Dear DB Team and Fellow Buddies, I Need Your Help on This Research!

[ikw]

Dear DB Team and Fellow Buddies, I Need Your Help on This Research!

I'm currently taking a business ethics class and I've decided to write a 15+ pages research paper about whether it is ethical to bot in online games. As a botter myself, I think it is a very interesting topic and that's why I want to do a research on it.

For the paper, I will have to explore both sides of the argument and do thorough analysis on each point, and possibly take a stand on the issue. With that said, I would like to get some insight from you all:

1. What are the pros and cons of botting, in terms of a)individual gamer and the whole in-game community, b)bot developers and the game companies c)to the gaming industry?
2. In terms of ethics(whether it is an ethical decision), what would you say about botting in game? Is it ethical?

Also, does the DB team or anyone still have the link/info on the court case against blizzard? I remember there was a sticky post in the forum but I couldn't find it anymore. I would like to know what arguments did both side use in that case, or in the wow case.

Any other inputs or suggestions are welcome as well. Btw I will keep you guys posted on the progress and when it is done I will definitely post it here as well.

1000 thanks for your help in advance!!

-IKW

 

[Bertrand]

1. You make money
2. Blizzard make money
3. Casual players get the best loot at lower and lower price every day

 

[awww]

1. You make money
2. Blizzard make money
3. Casual players get the best loot at lower and lower price every day

Blizzard is the government; casual players are the middle class. The botters are the capitalists )

 

[ikw]

3. Casual players get the best loot at lower and lower price every day

I do agree that it can drive the rmah price lower. How about the inflation caused by it tho? Items seems to be more and more expensive due to gold inflation. What's your argument on that?

 

[CodenameG]

anything related to pending litigation can be found in the Legal section on our forums.

 

[blackpearl]

Well is stealing considered to be ethic?Kind of same shit...anyways boting rullz and the guys who made this hack are fucking geniuses

 

[DDaems]

Isn't cheating unethical than?

Some reads:
pokerai.org • View topic - Introduction: Pokerbots and Computer Poker Players (FAQ)
http://ezinearticles.com/?RuneScape-Botting---An-Ethical-Overview&id=6579117

 

[blackpearl]

Isn't cheating unethical than?

Some reads:
pokerai.org • View topic - Introduction: Pokerbots and Computer Poker Players (FAQ)
http://ezinearticles.com/?RuneScape-Botting---An-Ethical-Overview&id=6579117

ofcours who gives a shit about ethics though??

 

[hetsig]

Well is stealing considered to be ethic?Kind of same shit...anyways boting rullz and the guys who made this hack are fucking geniuses

Far from stealing... Botters produce wealth, not steal it.

 

[Ghibli]

Botting is unethical and provides an unfair advantage to specific players. It ruins the economy and balance of the game in a way that diminishes the enjoyment value across the legit player base.

 

[ikw]

anything related to pending litigation can be found in the Legal section on our forums.

Thanks alot G!

Isn't cheating unethical than?

Some reads:
pokerai.org ? View topic - Introduction: Pokerbots and Computer Poker Players (FAQ)
http://ezinearticles.com/?RuneScape-Botting---An-Ethical-Overview&id=6579117

Thanks for the links DDaems. That would be good case references for the paper!

Botting is unethical and provides an unfair advantage to specific players. It ruins the economy and balance of the game in a way that diminishes the enjoyment value across the legit player base.

Good point for against botting. How about if I argue that your argument is based on the assumption that enjoyment comes from legit game playing? What if the actual enjoyment comes from owning godly gears? After beating the game once, I do think that most players create enjoyment by finding good gears, possibly through intensive grinding or buying in rmah(if they dont have time to grind). In this case, the argument for botting is that it makes grinding more efficient, lowers the price in rmah, and accelerates blizzard's profit generation thru running rmah. Also, anyone can buy the bot if they pay for it, so it's not just for a certain group of players. What do you think? How would you argue against it?

 

[hetsig]

Botting is unethical and provides an unfair advantage to specific players. It ruins the economy and balance of the game in a way that diminishes the enjoyment value across the legit player base.

Not rly but that depends how good the balance is between botters and legit players. If its a good balance then everybody wins on it.

 

[Wookis]

obviously its not ethical to cheat...but ppl will do ANYTHING for money

 

[Soullinker]

Now it depends how the market develops.

