To protect a revived or existing Trickster server from botting:
Trickster Online provides a case study in bot-induced mortality:
SG Interactive and later Valofe (who took over the game) implemented several anti-bot measures, most of which failed spectacularly. Trickster Online Bot
To understand the botting epidemic, one must understand the core loop of Trickster Online. The game was notoriously grindy, even by Korean MMORPG standards.
Players rationalized botting as a necessity. The mantra was simple: "I’d love to play the game, but I also need sleep. I’ll let the bot do the boring part so I can enjoy the PvP (Player vs. Player) and compound events." To protect a revived or existing Trickster server
To understand the bot, one must first understand the core loop of Trickster Online. Unlike quest-driven MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, Trickster relied on a near-infinite treadmill of repetitive actions. Players spent thousands of hours in the same few maps, using digging tools to unearth “Driller” items, defeating the same monster families for “Star Candy” (the game’s currency), and collecting “Card Combo” pieces to summon boss creatures. Each action was a discrete, predictable, low-stakes event. This mechanical predictability is the ideal environment for a bot. A human player would experience tedium; a script would experience efficiency.
The Trickster Online Bot was typically a third-party macro program (such as AutoHotkey or a more sophisticated memory-reader) designed to mimic mouse clicks and keyboard inputs. The basic bot could perform four tasks: move to a designated tile, swing a drill to dig for items, use a skill to defeat respawning enemies, and pick up loot. More advanced versions incorporated pixel detection to identify rare drops or health bars. In essence, the bot did not “play” the game in any meaningful sense; it executed a labor function. The game had inadvertently been reduced to a set of industrial processes, and the bot was its assembly line robot. Players rationalized botting as a necessity
The widespread adoption of bots in Trickster Online was not driven solely by laziness; it was driven by the game’s internal economy. Rare items, such as the mythical “Mermaid’s Tear” or high-level “Card Combos,” had drop rates often cited as fractions of a percent (e.g., 0.01%). For a human player, farming such an item could represent hundreds of hours of monotony. However, a player running a bot on a secondary computer—or even a virtual machine—could farm 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
This introduced a market logic. Players who used bots could amass enormous quantities of currency and rare items, which they then sold to “legit” players for in-game currency or, on third-party sites, for real money. Consequently, the in-game economy hyperinflated. An item that cost 1 million Penya (the game’s currency) in 2006 might cost 500 million Penya by 2008. Legitimate players who refused to bot found themselves priced out of the player-driven market. The bot thus became a prisoner’s dilemma: if you did not bot, you fell behind; if everyone botted, the game’s sense of achievement evaporated.
The Problem: In Trickster Online, drilling is essential for quests and money, but it is physically painful. Players have to click a spot, wait for the drilling animation, check if an item is found, and repeat across a huge map. It burns through drill life and consumes hours.
The Solution: A computer vision and logic-based module that automates the drilling process while simulating human behavior to avoid detection.