All about botting in EU
Hello dear Entropians, Today I wanted to talk a little about botters and botting in Entropia. I will try to address problems and motivation behind this. Why bot? And its not easy to answer, first of all EU is not a regular game, its real cash economy and you would think an avatar that is left to run on software is simply wasting peds. Not exactly true, bots can be very sophisticated and can know when to shoot and when not, even use finisher and right healing tools. So as for expenses its not exactly costing you much more than simply shooting yourself. I am sure a botter can still achieve some sub 95% tt returns. So if bot can achieve the same financial results, whats the point to do it?
Skills? Yes! Its hard to skill past certain levels and having an avatar run for longer hours can help in that. With sub 95% it might still be much cheaper than chip in, or pay a person to skill your avatar. Tiering? Yes! It is super hard to tier slow guns and while those slow guns most of the time are un-eco, it's even more frustrating than loosing peds. Some guns that come to mind are all plasmas, slow BLP weapons, some swords and some mind-force tools. It is also hard to tier armor, so that's a nice benefit if you have armor set you want to tier and your bot is sophisticated enough to heal yourself etc. Loot? Well, maybe! I have always had belief that the more you are out there hunting/mining the better your chances. When someone asking me about that, I always say - "Every minute spent not shooting is wasted, if you are not shooting when someone HoFs, you never had a chance for that loot in the first place". Auctioning should be done quickly, repairs are the same, and back out you go. Your avatar is not getting skills or chances for loots if he is just standing next to storage or auction, so yeah having a bot out there while you are doing other things in your life is very beneficial. You could be working on your other computer and just have your ava running and hunting while you are "supervising" from nearby. So that is what I think about botting, what are the advantages to the person that would want to use a bot for his avatar, but all that while beneficial for the botter is not really that bad for other players or the game, since the peds are cycled and so on right? Wrong! Same goes the other way, while person who is not botting is sleeping, working, making dinner etc, he is not out there, he is not looting ha has no chance of that big hof that might be coming. He is also progressing slower. That is not certainly a bad thing, but at some point it will become. So the above are the problems and benefits that players enjoy or suffer from, but what about the game? Sure enough it looks like MA doesn't care what happens in game, they don't particularly want to acknowledge bots, they still cycle peds so in their eyes they are the same as any other player. But times were different, everyone knows about the infamous Riga Team - Hunterz, Nostrop and the rest. Yeah well that was bad, and MA knew it so they acted. Marco warned Hunterz, he didn't listen, he kept on going, got banned, then after several phone calls got unbanned, but he never stopped botting, so he was banned again and for good this time. Same goes to other guys in that soc. As far as I know only one member was not banned. But what was the bot doing? Was it just hunting? No not really, troubles started a little different. Hunterz was active player from very early PE days, he saw a potential, and deposited some money in the game. Back then all laser guns were thought to be bad and only BLP were good. No one had done tests on economy or dpp so only thing that mattered was how quick you can kill a creeper that can drop you laser guns. Imk2 and MM has 1k and 1.5k tt respectively. If you loot that you are golden, you can tt it and go hunt again, thats your profit. Obviously sounds absurd, but ask some old-timers, and I mean true old-timers and you will hear similar stories. While that didn't hurt PE much, it was a time when developers couldn't allow such atrocities. Greed is a killer, you could ask Hunterz to skill your avatar, and he would do it overnight for a price. So if you want to gain some paramedic and evade skills you could ask him and then hand over your account details and he would put mod fap and run the bot on your avatar till it skills up. But not Hunterz alone is the bad guy, it was a very common practice to see someone on the acid pools or in a middle of the merps or ripper snappers with mod fap for hours and hours. Many of todays retired and active ubers have done that in past. It could have been bot or just tedious clicking by yourself, but it was done the way it was. Evade was easier to skill, but still hard skill to come by and first who realized how the skill works were first to try to acquire more of it! Ask Dan Petrov, he is one of very very old players, he can tell a lot, but will he want to?! Now it is 2017 and we are probably back to the number of players we used to have in 2004-5, so such doing as botting and other bad stuff like auction manipulation etc are very well seen within community. You can not really hide it as well as when we had peek times in 2009. So now botting is back (or was it ever gone) and is our time to fight it again! Lets get deeper in to botting itself.
Our minds work the way that we need to invent and make our lifes easier, its a great attribute. Humanity is not lazy, qutie the opposite, we want to be lazy but to get to that we will go above and beyond to simplify our lifes so we can lay back and do less. When you look from this perspective you will understand that laziest persons of all times were - Benjamin Franklin and Karl Benz or Henry Ford. Because of these guys we can have lazier lives than 2 centuries ago. Botting is exactly that - laziness and drive to simplify our life. Unfortunately there is third factor and that is greed. It's another drive that is not always a bad thing even so most of the times it unfortunately is exactly that. Some bots that are created for Entropia are fairly simple and is just a macro that would do things like select next target and auto use tool like in this video where a developer explains how his macro-bot works.
Unfortunately video is in russian, but all that is said is what the bot is capable to do and some comparison for what prices are for fruits and stones. Bot used to be available on the site www.gamer-bot.ru, but seems it has been taken down or most likely developer wasn't able to sell the bot so running a website ended up being too expensive. He tried to market it on YouTube but it was a poor attempt. Sure, fruits and stones = pure profit, but who would want to run a computer with risky program and for just few cents. Electricity must cost more than bot can earn. However that is not always the case, as you can see in next videos that people have actually been using this bot, or very similar bot for hunting or sweating.
These are just some small examples, last video is my own and the person in question actually pmed me like a week later and told me that Mindark had warned him, he did try to tell me that he is a disabled person and can only use next target for hunting and that's the reason he was acting like a bot, but was in fact doing all that himself... well judge for yourself! Enough with the peanuts lets get to the business.
This is a program that's called Entropia Raider and it s a much more sophisticated bot, take your time and watch the video, you will see how it's setup and all the things it does, it obviously utilizes screen capture and chat log file.
And then there is this controversy video about the Entropia Raider, it explains everything about the bot and shows the backdoor as well. It is in fact a key-logger as well. So if you thought you would like to try it out, think again, its not worth it. Do not downlaod any programs from Internet that are not official. They can harm your computer and even your wallet as it can log login data and credit card information and so on. If you still want to check the web click here - http://entropiaraider.com/euraider.php
Here you can see a fairly high level player getting caught up in his botting adventures, lets just call it botting gone wrong.
Then there is this video that I created myself after catching a botter
while I was live-streaming on twitch. Well the outcome of this video was nothing much, player in question got scared, he traded his items away to other players in the game and was just awaiting what will happen. Nothing... all the support cases in vain. Sure enough I am completely convinced he was using bot and my hope was that it wont happen again, well guess what? Nothing, nothing at all, apart from player getting scared for a little bit he is back and continues on his botting adventures as you can see in below 2 videos. Game developer is aware as in next videos a live-support representative came to the spot where that happened and seemed convinced it truly is a bot. This was pretty recent so the outcome is not know yet, but by the looks nothing much will be done. Player is still active and is still hunting, however it is unknown if he is still botting or not, but it has been a few too many times already for just warning like in first instance where a guy in person replied to me and told me he was warned. Enjoy the videos!
Please let me know what you think about this, feel free to comment below or comment in forum or in youtube. Do you think they are botting or those are isolated cases of just abnormal behavior? What do you think should be done by game developers? And how the community can fight this? Best regards Soko