In one case you can have a market where the bots provide almost all the gear, feeding better and better items in the system. Which in turn will devalue the previously boted items, so they will be prized lower, as a result average gear that allows you to easily farm Diablo 3 and have a enjoyment and somewhat balance between challenge and fun.
I remember in the beginning of the game when i played the game that i was frustrated beyond believe that each elite pack was farming me instead of me farming them. Gear that would be now vendor trash was millions.
As a example of my case: I was able to build a 0 deaths per hour barb for a bit over 13 mil. Granted shit dps, but unkillable. As a said gear that is more than enough to faceroll inferno is dirty cheep. This is a result directly by boting and by items never leaving the system. Is being able to gear up a char so cheep a bad thing for the average player? I think not.

However this also has a downfall for the average player. For the average player it is not possible to find "good" gear that is sellable on the ah for couple of mils, unless they spend as much time as a program does to find items. It good to note that the "good" gear is really high end inferno gear, because average gear is considered week and dosnt sell for allot.

So players not willing to buy 13-15 mil for around 7-9 euro will suffer until they collect that amount of gold(although with 400GPH reachable easy i don't see why is that a problem). At which point they can farm inferno freely, however they have high end gear, which makes upgrades by drops very rare, which leads to the forum QQ of broken loot.

And blizzard is turning a blind eye to the boters and only bans us when we get to obvious(read like in WoW, train of bots flying behind each other) or need to boost there game sales. Plus they benefit more from our activity than a normal user. When boters lower the gold price, it opens the market for more people. Its easy to depart with 2 euro to buy 4 mil gold than depart with 10 euro for 4 mil gold, that how the human mind work.

So far i talked only about the item farming bots, but there gold farming bots, which are the real problem in my eyes, due to pumping gold in the economy no-stop causing huge inflation, which make gold farming for the average person not a very good idea if he want to gear up. Basically item farming is like High-tech industry low emissions and effect to the environment, and gold betting is smoking behemoth.
Also most players complain mostly against the gold farming bots because of inflation and ever raising item prices, but don't mind cheep available items on AH. IMO

However we did make it impossible for the average Joe to make money on the RMAH, and are kind of like farming the little man forcing him to play by our rules and to buy our stuff. We are forcing him to become a consumer.

As a person said, blizzard is the government that we pay tax to, we are the factories and big companies like Nestle selling stuff to the average Joe, and the average Joe is the working class forced to buy our stuff and live day for day.
If by mimiking the real world and how it works we are bad then the whole word is bad and wrong.

And a point that i have forgotten is why exactly the average player not botting? Is it because they have higher moral and ethical standard than us? Or is it because they find it not fun?
Now the reason that my friends gave me when i asked why you don't start boting like me, after i explain all the gains of boting is that there are just too afraid to lose there accounts. People are just generally afraid to start and do thing that they don't have experience in it, they want a sure win plan, with no chance of losing. Do they want the results that boting brings? Yes. Are they willing to bot? No, and it because they afraid.

 

[lolwatpear]

It's not unethical at all. We make money, blizz makes money, and the buyers of our botted goods get our stuff cheaper due to botting. Everyone wins. It's no different than any company who 'farms' their materials and sells to the public. Technology continually makes the ability to obtains the goods easier and because of that, the material becomes cheaper.

 

[ikw]

Now it depends how the market develops.

In one case you can have a market where the bots provide almost all the gear, feeding better and better items in the system. Which in turn will devalue the previously boted items, so they will be prized lower, as a result average gear that allows you to easily farm Diablo 3 and have a enjoyment and somewhat balance between challenge and fun.
I remember in the beginning of the game when i played the game that i was frustrated beyond believe that each elite pack was farming me instead of me farming them. Gear that would be now vendor trash was millions.
As a example of my case: I was able to build a 0 deaths per hour barb for a bit over 13 mil. Granted shit dps, but unkillable. As a said gear that is more than enough to faceroll inferno is dirty cheep. This is a result directly by boting and by items never leaving the system. Is being able to gear up a char so cheep a bad thing for the average player? I think not.

However this also has a downfall for the average player. For the average player it is not possible to find "good" gear that is sellable on the ah for couple of mils, unless they spend as much time as a program does to find items. It good to note that the "good" gear is really high end inferno gear, because average gear is considered week and dosnt sell for allot.

So players not willing to buy 13-15 mil for around 7-9 euro will suffer until they collect that amount of gold(although with 400GPH reachable easy i don't see why is that a problem). At which point they can farm inferno freely, however they have high end gear, which makes upgrades by drops very rare, which leads to the forum QQ of broken loot.

And blizzard is turning a blind eye to the boters and only bans us when we get to obvious(read like in WoW, train of bots flying behind each other) or need to boost there game sales. Plus they benefit more from our activity than a normal user. When boters lower the gold price, it opens the market for more people. Its easy to depart with 2 euro to buy 4 mil gold than depart with 10 euro for 4 mil gold, that how the human mind work.

