pages of the Diablo 3 item trading thread had tons of cool information goons posted just before the Auction house was removed from the game, trying to dig it up now.

its been quite some time since I played d3 so some details are off.
There were 2 main ways i know people made tons of money on the game

1. a bot that bought low and sold high on the AH. These guys could have easily pulled 50k plus in a month. I got into it too late to make any money. A fully automated bot would be dangerous and abusable if other market barons caught on. As far as I know you had to manually relist. It could have been somewhat safe on very active markets like gems, but not the hundred dollar weapons.


2. a bot that ran the zone before the boss in act 3 on inferno. Its the zone with all the lava and those large mobs that are invis and teleport. You stacked gold find and gold pick up range items along with a 1k dps bow on the archer class.
Thats the one I did from launch. The nice part about this one is that it scales up very well when you run multiple characters at once. It was very easy to sell gold on the AH. One time I left it on during a 3 day weekend while i was at vegas and came back to 1600.00 in gold. At the tail end of the crash in gold prices I could still make $75 every 12 hours of botting. The bot is long gone now, but I can dig up the name if you are interested in looking it up

Fauxtool fucked around with this message at 14:54 on Nov 18, 2014

Chunjee
Oct 27, 2004

Great idea for a thread.


Found this video with the wowglider creator incredibly interesting: Hacking MMORPGs for Fun and Mostly Profit at DEFCON 19

Fauxtool
Oct 21, 2008

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Chunjee posted:

Great idea for a thread.


Found this video with the wowglider creator incredibly interesting: Hacking MMORPGs for Fun and Mostly Profit at DEFCON 19

thats just a better version of my op. I loved glider, so easy to use and i got in early with the lifetime sub

Unforgiven
Sep 4, 2007
Who needs redemption?
I've been interested in this kind of stuff for some time. I got my first taste of botting back in the heyday Diabo II:LoD, when pindlebot and maphack was a big deal.

I have high hopes for this thread, since I'm mostly too lazy to figure out how this stuff works for myself.

eonwe
Aug 11, 2008



Lipstick Apathy
I think I might try my hand at this in the next MMO. Always nice to make a little money.

Fauxtool
Oct 21, 2008

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Unforgiven posted:

I've been interested in this kind of stuff for some time. I got my first taste of botting back in the heyday Diabo II:LoD, when pindlebot and maphack was a big deal.

I have high hopes for this thread, since I'm mostly too lazy to figure out how this stuff works for myself.

i get way too deep into it when nothing good gets released for a game and I have to do it myself. I was super guilty of it in world of tanks. The only okay bot at the time was tankleader. It was extremely bot like and not very good at gaining xp. I ended up writing tons of autoit scripts and supplemental tools to override functions of the bot. The majority of them are now in the current version and I highly recommend it.

At one point I had every tank in the game unlocked and realized that I didnt even want to play, i would rather watch my bot play poorly. It getting 3 kills in a match was more exciting that me getting 9 kills.

If anyone wants info on the state of hacks in current games, i would happy to dig it up and share. A good rule of thumb is, if its full of gold sellers, its a popular enough game and someone is making hacks for it.

BERGfu
Aug 24, 2010


Path of Exile was a game a used bots for, mostly because grinding up a character in a new league was a massive pain in the rear end. Fauxtool do you every switch up for VPN or other stuff for bans? I know i got hit with Poe because they blocked my IP

..btt
Mar 26, 2008

Fauxtool posted:

I cant speak for every country, but in the US its perfectly legal to modify any of the files on your computer however you want.

I thought that the US was one of the few places in the world where this wasn't the case due to recent laws and provisions, e.g. the DMCA; or the lack of consumer protections against EULAs (unlike most of Europe, for example). Can you explain this statement a little further? Is there some precedent to back it up?

Kimsemus
Dec 4, 2013

by Reene
Toilet Rascal
This is actually some pretty interesting reading.

I remember talking to a few members of CCP's security team some 6-8 months ago, where they said that some cheaters/RMT launderers in Turkey were making upwards of 1M USD a year by doing stuff like this. They went after them and shut them down supposedly, but the market has to be insane in some games to support an economy like that.

Fauxtool
Oct 21, 2008

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

..btt posted:

I thought that the US was one of the few places in the world where this wasn't the case due to recent laws and provisions, e.g. the DMCA; or the lack of consumer protections against EULAs (unlike most of Europe, for example). Can you explain this statement a little further? Is there some precedent to back it up?

