Bot Ethics

[Scorpion]

This is one interesting topic. I'm an experienced player, started 4~5 years ago on a 3x private server. After 4 years I created 15 reborns of which 7 were 80+ and created in my final marathon of 5 weeks 16 hours per day last summer vacation. 5 were 90+ and 3x 99/70. even on iro that would be 15/3 = 5 reborns. In that period I had never thought of starting botting, on the contrary I was against botting but since the server was guarded properly I had never seen a bot.

Almost a month ago I started playing on the valkyrie server. I noticed there were a lot of bots but at first I didn't really mind. most didn't ks or steal loot. it was rather me who used them as tank because they were bots. I'm done studying , have summer vacation and found work last week, and that's when my relative time to play ragnarok shrank. I'm a most competitive player, and the thing I don't like about mmorpgs is that mainly time determines how good your character is instead of real skills. When I had a lot of free time I could compensate that factor, but now I can't anymore and I don't want to lose the competition. For the first time I thought about using a bot. What is fair? Someone leeching the government for money playing ragnarok all day getting better than you or someone who works and uses a bot to compensate for his relative loss of time?

Then I started looking into bots. I thought, even people who hate bots should know a lot about it because if you really want to fight against bots you should know how they work. I found bots to be harder accessible than I at first had imagined. The noobest noobs don't get it to work, the regular noobs get noob bots and pro's make money using bots or invent very helpful bots. 2 factors made me create my first bot. The first one I already mentioned was the lack of time throwing me out of the competition. the second one is that there are already a large amount of bots. On a server without bots I wouldn't start botting. At least, not if it's unethical to do so.

- the first two points you mention are economy modification and unfair competitive advantage. I think that the amount of free time someone has is the biggest factor in determining competitive capabilities. Even without bots there are already huge differences. Most of the Kids that are still in school or the elderly have more time than people from the working force. Although bots can be used to increase this gap even more they can also be used to make it smaller. If everyone had one bot that would play if they weren't online then chances would be more equal and skill would play a bigger role in determining how good you are.

- The large scale of botting has a big influence on the ingame economy. You can buy repeatable exp items, and cards from frequently botted maps for low prices. The downside is that as a human player a usually valuable item might be worthless and it becomes increasingly difficult to make your own money because there are so many bots in the good places. The upside is that bots can do work nobody would want to do. Who wants to manually hunt stems in the amount they're needed? I'm happy to find a selection of items buyable at vendors in constant supply.

- I agree that each map has an optimum amount of players. Maybe solo on a map is the fastest way but in certain cases the respawn generated by others might also come in handy. Imagine a map being entirely covered by the range of stationary archers, that would be awesome. In general as the number of players increases the exp/zeny gain per time drops. If this factor drops too much it becomes better to move to another map. I agree that human players should have priority over bots if characters would be forced off a map. Someone replied that in ragnarok you can't know how many ppl are on a map because everything is determined by the LOS but at least on private servers there are acp pages where you can see everyone online sorted by on which map they are. I guess the map server has this kind of information. Based on information like that you could know if maps are overpopulated or not. This problem is also a natural problem. On a big server with human players only there are also player density problems on maps. This automatically balances to a certain degree I believe because it's less advantageous to continue playing in an overpopulated map. botters also move to other places if it's overcrowded. It's difficult to try and enforce optimum map populations. Before you come to a dense populated server you can expect maps to be overcrowded regardless of bot existence. As I said earlier if everyone had 1 bot it would be more equal. In fighting bots it would be most efficient to attack the money gaining bots. the ones with the zeny spam in towns. I don't know anything about the process of arresting bots but if I were hunting them I would aim for those. You might get some feedback from the zeny spammers, seeing some companies disappear, or the price per zeny increase.

