I have a feeling the same sentiment will ring true across most of the software industry in the next couple years. LLMs are cool, but they don't perform better than purpose built solutions at scale.
I disagree. It works with the wow gold farmers because there is a finite set of known states in a videogame. In real life I don't think that's the case.
You can automate the first 3 or 4 nines the old-fashioned way. I guess you can escalate up to an LLM instead of directly to a human in the remainder of cases.
Don't worry: the natural predator of AI botting, Kernel-Level Anti-Cheat Rootkit, has your back. You may not like its methods, but it's fighting alongside you today, and you're going to learn to love it.
that can be trivially defeated by a second machine that analyzes the captured video feed and sends hardware keyboard+mouse inputs in response. won't be as capable as a bot that can read/write process memory, but will be undetectable client-side.
"Trivially" is relative. In the case of wow the standard way to do botting is to use the in-game lua scripting (normally used for UI addons) with more functionality unlocked. The difference between introspecting the whole game state and controlling the game in-process with good api vs running realtime visual model on the captured visual feed and using fake keyboard inputs is pretty large.
The worst way to do it would be to have people randomly having their characters farming stuff automatically with AI, and users have no way of telling who is AI and who isnt.
But there are plenty of times where a player would love something in the game that was smarter than an NPC, but less important than another user. It would be fun to fill out your raid group or party with a few automated players when you can't fill it for real. Or be able to summon an AI controlled character to duel any time you wanted to practice. It would have to be managed by blizzard and the AI characters would need to be visually distinguished in game, of course.
I've always thought playing ANY game would be a lot more fun with AI npcs. Ever since Todd Howard promised we could affect Skyrim's economy (which was a lie) I've always been hoping for dynamic systems in games for npc behaviour.
Like so many games when npcs have one canned voice line, or the level is lined with doors that won't open because it's not the way you're meant to go.
Right? I love playing games with more computer players and less real people. Really makes games more fun! In fact it saves the need to have an internet connection you can just spawn up a million bots and play on your own. Maybe its full circle just going back to C&C vs many computers.
that was the case at some point. Blizzard didn't give a flying fuck about bots for a very long time, at least through Cata-MoP-WoD. Honorbuddy, the most advanced one, could level from 1 to max by questing and appear human to an untrained eye. much less human in random battlefields, where they moved in sync -- I'd once witnessed my whole team except a few strays do that (out of 20 I think).
it costed, IIRC, 30 bucks per 1 instance for lifetime access. the people behind were a legit company, for some incomprehensible reason -- a fucking GmbH. so they eventually got sued and lost and that was an end of a very long era. I always wondered if anyone had managed to pick up the mantle. maybe that's impossible now that Blizzard doesn't want goldsellers to compete with WoW tokens and started to take bots seriously (or so it seemed during my last relapse a decade ago).
Yup! As mentioned by thevinter it was able to easily complete it in 40 minutes. It also did stop after the quest chain was completed and logged out in sen'jin village (the next stop after the starting zone).
Nah, there are plenty of chores for humans to do. While the AIs are composing music and writing code and proving theorems, we still have to do laundry and the dishes.
Vibe Gaming: Unlocking new gaming experience with agentic AI
Microsoft VEGA Team
Microsoft Research & XBOX
What if, instead of controlling every move your game character made, you could tell them what you wanted and watch them live, act, and connect with others on their own in the changing game world?
Crazy! I can't imagine what WoW would be like with bots! Another new frontier broken open for AI lol.
Joking aside it is interesting to see that a general model can adapt to a world like this, but I think the contrast between the model being "naive" and then needing to build special-purpose code to allow it to interact somewhat begs the question of the experiment. Customization will always be needed so how interesting is it that an un-customized model can play with a highly customized harness?
Last weekend, I made Claude play Panzer General II. I am pretty sure it will be in the weights soon, so it was valuable as an environment the LLM is not trained for. It accumulated experience in Markdown, made some tools to parse the game data and it got to a decent level of skill. It reached the last battle.
I tried to make it win the last battle, but that was beyond its ability. Further accumulation of "hard earned lessons" in Markdown only made its behavior more chaotic.
