New World’s Botting Problem
New World, Amazon’s latest entry into the gaming world, is a massive multiplayer online game with a sizable player base. For those unfamiliar, think something in the vein of World of Warcraft or Runescape. After many delays and an arguably bumpy launch… well, we’ve got a nice glimpse at some surprising (and other not-so-surprising) bugs in recent weeks. These bugs include HTML injection in chat messages, gold dupes, invincible players, overpowered weapon glitches, etc. That said, this isn’t anything new for MMOs and is almost expected to occur to some extent. I don’t really care to talk much about any of those bugs, though, and would instead prefer to talk about something far more common to the MMO scene and something very unlikely to be resolved by patches or policies anytime soon (if ever): bots.
Since launch, there has been no shortage of players complaining about suspected bots, Reddit posts capturing people in the act, and gaming media discussing it ad nauseam. As with any and all MMOs before it, fighting the botting problem is going to be a never-ending battle for the developers. That said, what’s the point in running a bot for a game like this? And how do they work? That’s what we intend to cover in this post.
The Botting Economy
So why bot? Well, in my opinion, there are three categories people fall in when it comes to the reason for their botting:
- Actual cheaters trying to take shortcuts and get ahead
- People automating tasks they find boring, but who otherwise enjoy playing the rest of the game legitimately (this can technically be lumped into the above group)
- Gold farmers trying to turn in-game resources into real-world currency
Each of the above reasons provides enough of a foundation and demand for botting and cheating services that there are entire online communities and marketplaces dedicated to providing these services in exchange for real-world money. For example, sites like OwnedCore.com exist purely for users to advertise and sell their services. The infamous WoW Glider sold enough copies and turned enough profit that it caused Blizzard Entertainment to sue the creator of the botting software. And entire marketplaces for the sale of gold and other in-game items can be found on sites like g2g.com.
This niche market isn’t reserved just for hobbyists either. There are entire companies and professional toolkits dedicated to this stuff. We’ve all heard of Chinese gold farming outlets, but the botting and cheating market extends well beyond that. For example, sites like IWANTCHEATS.NET, SystemCheats, and dozens of others exist just to sell tools geared towards specific games.
Many of the dedicated toolkits also market themselves as being user-customizable. These tools allow users to build their own cheats and bots with a more user-friendly interface. For example, Chimpeon is marketed as a full game automation solution. It operates as an auto clicker and “pixel detector,” similar to how open-source toolkits like pyAutoGUI work, which is the mechanic we’ll be exploring for the remainder of this post.
How do these things work?
Gaming bots, as with everything, come in all shapes and sizes with varying levels of sophistication. In the most complex scenarios, developers will reverse engineer the game and hook into functionality that allows them to interact with game components directly and access information that players don’t have access to under normal circumstances. This information could include things like being able to see what’s on the other side of a wall, when the next resource is going to spawn, or what fish/item is going to get hooked at the end of their fishing rod.
To bring the discussion back to New World, let’s talk about fishing. Fishing is a mechanic in the game that allows players to, you guessed it, fish. It’s a simple mechanic where the character in the game casts their fishing rod, waits for a bit, and then plays a little mini-game to determine if they caught the fish or not. This mini-game comes in the form of a visual prompt on the screen with an icon that changes colors. If it’s green, you press the mouse button to begin reeling in the fish. If it turns orange, back off a bit. If it turns red and stays red for too long, the fish will get away and the player will have to try again. Fishing provides a way for players to gain experience and level up their characters, retrieve resources to level up other skills (such as cooking or alchemy), or obtain rare items that can be sold to other players for a profit. As with any and all MMOs before it to feature this mechanic, New World is plagued with a billion different botting services that claim to automate this component of the game for players.
For the most sophisticated of these bots, there are ways to peek at the game’s memory to determine if the fish being caught is worth playing the minigame for or not. If it is, the bot will play the minigame for the player. If it is not, the bot will simply release the fish immediately without wasting the time playing the game for a low-quality reward. While I won’t be discussing it in this post, many others have taken the liberty of publishing their research into New World’s internals on popular cheating forums like UnknownCheats.me.
Running bots and tools that interact with the game in this manner is quite a risky endeavor due to how aggressive anti-cheat engines are these days, namely EasyAntiCheat — the engine used by New World and many other popular games. If the anti-cheat detects a known botting program running or sees game memory being inspected in ways that are not expected, it could lead to a player having their account permanently banned.