Not exactly what you are looking for, but the wowglider case is relevant.
Blizzard tried to say they retained ownership of their code when in your memory. They sued glider on the basis that they were modifying Blizzard files while in your memory and selling them as their own product.

Thats not at all what glider was doing and Blizzard knew they had no case so they dragged it out until glider ran out of money and couldnt fight anymore and shut down the service. All glider did was read the relevant numbers like location and hp and input commands like skills that their servers would normally receive from players. Nothing was modified, just added to.

The majority of hacking sites are based in the US and Russia, not just because American love to cheat

See also, the legality of modifying your smartphone as they are starting to be classified as computers. Apple unsuccessfully tried to fight consumer's right to jailbreak their phones.

There's not a lot of precedent because glider is one of the only ones to be successfully shut down. Most hacking site have a disclaimer that hacking is against the ToA and you will get banned for it. That puts the responsibility on the consumer and there is no way the game companies are going to sue individuals unless they manage to single handedly ruin the game somehow.


Gold sellers are great for games. They are my #1 indicator of a healthy game. If a game has no sellers, it probably has a terrible economy and a low population. The hate they get from players in unwarranted in most cases. Its a full time job with terrible pay, and they are just trying to make a living.

Fauxtool fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Nov 18, 2014

Morglon
Jan 13, 2010

Safe and sound, detached from reality.
Just like your posting.

Fauxtool posted:

Gold sellers are great for games. They are my #1 indicator of a healthy game. If a game has no sellers, it probably has a terrible economy and a low population. The hate they get from players in unwarranted in most cases. Its a full time job with terrible pay, and they are just trying to make a living.

Yeah, if there are no gold sellers game is dead. Also it's not so much the selling, not gonna buy fake gold but whatever floats your boat, have at it. It's the part where they make chat channels unusable because they spam their poo poo every second. Honestly as long as they're no detriment to me I don't give a gently caress.

Chunjee
Oct 27, 2004

Fauxtool posted:

At one point I had every tank in the game unlocked and realized that I didnt even want to play, i would rather watch my bot play poorly. It getting 3 kills in a match was more exciting that me getting 9 kills.

Optimizing the automation starts to surpass the amount of fun of actually playing. I imagine if you get money into the mix; you stop thinking about playing all together :(

Fauxtool
Oct 21, 2008

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Morglon posted:

Yeah, if there are no gold sellers game is dead. Also it's not so much the selling, not gonna buy fake gold but whatever floats your boat, have at it. It's the part where they make chat channels unusable because they spam their poo poo every second. Honestly as long as they're no detriment to me I don't give a gently caress.

thats super annoying, but on the game devs to fix. Its the same problem as someone spamming curse words on every chat. If they cant fix that, they cant fix the gold spam. Most games have spam protection. Only total clusterfucks like archeage dont.

..btt
Mar 26, 2008
Oh, ok. I remembered Blizzard "winning" that case but I never followed the details. Still, I'm fairly sure your statement isn't strictly true, not that it would ever make sense to prosecute an individual hacker rather than whoever made/distributed the tools. Especially in a non-F2P MMO where you can just ban them and get them to buy/steal another account - more revenue for them.

Have you ever got in hot water trying to offload ill-gotten virtual items? I imagine it'd be fairly trivial for a game developer to run sting operations to get account details. Mind you, most companies don't really seem to care beyond saving face.

Fauxtool
Oct 21, 2008

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Chunjee posted:

Optimizing the automation starts to surpass the amount of fun of actually playing. I imagine if you get money into the mix; you stop thinking about playing all together :(

After many weeks of terrible results in ffxiv pvp arena I managed to fine tune the mmominion bot to be far better than an actual player. It had instant CC breaks like it never even got hit and a perfect dps rotation that could burst down most players before the healer even noticed. It had perfect target priorities too, switching targets whenever someone dropped below 50% hp.

