The story is fascinating but I cannot help but think what a massive waste of time and resources it is. And I thought hedge fund managers were not adding value to society. This puts things in perspective. I especially like the bit where he explains that botters were helping the virtual economy.
From the article:
"I know a lot of people will say that what I did was cheating or unfair, but everyone must realize that in the end what I did was completely legal."
I suppose you could say it is a waste, but this entire story essentially started out as a fun side project. It would also "be a waste" to sit at your computer for 12 hours a day playing D3 and flipping items on the Auction House, but that's just the way some people play the game. Do all of your side projects really add that much value to society?
What I mean is some question whether hedge funds and the like add value to the economy - botting in MMO has the added characteristic of the economy not even being real (I know it involves real money but you know what I mean).
I'm all up for reading books, playing games, watching films etc.. I question the need for high frequency trading in those leisure pursuits ;)
Actually, some parts of the economy are pretty much the same, do you know that people create fake scarcity all the time? Colanta, one of the big milk companies in the world actually throws tons of milk when it suits them, why? to avoid lowering the price of milk thanks to too much offer. And Market Manipulation is a very common practice in all industries, and even if it's illegal in most parts that's not enought to stop them, you can throw away a bunch of milk and say it was spoiled, who is going to say or proof otherwise?
The exact same thing happens with value; value is created itself by offer and demand, you can say that mining gold doesn't create any value for society, or you can say that it does, it completely depends on your definition of "value for society". Some may say that finding golp helps thousands of jewelries and jewelry makers, that it brings money in to multinational companies and so forth. But at the end of the day you could say the same about this kind of bots, you are moving money from people that have resources to spend on digital goods transfer to third world countries like Bulgaria. That it also helps to the entertainment, where a lot of trades happens all the time giving entropy to the ecosystem.
I know it's awfully arbitrary. I make terrible analogies but indulge me.
I ask you to dig a hole and pay you 10$. I then pay you 10$ (or better still you pay me) to fill the whole. Was 20$ dollars worth of value created?
Company makes MMO that is only fun if you grind to level 60. Guy pays third world country citizen to play the game for him until he reaches level 60. You claim that is a good thing because it gave a job to someone in the third world. I put it to you that is madness akin to digging and filling holes over and over. The company could sell you a level 60 character at no cost to them (changing a few bits on a server) and give the money to the third world citizen in aid (obviously not going to happen) and nothing would change except he could do something productive rather than slave away at a PC 12 hours a day (like we do).
That's where the definition of "value" gets blurry. If in your analogy you use the hole I dug for raising plants, does that mean you created 20 dollars worth of value? It's uncertain, neither "yes" or "no". Maybe the plants bring unwanted insects to the yard. Maybe the plant has to be removed just 2 months later because you need to build a new room. Maybe you forget to feed the plant and it dies two weeks later.
The concept of value is completely related to what
you value and absolutely nothing else; if you value having a 60 level character you are willing to pay for that, if the game company does not offer that deal you are going to look another way to pay for it. Is like when someone give you apples in exchange for oranges, is not about creating value, is about exchanging. If you value more the oranges that's completely up to you. Therefore, charity (non-exchange) is a whole different subject.
Exactly. We know whether a virtual item is worth $20 by whether someone is willing to pay $20 for it.
I'd suggest that to make the hole-digging analogy work, we'd need to assume that there are people willing to pay $20 for the privilege of seeing a hole dug and then refilled (or something similar). And if that's the case, then who's to say the digging and refilling didn't create $20 of value?
Value isn't the right word here. "Global utility" would be better, but how do you define that? Take heavy drugs for instance. They can have a high positive value but most definitions of utility would assign them a low negative one, I figure.
The relationships between actions are so complex that "global utility" is just as blurry, maybe the ones overdosing are mostly criminals; maybe the company that creates the chemical products for the distilling process of the heavy drugs is actually owned by some guy that is going to find the cure for cancer thanks to the funds earned from his chemical company. Or maybe experiencing reality is not better than your experience on drugs. Yeah, those are very controversial statements but is mostly because it falls under the field of psychology, sociology and philosophy, which arguably are even more blurry.
