The Danger of Bots in MMOs

Oh, the nice times when one can go around a huge map on their quests, evolving one’s character while battling their way through incredible boss battles, ensuring, this way, some good and relaxing hours of gaming! Oh, how nice it would be if other players didn’t focus their attention and abilities on creating and developing bots to farm resources and money to surpass my steady and just grow on the game, how nice that would be… but no! MMOs are, nowadays, a fertile place for the exponential grow of bots.

What are bots and how are they used?

Bots are third-party programs gamers can use to impersonate characters in a video game. The goal is for the bot to play the game in the place of a human imitating human behaviors. But why should a human want a bot to play for him? Well, MMOs are one of the most time-consuming game types that exist, you need to perform certain tasks that require a lot of grinding and time to achieve and many times, these tasks are completed by a series of same lesser tasks like hunting or gathering resources and so if a bot can do the tasks at the times that you can’t play the game, you will upgrade your character faster, that’s why there is a bot infestation in MMO games nowadays.

Why are bots danger?

The first thing that one can talk about is how bots break the balance that game developers thought for their games. Bots are used as a lever for gamers to surpass others by breaking barriers that were placed by the devs, barriers like the need for time to reach a certain level, the need for time to grind resources to build something, the need for powerful items to break into new areas of the map, etc…

Bots can also disrupt the entire economy of a game. Let’s picture the (recurring) case of MMOs that are free to play but have cosmetics or in-game money trades available for gamers and those are the main forms of financing for said game. Now, with bots coming up with a main part in this type of game, all the money rules can change. If a bot is used to farm infinite resources that can posteriorly be traded for money, that means that the value of money will decrease and so the revenues of the game will not be as great as they could be. Sometimes, when a player doesn’t want to go through the hard work of grinding to trade for money or other resources, they turn to buying in-game money with real money, with bots, that will happen less and less. Still, on the money topic, a bot slaying enemies 24/7 gives the player an unbelievable advantage because the bot can play uninterruptedly and kill many more enemies than a regular player.

A Community in Shambles

Well, it isn’t my most intelligent or out-of-the-box take but here I go, bots are bad for your games. There is no gamer that doesn’t use this type of advantage that, when encounters one (or one thousand) doesn’t want to give up from all the hard work that they put into the game and that is seriously sad to witness. Throughout the last few years, we’ve witnessed the rise and (somewhat of a) fall of some amazing MMOs, cases of Lost Ark, New World, FFXIV and in many cases, the reason for the less and less amount of gamers logging into those games? Bots, cheaters and all the different types of hacks.

A quick search on these games’ fan forums is a trip through what gaming has the saddest, unhappy players. The video game studios are, of course, aware of their gamers’ feedback and are constantly trying to resolve this problem but it is a tricky one to do.

Until video game studios can work things out, many communities will grow tired of this issue and stop playing these kinds of games because of bots but some solutions are visible on the horizon.

Solutions for the bot problem in MMOs

Recently, there have been talks of regulation of some types of bots in these games. The creators of Runescape, Paul and Andrew Gower have come up with an innovative solution to this problem while working on their new title, Brighter Shores. In an interview with PCGamer, Andrew Gower admits that “you’re never going to eliminate bots, so our approach has been more to make it so that they don’t negatively impact the game”. How, you ask? Bower answers that the way that they found is to decrease the grind that is needed to evolve in the game by “set your character to carry on doing activities even whilst you’re logged out”, with this, you can take off hours of gameplay that would be spent on grinding, getting resources, and doing other repetitive activities. This will be the way of approach for Gower because he thinks that “the reason for a lot of people to use things like bots is sheer frustration about the grind; (at some point, players think) I just cannot face chopping down this tree for another 10 hours, and then end up resorting to bots out of desperation”. With this alternative, players can set up their character to do the activities that they don’t want to do while they are not logged in.

This is the solution found by Gower. Another solution can be an effective anti-cheat that has good and well-tested countermeasures against bots like the Anybrain solution. Since 2015 Anybrain’s anti-cheat solution has been improved to battle cheats like bots, the company has been upgrading their solution in the past years, more precisely since 2021 as you can read on this text. This solution uses machine learning models to analyze in-game behaviour and flag non-human behaviour as possible cheating. Well, bots are in their genesis the most non-human behaviour thing in gaming, so this solution goes top-list when we think about ways of tackling the bot issue in MMOs.

With a solution that can detect bots both on PC and consoles but also on mobile in an adaptive way, Anybrain’s solution is a viable choice to minimize the bot problem in MMOs. This solution offers real-time detection to any type of game and platform which makes it a dream tool for game developers.

Will it ever be safe?

It is not overreacting when I can write that MMOs are infested with bots and that bots are an issue. From major losses of money to the studios that build these games to communities destroyed by this problem, bots are in no way close to disappearing but the other way around. Nonetheless, we covered here two solutions that aim to tackle this problem in different aspects of game development and architect. Will it come to a future where everything will run smoothly and the fun times are back, I believe so, the industry is making all the efforts in that direction and it will come out victorious because, at the end of the day, gamers will have games and games that can be played and enjoyed by all! That I believe in!