So far i talked only about the item farming bots, but there gold farming bots, which are the real problem in my eyes, due to pumping gold in the economy no-stop causing huge inflation, which make gold farming for the average person not a very good idea if he want to gear up. Basically item farming is like High-tech industry low emissions and effect to the environment, and gold betting is smoking behemoth.
Also most players complain mostly against the gold farming bots because of inflation and ever raising item prices, but don't mind cheep available items on AH. IMO

However we did make it impossible for the average Joe to make money on the RMAH, and are kind of like farming the little man forcing him to play by our rules and to buy our stuff. We are forcing him to become a consumer.

As a person said, blizzard is the government that we pay tax to, we are the factories and big companies like Nestle selling stuff to the average Joe, and the average Joe is the working class forced to buy our stuff and live day for day.
If by mimiking the real world and how it works we are bad then the whole word is bad and wrong.

And a point that i have forgotten is why exactly the average player not botting? Is it because they have higher moral and ethical standard than us? Or is it because they find it not fun?
Now the reason that my friends gave me when i asked why you don't start boting like me, after i explain all the gains of boting is that there are just too afraid to lose there accounts. People are just generally afraid to start and do thing that they don't have experience in it, they want a sure win plan, with no chance of losing. Do they want the results that boting brings? Yes. Are they willing to bot? No, and it because they afraid.

Thanks for the thorough analysis Soullinker, this is very helpful!

I particular like how your point that an average Joe would suffer if he doesnt play by our rules. Yet, since average items are much much cheaper now, it also lower the barries of entry for him to farm high end bosses/champions because most average to above average items are quite affordable. So is he better off or worse off? I really don't know. But it seems to me that even if he doesn't bot, he is indirectly benefit by us feeding items to the market.

"If by mimiking the real world and how it works we are bad then the whole word is bad and wrong."
This is a good analogy my friend!!

Regarding your friend's comment, I think that if there is no negative consequences of botting (such as creating a bot that acts completely like human/undetectable), most people will do it since its a win-win situation for everyone, not to mention that it also benefit companies like blizzard.

With that said, what do you think about how botting will affect the gaming industry as a whole, especially for mmo?

 

[Coupons]

Botting is unethical and provides an unfair advantage to specific players. It ruins the economy and balance of the game in a way that diminishes the enjoyment value across the legit player base.

What is unfair is creating an MMO based on how much real money you are willing to spend to succeed. If blizzard actually wanted to produce a good product, the RMAH wouldn't exist. period. The RMAH turned D3 from a video game into an ATM.

 

[Maxasy]

What is unfair is creating an MMO based on how much real money you are willing to spend to succeed. If blizzard actually wanted to produce a good product, the RMAH wouldn't exist. period. The RMAH turned D3 from a video game into an ATM.

Pointing out other wrong doings doesn't make botting ethical.

It is cheating. Simple. You are doing nothing but running a program and gaining profit from it - against the rules of the game.

Your question should be "Is cheating ethical," because really, that's all this question is.

You can justify it by who gets hurt, who doesn't get hurt. Who gets profit, who doesn't; but, all you are doing is justifying cheating - which at its base core is unethical.

As much as I bot in many games and always have, I am not going to fool myself.

 

[drakomatic666]

I was forced to bot due to a shit game. I didnt bot in D2 or WoW, but those games didnt suck. D3 hasnt even delivered the things it said it had on the box it came in.. where's pvp? Botting was the only solution. Is it stealing? I dont think so. But i would steal from Blizzard if given the chance. If i went to the Blizzard building in Irvine, i would steal a stapler and a few rolls of toilet paper and whatever else i could get my hands on.

 

[Bulzap]

It is ethical aslong as you keep the powers (gear) it grant for yourself and don't abuse it in multiplayer. Such as if you just enjoy seing big numbers in diablo and enjoy being able to kill everything really fast I don't see the harm in doing that for yourself. Selling some items on GAH and buying some other items on GAH shouldn't influence anything.

But running multiply bots for selling the items on either GAH/RMAH and therewith devaluating the real peoples "hard word"(grinding) is a bit uneithical in my mind.

In WoW I bot aswell because I like to do arena but I hate the other part of the game today. I used to be a part of hardcore pve but it lost my interest. Due to a very limited amount of playtime available it would take me many weeks to get full honorgear and therefore being viable in arena also leveling takes ages. Basicly I am only botting to a extend in WoW as a average player would play. Basicly my bot just do what I would have done if I had 15 hours less work /week to do.

Part of the reason for developing the RMAH in Diablo was to make people who are grownup and who had a busy schedule able to get the best gear as the 12 year old who got 10 hours of freetime each day. I think the bot do the same thing for us just with lower cost.