4 ms·

As a teenager I ran a pretty high margin business operating botting software for a popular MMORPG. Bots would autonomously play characters in the game in order

As a teenager I ran a pretty high margin business operating botting software for a popular MMORPG. Bots would autonomously play characters in the game in order to "farm" items that could be sold to other players in the game. Virtual currency could then be transferred over a "black market" forum, usually with paypal as a medium. Just to be clear all this was legal, it merely took on the visage of "illegal" because it violated the TOS of the game and could you your in-game character(s) banned. The software was written by mostly teenagers and by all modern metrics was absolutely atrocious. It required constant maintenance, crashed all the time, and was riddled with bugs that would reveal your character as a bot and get it banned. But the exchange value for the virtual currency was so high it didn't matter, I was still making hand over fist. I didn't write any of the software I used at the time but it's a pretty frequent daydream of mine imagining the literal millions of dollars I could of made were I able to go back and re-write that software knowing everything about software development I know now. The beauty of bots is that they do not augment the productivity of the user like most software, they replace it with something that is a consistant multiplier better.

gnahckire 10y ago
Did the MMORPG happen to be Runescape or WoW?
- ben_jones 10y ago
  Runescape circa ~2011. It was a once in a lifetime thing because tens of thousands of players were flocking back to the game because of new updates, and Jagex (the company behind the game) was selling out for an acquisition by Insight Ventures Partners, so they inflated their player base by vastly scaling back their anti-bot measures (mainly bans). Huge supply, meet huge demand. The Jagex founders (the Gower brothers) came away with $100m for the whole ordeal and power to them the technical achievements of the game (a browser-based MMO written in Java 2001 - present) was nothing short of remarkable [1]. [1]: https://youtu.be/yrVUegwSKlY https://youtu.be/yrVUegwSKlY
cheez 10y ago
As someone who has rewritten software with the benefit of hindsight and experience... I'm still in awe of how simple and functional my old (sometimes crashy) code was without any forethought.
- dasil003 10y ago
  Yeah, one of the first professional jobs ca. 2001 was to replace the student group registration form and database at my 40k-student state university. I replaced an old ColdFusion app with a few pages of PHP backed by MySQL. The design was horrendous, the error handling worse, and yet somehow it was an incredible leap forward in terms of performance and UX. I think the bottom line is that there is often very juicy low hanging fruit that you can get to just by a minimal amount of knowledge and sheer force of will. The deeper knowledge and experience will give you a lot more things to think about which will help with edge cases, scalability, maintainability, robustness, etc; but while those things may be necessary for some projects, in many cases they end up bringing only small marginal gains. I'm at the point in my career now where I'm actively cultivating beginner's mind to avoid being paralyzed by my knowledge of all the ways things can go wrong.
- ben_jones 10y ago
  This software wasn't. The number one requirement was 100%, or near 100%, uptime. The longer it operated the more money you made. Certain scripts could be guaranteed only a ~6 hour uptime, and required a manual restart which did not scale well to multiple instances. But yeah, in general thats absolutely true.
nv-vn 10y ago
Interesting. I think Runescape still has this sort of thing in OSRS. Anyways, this sounds a lot like the Minecraft cheats community, which was somewhat more recently a big thing. Most of the cheats were poorly written client mods made by high schoolers and middle schoolers, but since all the anti-cheat server plugins were about the same quality it was relatively easy to make these cheats. Some of my friends worked on some high-profile clients that made them thousands of dollars, although people frequently got into fights and would leak each other's source code or share the binaries for free which made the value go down immediately. I imagine that something somewhat similar probably occurred in the Runescape "black market" around the time you were involved in it, which is probably what stopped anyone from getting literal millions of dollars out of it.
- ben_jones 10y ago
  Its a running joke between the "old timers" of the community about how many kids bought mustangs around this time (the player 'Sparc Mac' being the most well known). The upper bounds that existed was actually caused by payment processing. Paypal vehemently sided against the seller of 'virtual items' which led to locking of accounts. That's what did me in at least. The margins though decreased over time as the demand for virtual currency went down. In 2012 the proprietor of the most widely used botting-client went to work at Jagex and in 2013 they released a patch known as the "bot nuke" which quite appropriately wiped out maybe 90% of injection-based botting clients (which is what we all used). I actually poked my head back into the scene when OSRS came out. But three things make gold farming on the game pointless: 1) Jagex monitoring systems are much better. They can ban you when they want to ban you, they still don't (I imagine because they want to wait for your membership to renew, as well as keep numbers up), but they'll get to you eventually if you're a serial offender. 2) the margins are still really low. Throwaway accounts will make $0.40/hr at most. 3) the software quality is even lower then before, the clients are poor and the scripts are poorer. All the best scriptures from ~2011 are probably full-time SWE's right now who can't be bothered.
