>Second, artificial botting to make your game look active. MMOs have been using artificial players produced by the developers since at least the early EverQues

>Second, artificial botting to make your game look active. MMOs have been using artificial players produced by the developers since at least the early EverQuest days. The choice space in an mmo isn't that great, it's trivial to make a realistic acting NPC that mimics player behaviors and hand-wave the poor language capability as the other player being a unable to understand your chosen language. NCSoft was involved in things like this in the early Lineage days and were fined for it. I would have a real hard time thinking this behavior is now uncommon given how low the fruit is. Deck an NPC-Player in the most expensive cash-shop goods and have it stand around in a social area doing emotes but otherwise silent just to make the other players jealous and apt to purchase goods -- self-generated whale-bait.