Still, a very decent result, comparable to what I achieved back in the day (late 90s).
like how cool would it be to be roaming around and there’s a group of 3 or 4 horde or alliance bots wandering around as a war band or maybe they’re doing a special mission.
or a world boss who could engage in more interesting ways than just a fight.
a richer world would be cool in a game where it’s so casual and optimized there’s almost zero social interactions anymore and the world is barren.
i haven’t played wow since cata but that’s what my friends say about it to me. even in cata the world would feel dead.
Years ago, I loved playing Puzzle Pirates. There were hundreds or thousands of people active at any given time, the puzzle games were fun, I loved the in-game economy. The game is pretty dead now, but I miss it all the time. I finally have time to play it again, but it's just not active enough to do all the stuff I used to like doing.
I wonder if people would be receptive to bringing games like that back to life with full-fledged AI players - not NPCs, but player-characters controlled by AI. It wouldn't be exactly the same - there was something charming about knowing that the guy you were swordfighting could be anyone from anywhere, talking to people about their IRL world, etc. But as others have pointed out, modern MMOs are flooded with bots that make the games actively worse and have been since well before LLMs became popular.
Plus, games might be a helpful means for folks to get used to the idea that, at this point, you have no idea whether the person you're interacting with is a human being until you meet in person.
1) There is a burgeoning genre of game - that is, I know of one, called Erenshor - that simulates the experience of playing an MMORPG, but entirely offline, on purpose. I found it to be a very clever idea, likely made in reaction to many Runescape players who essentially treat OSRS as a single-player challenge with a live element.
2) I'm very glad to see some Puzzle Pirates love. I was and still am enthralled by the idea of in-game economies, loosely-narrative-driven cooperative play driven by simple independent tasks; it was such a neat idea in such a simple package, I'm surprised it hasn't really been copied with much success, the casual/puzzle games boom notwithstanding. I've been daydreaming of mixing Puzzle Pirates with FTL as a spiritual successor, but it's a game design exercise beyond my ken.
id say the best part of puzzle pirates was how the whole economy was based on player agency. the only reason they added bot players was because of dwindling playerbase. ive long dreamt of making a game inspired by it with some of my ideas sprinkled in. i got some experimental version running on pharia.gitaki.com
> This is not surprising in hindsight and is probably the optimal strategy. The agent extracted quest requirements, quest givers, turn-in NPCs, and spawn coordinates from AzerothCore SQL files to provide the concrete checklist and locations for planning.
> Using this data, it's also able to create an optimal strategy for quest order and preparation.
Shout out to AzerothCore. With the Forever hype I needed som WoW fix so I set up AzerothCore, it went smoothly and I have everything running locally. And since it runs locally I can have custom stuff like the ability to learn all professions, increasing movement speed, teleport command, 32 slot bags. It's a lot of fun!
100% grateful for the community and team behind AzerothCore. WotLK was probably peak WoW for me and with an open source implementation it feels like I can bring back that experience and add my own twists.
w4yai | 13 days ago
There have been bots playing WoW for more than 20 years though.
The protocol has been figured out long time ago and well documented.
hn-acct | 13 days ago
aprct | 13 days ago
yourself92 | 13 days ago
tripleee | 13 days ago
blindhippo | 13 days ago
StrauXX | 13 days ago
sergiotapia | 13 days ago
fwip | 13 days ago
xdavidliu | 13 days ago
JSR_FDED | 13 days ago
niceguy1827 | 13 days ago
Insanity | 13 days ago
eatsyourtacos | 13 days ago
cbg0 | 13 days ago
btown | 13 days ago
jzemeocala | 13 days ago
vlyan | 13 days ago
fireant | 13 days ago
mentos | 13 days ago
demaga | 13 days ago
andrewmutz | 13 days ago
The worst way to do it would be to have people randomly having their characters farming stuff automatically with AI, and users have no way of telling who is AI and who isnt.
