City's Lack of Bots (of the script kind)

[Crysis]

It was an overall lack of significant player population IMO.  Bots that control behaviors of player characters -were- around in Live for awhile and likely would have spawned others except at the time there were no IO’s so other than straight influence (no recipe drops, just DO/SO’s) there wasn’t anything super-rare worth using a bot for anyways.  Once purples and PVP “loot” became a thing, the player population was (relative to WOW) even smaller and less significant.  
 

-Any- game that uses mouse/keyboard can be botted.  And I’ve been in AE enough to see some players were using Bots trying to find the “hit box” for entering maps but I hardly ever see those these days as, once again, player population just isn’t big enough to create a market for what you’d be botting to gain in first place.

 

Those of us who have played this game for over 15 years and counting may love it but it’s just never been much more than a little blip on the overall game population rankings.  I’d argue at this point even Team Fortress, Day of Defeat and CS all have bigger player pops than we do. There’s bots/cheats for those games also….and they are far more FPS oriented with “cheat buster” anti-bot coding systems in place.  Because in PVP games at least there’s a goal for cheating.  Not that I support that goal of course but just to illustrate my point.

 

This game matters to us.  But it doesn’t matter to most.

[Snarky]

On 3/25/2022 at 11:18 PM, Clave Dark 5 said:

We had gold sellers back in the day, for a long time.  I used to bump into those villains broadcasting from near the black market in Cap au Diable... which... isn't too surprising, really.  But as to if they'd farmed via bot or not to get that gold to sell, I dunno.  I never checked into it, but I believe the usual was they'd direct you to a website to enter CC info (the gullibility of some folks!  I mean, you're in Cap au Diable!!) to buy the Inf, so that broadcaster themselves might have been a bot so to speak.

Back on Liberty I recruited hard for my villain group.  For a week or so I think there was a gold farmer PLing their toon (just grinding).  I suspect this because they spoke no english, were new to the game, and were levelling as fast as me.  I leveled fast as a hobby and new exactly how to do it

 

I read news stories back around that time that certain foreign governments allowed the guards ti use the prisons as “gold factories”.  They would make the prisoners grind all day long on a comp then sell the gold to whoever they could. Big dollars off free labor…

 

I can say this….It is never hard to find someone to take US dollars and get worthless  (except to geeks) game currency in return…