Perfect World: Bots will ruin game
November 22, 2008 by Joel Tan
Filed under Asian MMO, Asian MMO Players, Level Up! Games, MMO Guides, MMORPG, My World, Perfect World, Random Rants
I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: Botting, if unchecked, will ruin Perfect World. Again, let me provide MMOtaku readers with a short description of bots, botting, and why it’s illegal in most massively multiplayer online role-playing games.
A bot is a program that gives a character autonomy, to move, to seek out monsters or mobs, and to kill these great sources of loot and experience points. Some of these third-party programs also automate the use of pots and, to some degree, flee from unwanted situations (such as if the character’s hitpoints fall below a certain percentage).
Botting is the act of using a bot to gain experience for a character and the loots that come with killing dozens upon dozens of monsters.
Sounds great, eh, even from a non-MMORPG player’s perspective. Having a program do all the hard work, playing 24 hours a day, seven days a week … as long as the electricity and Internet connection (and the computer) do not conk out, your character is guaranteed to hit high levels in a few weeks, sometimes even days.
So if it’s so great, why is it illegal?
For starters, bots are third-party programs, meaning they are manufactured using reverse engineering of copyrighted products, such as online game clients, with the sole purpose of undermining the security features built into these products. We’ve heard about them all. Damage hacks. Jump hacks. Flight hacks. Speed hacks. Bots. Great pieces of programming but used for ill purposes.
Of course, using bots is also unfair to other players who toil during their free hours just to level up and amass wealth. Botting creates such an imbalance that botters gain an almost unlimited supply of in-game cash that it leaves non-botters and decent players gaping in wonder at all the greed in virtual worlds.
So here’s a friendly advice to Level Up! Games, operator in the Philippines of Perfect World: Want the game to last longer? Get rid of all the hacks. Don’t wait for players to do the job of reporting. The process of reporting suspected botters and hack users takes so long and the results are almost always negative that most players are wont to file a complaint.
One game moderator to go around the world every day in search of these bots will spell the difference between a game that will survive a few more years and a game that will go the way of that MMORPG being operated by your competitor.
Thanks to Perfect World Tiger Server player Theros for the screenshot.
Bots are for cheaters and lazybums. No matter what they reason out that they just want to have “lives” while also having a high-leveled character is pure and unadulterated BS.
It’s unfortunate that MMOs have these @ssholes around but it’s par for the course. It’s also unfortunate that some gaming companies have fallen into dependency on bot gamers for revenues because they can’t beat the behemoths of the gaming industry. Can you believe that the max penalty for botting is a one day character ban in a particular gaming company?? What does that say to the legit players? “We don’t condone botting officially, but heck you can do it if you want because we need the fricken’ moolah.”