> As for why, I'd say that automating a game is a game in and of itself, and depending on the particulars it can be both challenging and rewarding.

speaking from experience, yes, it is much more enjoyable playing the meta-botting game than the actual game!

I used to play Ragnarok Online circa 2000 (on a private server - not the official one). This particular private server is a donation server, meaning if you paid real money, you can buy items from the admins/owners which is impossible to get otherwise. Think pay-to-win style items.

i was in high school at the time, and didn't have money to pay a "donation" to get these powerful items. Now, it's possible to buy these donation only items from player auctions in the game, but i didn't have enough gold to do so. But i did have some programming experience, and found an opensource bot (http://www.openkore.com/index.php/Main_Page) to use. Being a private server meant you can create unlimited free accounts, and so i decided to start a bot army, where banning a character don't mean anything, as the work to create the character is also automated.

Botting in Rag required your character to have a certain level, otherwise, it's not efficient, so the first task is to write a script to automatically level up your botting character, with the right skills and automatically collect the required armour, spells etc. This was the hardest part - full custom scripts needed to be written for each separate requirement. once a large number of bots are created, they are then spread out evenly across profitable maps to farm items to sell to NPCs. Some tricks include auto-teleporting when another player comes into view, which makes it difficult for anyone to spot you (as max view distance is lower than the distance at which your bot receives notice from the server of player entities coming into view).

The second part of botting involve item laundering, which involve rapidly dropping and picking up items from the floor, instead of making a normal player-to-player trade (or bot-to-bot trade in this case). Because this is suppose to be agnostic to bans, i cannot afford to keep any large amount of items/gold on any account being botted. I also cannot afford to have a transaction history linking my main playing account (which i don't bot, but play for real with). So i had to create automated money laundering scripts.

But after having botted for approx 3-4 months, after which i had enough money to buy one of the donation items (which is approx $40 in donation), and it made me one of the most powerful characters that didn't actually pay for donation items in the server, i no longer had interest in playing the game, but the botting kept being really interesting. The the code for the bot was a bit buggy, so sometimes bots would stop responding. But there is a way to reset it from another bot. So i devised a heart-beat into each bot, so that every bot monitors several other bots with redunancy, and restarted each other when failure is detected - this failure is done by sending in game private messages. Eventually, this became an army of 50-80 bots, all running together, cooperating to farm the map the most efficient manner, and heart-beat check each other so that there's very little down time. Ahh, those were the days.