Well, the definition itself isn't blurry I'd say, since it's pretty much universal: the examples you cited should be encompassed as possibilities by the model. It's just hard to define because it involves the complexities and oddities of morality, happiness and the like -- our objective knowledge of those is so restricted and sparse that we're better off just "winging" judgements from our legacy of humanities study.
Although I know what you mean, Bulgaria is not a Third World Country. I think a better term would be Developing Country [0]. Third world means that it wasn't allied with either the USA/UK (First World) or Russia/China (Second World) during the Cold War [1]. Bulgaria was part of the Eastern Bloc [2].
I've been botting a trading market in a different game for several years now. I haven't made any actual money off of because the game doesn't allow that.
But it has been very enjoyable and educational. When I started I had essentially no programming experience and taught myself as I went along. I find it much easier to learn programming when I have an interesting project to directly apply it to.
Eve Online, I'd say - it doesn't allow you to get your space money out, but you can pay for your subscription with it and its marketplace and economy is second to none. Oh and it has APIs and third-party APIs to get market data - although I don't think you can actually trade via an API, which is probably a good thing because high-volume automated traders would probably break the server / economy.
It's really interesting to know what game it is. If I don't know it, I will look it up.
I was always averse to trying out botting in the games where it is against the Terms of Use, that is, every game I know (I guess I'm goody two shoes like that.) The closest I know is Magic Online where trade bots are tolerated by the administration, but I just couldn't stand to play the game itself, even though it sounded fascinating in theory.
Sorry I can't give too many details because the game doesn't like bots and I don't want to give them any tools to use against me. For that reason there's also no public API.
But the trading system is web-based so it's not too hard to bot it.
Making millions on the stock market could be seen as a waste of time to somebody who's more interested in doing well on the Second Life game or whatever.
If you look at things in terms of making money and contributing to the 'real world' then almost every hobby is a waste of time.
I mean, does it really matter if it's real life or not? Money might be completely unimportant to somebody... if they already make enough from their day job they're free to do whatever's fun for them in their spare time.
> I question the need for high frequency trading in those leisure pursuits ;)
It's worth noting, though, that botting tends to flourish in any multiplayer game that allows it to, regardless of the potential for real money profit. Hell, MUDs used to have botting issues when I played them 20+ years ago. [0]
As for why, I'd say that automating a game is a game in and of itself, and depending on the particulars it can be both challenging and rewarding. (Sometimes moreso than the actual game!) So in implementing the RMAH, I think Blizzard made a playable meta-game, and the result was that people played it. The author of this article simply played it competitively. ;)
> As for why, I'd say that automating a game is a game in and of itself, and depending on the particulars it can be both challenging and rewarding.
speaking from experience, yes, it is much more enjoyable playing the meta-botting game than the actual game!
I used to play Ragnarok Online circa 2000 (on a private server - not the official one). This particular private server is a donation server, meaning if you paid real money, you can buy items from the admins/owners which is impossible to get otherwise. Think pay-to-win style items.
i was in high school at the time, and didn't have money to pay a "donation" to get these powerful items. Now, it's possible to buy these donation only items from player auctions in the game, but i didn't have enough gold to do so. But i did have some programming experience, and found an opensource bot (http://www.openkore.com/index.php/Main_Page) to use. Being a private server meant you can create unlimited free accounts, and so i decided to start a bot army, where banning a character don't mean anything, as the work to create the character is also automated.
Botting in Rag required your character to have a certain level, otherwise, it's not efficient, so the first task is to write a script to automatically level up your botting character, with the right skills and automatically collect the required armour, spells etc. This was the hardest part - full custom scripts needed to be written for each separate requirement. once a large number of bots are created, they are then spread out evenly across profitable maps to farm items to sell to NPCs. Some tricks include auto-teleporting when another player comes into view, which makes it difficult for anyone to spot you (as max view distance is lower than the distance at which your bot receives notice from the server of player entities coming into view).