But there are plenty of times where a player would love something in the game that was smarter than an NPC, but less important than another user. It would be fun to fill out your raid group or party with a few automated players when you can't fill it for real. Or be able to summon an AI controlled character to duel any time you wanted to practice. It would have to be managed by blizzard and the AI characters would need to be visually distinguished in game, of course.
tomaskafka | 13 days ago
ajmurmann | 13 days ago
fennecbutt | 13 days ago
Like so many games when npcs have one canned voice line, or the level is lined with doors that won't open because it's not the way you're meant to go.
boringg | 13 days ago
vlyan | 13 days ago
it costed, IIRC, 30 bucks per 1 instance for lifetime access. the people behind were a legit company, for some incomprehensible reason -- a fucking GmbH. so they eventually got sued and lost and that was an end of a very long era. I always wondered if anyone had managed to pick up the mantle. maybe that's impossible now that Blizzard doesn't want goldsellers to compete with WoW tokens and started to take bots seriously (or so it seemed during my last relapse a decade ago).
jasonlotito | 13 days ago
Here you go.
Chiron1991 | 13 days ago
singron | 13 days ago
I'm also curious if it stopped after that goal or if it kept playing.
thevinter | 13 days ago
> But it turns out it completed the task easily in 40 minutes with 0 deaths and minimal complications.
singron | 13 days ago
[OP] almostlit | 13 days ago
I uploaded the full gameplay session here: https://youtu.be/8NmmFdREk5s?si=2YSXLwoYFR6eonBa&t=2340
If you skip to the end at 39 minutes you can see it finishing its run and logging out.
ActionHank | 13 days ago
ch4s3 | 13 days ago
jrockway | 13 days ago
esaym | 13 days ago
copperx | 13 days ago
qlte | 13 days ago
aeturnum | 13 days ago
Joking aside it is interesting to see that a general model can adapt to a world like this, but I think the contrast between the model being "naive" and then needing to build special-purpose code to allow it to interact somewhat begs the question of the experiment. Customization will always be needed so how interesting is it that an un-customized model can play with a highly customized harness?
gritzko | 13 days ago
I tried to make it win the last battle, but that was beyond its ability. Further accumulation of "hard earned lessons" in Markdown only made its behavior more chaotic.
Still, a very decent result, comparable to what I achieved back in the day (late 90s).
DeepYogurt | 13 days ago
moomoo11 | 13 days ago
what about world mobs and ai pvp players?
like how cool would it be to be roaming around and there’s a group of 3 or 4 horde or alliance bots wandering around as a war band or maybe they’re doing a special mission.
or a world boss who could engage in more interesting ways than just a fight.
a richer world would be cool in a game where it’s so casual and optimized there’s almost zero social interactions anymore and the world is barren.
i haven’t played wow since cata but that’s what my friends say about it to me. even in cata the world would feel dead.
charcircuit | 13 days ago
bigyabai | 13 days ago
Mistletoe | 13 days ago
deepwoods | 13 days ago
I wonder if people would be receptive to bringing games like that back to life with full-fledged AI players - not NPCs, but player-characters controlled by AI. It wouldn't be exactly the same - there was something charming about knowing that the guy you were swordfighting could be anyone from anywhere, talking to people about their IRL world, etc. But as others have pointed out, modern MMOs are flooded with bots that make the games actively worse and have been since well before LLMs became popular.
Plus, games might be a helpful means for folks to get used to the idea that, at this point, you have no idea whether the person you're interacting with is a human being until you meet in person.
sabas123 | 13 days ago
ljp_206 | 13 days ago
2) I'm very glad to see some Puzzle Pirates love. I was and still am enthralled by the idea of in-game economies, loosely-narrative-driven cooperative play driven by simple independent tasks; it was such a neat idea in such a simple package, I'm surprised it hasn't really been copied with much success, the casual/puzzle games boom notwithstanding. I've been daydreaming of mixing Puzzle Pirates with FTL as a spiritual successor, but it's a game design exercise beyond my ken.
kungito | 12 days ago
JohnMakin | 13 days ago
Without the /s, WoW has been successfully automated without AI as a completely solved problem for like, 20 years.
gritzko | 13 days ago
> Using this data, it's also able to create an optimal strategy for quest order and preparation.
Bwahaha
DropDead | 13 days ago
gdotdesign | 13 days ago
[OP] almostlit | 13 days ago