- Social deprivation hahaha. I can already imagine browsing the internet and running into stories like; "I found out that my girlfriend was a bot T_T" , We discovered that our active guild leader had been dead over 20 years" or events like who is the bot and human players losing the game XD. the problem lies in determining whether players are human or bot. imagine the online law enforcement to only punish bots that don't show they're a bot, and that bots have to wear a certain headgear or something that tells you they're a bot haha. If you want a party you go to places crowded by humans. for example outside the south portal of pront. Imagine bots going there and joining parties, perfectly blending in. So on the one hand if bots get accepted it could be handy if everyone could tell a bot from a human player. On the other hand it would also be very cool if bots can just blend in. Someone who makes money using bots doesn't need to make a very polite bot, the main objective would be having bots that don't get caught easily. But if I had a legal bot I would try and give it my own personality XD

- Yes, bots can be very helpful. even to those who hate bots. On some private servers there is the command @whosells. you can use it to search for items being vended and it shows the location of the vender and the last seen prize. I don't know exactly how it works but there is a bot who goes around looking in all the vending shops making it possible to easily search instead of having to look in every shop yourself. Polite support bots would also be cool, and in my opinion homunculus and merchants are already legal bots. Who wants kafra everywhere on the valkyrie server? XD imagine a kafra guild made by bots that can warp you if you deal them zeny.

I agree that bots really can improve the game for everyone. but there are even more things. autoloot would also help out a lot XD On the official servers looting takes so much time.

legalized botting is unlike ethical hacking. with hacking there are always victims but that's not necessarily the case with botting. It all depends on ethics. I can understand you think botting is bad because they have an unfair competitive advantage or are overcrowding certain maps but in the future your best friend is destined to be a bot! that last part was j/k. I think bots can also be used to make the entire competition fairer to everyone and greatly improve the gameplay.

Why should I send away my Hunters when I want a Slotted Muffler too? If I leave just 1 Hunter there, yes I give the Knight a chance, but at the same time, I cut my chances by 2/3. Why should I hurt myself a lot just to help out a stranger a little bit? This doesn't make any sense at all.

situation like this also occur without bots. it's comparable to mobbing. If there are 20 seals on the beach and there are 7 players, do you still try to create mobs of 10? In my opinion the ethical thing to do would be dividing the monsters equally over the players. 3 seals/player. if you see someone walking with 10 seals behind him he's worse than a bot. In that case I'd just ks his mob because that's the most profitable action for everyone on the map. If you only think of your own advantage you're an ass. In most games that's not bad because it's 1 on 1 but that's not what you should do in an mmorpg if you're together on a map. unless they are bots. I can understand you ks bots. bots don't mind you ksing them. unless you're talking about the situation where everyone has 1 bot playing if they're offline. then the bot should equal that player and ks would be bad. ksing a bot that does /sob after being ksed is also bad

I wonder how much bots get caught over time. On small scale botted servers it's easier to just catch them all, but on large scale botted servers there might be no stopping them. I really have no idea. I don't know how the gms work to stop them and I don't know what those money making botters do to keep making money. I believe in moderately botting. I'd be happy with one legal bot. Aren't there servers that allow botting? I also wouldn't mind busting extreme botters, seeing the zeny spammers disappear and having bots accepted on official servers.

People bot for a few different reasons. But in the end, it is against the Terms of Service to bot, so no matter how ethical you try to be, you've already broken the rules.

TL;DR: There is no Bot Ethics.

rules are there for a reason, if you can protect that reason you might be allowed to break the rules. I don't know what the official reasons against botting are, but players tend to dislike bots. Maybe for gravity bots means players lvl faster so make less money for them. on the other hand the bots on the valkyrie server might be useful to them to keep the other servers more attractive.

even if botting is legalized there are always "good" and "evil" botters. botters who also think about others and botters who only think about their own game. Like I said it's similar to mobbing and Ksing: purely going for your own gain and mobbing the whole map is bad. it's ideal when both parties feel guilty. that the evil mobber feels bad when he mobs in front of other ppl, and that the ppl against mobbing dislike having to ks his mob. ultimately the alternative situation comes into being where all players share the same AI in the seal example to have 3 seals per player. and that no one feels guilty but that they know what to do because of common ethics. for example the mobber being attacked by 7 seals on accident, someone else walking into the screen and killing half of the seals and both players doing ctrl - because they knew this was the thing to do. in terms of botting it's harder to come with a concrete example. most problems arise from their mere existence, but in theory bots can be programmed to be ethical. A bot can even be gm XD if someone is attacked by a lot of monsters on the same time a witness can't tell how many there exactly are. in such a case a bot can immediately tell.

