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[onyxthedog]

In this thread we will talk about online game security, mainly bots. (I.E. Real-World Item Trading, I will now refer to as RWT.) Gold-farming and power-leveling services are on a major rise, as I am sure you know. There are major sweat-shops in many parts of Asia, namely China. To combat that a major MMO, Runescape, has added major changes to its game to help prevent this "illegal" activity. They claim that a lot of the bots are stolen accounts, but I beg to differ considering the majority of autoers are lvl 3's (the starting level in Runescape.) Many consider the updates to have ruined the entire infa-structure of the game. While true the updates have had a major impact on the number bots in-game, and RTW, they have also lost a large number of players, including members (their version of P2P). I beleive that they could have improved the RTW/bot problem without causing such a dislike for the game from many of their players.

I want to start a thread on the topic of how bots/exploits work, how the hackers create them, what their main motive is on why they create bots/exploits, and how to combat them in a way that we all, players and creators alike, can agree on. I think that we must first understand the motive and mechanics before we can defeat the problem. My "theory" on why this is true is because as a programmer you should know before you can fix the bug in a program you must first find and understand the problem. I am by no means an expert on this topic, so I will now turn over the technical stuff to people much more versed in this topic than I.

Anyone one is free to post questions, thoughts, explainations, links, and answers pretaining to the matter discussed.
Thanks,
onyx
P.S. By people more versed than I, I meant anyone with knowledge on how bots work and how to combat them. (Or any of the other topics I listed.)