So what’s a safer option? What about all of these “undetectable” bots being advertised? They all claim to “not interact with the game’s process memory.” What’s that all about? Well, first off, that “undetectable” bit is a lie. Second, these bots are all very likely auto clickers and pixel detectors. This means they monitor specific portions of the game screen and wait for certain images or colors to appear, and then they perform a set of pre-determined actions accordingly.
The anti-cheat, however, can still detect if tools are monitoring the game’s screen or taking automated actions. It’s not normal for a person to sit at their computer for 100 hours straight making the exact same mouse movements over and over. Obviously, anti-cheat developers could add mitigations here, but it’s really a neverending game of cat and mouse. That said, there are plenty of legitimate tools out there that do make this a much safer option, such as running their screen watchers on a totally different computer. Windows Remote Desktop, Team Viewer, or some sort of VNC are perfectly normal tools one would run to check in on their computer remotely. What’s not to say they couldn’t monitor the screen this way? Well, nothing. And that’s exactly what many of the popular services, such as Chimpeon linked earlier, actually recommend. Again, running a bot with this method could still be detected, but it takes much more effort and is more prone to false positives, which may be against the interest of the game studio if they were to falsely ban legitimate players.
For example, a New World fishing bot only needs to monitor the area of the screen used for the minigame. If the right icons and colors are detected, reel the fish in. If the bad colors are detected, pause for a moment. This doesn’t have the advantage of being able to only catch good fish, but it’s much better than running a tool that’s highly likely to be detected by the anti-cheat at some point.
Let’s see one of these in action:
In the video above, we can see exactly how this bot operates. Basically, the user configures the game so that the colors and images appear as the botting software expects, and then chooses a region of the game to interact with. From there, the bot does all the work of playing the fishing minigame automatically.
While I won’t be posting a direct tutorial on how to build your own bot, I’d like to demonstrate the basic building blocks required to create one. That said, there are plenty of code samples available online already, which incidentally, are noted to have been detected by the anti-cheat and gotten players banned already.
Let’s Build One
As already mentioned, this will not be a fully functional bot, but it will demonstrate the basic building blocks. This demo will be done on a macOS host using Python.
So what’re the components we’ll need:
- A way to capture a portion of the screen
- A way to detect a specific pattern in the screen capture
- A way to send mouse/keyboard inputs
Let’s get to it.
First, let’s create a loop to continuously capture a portion of the screen.
import msswhile True:
# 500x500 pixel region
region=(500, 500, 1000, 1000)
with mss.mss() as screen:
img = screen.grab(region)
mss.tools.to_png(img.rgb, img.size, output="sample.png")
Next, we’ll want a way to detect a given image within our image. For this demo, I’ve chosen to use the Tenable logo. We’ll use the OpenCV library for detection.
import cv2
import mss
from numpy import arrayto_detect = cv2.imread("./tenable.jpg", cv2.IMREAD_UNCHANGED)while True:
# 500x500 pixel region
region=(500, 500, 1000, 1000) # Grab region
with mss.mss() as screen:
img = screen.grab(region)
mss.tools.to_png(img.rgb, img.size, output="sample.png") # Convert image to format usable by cv2
img_cv = cv2.cvtColor(array(img), cv2.COLOR_RGB2BGR) # Check if the tenable logo is present
result = cv2.matchTemplate(img_cv, to_detect, eval('cv2.TM_CCOEFF_NORMED'))
if((result >= 0.6).any()):
print('DETECTED')
break
Running the above and dragging a logo template into the region of the screen this is on will trigger the “DETECTED” message. To note, this code snippet may not work exactly as written depending on your monitor setup and configured resolution. There might be settings that need to be tweaked in some scenarios.
That’s it. No seriously, that’s it. The only thing left is to add mouse and keyboard actions, which is easy enough with a library like pynput.
What’s being done about it?
What is Amazon doing in order to provide a solution to this issue? Honestly, who knows? The game is just over a month old at this point, so it’s far too early to tell how Amazon Game Studios plans to handle the botting problem they have on their hands. Obviously, we’re seeing plenty of players report the issues and many ban waves already appear to have happened. To be clear, botting in any form and buying/selling in-game resources from third parties is already against the game’s terms and conditions. In fact, there are slight mitigations against these forms of attacks in the game already, such as changing the viewing angle after fishing attempts, so it’s unclear whether or not further mitigations are under consideration. Only time will tell at this point.
As mentioned earlier, the purpose of this blog was not to call out AGS or New World for simply having this issue as it isn’t unique to this game by any stretch of the imagination. The purpose of this article was to shed some light on how basic many of these botting services actually are to those that may be unaware.
