Video Game Bots – Things to Know

When you hear about video game bots, you might wonder what are they required for.

Well, bots are useful for automating several monotonous game processes, so that players can start competing with human opponents much faster. Bots are also necessary for training player’s character in multiplayer online games; e.g. AltaBot is a Lords and Knights Bot which provides round the clock support and many other features. The last application of bots is cheating and skipping game rules to take advantage over opponents.

Stepping back into the history of video games and finding reasons for inventing bots may be interesting.

Bots first appeared in first-person shooter (FPS) games. There is a problem, when players start competing in “player vs player” mode which is also called deathmatch. Players sometimes wanted to practice the game without any human opponents or they just didn’t have any chance to connect to other players. The deathmatch mode differs a lot from the single player mode, in which AI (artificial intelligence) is enough. The AI in deathmatch needs to be more complicated and simulate human behavior better. Not only it should find and attack real players but also for more. AI needs to choose a route on the map, find when it will be advantageous to attack players or to withdraw for recovery and do several other things. This type of AI was termed a bot.

Evolution in video games brings a new set of problems. MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) were becoming increasingly popular along with the involvement of the internet. New genre has a significant resemblance with the classic role-playing games (RPG). However now a game process was more stretched for a time due to the participation of many players and intention of game developers to maintain players’ interest as long as possible. This gave rise to the need of more time to development of player’s character. Now you have to spend weeks or even months conducting quests and resource extraction. All this work is needed to reach the character’s level, that will be sufficient to begin competing with other players. The major appeal of MMORPG is this type of competition with human opponents.

Several players find the task of character development very monotonous, with high amount of simple actions that are to be repeated. They begin looking for ways to automate these boring tasks. Sometimes tools are provided by MMORPG developers for creation of plugins with minor automation features. However, usually many more are needed. To really increase MMORPG functionality, new workarounds and approaches should be explored to meet particular needs. MMORPG developers don’t get any benefit from this type of functionality; hence they wouldn’t use it. These custom applications used for game automation were termed MMORPG bots. The reason for this name is perhaps the imitation of players’ behavior that resembles with the FPS bots.

Hopefully this information will help you in making good use of bots for your play and enjoy video games even more.