The second part of botting involve item laundering, which involve rapidly dropping and picking up items from the floor, instead of making a normal player-to-player trade (or bot-to-bot trade in this case). Because this is suppose to be agnostic to bans, i cannot afford to keep any large amount of items/gold on any account being botted. I also cannot afford to have a transaction history linking my main playing account (which i don't bot, but play for real with). So i had to create automated money laundering scripts.
But after having botted for approx 3-4 months, after which i had enough money to buy one of the donation items (which is approx $40 in donation), and it made me one of the most powerful characters that didn't actually pay for donation items in the server, i no longer had interest in playing the game, but the botting kept being really interesting. The the code for the bot was a bit buggy, so sometimes bots would stop responding. But there is a way to reset it from another bot. So i devised a heart-beat into each bot, so that every bot monitors several other bots with redunancy, and restarted each other when failure is detected - this failure is done by sending in game private messages. Eventually, this became an army of 50-80 bots, all running together, cooperating to farm the map the most efficient manner, and heart-beat check each other so that there's very little down time. Ahh, those were the days.
"And I thought hedge fund managers were not adding value to society"...
Its always weird to me when people in the tech industry say that hedge fund managers/quants "add no value to society". The presumption that any individual's job "adds value to society" is really arrogant...do you really think that all the software engineers working at Google or FB or Twitter to make people click advertisement "add value to society"? Does my local grocer "add value to society"? Its such a vacuous statement.
I apologize in advance if this is harsh, so I would offer you to read more about finance before you make blanket statements like "hedge funds do not add value to society"
Worse case scenario: making people click google ads is just as mindlessly financially driven as eking out more alpha from an algo, in which case the googlers still win, because at least some of that money generated goes toward moonshot projects that may very well benefit society.
I respect Google, Facebook, and Twitter because of their ability to connect people and their genuine intellectual contributions to fields like information retrieval and AI, and sure, their moonshots. But I think its arrogant to say whether someone adds value to society because its an extremely complicated philosophical question (judging the guy playing the game saying he's wasting his time). I'm not sure its fair to characterize all hedge funds as simply trying to squeeze out alpha though either, there are many prominent activist investors who've pushed for greater corporate governance and transparency, in cases like MBIA, Lehman, Herbalife most recently, etc. And if you wanted to consider Google's moonshots, it should be only fair to consider the billions most of the hedge fund managers have given away in a dick-measuring contest to various charities and research initiatives. But I understand your argument and agree that a lot of financialization provides no benefit to anyone.
i think when someone laments that a high-frequency-trader/hedge fund managers don't add value, they really mean that they get an unfair amount of money for little visible work, and little visible benefit to somebody else in the world. I emphasis visible.
I do believe that having arbitrage evens out the pricing of long term assets, and having traders do this continuously does indeed make the prices of things reflect reality.
That they make a lot of money doing this seems unfair, but the world isn't fair.
Thats a terrible analogy. Ebay sellers are scamming. Hes taking advantages of mispriced items and arbitrage opportunities of others' ignorances. The real currency -> gold mistake is, granted, crushing for the seller making the mistake, but part of the game.
There are also people who just don't care enough to put in the time to sell items for their real value. I never sold much on the RMA, but when I sold stuff on the GAH I would eyeball the item and just throw a price on it that I think would get it to sell fast, but still get me decent gold. I didn't play Diablo to make money, I was there to have fun.
The author seemed pretty convinced that many of the prices he was spotting were probably supposed to be real-money prices -- e.g, an item that was supposed to sell for $100 would instead be sold for 100 gold. (Which is a trivial amount, even in game.)
this happens more often than you think in games that have two systems that can be confused with each other. EVE online is a good example (except instead of real currency, it's just mis-typed zeros and bad UI queues)
It's more like ebay sellers accidentally mistyping their initial price / buyout value and still be required to send their item for that price. Actually that happens from time to time in for example webshops, accidentally listing items for $1 instead of $300.
I've been poking at the open source hearthstone bot. And there's no market in hearthstone so there's no financial reason to running a bot (you can get like colored portraits or something if you win enough games I guess). But the idea of making the best AI for a wildly played competitive card game seems like a lot of fun. I really enjoyed the Google AI challenge one year and seeing if I could hit legendary with a bot would be even better.
