Courtesy of a free Windows program called ROS BOT that is “made by botters for other botters”.
Automated game play is against Blizzard’s Terms of Use. The thing is that automation software by their nature is basically just software that resides in memory and can intercept things like user input, and act upon them in some manner. In this case, the software is specifically designed for the game since it can extract all the scenes used for navigating around the game world (no need to manually deal with those coodinates which was an issue with other bot programs).
From there, the software handles moving the mouse around, reading regions and labels on the display (used to determine coordinates of the loaded tileset), perform click and keyboard actions depending on what is detected on the screen (and based on script settings); essentially it can just play the game on its own and adapt as needed. The app itself utilizes binary obfuscation to make tracking its signature more difficult.
While Warden can scan memory and look for certain system processes (within self-imposed limits such that it doesn’t head too far off into the realm of being classified as spyware), it still has to assume that named processes aren’t always representative of what they are called (though most will change the app so that it doesn’t show up as ROS BOT in the task manager). Blizzard has taken a stance to err on the side of caution when permanently banning players.
Thus part of their investigation would also involve “looking” at actual game play (like trying to detect very redundant static patterns with keyboard and mouseclicks) to determine with better certainty whether or not the game play is automated. Some older bot scripts that farmed the game during vanilla D3 were very static with how they detected screen regions, and moved around based on those coordinates (that you often times had to enter during initial configuration). This made it much easier to correlate system process with game play data that signified a high confidence level that it was automated. More sophisticated apps like this which has the ability to script out game play that better mimics that of a human, makes it a more difficult process for Blizzard to detect with a high level of accuracy.
The question is why are players botting in D3? Part of it is for loot. But for those engaging in the leaderboards, the main thing is grinding out Paragon experience in Greater Rifts where those XP gains are multiplicative.
I’ve already covered the issue with main stat inflation (for anything over P800) with Paragon (made worse by the multiplicative XP in Greater Rifts). It’s a self-inflicted wound by the design team since the entire Paragon system is a relatively shallow bandaid fix to the initial level 60 hard cap in vanilla. Furthermore, the entire max level design is one of the main core problems in the game which directly affects everything else including skills and itemization.
ARPG’s like this are supposed to be about the continual journey. In D3, there is the initial low leveling journey (where most everything there doesn’t matter including items) to get to max level where the real game begins. This was one of the worst design decisions they decided to make because it directly affects the entire character building aspects of these type of games.
The max level (and the intended design to make it easy to get there) resulted in an experience cap which made players feel they weren’t progressing any further. Thus Paragon 1.0 was added to continue logging XP, and providing small boosts in several categories. With Paragon 2.0, that was moved to an account wide format where there was no upper end cap (expect for integer storage limits based on the current 32-bit design), and anything over P800 would allow putting those points into only main stat and/or vitality (since everything else would be maxed out at P800).
And that is the key reason for why players are resorting to bots; the bot can continue to grind out Paragon experience (which grows exponentially) while the player is sleeping or doing other things. And it seems to be a growing epidemic. Blizzard is of course not blind to this. But with D3 being resource limited as to the backend support (including human monitoring), it’s not surprising that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of action being taken.
Ironically, one aspect of the online only requirement was to reduce the cheating and exploiting. The only thing this has accomplished is prevent hero editors. The thing is that offline characters would have remained offline. Battle.net 1.0’s lack of a hardened security model also allowed other attack vectors to take place where players utilized weaknesses discovered in the offline engine to try those exploits on the closed realms. Better security validation of data with Battle.net 2.0 would make this moot. My point is that the game could have had an offline mode (without bonuses like achievements, Seasonal ladders, online profiles, etc) and the valid online one. But this debate is long exhausted since Blizzard isn’t going to go that route since this is mostly all about online DRM.
The problem is that botting like this (plus HUD overlays like TurboHUD) ruins the entire “integrity of the game” aspect that Blizzard promotes. The lack of perceived enforcement (which as I mentioned, isn’t simple as the sophistication of a piece of software goes up) eventually leads to being more widely accepted. Sure, as someone who primarily plays solo and ignores the leaderboards, none of this should matter to me. In those regards, it doesn’t.
Where it does have an indirect impact is how the designers will need to balance the game. The game continues to power creep upwards and if you don’t continue playing the meta, your characters will be way behind the power curve. In Season 1, GR30 was a key achievement. That was moved upwards to GR35 in Season 2 and GR40 in Season 3. This entire aspect forced their hand to add 4 more Torment difficulties in patch 2.3. And they are going to have to deal with the non-seasonal Paragon inflation for the next expansion (that variance is far greater than what existed with the launch of Reaper of Souls). Exactly how are they going to make the journey from level 70 to the next level cap, feel good for all players?
That is the indirect problem that botting creates with the game. And the longer it takes Blizzard to actually action accounts and deal with the issue, the worse the issue becomes.
