Bot...such strange 3-letter word that not until I joined Wonderland Online did I ever knew of its existence. Even from the very first game I played, bot was unheard of, or at least to my knowledge, no one ever used bot there. According to Wikipedia, a bot is also called a web crawler or a web spider which is a computer program that does automated tasks. It is synonymous to cheating in online game.
I am not quite sure when botters started to arise at WLO. My assumption was that it started when IGG introduced the electron remote. It was such a hot topic way back, when someone (I have a pretty good idea who that someone was) dropped a bombshell and pinned up an endless video as evidence of the botters. It was incredible to see some people I knew who was botting. Truth to be tell, I didn't feel any antagonism toward them. On the contrary, I was amused to see the botter themselves belligerently hurling insults and swearing to their fellow botters. The greatest hypocrisy in such instances are the one who is all prim and pious from the outside while secretly subverting to botting too. You bot, you cheat. No need to put up a righteous indignation about the pathetic botters.
What really pushes the button for these people to start botting was to level up faster. A lot can not afford to buy an electron remote using real money so they resort to botting as well. And if I am not mistaken, the bot program can be use to open as much clients as we want without facing any game lag. It can also be modified to hasten speed and teleport bot. Up until now, I have a hazy idea of how bot really works. I heard of extreme bot but haven't dig deeper on the program nor I do I intend to do so. The computer geeks, on the other hand, was able to tweak the game code to be able to bot.
With the electron remote offered within the game, it can be difficult to detect whether a player is botting or not. Not unless we are knowledgeable enough to know bits and pieces about botting. Some said if a team was walking in a triangular pattern instead of a figure eight like the video above and video2, that is botting. Other said if a team was doing the same fashion of training like healing on the same player, recovering HP on the same pet and etc, that is botting too. Another or rather a more advanced way of botting looks like this video3. Video 3 seems to be a combination of speed hack and trigger bot to me. But then, what do I know about botting.
Despite the assurance of IGG that they always take measures in punishing the botters, many of them are still running loosely within the game. How IGG determined who among its roster of players should they locked up will be based on the real money they pooled in to the game. If a botter is a VIP, they will be most likely safe from getting banned. For the paying non-botters, this is regarded as an act of injustice therefore, more and more are losing faith with the unfairness being served on the game.
One may wonder the price these people need to pay for botting. But as the furor of the issue dwindled down, people simply forgot about the fiasco and move on to doing their own businesses. And from the way I see it, not one of the botters gave much thought to the issue. They consider botting as harmless but it certainly was used to gain advantage over others. They either quit the game or create new accounts. No big deal really. I even heard from the grapevine that IGG still released this set of botters after a month of locking up their accounts.
With the dormancy of the current game set-up, botters is increasing by the numbers but no one is willing to spare their time and report to online support anymore. The trend of the game is changing so are the behavior of the players. I'd personally seen a lot of them lurking around on all four corners of WLO...during goddess skill training, during normal training or teleport bot during 15th round. I witness teleport bot almost every 15th round event. How bot could greatly affect the game lag, I am not sure.
We each have our own prerogative in choosing how we want to play WLO. It never occurred to me to try my hand on botting. I had survived 3 years in WLO without botting, so why start now? Despite the rustic mantra that this is only a game, my sense of principle wouldn't allow me to join the botting frenzy. Why do something that I am not comfortable with? Compared to a hacker, I can say a botter is better. Not unless they used bot program for their friend's character without their knowledge, that will be a different case.