I hate to dissent but I wouldn't recommend REAMDE under any circumstances. The first third or so begins lots of interesting threads about virtual worlds, economies and especially ransomware, but the book then morphs into a fairly standard-issue spy thriller, and leaves the most interesting subplots (the ones that don't involve commandos and terrorists shooting at each other) unexplored or unresolved.
In that it relates to a virtual world with real currency conversion, I guess. I felt that aspect of Reamde wasn't especially well thought out though still better than any other fiction attempting to cover similar territory.
And with Blizzard getting a cut of the Real Money Auction House sales, there seems to be little incentive for them to really crack down on this. The perfect "crime"!
Blizzard gets some extra revenue, deep pocket players have a constant selection of rare items to buy, botters make a nice chunk of change, semi-oblivious sellers turn their items into gold instantly (reminds me of payday loans) - everyone* wins!
* Except the folks who list the RMAH price in gold and, of course, the normal players ;)
i m sure blizzard's main source of revenue is selling of the game, not from commission earned from the RMAH. RMAH is probably players away, and i m sure their measurments/analytics showed this and thus shut it down.
Except they only did it a long time after introducing the RMAH - they were probably well past their peak income when it came to that income. If I were to make a random guess, I'd say that they made twice or thrice as much revenue from the RMAH than they did with actual game sales, and that's probably being conservative.
I don't know why they finally decided to pull the plug, given all that money. Probably trying to salvage some goodwill before figures were leaked about how much they earned from it, although I'm sure those figures are out there already, given that Blizzard is a publicly traded company and their earnings are out in the open.
Yes, but these items are basically only flags in a DB under the power of Blizzard. It's not real in the sense that Blizzard could just enter whatever values they want in this DB and it would be perfectly legal.
Conspiracy theory: Maybe the didn't ban bots that much so they could hide their own "bots" (a simple function in their servers that sells goods they just have created out of thin air by a simple insert statement).
There it's two records in two banks (in the general case) for each transaction. The sum must check out to be zero. And beside that there are laws that are enforced because it is not legal to create money out of thin air. Ok, it is done anyway (when the government prints more money and thus increases inflation) and to a degree banks are allowed to do that in some sense as well (they loan can a certain percentage more money than they actually have). The whole system isn't perfect (hence the economic crisis), but there are enforced laws that aren't written by companies (well, mostly).
> Maybe the didn't ban bots that much so they could hide their own "bots"
They don't need to; they own the market, they get 15% + a flat fee for every sale. The items listed for 250 in the article? Blizzard earned 38.50 from sales like those, which is probably more than they earn per game sold via their own webshop. And the bans were wholly ineffective too, and they knew it - the botters would simply buy more game licenses from their profits and continue printing money, recuperating their loss with just one item found/sold.
Although I can only perceive them through specialised devices, pack of electrons trapped in a cell or magnetic wave patterns on a platter sound perfectly physical to me.
I'd imagine just about anything that exists in any capacity can be tied to the physical in some way. I think that in this context, "tangible" means more than that.
I'm not saying I agree with how he made money, but if he made 100000 €/year writing software would you still claim he was trading something that doesn't exist?
It's about providing value to other people. If you write a software that is really used for something you provided a service. If that service is worth 100,000€/year then so be it. But he just gained money from the misjudgement of other people, not providing any service to anyone else. (Just like high frequency traders.)
You could argue that he was funnelling money from richer economies(West of EU, US) to poorer economy(Bulgaria) - because he was making many many times the national average wage, everyone around him,every shop that he visited or purchased from benefited from his endeavour. What he did did not bring worthwhile services to other people,but the money he earned did.
I think this is a bogus argument. Maybe it somewhat works for this particular case, I does not work in general for such activities. Also what's he gonna do with the money? Probably buy something on Amazon or Steam or go on vacation to the Caribbean or something like that.