In the early weeks I got hate mail from players because my botting ruined their matches and caused lots of losses. Once I tuned it, those same players were telling me that they were glad I finally decided to stop botting and I was actually really good. Even though I never stopped :blush:

Fauxtool fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Nov 18, 2014

Fauxtool
Oct 21, 2008

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

..btt posted:

Oh, ok. I remembered Blizzard "winning" that case but I never followed the details. Still, I'm fairly sure your statement isn't strictly true, not that it would ever make sense to prosecute an individual hacker rather than whoever made/distributed the tools. Especially in a non-F2P MMO where you can just ban them and get them to buy/steal another account - more revenue for them.

Have you ever got in hot water trying to offload ill-gotten virtual items? I imagine it'd be fairly trivial for a game developer to run sting operations to get account details. Mind you, most companies don't really seem to care beyond saving face.

its the american legal system, nothing can be truly 100% legal or illegal when meanings of things are so fluid. I have never heard of legal action being directed at any individual players.

I should probably change the OP to use "safe" instead of "illegal"

If they are really looking hard you cant hide. Just dont be the worst offender and they will always be looking for someone else.
Its generally pretty easy to launder money in games as long as there is an auction house. The gold buyer lists a common item at the amount of gold they are buying and you buy it.

Fauxtool fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Nov 18, 2014

puberty worked me over
May 20, 2013

by Cyrano4747
Based on the only few cases game companies have actually brought to court the general rule of thumb is to make sure you're not doing anything that is making a lot of money or pissing a lot of players off. It's not worth a companies time to go after an individual selling a couple thousand dollars worth.

Fauxtool posted:

Just dont be the worst offender and they will always be looking for someone else.

I suppose the biggest secret that maybe Fauxtool won't be willing to share is how to find customers to buy your gold/items/etc. Also curious why this thread is in public games instead of PGS.

puberty worked me over fucked around with this message at 17:50 on Nov 18, 2014

CharlestonJew
Jul 7, 2011

Illegal Hen
wait there's people who will pay for cheats? like is there that much of a quality gap between free cheats and paid cheats?

Fauxtool
Oct 21, 2008

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Extra posted:

Based on the only few cases game companies have actually brought to court the general rule of thumb is to make sure you're not doing anything that is making a lot of money or pissing a lot of players off.


I suppose the biggest secret that maybe Fauxtool won't be willing to share is how to find customers to buy your gold/items/etc. Also curious why this thread is in public games instead of PGS.

I sold on ebay for SWG, and on these forums and playerauctions for every other game. I get a lot of business on SA because they would rather buy from me than a chinaman.

The private cheat forums are also a good place to buy and sell virtual goods. The same people willing to spend money on hacks are often terrible at it but still want to pay money to get a leg up.

Its in general games because there is nothing to hide and no one would see it in PGS.

puberty worked me over
May 20, 2013

by Cyrano4747

CharlestonJew posted:

wait there's people who will pay for cheats? like is there that much of a quality gap between free cheats and paid cheats?

Back in the BC era WoWGlider was the best thing since sliced bread and the free stuff didn't even come close. You could run quite a few clients at the same time all botting up characters basically acting like perfect little players. They would respond to tells, head to vendors, make random variations in their patrol paths, etc.

I suppose the biggest factor in making a solid bot is being able to identify/decode addresses/packets the server is sending your game client and basing the bot on those. There are some AHK/AutoIt wizards out there but those programs seem to only do so much. This thread is neat because I'm going to spend some time figuring out how the image recognition works on AHK.

puberty worked me over fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Nov 18, 2014

Fauxtool
Oct 21, 2008

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

CharlestonJew posted:

wait there's people who will pay for cheats? like is there that much of a quality gap between free cheats and paid cheats?

The paid ones dont steal your financial info since you are willingly paying them already. Nobody makes quality free stuff anymore except as a stripped down trial version to get you interested in the paid one. Look up videos for honor buddy if you want to see the quality of paid stuff. No complex setup, just input your class and which pvp you want to Q for and then come back tomorrow for tons of free honor.

Right now on aimjunkies there are over 50,000 premium members registered. Those are people paying $9-$25 monthly. Its serious business. This one was just released for LoL. Aint no one gonna write that kind of code for free.

