What are bots?

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SqueakyToyOfTerror wrote:

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anubite wrote:

stuff

In answer to a few parts of this response: Packets.

This, I was part of the coding team for a free D2 bot that was fairly well known (If you cant beat them, join them). Although my contribution was mostly in small script or debugging a few simple overlooked routine, I knew enough about the code to know that once you can decipher the packets, all that you mentioned is almost trivial to implement to a well versed coder.

Oh, and no, I was not botting/selling stuff on the black market.

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Blackened wrote:

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SqueakyToyOfTerror wrote:

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anubite wrote:

stuff

In answer to a few parts of this response: Packets.

This, I was part of the coding team for a free D2 bot that was fairly well known (If you cant beat them, join them). Although my contribution was mostly in small script or debugging a few simple overlooked routine, I knew enough about the code to know that once you can decipher the packets, all that you mentioned is almost trivial to implement to a well versed coder.

Oh, and no, I was not botting/selling stuff on the black market.

Mapping the function pointers are the hardest parts. Once you do that the packets kinda write themselves (literally, you just hijack the client packet writing itself)

Oh, right, packets. I forgot about those. Silly me. Yeah, that would probably be a bit easier than getting control of the server. You can make a bot by reading the packets you send/receive from the POE client, altering the data that gets sent/received by the server at the other end. Erm, well, physically editing a packet is more akin to hacking than to botting. But you can use the information stored in a packet to make botting easier.

I imagine D2 had minimal security, but POE-packets that are edited probably won't be accepted by a POE server (authentication is required). Thus, you can't ping the server for illegal requests for information, or submit altered information. Though you can also make a bot that uses information using the information stored in your computer's memory, which isn't as hard as it sounds. You can use any memory editor to watch values fluxuate and it should be trivial to locate various things stored in RAM that represent health or what not, in order to properly control a bot's behavior. You don't always need to do a pixel serach.

When I was younger, I had a lot of fun using rudimentary packet sniffing tools to try and hack many of the F2P MMOs that showed up after the WOW-craze started. It was pretty easy to identify the stuff in the packet that was responsible for health, experience, et cetera but physically hacking that information was impossible for me. I imagine for POE it will be the same way. Even if GGG are clever in how they store vital statistics in each packet (you can always store a health value as a value divisible by like 108 or some random number, to make plain searches harder), people will eventually have the tools to bot.

The question will be: will all the work be worth it. You could just play the game.