for now this post is long enough

[Liebot]

The biggest problem so far that i see is that people (in the valk server) are greedy to the max at this point there are a million bots on, to be honest i think gravity gave up on that server, now one would say that simple supply and demand would come into effect but however when somone who has and item and says to him self " i will sell it for more then i am suppose to" people see this and like a moth to the flame people get drawn into this vortex of costing alot like A.Horns at some point they were 6k but all of a sudden like a flood they were 8k as if over night now having such an abundence of those horns should say that it should cost less but now everything that is not really worth anything is getting expensive and the rare or just plain usefull have become to expensive for people to buy like mocking muffler i have seen it on sell for like 30mil. now i dont think they were selling it for 30 mil maybe they just want to be mail a price but that kinda of stuff leads to people selling them for 30 mil now i hate to say it but unless u buy zeny or bot there is no way to make that much unless u are lucky i mean super lucky i mean a millionire falls in loves with and then dies leaving u everything do to natural causes lucky. now thats the bad the economic downturn. the good thing is this point blank most of the items that are circulating to day are do to bots. i have spent about lets just say like 200/hrs in geffen dungon 2 killing wisper and no card sweet jesus how would a normal player get that card again super lucky so botting is kinda a blessing and a curse I just think that if we can get a hold on the economic's in the game then all would be well

[Scorpion]

Normally you'd expect prices to drop if there's a lot of supply. A reason why the prices could be rising is because bots also generate a lot of income making it easier to buy stuff.

Prices can also be expressed in time needed to hunt items or zeny. The time needed is the same for human players and bots. A fair price for an item would be the amount of zeny you would make on average during the average time you need to hunt the item. If all prices were set up like this and everyone would only buy fair priced items then there would be no problem. The problem starts when a botter who makes more money than a human player starts buying at an unfair price. even though this is at the disadvantage of the buyer, he still has more advantage than a human player.

For example. If human player A makes 1M by playing 2 hours per day and botter B makes 12M by botting 24/7 and botter B decides to buy rare item C which would take 10 hours to hunt for 10M then this could be a disadvantage to human players. In the case there's a high demand for certain items, then botters that are willing to buy at unfair prices have the advantage. On the other hand it would be smarter to bot for that item instead of botting the unfair amount of zeny. This is also true for the human player. If something is so expensive then you can make money by hunting it.

There are plenty of exp items being vended on the valkyrie server. I think a good way of making money would be also hunting these items. I witnessed the increase in ahorn prices, but they're relatively cheap compared to blanks. I guess the ppl who make money botting blanks can afford higher Ahorn prizes for their lower chars. The high prize reflects the demand and willingness to pay for it. I have no idea how much ahorns someone can hunt per time but it might be advantageous to sell them yourself if they're really expensive. If they're being sold at unfair prices then you have to depend on regular loot selling to make your money.

It's the same with the whisper card, if it's expensive to the degree that only botters are willing to buy it then it's better to hunt it yourself. But who wants to pay 30M for a whisper XD I'd expect a whisper card to be common though, because alchemists need a lot of fabric.

Still, this doesn't make the game harder then it normally is. I was used to no vendors and hunted everything myself before I came to iro. To me all the venders in pront are only an advantage, therefore the fact that the prices are higher than on a human only server doesn't affect me. If there are unfair prices maybe you can use this to your advantage.

If you haven't found a whisper card in 200 hours then you probably have bad luck. on average you need 10000 kills for a card. in 200 hours that's only 50 per hour. but 200 hours is an insane amount. I'd worry more about the kills/time instead of the fact that you haven't found one yet. Isn't the glastheim culvert a better place to hunt whispers? there are 40 there but only 20 in geffenia. How much whispers do you kill/time?