Orbwalking

Lane freeze mode: automatically last hit any minions, while ignoring enemy champions
Mixed mode: same as lane freeze, but will poke any enemy champions that come in range
Lane clear mode: pushes the lane by last hitting minions but also continuously attacks
Carry mode: used for fights against enemy champions, will auto attack and execute combo on best target(s)
Keys: set different toggle keys for each mode
Customizable: implement your own combo for each champion via Lua scripting
Callbacks: implement your own callbacks for each stage of the orbwalking logic via Lua scripting



Autocaster

Auto ignite: uses ignite on any enemy champions that are low enough to be killed by it
Auto smite: uses smite on jungle monsters, you can filter which ones you want to smite in the menu
Auto heal: uses heal spell when you reach a percentage of health specified in the menu
Auto barrier: uses barrier spell when you reach a percentage of health specified in the menu
Auto clarity: uses clarity spell when you reach a percentage of mana specified in the menu
Auto potions: uses health / mana potions when you reach a percentage of health / mana specified in the menu
Keys: set different toggle keys for ignite and smite



Scripting

Lua: access to engine API to write custom features via Lua scripting
Manager: ability to manage all your scripts from the menu by seeing what scripts are available, loading new scripts, unloading running scripts, and more
Callbacks: implement an array of callbacks such as OnProcessSpell, OnSendPacket, OnReceivePacket, OnGameUpdate, and more



Upcoming Features

Auto evade: automatically avoid enemy skill shots if possible
Collision: visibility checks for proper skill shot logic and similar things
Awareness: show all enemy champion ranges and cooldowns, warn you when someone is trying to gank, and more

Fauxtool fucked around with this message at 18:04 on Nov 18, 2014

CharlestonJew
Jul 7, 2011

Illegal Hen
dang. I can understand paying for cheats in an MMO where you'll probably make a profit off it, but I can't really understand paying money so a bot can headshot dudes in call of duty for you.

puberty worked me over
May 20, 2013

by Cyrano4747
When protracted linear progression is so intrinsic to games these days it's natural people with more money and less free time will turn to software to do it for them so they can enjoy the fruits of progression with their pals later on.

Fauxtool
Oct 21, 2008

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

CharlestonJew posted:

dang. I can understand paying for cheats in an MMO where you'll probably make a profit off it, but I can't really understand paying money so a bot can headshot dudes in call of duty for you.

because they are mentally deficient and it makes them feel big. People cheat in sports too and its not just for the money. Winning is still winning to a lot of people even if they cheated.

dorkasaurus_rex
Jun 10, 2005

gawrsh do you think any women will be there

PC Gamer actually did a great article on the business-side of this a while back:

http://www.pcgamer.com/hacks-an-investigation-into-aimbot-dealers-wallhack-users-and-the-million-dollar-business-of-video-game-cheating/

Bieeanshee
Aug 21, 2000

Not keen on keening.


Grimey Drawer

Extra posted:

When protracted linear progression is so intrinsic to games these days it's natural people with more money and less free time will turn to software to do it for them so they can enjoy the fruits of progression with their pals later on.

Yeah, they've been observing that since... poo poo, at least since that guy bought a castle on a UO production shard for a few grand. Big, messy can of worms.

Harold Fjord
Jan 3, 2004
The latest Call of Duty already has players hacking themselves into walls and floors so they can be invincible.

I used to sort-of bot eve. I had a looping macro that would tab between two overlapping windows and automatically retarget and refire my guns every few seconds. When the target died the target overview would change and I'd automatically lock and start firing on the next target. I also had another program that watched the local chat windows for unfriendly players and sound an alarm when they were in the same solar system. I would read, work on my laptop, or clean while my characters farmed. It was less efficient than real bots, but it was free!

Suprfli6
Jul 9, 2008

:shepface:God I fucking love Diablo 3 gold, it even paid for this shitty title:shepface:

Delamore posted:

Now that it's far too late to make money off Diablo 3, I don't suppose anyone who made a solid bot for it wants to explain the methods they used?
Even with a terrible homemade bot you could make money off Diablo 3 as long as you were willing to manually update the prices. From what I heard some people had taken it as far as gathering price data from the auction house and then using that to decide if items were underpriced rather than entering it in themselves.

Alot of goons posted pictures of bot filled storage boxes so I assume most were relisting the items manually, did anyone reach the point where they were automatically pricing and relisting their items using a bot?

edit

If you're as interested in this as me, the last pages of the Diablo 3 item trading thread had tons of cool information goons posted just before the Auction house was removed from the game, trying to dig it up now.

