MMORPG Bot part 2 - Some thoughts on the data 

The huge drops that you see are account cash-outs. They're transferring funds to a safer/legit account that's not used for botting.

Using games and software we interact with every day makes topics so much more approachable

Someone posted your last video on Reddit and then I stayed up until 4AM watching your stuff. Good shit.

Those graphs tell a better love story than twilight

This is the best channel I ever viewed in reversing subject, really. You are doing so many different things, open our eyes and teach us to think in a different ways on reversing because you come up with a challenges and other stuff like MMO Game which when I been 16 ~ 17 yrs old I done some stuff for Silkroad which was fun :) That's not all, you are editing those videos so professional, you like just drew a players and a map lol ;D Thanks for that, you are doing a FUCKING great job with this channel. I get excited each time you release new video :)

OMG, so much good info dude, nice work showing this, people like you motivate me, thanks!

your channel is awesome man, thanks for the video. Even though i don't play GW2 anymore, it is one of my all time favourites.

This is really unique series on youtube. Please continue. I would love to see move tytorials about bots re.

Love the storytelling and illustrations.

I've always appreciated trading bots in MMOs - it drives prices lower such that the market is positive for consumers.

This video definitely earned my sub. Great video, great information! Keep it up!

wow you are good, the most resourcefully person i see on youtube. i have experience working with some game developer. and most of them implement antibot after the game final version, so they are screw after game release.

Wow, I feel like I can learn a lot from you! All that data analysis is very usefull for me

This was unexpectedly a brilliant video. *thumbs up*

Drops in graphs - items transfer between bot and player account

great channel and content man, keep it up!

These videos are brilliant.

You absolute have to do a series on where you dismantle MMORPG bots like this. I would subscribe right away if you did this.

You have my sub. You are a genius - looking forward to see more videos

This an the last video are great! Thanks for uploading.

WOAH! That Christmas break thing is really cool! :D It is funny to see into human actions like that... :)

About the jumps in the graph, if you look at the gold, it goes down significantly at those steep drops, but the buy orders and the sell listings are basically unchanged. I think those dives are due to this account being a "mule" and the owner sends the gold from the trader to their main account at regular intervals. That's why the drops are so evenly spread as well. If you were to make a separate graph checking only the blues and reds, you'll see a much steadier curve and if you lined the gold, instead of just plotting it, you'd see the variations a lot clearer.

Eve is a good example of where trading bots have been somewhat allowed while other bots are often banned. Without the trade bots half the of the economy and items available on demand would be gone and the ecnomy would be less stable on things like basic minerals would be able to be controlled more by a few players if they did not have 40-50 bot traders to compete with.

Such an interesting and fun video to watch ; )

I love the ending :P

Super interesting, while a little bit controversial given how you got the API keys, still extremely neat to be able to look over.

I don't play GW2, nor do I play any video games actively. However, I watched part 1 and part 2 in one go. Thanks for making great content, you attracted random people who has no knowledge about coding or whatever this "grass" is. +1

Ich finde es erstaunlich. Und ich beneide dich um deine Fähigkeit. Mich interessieren Zahlen (Tabellen) und Statistiken (Graphen). Jedoch habe ich kein Ziel und auch keinen Anstoß welche Daten ich sammeln könnte. Auf jeden Fall zwei schöne Videos. Sie werden mir in der Zukunft vielleicht helfen können.

Beautiful video!

If someone is running 24/7, they probably have several accounts. I've been in the botting scene of WoW and it's extremely common to have "botting account" and "legit account". I would never ever bot on my original account since I wouldn't want to get banned, but I had up to 4 bots running 24/7 doing whatever I wanted. They all work in conjunction and can semi-interact with each other. This bot was cancelled and now there are extremely few or maybe even no working bot in WoW. Found your channel today and it's amazing, I'm amazed with how far you go and it makes me *very* motivated to do something similar. Or at least, I would *want* to haha

Haha now I want to decompile and hack around every bot softwares on the internet, this is so cool ! Your channel is awesome man, I've always wanted to get into decompiling stuff and reverse engineering but never knew where to start, now I know :)

Detailed info... Very cool..

