Wyrm,Aug 13 2004, 02:19 PM Wrote:They had one a while back, when they denied bots access to battle.net entirely. Unfortunately, that only lasted a few days because of the uproar it caused among people who used chat bots. Probably a safe bet that 3/4 of the people complaining were the ones using bots of the more non-tos-conforming variety.A few days? More like a few weeks/months minimum! Time for more than a fair share of new bots to be made. There were, for lack of a better word, chat-hacks that allowed you to enter chat with bots by using a Starcraft log-in. Chat bots comprise mostly spam bots also.
As for in-game bots, those werenât stopped AT ALL by this ban. D2HACK-IT (the biggest bot running program at the time) hacked into Diablo's .DLL and sent packets, of which this process was not stopped. This was eventually detectable, but a new version of D2HACK-IT came out which is supposedly undetectable, but I doubt that. Then there was D2JSP which used JAVA to simulate key presses based on what is on-screen, not hacking into Diablo at all thus could not/can not ever be detected without checking for the current running programs, which I guess is illegal. So some bots can be stopped, but most can never be stopped and furthermore, cannot even be detected!
I think its a terrible shame, but it also makes me wonder how many other games out there run bots, if not out in the open then low-key? For example, a SWG bot using a Turosk-Kesi (however the heck they're spelled) to kill Rankors all day long to collect credits to sell on eBay. What a shame.
"The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self." -Albert Einsetin