  - DonHopkins 10y ago
    I wrote a bot for The Sims Online that manufactured Simoleons, then repurposed it to catalog and describe objects in the game for you with a speech synthesizer. TSO had some ham-fisted money making multi player games that forced players to interact with each other in exchange for Simoleons. One of them was a maze solving game for two players, where one player is lost in the maze and can see the local walls around them, and the other player can see an overall map of the maze without the player's position, and has to guide them around and figure out where they are and how to guide them out by asking them what they see and telling them which direction to move. That required a lot of work for two people to do manually, so there was a big reward, but it was trivial and fun to solve mazes programmatically! (Plus it made cool bleeping and kaching sounds as it solved the mazes and printed money!) I would run two TSO clients at the same time, logged into different accounts in different windows. The bot attached to both of them, then screen scraped pixels and injected events to repeatedly solve mazes by moving the player around until it identified where they were, solving for the shortest path, and bringing them straight home quickly by machine-gun clicking on the arrow buttons. My housemate had a good eBay reputation, so as an experiment, we tried selling Simoleons on eBay for real currency via PayPal. I could generate arbitrarily huge amount of virtual currency quite quickly. The bottleneck was selling it, and the problem was customer service. The problem was that many of the customers were pouty temperamental 15-year-olds using their parent's eBay accounts, who would give scathing eBay reviews if their order wasn't delivered instantly, or they suffered some imagined slight. And the other problem was that TSO just wasn't designed to make it easy to transfer large amounts of Simoleons from player to player. You couldn't just "wire" somebody an arbitrary amount of cash via in-game email -- you had to show up on their lot and meet them at a specific real time, and suspiciously hand it over to them $1000 at a time. There was another better way to transfer cash more efficiently than handing it over grand by grand, and that was with tip jars: You could fill a tip jar with $5000 using the pie menu with a couple of mouse clicks, and then the user could empty it the same way. So when I had to deliver our first million Simoleons, I came up with a system where I'd go to the lot of the customer and meet then, then ask them to line up a bunch of tip jars in a row. I would then use bot macros to fill each tip jar one by one with $5000, while the customer would quickly empty them as I filled them up, and then we'd go back to the beginning of the row and start all over again, until we'd transferred the entire million Simoleons, in only 200 $5000 hand=>jar=>hand transactions instead of 1000 $1000 hand=>hand transactions. One time when we were making a big delivery of cash, running the gauntlet of tip jars in our customer's living room (which I admit looked pretty fishy), and their housemate came home, saw what was happening, and wisely sussed up the situation that there was some kind of deal going down, that she wanted in on. So she put her own tip jar down at the end of her housemate's row of tip jars, and I blithely deposited $5000 into her tip jar several times, which she immediately snapped up. When I realized what happened, instead of contracting The Sims Mafia [2] to do a hit on her, I congratulated her for her loose morals and ingenuity. It was such a great hack, and I totally fell for it, and had more Simoleons than I knew what to do with anyway. It's all about good customer service! It was a fun experiment, but other bots and offshore farmers were starting to work the system too, and customer service and delivery problems made it not worth continuing. So the unemployed Sims bot wouldn't feel bored, I retrained it into a more practical assistive utility called "Simplifier" [1], which knew how to recognize and navigate the Sims user interface to show, scroll through, and enumerate all the many items, wallpapers, floor tiles, etc, in the catalog. It took snapshots of the icons, and read the text off the screen to capture the title, price and description (it was all in a bitmap Comic Sans font, so it was easy for a bot to recognize, if not for your eyes to read), and made a searchable illustrated database of all your built-in and downloaded content. Simplifier addressed the problem that many players would download thousands of objects from web sites, or make their own custom objects with tools like Transmogrifier and RugOMatic (shown earlier in the demo video), but it was impossible to search or keep track of them through The Sims interface. And it was useful for Sims web site publishers to make illustrated catalogs of their own objects. You could also operate it in manual mode, where you press and hold on an icon in the catalog, and it reads the object description to you with a speech synthesizer. That was useful for kids learning to read, old farts with bad eyesight, and snobby designers who hate Comic Sans, who would enjoy having the object descriptions read to them. [1] Simplifier demo starts at 3:15: https://youtu.be/Imu1v3GecB8?t=3m15s https://youtu.be/Imu1v3GecB8?t=3m15s [2] The Sims Mafia: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/virtual_mafia_i.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/virtual_mafia... and http://buildingreputation.com/writings/2009/10/the_dollhouse_mafia_or_why_to.html http://buildingreputation.com/writings/2009/10/the_dollhouse...