Really interesting video! :)

Wow! I learned so much, in so little time! You need more subscribers :O

GUILD WARS 1 >*1000 GUILD WARS 2!!111!!1! 🙌🏼🌝 Sau geiler Kanal 😅❤️ Hätte nicht gedacht, dass soviele Leute die Themen überhaupt jucken.

really good video, thanks for that

Gotta love the leet damage in the beginning!

Love your German accent, as soon as I heard your accent, I was like " this video should be good".. haha

this is pure statistics porn, ty for video. as a hobby programmer, maths lover and gw2 player this feels good on so many levels!

Super interessanter "Bericht". Wirklich sehr gut geworden. Erinnert mich stark an das SpiegelMining von David beim 33c3 ;)

I guess you could say you are the David Kriesel of youtube lol nice work

i would assume that the hard drops in "Networth" come from either the bot or the player stuffing their gold into their guild bank.

user #38, he is a man of focus commitment and sheer will

Unless I set my bot to buy all stacks of cloth from the trading house if it's less than 50 gold, and then list stacks of cloth at 50 gold. Thus, if anyone wants to sell cloth, it either has to be 50g or more, or I will immediately buy it, and anyone who wants to buy cloth, has to either buy it from me, or pay more (by buying it from someone else). This is only a big problem if before I came along the stacks were selling for 5 or 10G - thus, casual players are not getting a lower price before of me (my bot) existing.

The large jumps in the player's net worth can be explained by them buying large items. This is a sum of their gold in their inventory (but not the items in their inventory) and the items listed for sale/purchase on the exchange. But it does not include items held by the player or in the player's bank. So if they bought an expensive item, or exchanged it for gems (and then bought something on the gem store) you would see a huge drop in your net worth metric because it doesn't continue to include the value of purchased and held items. And you probably see it every weekend because that's when that player signs on and spends their earnings on luxury items or equipment.

You are soo awesome, I got an idea to make an anticheat for my game based on your videos, like finding patterns

So, did ArenaNet ask for the keys? :)

is it possible that the drops in net worth are from placing the gold on another account?/selling the gold?

Good stuff

interesting video, ty :)

11:00 dont you think the drops are when the player sold some of his wealth? or moved it

Hi sir i have a question? like if i am playing a game and i am using my scroll wheel to do something in game. So can i inject some code or something in game so that if i scroll down 5 times the code convert that 5 time to 2 time at run time. Sorry for rip english. Thanks

Wow super interesting, i mainly do we develop work and find this so much more interesting :), subscribed to you sir I have a newbie question have an recommendation for good python tutorials? :)

@LiveOverflow So did arenanet ever ask you for the apis?

thx for the video was interesting

The jumps down might be when the player went on a spending spree, like visual items with low re-sale value and such.

Just a question why did he get no response when he put the get users url in the browser but he did in the packet capture software ?

Gutes Video weiter so

I think the best in game economy I've seen is from "realm of the mad god", where people just yelled in the chat what they were buying and selling. There were bots there, yes, but nobody would ever go to them because they were always buying too low and selling too high. only if people needed something at that moment would they usually go to the bots.

True engineer

that was awwwwsommme

"the code is terrible, please ignore it" sounds like my usual jupyter notebook.

Hi LiveOverflow, do you know if GW2 keep track of players who illegally bought gold from third party websites? I spent about $500 buying illegal gold, but also about $500 buying legal gold (through in game cash shop), but I never got banned. My guess is that ArenaNet knows that I'm a bad player, but because I've bought from cash shop, they don't want to ban me as I may buy something again in the future

I would love to see the reaction of User 25 if he ever sees this video lmao.

Isn't it possible that those slopes down, represent when player withdraws gold from the bot and transfer it to his main account ? (seriously who would have run bot on his main account and risk being banned?)

Awesome

Could the account be selling their gold every weekend hence the weekly drop in net worth?

