Ex-World Of Warcraft Developer Offers Insight Into One Of The Earliest Anti-Bot Measures
The war between bots and developers has been raging since the dawn of MMORPGs, as botters continue to create a sweatshop of characters to farm gold, resources, and sometimes even quests while developers try to stop them.
Back in the day, all that was needed to get rid of bots was to block their path with an object since bots would often follow the same path from one point to another. In World of Warcraft’s case, this was done with a rock, as revealed by one of the game’s former developers, Jason “Thor” Hall. Developers would then teleport to the said rock and manually ban characters caught in the “trap.”
Over the years, bot programs have evolved to create paths around these obstacles to reach their goal, forcing developers to come up with new ways to get rid of them. Square Enix, however, still employs anti-bot measures that mess up bot pathing by constantly changing the location of resource nodes and gathering points with every patch.
Other studios have resorted to anti-cheat programs and other hard-coded measures to counter bots and automatically dish out permanent bans to anyone caught by the system. Unfortunately, bot creators can get pretty creative in circumventing these measures, leading to a seemingly never-ending cat-and-mouse game that will likely continue well into the future.