gnahckire 10y ago

Did the MMORPG happen to be Runescape or WoW?

ben_jones 10y ago
Runescape circa ~2011. It was a once in a lifetime thing because tens of thousands of players were flocking back to the game because of new updates, and Jagex (the company behind the game) was selling out for an acquisition by Insight Ventures Partners, so they inflated their player base by vastly scaling back their anti-bot measures (mainly bans). Huge supply, meet huge demand. The Jagex founders (the Gower brothers) came away with $100m for the whole ordeal and power to them the technical achievements of the game (a browser-based MMO written in Java 2001 - present) was nothing short of remarkable [1]. [1]: https://youtu.be/yrVUegwSKlY https://youtu.be/yrVUegwSKlY

cheez 10y ago

As someone who has rewritten software with the benefit of hindsight and experience... I'm still in awe of how simple and functional my old (sometimes crashy) code was without any forethought.

dasil003 10y ago
Yeah, one of the first professional jobs ca. 2001 was to replace the student group registration form and database at my 40k-student state university. I replaced an old ColdFusion app with a few pages of PHP backed by MySQL. The design was horrendous, the error handling worse, and yet somehow it was an incredible leap forward in terms of performance and UX. I think the bottom line is that there is often very juicy low hanging fruit that you can get to just by a minimal amount of knowledge and sheer force of will. The deeper knowledge and experience will give you a lot more things to think about which will help with edge cases, scalability, maintainability, robustness, etc; but while those things may be necessary for some projects, in many cases they end up bringing only small marginal gains. I'm at the point in my career now where I'm actively cultivating beginner's mind to avoid being paralyzed by my knowledge of all the ways things can go wrong.
ben_jones 10y ago
This software wasn't. The number one requirement was 100%, or near 100%, uptime. The longer it operated the more money you made. Certain scripts could be guaranteed only a ~6 hour uptime, and required a manual restart which did not scale well to multiple instances. But yeah, in general thats absolutely true.

nv-vn 10y ago

Interesting. I think Runescape still has this sort of thing in OSRS. Anyways, this sounds a lot like the Minecraft cheats community, which was somewhat more recently a big thing. Most of the cheats were poorly written client mods made by high schoolers and middle schoolers, but since all the anti-cheat server plugins were about the same quality it was relatively easy to make these cheats. Some of my friends worked on some high-profile clients that made them thousands of dollars, although people frequently got into fights and would leak each other's source code or share the binaries for free which made the value go down immediately. I imagine that something somewhat similar probably occurred in the Runescape "black market" around the time you were involved in it, which is probably what stopped anyone from getting literal millions of dollars out of it.

