An Overview of the Botting Problem
Know your enemy – the famous saying derived from Sun Tzu “The Art of War”. But this is merely a short version. The complete citation is “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.“ And it fits the situation much more accurately.
Tibia is a game that is proud to be the first graphic Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) in existence and still going. People often mix Ultima online – much more popular MMORPG – as the first graphic MMORPG. But Tibia official started few months earlier. However like many old games it also has old community. And community will always find ways to make their life easier. Thus - the problem of botting. Don’t think that botting is a new fashion. Even back in 2002 when I started playing botting existed. Back then there wasn’t so much choice in the matter. Only certain people knew how to do it and the rest were using simple tools like Tasker, which simply repeats the actions you record. For that the game has to be repetitive enough, and thus the power of bots was limited. But Tibia is a game where repetition is everyday issue. Anything from fishing, to training, to hunting in the same cave for 8 hours gets boring real fast. Back in those days manasitting was also still very popular, as runes market still worked on player based economy and there were none in stores. Runemaking was a profitable business so no wonder this is where the botters hit first. Soon mage farms started popping up with 20 or even more accounts run by a bot making runes all day long. The botting was starting to hurt the game for the first time in mmorpg history. Cipsoft had to react. And they tried to by initiating such things as banning thousands of botters during the same day to fend them off. But the spark was already ignited and there was no way to stop the fire.
Soon thereafter the amount of botters grew rapidly while cipsoft tried to battle them inefficiently via GM system. As botting was gaining speed various programs started popping up on the internet. At first it was limited to simple tasks like lighthacks and multiclients, but it grew in size and speed. Most of them were created to hack your account, but soon trustworthy names started to rise and attract even the more cautious people to the cause. By the time Cipsoft realized that baning is not working it was too late. We already had programs like TibiabotNG and TibiaAuto that could do even the complex tasks of hunting monsters and even replying to strangers and GMs along. It was the time to take action if this phenomenon was to be curbed.
What happened next depends on opinions but Cipsoft has started to aim for crippling the botters more than improving the game itself. We quickly saw implementations such as worms system, level limits for spells and soul system. But this did not stop the botters. While the fair players lost their ability to manasit and chat with friends at guildhouses due to need for souls people using illegal programs crowded the lower level caves with massive amount of characters trying to get to the level of making runes. After this came what some call the destruction of rune economy – Runes in shops and potions. Runes in shops have cut the price of runes to shop prices and thus left the only rune type worth manufacturing to be sudden death runes. Botters simply moved onto manufacturing them crowding lower level caves even more as sudden death runes require level 45 to make. The potion system totally removed the need for healing runes as health potions did the job better and mana potions that increased mana by large amounts made hunting with spells more cheaper and easier than with runes. There also were such changes as the light system that rendered all light-source items useless. By this time bots were getting so advanced that they were used to fight wars, when the program would aim for you and all you had to do is follow your enemy. Features made to fight botters were obviously not working, and neither were the bans. At this time it was clear that botters consisted of significant amount of tibia community. What Cipsoft done next has caused a massive uproar in the community from both fair players and rule breakers along. They introduced the automatic aiming system, quickly dubbed CipBot. From that day, Tibia client itself could aim your weapons for you and heal you by using hotkeys. They hoped to level the field against botters, and they ended up being hated for it. If you can’t beat them, join them? Well, not in this case. Other bots were more sophisticated than CipBot, and thus they were still widely used in wars. They have went so far as to be able to set up traps, automatically time magic walls and other various war related actions. Other bots invested their time into improving the cavebotting algorithms and preferred a more peaceful bot usage.
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Lord'Paulistinha Caught Botting
Then came the dark ages. Tibian community has stopped growing. There is a pretty steady decline in online numbers since 2007. It is a well known fact that majority of Tibia players are using some sort of bot or another. Most conversations have deteriorated to “pay or hunted” and the atmosphere of roleplaying game was gone. It is very hard to meet a truly new player in the game anymore. Many fair players have moved away to Open Tibia servers. Reason being – they take more action against botters than Cipsoft does. But Open Tibia servers and their rise is a topic for another time, lets just mention for now that currently there are more people playing OT servers than Official servers. Other mmorpgs have contributed a lot too. When Tibia started, it was almost alone. It was a new thing and there wasn’t much to compare it to. Now however we got everything, from World of Warcraft to Eve Online, from Day of the Ancients to League of Legends that sucks the online player’s crowd. During this whole time Tibia didn’t stand in place. But the path it took has lead people to compare it to World of Warcraft, and its reputation is known to all. Add that most of the young gaming generation won’t even look at anything in 2D and you have the reasons for the decline.
Drastic actions had to be taken to save the game. Drastic actions were taken, but will it be enough? Few years ago Cipsoft announced that after 5 years of promises, the automatic botters catching tool is going online. This has caused a ruckus among the botting community. To spice things up, Cipsoft has changed their EULA so that Tibia client could scan your computer’s processes. It was the first time in Tibia history that botters got scared. A new phenomenon emerged – moneymakers. People would play fair with one “main” account and have 5 accounts being botted that would make them money and other goods. If one of the 5 would get banned, this would not hurt the main character at all. Meanwhile the new Cipsoft tool was being busy. It was banning around 5000 players every month. But this was clearly not enough. Botters quickly noticed that the tool doesn’t ban them and started botting freely again. And even if they get caught, after a month long ban they would transfer all the gold to the main and make a new account. On top of that Lord of War (LoW), an infamous bot-creator, has proven that Tibia client does not scan your computer for bot programs. More new botting accounts have sprung to life. After couple months it was clear that neither technically, nor publicly, this was working. The community demanded instant deletion while bot makers have started randomizing actions to avoid statistically based detection. First time in botting history big attention was made to hide the bots. Broken packets sent to server was removed, bots no longer tried to buy 200 items at once, some even went was far as to imitate keyboard and mouse strings and let the client convert it to packets. The bot detection tool started to bring in smaller numbers and the amount of botters were still large. But something happened at Cipsoft that the tool has gotten a second breath and then started to ban 5000 accounts every 2 weeks now. This has started the fall of Tibian bots. Major names such as TibiabotNG started talking about detection and it was clear that some bots were more detectable than others. Since then we saw a wave of career ends for botmakers. All but one major bots have stopped their production and even that last one is nowhere close to being perfect. This has made a large gap in botting community and it finally hit them where it hurts – the botmakers. This gap didn’t last long however as many newly found corporations have started taking the business over. We saw the rise of Orkbot, Xenbot and others sucking up costumers of what once was Elfbot (came to an end on December 30, 2011 - Read More Here). We also saw a lot of fake programs trying to hack you once again such as Tibia Anti-ban. The rumors of client detecting bots has spread wide again and new botmakers have made it their main task now to prove that their bot is not detectable, in contrast to the race of speed that we saw before.
A War of Botters
The botting world of tibia has come a long way. Cipsoft started knowing neither themselves nor their enemy. Then they have learned about their enemy though a long and painful war. The road to learning about themselves is still ahead of them. The bots have come full circle. They grew, got old and retired, now its time for fresh meat to take their place. The question is, is Cipsoft ready for this new challenge? Has it learned from the mistakes it done in the past? How do you fight software that is used by majority of your clients? Only time can show where we will go now. We stand in the crossroads after a long and tiresome path though the woods. What lies ahead of us depends on every one of us, Tibia players.
Reflection by Strazdas
