Guide to Botting: Illegal Automation for Profit and Amusement

Make your computer work for you by employing bots. In online games, botting is accomplished by scripting, a process that repetitively carrys out a series of tasks. Applied to an HTML form, hackers have shown that they can effortlessly create hundreds of accounts or aliases through form scripts. Mail scripts are responsible for all that spam that shows up in email boxes. But simple scripts can also serve as game hacks in aiming bots or farming bots. This is how they work.

Pixel bot. It scans the screen for items of interest and clicks or maybe presses a few keys. This interesting item could be a certain pixel color, a pattern, or some text. This bot makes it possible for people to aim really fast or target mobs, and it requires no file modification. Because all it does is control your mouse and keyboard, it does not directly interact with the game and is hard to detect.

Packet bot.The best bots out there are all packet bots. These interact with the program by modifying the executable file to disable anti-hacking defeneses. Then it "sniffs" the packet traffic between the game client and the server and intercepts the information to analyze the game environment and return altered packets to the server.
SERVER <----> PACKETBOT <----> GAME CLIENT
However, it is not difficult for admins to detect the packet editing activity of these programs. Packetbots are also a bit more difficult to obtain as development teams tend to keep them private.

Texture editing.When an object is shown on your screen, your computer is doing the work, not the server. Therefore, you can alter the appearance of the game world by altering the files that draw them through Hex Editing. Hit the right code in the .pk2 file and you can change the color of a graphic skin to pitch black or bright pink. The sprays in CS are editable textures. Nude patches are texture modifications. Turn your team mates into rabbits. Turn your pet into an end boss. Hex editing is mostly done for fun, but can also increase botting efficiency or warp object size(like ballooning a person's head) for easier clicking or headshotting. You can also impersonate GM's with this modification, and sow chaos by going around telling people that they will be banned.

Multiclient. Run a dozen instances of the game on the same computer and you can increase gold farming profit margins. This can also be used to aid in server crashing as has been done in Second Life. See that crowd of people all running around in unison? That's a multiclient.

The phenomenon known as the "bot line", a completely stochastic convergance of bots following the same programming, causing them to move in unison and creating a train effect. Multiclient can occasionally create this effect as well.


Spam bot. You'll see them everywhere, spamming advertisements or insults in the public channels. They're competitive as well, often sabotaging each other to make thier announcements come out on top. They can also be used for channel jamming, through rapid and continuous output of text messges. Just remember that if you complain that they're annoying, your protest falls on deaf ears.

With these tools, all but the most prized and GM-policed games can become a circus for your pleasure. The online world is YOUR HOUSE