Bot idea

[alzika]

Imagine a bot that takes turns auto-conceding or letting the opponent auto-concede.

The first hurdle is how the bot will detect if it is playing against another real player, or another bot. This can be quite simple. Have each bot keep track of whether it is their turn to win, or auto-concede. The bot should only start games once a minute, based on an exact second time where everyone syncs their windows clock to the same time server. For example, if 20 players, some botting, and some not, all start at exactly, say, X:X:42, IE 42 seconds after each minute, just pure chance will lead to bots being paired up against one another quite often.

To keep it simple, the bot who auto-concedes should perhaps simply be the player who goes second and over time this will average out as 50/50 since you are randomly chosen to go first, or second. If the games goes on and the other player hasn't conceded, you are playing against a real player and the bot should concede at that point anyways.

Is this something that would theoretically work?

[Xel]

Doesn't iPad have different playerpools for old patches? At least when UTH got nerfed you could either play others with or without the update.
I think this bot could be successful in an environment like this.

[swatt]

I actually have an idea similar to this working with the python color bot, but how you described would require a lot of people using it in order for it to work consistently, especially since people would hopefully be able to get their 30 wins faster. My only issue with the idea is that I think it would make it much easier for blizzard to detect, especially if the bot is public and popular.

[alzika]

The only reason I posted this is it was something that came to mind to me when I was emailing someone yesterday about some prior coding experience I have in C# on top of my main experience as a PHP/MySQL backend developer.

In the past, I've written bots for a website that used to have free games you could play and win money from jackpots on games such as bingo, slots, and other unique flash games. Anyways, I had multiple bots for that website that were running on 4 different computers at once. I had written a bot that would auto-play every game for me.

One day I went to check on the status of the bot and had a jackpot message up that I had won $863 in their bingo "coverall" game.

The company was too dumb to catch someone like me who botted 24/7 across at least FOUR different games ALL being played at the same time, and it ran for weeks straight at a time without breaks in between. They obviously didn't have any type of logging or anything on their back end that would let them look into potential botting issues. I ended up making around $1200 from bots running on that site in a 4 month period. Within the last year, however, that site has since shut down and has gone to an entire system that is no longer instant win games that people can play...just stupid points you can earn. Not surprised when I was able to write bots myself that easily and they never even found out.

One neat trick I would do to ALWAYS net myself a win in a specific game was to load up cheat engine, and then depending on the browser, either select the browser itself or instead the running Adobe Flash Process and then do a speed hack of about 5x speed on Flash. My bot was able to play a slot machine game 5x faster than anyone else and it would almost ALWAYS come in first place for a win of money unless someone else during the game hit a very nice win while they were playing.

OK, got way off topic there...

Back on topic, this type of bot is something I could easily write code for and I think this is something that players themselves should set up with one another on two computers with a second account you can just go register.

If you are botting for XP, have each player pass turn a total of 10 times until each player has full mana crystals and then concede on the player who is the newly created account so your main account gets the win. That's how the bot should play, I mean, if you are trying to level up, as it gives exponentially more exp the longer you play based at least partly upon how far into the game you are (ie if the game ends on turn 7 or perhaps turn 10+; turn 10+ nets more XP than turn 7 or anything else lower than 10). There's also a bit more to their XP formula for leveling up, I believe (maybe the total number of cards played in the game?) but I don't know any specifics on that at all.

The source code should be released and then its up to each individual person to set a specific EXACT time of which both players hit the play game button. Again, for eample, the code should be configurable such that you can set it to both search for games at the :02 second mark of every minute or the :42 second mark. By doing this, that allows for 60 people POTENTIALLY, in theory, to have a higher chance of getting paired up against their own bot.

In the scenario that it doesn't detect you are playing against your own character, the bot can just concede on its own immediately.

Note that Blizzard did release a memo recently telling people not to bot in Hearthstone. They are in a sticky situation, though, as this is a game where you essentially "buy" digital content in the form of cards. Regardless of what the agreement that nobody ever reads that we all agree to when we signed up, even if it states that Blizzard owns full rights to the content and you have no right, a contract is only good if it is legal which is partially determined by whether or not it is fair. Blizzard would lose if there was a major court case if some Hearthstone players who had all spent a ton of money on cards all got banned for using a bot. This is a different animal than WoW completely and again banning someone who paid money directly for the digital content is a whole different ballgame. Plus, when Diablo 3 had the real world auction house to sell in-game items for real money, it demolished Blizzard's stance that they've long held that their items in-game have no real world value. They effectively told the world that they knew otherwise when they released the D3 RMAH. Regardless of what their memo regarding not to bot in Hearthstone, I do NOT see them issuing permanent bans in Hearthstone like they would in their other games. I think they would most definitely issue a warning first, regardless, and anyone who is botting would be best advised to stop after any warning...