My (somewhat lonely) contention has always been that these 'waste of time' games are actually the source of many more of the best programmers/quants than after school classes like 'learn to program 101'
Awesome article. I remember running a bunch of D2 farm bots in high school, and waking up every morning to put them up on Ebay, ended up making a few hundred bucks - first time I've ever made any money.
Really appreciate the writeup; it was very well written and its cool to see the guy figure it out and scale out from his initial experimentation.
How did the bot interact with the game? You could send key commands and text to the program, but you can't easily read the item price for example. That script at the end doesn't tell much.
Along with the other approaches mentioned, another interesting one is to intercept the graphics library function calls before they enter the library code.
This strategy has been successfully used for a variety of game automation, including WoW auction house arbitrage and a multiplayer Starcraft II AI / bot.
This method is advantageous because it doesn't have the overhead or uncertainty of going from pixels back to information but it also does not require patching or inspecting the game's address space which is fragile and often triggers anti-cheating or anti-botting systems.
You can read a good write-up about this method here:
> or inspecting the game's address space which is fragile and often triggers anti-cheating or anti-botting systems
Just looking without touching rarely (never, to be honest) triggers any anti-cheating systems. It's madness enough trying to stop people touching, trying to stop them looking reliably is futile.
The graphics interception hacks are pretty neat though, but I wouldn't say it's a common method at all.
The most basic answer is: most bots inject some code into the running client, getting access to data structures and references. They read out the data from memory. Some do OCR, others use Library APIs to do that, some even hijack the network stack and talk to the servers themselves.
A decade ago, botting in a game called Ragnarok Online was huge. You can find a hint of how structured those communities were here: http://www.openkore.com/index.php/OpenKore
WoW's botters took this one step further, disassembling the game to the point where they made WoW "clients" which could bot/gold farm at <15MB of memory - meaning you could have a hundred accounts botting on one PC.
Trying to find it, it was a news article written as an interview with one of the original WoW Glider creators and his friend who also wrote bots.. Having trouble finding it..
I am interested in game design, but don't have time to really play games, as of late.
This write-up illuminated me on what really was going on in Diablo 3 and why Blizzard who supposedly worked hard on the Auction House feature, had to remove it in the end.
So, does it mean that maintaining a stable virtual economy in an MMO is an insurmountable task even for a top-tier company?
Not directly, but I'm sure you can come up with a scheme where you get friends to give you money IRL and you transfer Steam money or gift a game to them.
I'd rather uninstall that shit and play a game that's fun immediately. Why on Earth would I spend either 100 dollars or 100 hours to be allowed to enjoy a game that I already paid for?
I spent easily a 100 hours on D3 before I decided to buy something from RMAH. I had lots of fun with the items I found, and then decided to spend 20-30 euros on some other stuff I wanted to experiment with. I did not do it to make the game fun - it was fun without it. I just wanted to add variety without playing for another 100 hours just to get the items I wanted.
Diablo is a game about grinding. You finish the first run on lowest difficulty in 10 hours and after that you just have fun on increasing difficulty with better gear.
Because the relationship between money and utility is not constant across the human population.
If we consider a meal at a moderately fancy resteraunt then there are people without much money who would be aghast at spending that much on a meal. Conversely there are rich people who wouldn't even look at the menu-prices or the bill.
They explicitly made a policy not to resurrect HC characters even if that happened due to a technical bug, server drop or whatever else. Would get messy with real money items.
it would make the game much more exciting - facing actual loss is exhilirating. Some people can't handle it though.
In my experience playing EVE online (which exhibit similar characteristics, where you could have paid real money for in-game items, and yet lose them for real), players who can't handle this sort of loss tend to be adversely against the parts of the game that could force such losses. They then end up enjoying the game less over all. Players who bit the bullet and take these losses on the chin tend to have much more fun in the long term, and tend to make better guild mates too.
I disagree, I think the pain of losing your main HC character, all of your items and your highest paragon level would feel just as bad regardless of any extra money you'd sunk into it. Is the time and effort that hurts. But that is also the pleasure, the fear of that pain is what makes the game thrilling.
From the article: "I know a lot of people will say that what I did was cheating or unfair, but everyone must realize that in the end what I did was completely legal."
Sounds familiar?