The Botters of Diablo 3 – An Interview
Posted 20 July 2012 by RushsterAn interview has been posted on AtomicPC with a player who is very open about his botting operation. In the interview he discusses his methods, how he sells his gold and the amount of real money he can turn over by simply running bots in the game. If anything the interview highlights the problems Blizzard face with botters and the way it affects the Diablo 3 economy.
Do you think Diablo 3 will remain a profitable game to bot?
Absolutely. Diablo 2 was the most botted game ever made. The primary reason for this is that unlike MMORPGs there is no subscription model. Once you’ve paid for your account there are no ongoing costs provided you don’t get banned.The way I’ve calculated it is like this. My botting rig uses around 400w of power constantly. This equates to roughly 10c per hour in electricity. My yield per account is between 300-400k per hour. This equates to 80c per bot, per hour. When I’m running 8 bots I’m making roughly $6.40 per hour. Even if the value of gold was to drop down to below $0.50 per million I’d simply switch over to farming items rather than gold and turn a nice profit.
We obviously don’t condone the use of bots, but when you read interviews like this, you can’t help but be concerned about how players like this impact the game and how Blizzard can combat the botters.
They must be pretty confident that Warden doesn’t present a big enough hindrance. I had no idea they can fake responses or that they keep a global record of the queries warden is transmitting.
Gold botting is rampant. Third party sites can sell you 100 mil gold for $200 without blinking an eye. Imagine the vast amounts of gold reserves they are sitting on.
Sometimes I just get fed up with these freaking botters that I just want to turn to botting myself.
I hope all botters die slow and painfully, or at least that all their bots do.
If you buy items or gold, you’re supporting these botters. Just keep that in mind.
Yea, next time you’re using the AH, make sure you know who you’re buying fr….oh wait.
…exactly my point.
Why would blizzard want to stop botting when they can just spam banwaves thereby forcing the botters to purchase new copies of the game using their botting profits. Circle-jerk-o-rama.
Blizzard won’t stop the botters because it’s their main source of income after the release. They already exploited the mass banwave cycles in D2 because all the botters simply buy new accounts when they are banned and proceed to cheat because they make more money selling items than they lose when they have to buy a new game.
Blizzard could easily solve this issue, but they won’t, because they profit from it.
Anyone that thinks that profiting from box sales due to banned accounts is a simple minded average tard. First of all, botters buys cdkeys from third party websites that get their keys from stolen credit cards.
Secondly, botters ruining the economy and thus creating a turn off for the real players is far, far more detrimental than whatever “box sales” they can get.
Detrimental to pandaland?
I guess we’ll see soon enough.
Oh really? Care to explain this?
http://i.imgur.com/vbpvH.jpg
There aren’t that many people having their credit card scammed to justify so many botters. They do it because they can easily make more than 60 dollars before they get banned. If you read any D3 cheating website you will see that cheaters are making 20+ dollars a day per account, so there’s absolutely no reason for then to waste their time stealing credit card numbers.
But well, if you really want to believe Blizzard is not anti ethical good for you bro, keep playing this game… I’m just here eating my popcorn and laughing about every failed aspect of this game.
Blizzard won’t stop the botters because it’s their main source of income after the release. They already exploited the mass banwave cycles in D2 because all the botters simply buy new accounts when they are banned and proceed to cheat because they make more money selling items than they lose when they have to buy a new game.
Blizzard could easily solve this issue, but they won’t, because they profit from it and the average legit player is to stupid/stuborn to stop playing a game infected with so many cheaters, so the hacking is not a detriment to them and Blizzard can just continue to let cheaters use their bots like that.
“When I’m running 8 bots I’m making roughly $6.40 per hour.”
Seems decent, then you realize if you are working anything more than a minimum wage / throw away job, it’s not entirely a good “career” move. All the while, risking getting banned by blizzard, and being forced to drop extra cash on new licenses. Still, sounds nice to make a couple of bucks on the side… although I get the vibe from this article, running that many bots is a full time job.
That’s only 8 bots. He can run many more. Imagine running 80 bots and now you are talking about $64 an hour. I would say it’s definitely profitable if done in a large enough scale.
Uhh.. except you can run those bots while working full time? Grow a brain?
lol, to be fair, I think running hundreds of bots is a full-time job. Put it this way, I don’t think these bot-operators are the kind of folks who will put on a tie and take the subway to work
You can’t grow brains, brains aren’t apples or oranges
This is fine if the bot software cost you $0 to acquire and $0 to maintain.
If these people wrote it themselves, then they should include the time it took them to write the code. Or, if they bought the bot scripts from someone else, then they need to include that into their profit/loss calculation. Also updates may need to be made to the bots, to cope with patch changes from Blizzard and/or improved warden detection mechanisms etc.
By saying how much money he has actually made so far, he has included all such costs.
The question is how much time it takes him to manage all the stuff per day. If it is 2 hours, he makes 12 * 6.4 = 76$ / hour! The other 22 hours he can drink beer and watch TV. Annually (365 * 150$/day), he makes 56k additional income in addition to his normal job. With 100 bots instead of 8 and assuming linear scaling the revenues are 700k, you can have two employees and still have a very decent profit yourself.
It sounds almost too good to be true tbh
I’d say it is indeed too good to be true. He has said that for all that work he has only actually made $3K so far. If he has been running 8 bots and making $6.40 in gold per hour, less than 60 hours of time his computers were botting has actually been profitable. Then he describes all the extra work required to maintain good contacts and do bids, having to deal with potentially frozen Paypal accounts if he gets screwed, etc. With his description you probably could run more than 8 bots if you go full time but nowhere near 100. Then you would get no benefits without a normal job and you’re starting to get into questionable moral and legal territory to boot–imagine trying to explain that income to your tax authority. Would you make enough for a decent living full-time at the rates he described, sure…but for how long and is it ultimately worth it?
An internet beheading by the Taliban wouldn’t be justice enough for this —-. Sorry, did I break forum rules?