Sorry for long post. I'm at work where I essentially do nothing any more and am an expendable employee...I only work about 5 hours a week from home at this current full time job and it has been that way ever since I was put in charge of just managing two outsourced coders instead of actually doing the work myself. My boss is too dumb to realize that he is paying me for pretty much nothing. Sounds like a good deal, sure, but without something to do all day I go literally insane from boredom and type out a full 30 page dissertation on a random OwnedCore thread about anything that pretty much comes to my mind. Christ. I need to find a new job that pays better AND gives me actual something to do.

[MooseFace]

I ended up making around $1200 from bots running on that site in a 4 month period. Within the last year, however, that site has since shut down and has gone to an entire system that is no longer instant win games that people can play...just stupid points you can earn. Not surprised when I was able to write bots myself that easily and they never even found out.

No matter how you carve it, your bots, and perhaps others like them, shut this "service" down .... It was crazy / very slack for not doing proper bot checking ....

About 6 ? years ago, they had a bingo program live on TV that you could play along with - it was a UK program .... But they syndicated it in Australia and other countries .... IIRC, they started out by putting bingo cards in the local paper (I think), but they wannted it to be "free to play", so you could also download free bingo cards from their web site as PDFs. For the first few week, friends and family and I would each download and print a bunch of cards (5-10 each) and we would all get together, have a big dinner, have a few drinks, and watch the TV show and play these cards. It was a lot of fun. But none of our bingo cards won anything .... And this got me thinking .... So I wrote some software (and improved it as the weeks went by) to automatically download the bingo cards from their web site, convert the PDFs to text, and then check every bingo card against the numbers as the numbers were being called live on TV. Only a limited number of numbers were called each game - so the chances of any bingo card winning were *very* slim. If you had a winning card, IIRC, you had to fill out a form on their web site and they would mail out a check.

By the end of the season (13 weeks ??) my software had become so good that I could (if I wanted) have downloaded 100's of 1,000's of bingo cards each week and then play these with virtually no effort required (just enter the next number and click a "check cards" button). But I decided to take it very easy .... and not go hell for leather on the cards, as this would draw too much attention to me and what I was doing ..... I didn't want to cause the show to be cancelled or not come back for further seasons. I didn't want them to lock down the bingo cards or restrict their numbers or slow down the web server code that generated them ..... So, I generated a limited number of bingo cards each day during the week and space things out a lot. I didn't generate too many cards at any time or for any week.

From memory, I ended up winning a $100 or so from winning cards ..... Not bad ... It worked out to less than $1 per hour for my work. But I didn't do it for the money. I did it for the challenge. And, I shared the winning cards around amongst friends / family, so that my name only ever appeared on 1 win for the whole season.

Alas, at the end of Season 1 the show never came back ..... a real shame ...... I sure hope my activities didn't contribute to the demise of what was a fun TV show .... Because I kept my activities so constrained, so controlled, I'd be amazed if anything I did contributed to the demise of the show. Maybe there were others out there doing the same thing and who weren't so controlled .....

When the series ended, all of the people that used to get together for these bingo nights really missed the TV show ..... It was still a fun night even when no-one won .... But, of course, winning was better .

The whole trick to these sorts of things: DON'T BE GREEDY. Don't take all you can possibly take. Leave some (a lot !) for others. And never take so much that it will draw attention to what you are doing.

After all, it was greedy people who ruined bot'ing in Diablo III and other games.

Anyhow, here's my advice on how to still have fun and NOT f**k it up for everyone:
(1). Don't run more than 1 bot.
(2). Don't run your bot for more than an hour or so at a time and space things out (leave a break for a few hours between runs).
(3). Don't create lots of extra accounts to bot from.
(4). Don't setup lots of other machines or VMs to bot from.
(5). Don't hack things to make things run faster than they would for a normal user (human).

If you do any of these things, you will draw attention to what you are doing and sooner or later what you are doing may be stopped and you will kill it (f**k it up) for everyone. But if you do multiple of these things, and really hammer it, then you will f**k it up and kill it even quicker.

Common sense really. It's not rocket surgery.