The jumps down on the weekend is most likely him dumping his gold/assets on his personal guildbank, you can have multiple guilds so most people have a personal guild for extra storage, the API just sees it's no longer in your personal wallet or bank so it thinks it's gone from your account.

The net worth graph showed the max potential value which to me seemed to drop over time. With every reset, the slope up never getting higher than the previous one

Awesome video. I have some thoughts about that weird buy order pattern, like you say you'd expect it to be constant for an optimised bot right? And what about those big spikes down in net worth? Well, my guess is that the bot is designed to run 24/7 and doesn't really work if it doesn't, number 25 must be aware of that - perhaps they're the person behind the bot? Anyway, I wonder if ArenaNet are watching for bots with some simple algorithms. Amount of gold in account? I bet it's a well studied area where they could borrow tips and tricks from other MMO developers, I'll even bet that they have developers who have worked on the same problem on other MMOs - "amount of gold in account" is an easily transferable metric. I bet if it rises steadily or stays high too consistently you'd be able to pick the bot operators out of a list of normal accounts a mile off. Also it makes me think that the bot programmer might have built a bot before. Those huge downward spikes in net worth? Well, is this account an account that someone plays or just an alt account? They could be making big purchases of soul/account bound items, or guild items in the former case, and in the latter case they could just be transferring the money out to launder it for another account or even exchange it for real world money. In any case it makes sense to me - no point earning all that money just to have it sit there right? Also, notice how the total value of listed items becomes huge before a downward spike but then it somehow all goes away again really fast? Any way if you can tell what items were listed? I'm guessing a small number of high value items being used to pump up the amount of gold really fast - sort of a short sharp spike in gold to move very very quickly rather than having it slowly ramp up over time.

I am playing GuildWars2 myself from time to time and I am very curious to see that the Items you mentioned are supposedly bringing the most profit. Would be interesting to know if the bot really has a strategy there or if its just randomly buying items that look "good" in his eyes. Also: Did ArenaNet contact you about the API Keys? :P

Those big drops in net worth are probably gold transfers to their main account. It would be interesting to see a cumulative graph of gold generation, and whether or not your opinion changes at all.

10:34 - i would guess those jumps are somewhere between 1000 and 1200 gold, which would be the price of legendary crafting / buying legendaries from the AH. Legendaries are the most prestigious items in the game and have to be soulbound before use.

Pretty sure the black drops are when the player sends the gold from the bot to his main account.

I wish you would look into OldSchool RuneScape botting Clients.

Wow. Subbed.

Did someone come up with solution about net worth's trend? I haven't played the game, but if I understood the listed graph correctly, nowhere in the graph is presented value of items players have bought and want to keep. Primary gear that is. High spikes during weekends and massive crash to next week sounds like raid to me, don't you think? Active raiding through weekend and then making huge investments in gear, player isn't listing anytime soon and therefore isn't visible in tracked graphs. Please, inform and correct my assumptions! I'm very eager to know, what causes this. By the way, fantastic work with video! Easy to watch and follow and very well explained. A++ material!

These jumps are when the player used the gold for something.

Will you make a video Q&A ? Will you make an programing tutoria for beginers ?

I think the big drops in net worth could be related to items owned, but not listed for sale. Your "net worth" line takes into account gold, listed items, and buy order gold, but not value of unlisted items owned by the player. Also, you see a large spike in the red dots right before these anomalies, which means he put a money in buy orders up, then those orders are filled, resulting in valuable items being held, yet not listed. The thing I can't really explain, is that you don't quite see a commensurate drop in gold to allow for the large buy orders being placed. The only thing I can think of is some shenanigans related to premium (real money) currency. For instance, maybe the player buys Gems, converts it to gold, and immediately puts that gold into buy orders for something like a monthly time credit or rare mount or something.

THIS is what a data science degree would be useful for.

large jumps seem obviously from putting up expensive offers, you can see the black jumps heavily correlate to the red jumps.

