User:Athlon/a far nastier cat

Running bots in groups is illegal. There is no defense for a person who runs his or her bot and then gets thwacked for it. This article will discuss what is and is not a bot and the power of the punishment that you are liable to receive.

The definition of the group bot
The first thing to do is figure out what is and is not a group bot. Group bots are player-uncontrolled sets of triggers that automatically respond to the group situation. Some bots automatically assist and hit for you; others can check on group members and heal them up if they are hurt; others warn the group about fallen spells, or rescue group members from danger. Each of these situations are okay on their own, but once you add player-uncontrolled to this though, things get dicey for the bot user.

The definition of player-uncontrolled is fairly simple. If you are not actively around to keep tabs on the bot and turn it off before something stupid happens within a timely period, the bot is player-uncontrolled. You could be working in another window, but have sound triggers up so that you could keep the game, and your bot's, activity in your peripheral hearing. If, however, you leave for 10 minutes to cook some food, you can no longer respond in a timly manner to events in the game and the bot is player-uncontrolled. Some people fall asleep while playing; this also causes the bot to be player-uncontrolled until the bot user wakes up.

The Group Bot Detector
The game has algorithms that decide whether you are a bot or not. If you do have a bot, it will be detected, even if it takes a while for Dentin to catch on. If you really are not botting and you get detected, you will know immediately, because the game will automatically ungroup you for botting. The best thing to do is log out and back in so that the game resets its stats about you, which is usually enough to give you another chance. Once you rejoin your group, do something else, or vary what you do to keep the bot detector off your case. Generally though, the bot detector does not give false positives, unless you are trying to set it off. Bottom line: don't spam commands, and you'll probably never be ungrouped for botting.

3 strikes and you're thwacked
Dentin asserts that the game will send you 3 warnings before it begins to thwack your bot. These warnings are cumulative throughout your gameplay, and will never reset. If you persist in botting in groups, you will be penalized viciously for disobeying the rules. Some punishments include:


 * You will lose knowledge of skills and spells you have spammed.
 * Your alignment will shift towards neutral, if you have been running alignment.
 * You will lose millions over millions of xp.
 * You will begin to lose micro levels, and timers on microlevels will go up. Micro levels that don't have timers may suddenly begin to have timers.
 * The fact that you have been running a bot will become public knowledge over the notify channel so the entire public can laugh at you. No one will group with you, because you have gained a reputation for running bots in groups, which isn't quite what you want, probably.

Your only hope
THere are two ways to avoid these dire consequences:


 * 1) Don't run a group bot. That's obvious.
 * 2) Make your group bot smarter than Dentin. This will become progressively harder, because Dentin is always looking to find those smart people who can outwit him, and smashing them once he finds them. Stay under the radar if you can. A smart group bot can go unnoticed for months; a dumb one will be detected and penalized in minutes.