Former World Of Warcraft Dev Explains Earliest, Simplest Anti-Bot Strategy

mmorpg.com:

Almost every MMORPG player with a scrap of ethics hates bots, and has since the dawn of time. We see them taking up space in our hubs, running around, stealing mobs away from new players, smacking them for currency, and completing quests to try to sell on online black markets for real money, while us players have to endure the grind ourselves while already paying a subscription fee. 

In World of Warcraft , this became an issue pretty quick—but one developer came up with a solution just as easily. And, well, at the time? It rocked.  

The solution is explained by Jason “Thor” Hall, who used to be a Blizzard employee, is keen in cryptography, and now runs an indie studio, under which he uploads educational videos as well as game updates. In one of his YouTube Shorts , published in November and pushed to some of our staff’s algorithms lately, he explains that they literally did, in fact, use a rock. (While we don’t know if he’s directly responsible for this, it’s still a pretty cool factoid from the time.)  

Back in the day, as he discusses, bots literally moved from point A to B. When developers caught on, all they had to do was stick a rock in the way—and trap all the bots against it as they got stuck running. 

“A GM would literally teleport there, see all the players running in place, and ban them all manually.” It’s janky, but it was technically the first reliable method of catching bots. However, they did grow smart and start pathing around rocks and the like, leading to the eternal cat-and-mouse dynamic of botters versus MMORPG developers. 

It’s a pretty simple but useful technique. Off the top of my head, in Final Fantasy 14 , devs will still move material gathering points around throughout patches, likely for much