As Somebody who has played Guild Wars 2 since day 1 and has also played a ton of other MMO's. I have played other free MMO's witch are taken over by bots and yea you could not buy anything and i just stopped playing them. I am happy to know that the trading bot you talked about was not that effective. If you just played the game instead of botting i know you would make more money.

Cooles video

Hey LiveOverflow! Ich habe gerade dein Intro-Video gesehen und ich bin der Meinung du hast/studierst noch in Berlin bzw. lebst in Berlin. Weil es einen Abschnitt gab, den ich mal schätz vom CCC ist. Falls ja, ich studiere auch Informatik in Berlin. An der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (bin im 5. Semester), falls du Lust hast kannst du dich ja mal melden und wir können bisschen über Informatik und so schnacken! :D

I did botted A LOT many years ago on a private server of Ragnarok Online were botting was allowed (auto kill mobs and other stuff). Compared to the official game economy, our server showed that all bot-farmed items (lets call them commodities) dropped A LOT their prices, but impossible to bot-farm items (lets call them rarities) became extremely expensive (in terms of gold/zeny). What is not fair is that those players who didnt botted would never be able to buy rarities with the gold/zeny they got from commodities. But this encouraged them to go to dangerous places were bots couldnt go in order to farm rarities. IMO from my experience in that game, botting removed a lot of boring content of the game (grinding in 0 difficulty levels during hours) and also those commodities allowed players to enjoy the parts of the game that presented real challenges.

well done sherlock

Those spikes at week ends I think are from dumping any remaining items that have not yet sold & then immediately real world trading the gold causing the dips in net worth. I don't play GW2 but I did run a gold farm in Runescape for a number of years and part of the gold farming consisted of interchanging items using a GE bot and I used the same strategy. Dumb items on Sunday & sell the gold to minimize losses in case the bot gets banned. Those GE bots didn't make a lot of money relative to say dragon bones bots but they required no skills so if a bot got banned you just simply made a new account (which I used a bot for as well).

My guess would be that the 3 large jumps before the dips are due to people being on holiday. Thanksgiving, Christmas, new years.

I am trying to automate HTTP API calls for a game that I play. The only problem I have is that each request requires a signature header (which I can only imagine is a checksum of the request body). However, I can't work out how to generate it and the game is packed with a bunch of anti-debugging protections. Additionally, due to Windows, I can't read the parts of memory where I assume the unpacked code is. I just got a Linux install on my laptop, is it better to try memory related hacking on that instead of Windows 10?

These results are pretty surprising to me. I mean when I'm actively flipping stuff manually, I make about the same amount of gold as the most successful/active bot #25. And even then I usually have peak times where I make almost the entire gold within like 3 hours so it's not like I'd sit there the entire day clicking. On the other hand a bot obviously has the advantage of being fully automatic so if you can run several bots 24/7 your profit will be much larger of course.

Could you analyze more malicious bots? Maybe for other games

The drops are gold being removed from the bots inventory you can confirm this by looking at the yellow dots dropping from 1000+ gold to the next day where the gold drops to 400 again without having a increase in items being purchased meaning that the wealth is being removed from circulation of the bots inventory a second idea could be that the bot is failing to properly identify the value of an item purchasing it thinking that it is a profitable flip and being stuck with that item after over paying for it.

2:05 this was what happened to Ragnarok Online GGH on their fresh official launch, within just a month, the server already filled with bots. the inflation rate was so high that when you do buy and sell, the item you sold today will be 3x higher price tomorrow and you wouldn't be able to buy it back, because of bots were flooding the server with zeny(currency)

Are you going to be at the 35C3? :D

Did they actually send you an e-mail for those API keys back then? I'm dying to know.

Big drops in wealth may be due to moving funds to another account, but it could also be buying luxury items, like precursors, for personal use.

This guy is overpoweringly smart

You forget gems and account upgrades (that are bought with gems) are included into "net worth". Gem price fluctuates heavily with new shiny stuff dropping into gemstore thus jumps in networth.

will you be continuing binary hacking series using fusion from exploit exercises?