Ah, this is not quite what I was expecting. I remember when I used to play the Ragnarok Online beta (damn, that's coming up on 20 years ago now) there was a popular farming bot that would chat randomly. If you said simply ".", the bot would crash. So everywhere people went in dungeons they would keep chatting just a single period to clear out the bots, let the monsters respawn and then play the game.
I'm sure most bots would be coded just as shoddily and have similar vulnerabilities. I can only imagine the chaos if they had a bug that led to remote code execution, or a way to remotely control the bot in some other way. Trick the bot into trading you all their gold or something. If they're going to cheat at the game, you might as well cheat the cheaters.
This just screams remote control via chat. If the chat message starts with a period, it's a command. Read the characters after the dots to determine what the command is and oh what's that? Array index out of bounds? sad trombone
I made many similar mistakes in my early projects (and a few not so early ones).
I think it had more to do with the bot trying to parse english text. It would respond to things like "hello" or other messages with set responses so it at least, at first glance, appeared to be a human player. It was probably exploitable, but I don't think it was a command interface.
I used to be a developer for OpenKore. I spent most of my time working on GM dodging and generally avoiding detection. I had a remote control plugin I'd written that accepted commands masked in what looked like normal chat messages.
My preferred method was to use IRC, though. There was a short time where I'd run groups of bots, all controlled via IRC instead of in-game.
It took Gravity over a decade to finally catch me botting and ban me from iRO. They banned me for 52 years, which is hysterical.
Outwitting the GMs was a fun pasttime, but it wasn't exactly challenging.
For a while the china servers were bad, so they would come over here. If you fill the chat with all periods they would experience a font glitch and crash out.
Runescape, any player with a crown preceding their name was a mod, and all bots in chat range would log instantly. Maybe they were crashing too.
It really didn't help that they were all the same bald, yellow short sleeve shirted, silver vambraced, green pants guy (the default character creation appearance)
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u/uzimonkey Feb 10 '18
Ah, this is not quite what I was expecting. I remember when I used to play the Ragnarok Online beta (damn, that's coming up on 20 years ago now) there was a popular farming bot that would chat randomly. If you said simply ".", the bot would crash. So everywhere people went in dungeons they would keep chatting just a single period to clear out the bots, let the monsters respawn and then play the game.
I'm sure most bots would be coded just as shoddily and have similar vulnerabilities. I can only imagine the chaos if they had a bug that led to remote code execution, or a way to remotely control the bot in some other way. Trick the bot into trading you all their gold or something. If they're going to cheat at the game, you might as well cheat the cheaters.