I had no coding experience or anything and just used autohotkey to bot the d3 auction house for the first few weeks after the game launched. I'd target valuable uniques with low level requirements or ideal rares that were consistently listed for like 1% of their true value. At first I just did it to gear out my barb to the point where I could carry other goons through all the inferno bosses but then I started flipping stuff too. I never got to the point of relisting things automatically but I did purchase several accounts so I could sell more things faster. If my internet connection wasn't so terrible I would've run multiple AHK scripts and made serious money but I still ended up with around $5k after the first month when bliz finally started cracking down and too many other people had started running scripts/bots. I haven't played the game at all since then and I ended up spending like 10x more time in the AH than the game itself.

One huge global AH with a playerbase the size of D3 was like the perfect storm of auction house shenanigans, unfortunately I doubt anything else will ever be nearly that amazing.

Slime
Jan 3, 2007
I don't see the point in cheats when all that's at stake is your e-peen, and that counts for winning a competition with a cash prize too. Now, exploiting to get ingame resources that you then make real cash off? I can't really get all that mad about that. I'm pretty sure a lot of crafting in FF14 simply wouldn't happen without bots going around doing things. And besides, the way most MMOs work the progression part of it is boring as poo poo. You do the same thing, EXACTLY the same thing, over and over and over again so you can move on and do the same thing in a different place. The fun comes from PvP and doing cool things with your friends, so it's no surprise that people want to just skip to that part, whether that means botting themselves or buying cheap resources supplied by botters.

Eye of Widesauron
Mar 29, 2014

This thread loving rules.

Coolguye
Jul 6, 2011

Required by his programming!
Yeah I'd be really interested in discussions on the business and technical side of this stuff; Fauxtool, are you acquainted with any coders that could talk about some of the basics of what they do to evaluate their tools? Even though I've been programming for over 10 years, packet analysis is still kind of a big mystery to me and it'd be really interesting to hear what people who work with it regularly have to say on the matter.

Macichne Leainig
Jul 26, 2012

by VG

CharlestonJew posted:

dang. I can understand paying for cheats in an MMO where you'll probably make a profit off it, but I can't really understand paying money so a bot can headshot dudes in call of duty for you.

I used to aimbot and wallhack in MW2 and Black Ops. People got extremely angry and it was just really entertaining to see people get really mad at a video game they can disconnect from at any time.

As a software developer though it's always interesting to see how people figure out these things.

I also used to bot in WoW, because gently caress leveling up a new character to max level nowadays.

Kild
Apr 24, 2010

Fauxtool posted:

Gold sellers are great for games. They are my #1 indicator of a healthy game. If a game has no sellers, it probably has a terrible economy and a low population. The hate they get from players in unwarranted in most cases. Its a full time job with terrible pay, and they are just trying to make a living.

I don't think thats necessarily the case everytime. DFO got shut down (for reportedly low numbers) and had nothing but gold bots/sellers and had a terrible economy because of said bots.

Thought thats probably because Nexon didn't even crack down on bots. They could do dungeons in under a minute for 24/7 a month straight and not get banned.

dorkasaurus_rex
Jun 10, 2005

gawrsh do you think any women will be there

It's pretty fun to hack up perfectly bred Pokemon with all the right stats and moves because that poo poo literally takes hundreds of hours otherwise. And you can only use stuff which is legal anyways so

Third World Reagan
May 19, 2008

Imagine four 'mechs waiting in a queue. Time works the same way.
A lot of people will decry cheating or the RMT market, but so many people spend money there to make it profitable that it is kinda hard to say most players hate it. The market is really that large.

One of the non RMT cheats that I always found funny was for planetside 2. I think it was just cheat engine. But if anyone came near you, like gun range near you, it would move your cursor directly to their head.

You also knew if people were targeting your head with this cheat, so someone I know had paid for it and started moving around.

It is amazing how many people are using the cheat because of all of the head shot warnings he would get when he entered an area.

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Sizup
Nov 25, 2008


Coolguye posted:

Yeah I'd be really interested in discussions on the business and technical side of this stuff; Fauxtool, are you acquainted with any coders that could talk about some of the basics of what they do to evaluate their tools? Even though I've been programming for over 10 years, packet analysis is still kind of a big mystery to me and it'd be really interesting to hear what people who work with it regularly have to say on the matter.

Yea I'm interested in the technical side as well. Fauxtool I remember you talking about bypassing hackshield, was that just using a tool from one of these sites or something you put together?

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