ben_jones 10y ago
Its a running joke between the "old timers" of the community about how many kids bought mustangs around this time (the player 'Sparc Mac' being the most well known). The upper bounds that existed was actually caused by payment processing. Paypal vehemently sided against the seller of 'virtual items' which led to locking of accounts. That's what did me in at least. The margins though decreased over time as the demand for virtual currency went down. In 2012 the proprietor of the most widely used botting-client went to work at Jagex and in 2013 they released a patch known as the "bot nuke" which quite appropriately wiped out maybe 90% of injection-based botting clients (which is what we all used). I actually poked my head back into the scene when OSRS came out. But three things make gold farming on the game pointless: 1) Jagex monitoring systems are much better. They can ban you when they want to ban you, they still don't (I imagine because they want to wait for your membership to renew, as well as keep numbers up), but they'll get to you eventually if you're a serial offender. 2) the margins are still really low. Throwaway accounts will make $0.40/hr at most. 3) the software quality is even lower then before, the clients are poor and the scripts are poorer. All the best scriptures from ~2011 are probably full-time SWE's right now who can't be bothered.
- DonHopkins 10y ago
  I wrote a bot for The Sims Online that manufactured Simoleons, then repurposed it to catalog and describe objects in the game for you with a speech synthesizer. TSO had some ham-fisted money making multi player games that forced players to interact with each other in exchange for Simoleons. One of them was a maze solving game for two players, where one player is lost in the maze and can see the local walls around them, and the other player can see an overall map of the maze without the player's position, and has to guide them around and figure out where they are and how to guide them out by asking them what they see and telling them which direction to move. That required a lot of work for two people to do manually, so there was a big reward, but it was trivial and fun to solve mazes programmatically! (Plus it made cool bleeping and kaching sounds as it solved the mazes and printed money!) I would run two TSO clients at the same time, logged into different accounts in different windows. The bot attached to both of them, then screen scraped pixels and injected events to repeatedly solve mazes by moving the player around until it identified where they were, solving for the shortest path, and bringing them straight home quickly by machine-gun clicking on the arrow buttons. My housemate had a good eBay reputation, so as an experiment, we tried selling Simoleons on eBay for real currency via PayPal. I could generate arbitrarily huge amount of virtual currency quite quickly. The bottleneck was selling it, and the problem was customer service. The problem was that many of the customers were pouty temperamental 15-year-olds using their parent's eBay accounts, who would give scathing eBay reviews if their order wasn't delivered instantly, or they suffered some imagined slight. And the other problem was that TSO just wasn't designed to make it easy to transfer large amounts of Simoleons from player to player. You couldn't just "wire" somebody an arbitrary amount of cash via in-game email -- you had to show up on their lot and meet them at a specific real time, and suspiciously hand it over to them $1000 at a time. There was another better way to transfer cash more efficiently than handing it over grand by grand, and that was with tip jars: You could fill a tip jar with $5000 using the pie menu with a couple of mouse clicks, and then the user could empty it the same way. So when I had to deliver our first million Simoleons, I came up with a system where I'd go to the lot of the customer and meet then, then ask them to line up a bunch of tip jars in a row. I would then use bot macros to fill each tip jar one by one with $5000, while the customer would quickly empty them as I filled them up, and then we'd go back to the beginning of the row and start all over again, until we'd transferred the entire million Simoleons, in only 200 $5000 hand=>jar=>hand transactions instead of 1000 $1000 hand=>hand transactions. One time when we were making a big delivery of cash, running the gauntlet of tip jars in our customer's living room (which I admit looked pretty fishy), and their housemate came home, saw what was happening, and wisely sussed up the situation that there was some kind of deal going down, that she wanted in on. So she put her own tip jar down at the end of her housemate's row of tip jars, and I blithely deposited $5000 into her tip jar several times, which she immediately snapped up. When I realized what happened, instead of contracting The Sims Mafia [2] to do a hit on her, I congratulated her for her loose morals and ingenuity. It was such a great hack, and I totally fell for it, and had more Simoleons than I knew what to do with anyway. It's all about good customer service! It was a fun experiment, but other bots and offshore farmers were starting to work the system too, and customer service and delivery problems made it not worth continuing. So the unemployed Sims bot wouldn't feel bored, I retrained it into a more practical assistive utility called "Simplifier" [1], which knew how to recognize and navigate the Sims user interface to show, scroll through, and enumerate all the many items, wallpapers, floor tiles, etc, in the catalog. It took snapshots of the icons, and read the text off the screen to capture the title, price and description (it was all in a bitmap Comic Sans font, so it was easy for a bot to recognize, if not for your eyes to read), and made a searchable illustrated database of all your built-in and downloaded content. Simplifier addressed the problem that many players would download thousands of objects from web sites, or make their own custom objects with tools like Transmogrifier and RugOMatic (shown earlier in the demo video), but it was impossible to search or keep track of them through The Sims interface. And it was useful for Sims web site publishers to make illustrated catalogs of their own objects. You could also operate it in manual mode, where you press and hold on an icon in the catalog, and it reads the object description to you with a speech synthesizer. That was useful for kids learning to read, old farts with bad eyesight, and snobby designers who hate Comic Sans, who would enjoy having the object descriptions read to them. [1] Simplifier demo starts at 3:15: https://youtu.be/Imu1v3GecB8?t=3m15s https://youtu.be/Imu1v3GecB8?t=3m15s [2] The Sims Mafia: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/virtual_mafia_i.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/virtual_mafia... and http://buildingreputation.com/writings/2009/10/the_dollhouse_mafia_or_why_to.html http://buildingreputation.com/writings/2009/10/the_dollhouse...