Research Document: Server-side Bot Detection in Massive Multiplayer Online Games

I really don't remember where I saw this, as I just re-found this document on my messy-ass bookmarks list on my Firefox browser.

This may or may not help you in your RuneScape botting journey, but one thing's for sure, it sure is really an interesting read if you're into botting or software and automation in general. Trust me.

----------

​

Server-side Bot Detection in Massive Multiplayer Online Games by Stefan Mitterhofer, Christian Platzer, Christopher Kruegel, and Engin Kirda.

Abstract:

One of the greatest threats that Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) face nowadays is botting. Botting is a form of cheating where a player uses a script to automate actions in a game without actually playing herself. This has a severe adverse effect on honest players and impacts their motivation to continue the game, threatening the subscription-based business model of online game providers. However, if game companies make an effort at all to automatically detect bots, it is done through signature checking for suspicious programs on the client-side, essentially relying on information from an untrusted source outside their control. To address the botting problem, we propose an automated approach to detect bots on the server-side, solely based on the activity of a character. Our approach is completely transparent to the end-user and takes advantage of the fact that bots follow a script that guides them through the virtual world. More precisely, by analyzing the movement data of a character, we extract waypoints and detect paths that are taken repeatedly. This allows us to find movement patterns that repeat frequently, indicating that a character is controlled by a script and not a human player.

Link to the Document: http://www.eurecom.fr/en/publication/2860/download/rs-publi-2860.pdf

Alternate link: https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~chris/research/doc/spmagazine09_gamebots.pdf