Lets start back to middle school for me. I get introduced to scythe bots. I mine coal 24/7, and sell it off for i dont know. but eventually, I get into diablo 2 LOR and start botting. hardcore. So hardcore that I open an ebay shop that I can stock full every night since my 3 light sorc bots ran 24/7 and I was making great money off of that. Ban wave hits, everyone. ebay shops are closed, lots of revenue lost. RIP pindleskin, you were a great friend buddy. I then hit back up on RS3, using the runite ore hopper scripts, making a ton of RSGP and selling that, even hitting 99 mining. get hit with a macroing minor, and bam, bvack to 93 mining. There goes that. College comes around, I need cash. I then switch to honorbuddy, level 8 characters, 1 to 90, make a ton of gold and sell that gold. Account gets banned. Do it over, and still pull a profit, but now the WoW scene is kinda dried up. Diablo 3 comes along, and the bot is ready to go. the ingame auction house was a huge addition, was able to make money legitimately, although through botting. 1 Ban and an expansion later, and that game now has 0 profit in it. Try out exilebuddy, get banned nearly instantly. RIP. It seems that all these games we've been using to give ourselves a bit of extra cash each month are getting smarter. We're getting banned more, No? I know, "Bot smart" but the fact that you SEE less bots now-a-days, you have teams DEVOTED to destroying bots, its bound to have less of a turn around than before. I played a fuck ton of Archeage, am really interested in botting mining/trade runs... but is it even worth it? Is botting overall becoming a dead business, for the programmers, and the gold sellers? Just thought I'd try to spark a discussion
I find botting Coinpurses is by far the best way to make gold in archeage. Trion is doing a decent job banning but you only lose a account after hard grinding for weeks most of the time. A 15$ account will make you 15k+ gold easy
So you lost 3 sorcs in D2 and you quit? Damn son, I think I had over 300 chars in that game with revenue coming in strong until late 2007 when I finally switched to WoW. It's all a matter of perspective. If you're talking about the bots farming shit in azshara, yeah, they're gone, but do a /who in a lvl 80-90 instance, see what that yields. Botting isn't dead, it's adapting. People who can get that in their head will continue to make revenue from this game. If you treat it as a business, invest x and expect x+profit, then money will come. If you invest 20eur and expect to make 2000 from your main account and not get banned, then I got some bad news from you. I'm not talking directly to you, but to anyone reading this topic wondering if they should start their new botting adventure. As for the future, like you said, companies have teams which have just one purpose: to destroy the botters and the new fotm wave seems to be microtransactions. Why bot for an item when you can buy it for 2 euro? Why buy it from the chinese and risk a ban when you can buy it from the official store for 2 euro? My feeling is that when this hits, the only solution will be botting for lvl and selling off high level accounts. From my experience, you just have to lurk on the right forum in order to get all the info required to start botting or find the right bot. And no, the "is botting worth it?" topics are not to be considered.
Maybe it's a poor comparison but I always explain botting to people like selling drugs. The game creators are the cops, you're the dealer. It's up to you to not get caught and make as much profit as humanly possible before you do get caught. Finding ways to adapt and outsmart the 'cops' is all part of the fun. I also don't think micro transactions will destroy botters, they'll just sell gold for less than the price of the microtransaction and no company will go as low as a gold seller because then they'd make their currency completely obsolete. Recently the WoW gold market was down to 20$ per 100k, then they nerfed Stonecore/Grim Batol and it's back to about 45$/100k. Archeage was down pretty low too, recently its shot back up. I think most of these teams meant for destroying botters are looking for major league botters. People who run 24/7 every single day. Not the small fish in the pond.
