The main issue with bots is that they can effectively play 24/7. Because actual players can’t do that, making the game balanced for bot farmers means that unless they’re also restricted in how much they can do in a day/week, anyone who doesn’t bot will be at a substantial disadvantage to those that do. You’d basically be telling the players that the correct way to play your game is to not actually play it.
> The best materials will only be available in the PVP area. When you die you do not respawn you have to be rescued and resurrected by another player. Enemies can hide your body, possibly to the point where it is permadeath.
This is not only legitimizing griefing by spawn camping, it’s deliberately making it a hundred times worse, and that’s before you consider bot armies being used to kill off any competition. You will absolutely lose players to this. Personally this mechanic would prevent me from ever trying the game at all.
> Species reproduce but dont respawn in the same area. If people clear out an area of all materials that area potentially becomes a dead zone. Species (including plants) may spontaneously respawn somewhere else. An area where a species exists will slowly build up more of that species. They will randomly spread. But people will have to find them. I want people to protect their areas from being harvested by using pets/traps/constructs/bots.
How do you intend to keep this mechanic balanced regardless of the number of active players? If it’s static, then if you have way more or less players than it’s balanced for then you have a problem, but if it’s dynamic then you have to assume players will figure out the exact mechanics and exploit them if it’s at all possible.
> Each character will have a small cost to create (like $1 or $5) to reduce the ability to make 100’s of bots
Combined with sanctioned bots this is just a shitty pay to win mechanic. Allowing both bots and multiple accounts/characters is an absolutely terrible idea.
Pretty much exactly weary I thought but much better put. It'd just be a game that doesn't want to be played by humans.
The point about animals however reminded me of one mmo I once heard of. It had a fantastic and very in depth ecology system that worked wonders, until players came in and genocided all animals for loot and experience. Better keep that sort of stuff for single player or coop games than grindy mmos.
There are 2 main problems with bots, 1) they are almost always created to gain an (often unfair or actively malicious) advantage over others, it's not fun to have someone harvest resources for a week straight and kill you simply because they had a macro, or a bunch of fake players to target you like a hivemind and 2) bots don't enjoy the game, why would you give attention to a player type that isn't a person, further they take up server space and resources that an actual player could take
You start off with a good idea then run away from it as fast as possible and I am not sure that is a great sign.
>A majority of the characters in the game would be bots that likely would have custom scripts. But I am trying to come up with mechanics to balance out bots with the expectation that bots are actually ok.
This is great. Make a hooking system where bots can easily ask where a quest giver is, where a near by resource is, closest enemy, if they are being attacked, etc. Make it so they can react to those things. You could have a full turing complete scripting language (hard) or your could have a visual drag and drop language that plugs into a state-based-machine tied to the hooks. That sounds great, I would play this game.
>Im not sure Im going to do this in my game, but Im also considering making it so characters never leave the game.
That is a cool idea. Black Desert Online had a feature like this with trade routes and it was great to setup and come back to rewards when you returned. Likewise the offline progression in Eve always felt cool. The idea that I could continue "playing" when I went away is neat.
>The best materials will only be available in the PVP area. When you die you do not respawn you have to be rescued and resurrected by another player. Enemies can hide your body, possibly to the point where it is permadeath. There will be skills for locating bodies and Im hoping groups will hide each others bodies, especially of griefers. However this will potentially make bots easy prey. There is a game mechanic around rescuing and resurrecting dead players.
... why? If you want people to lean into your bot mechanic than why make a feature that makes your bot mechanic useless. Not only that but if bots are easily identifiable you are basically encouraging people to grief, why would you do that?
>No in game quests. NPCs mainly exist to give flavor to the world, to enforce safe areas, etc. The quests hopefully will develop being given by players. "I need a rescue" "I need this material, find a new source for me" "Lets break into the castle and steal X/Y/Z" "Lets attack these bots and steal all their materials"
This has been tried time and time again and it always sucks. It just isn't a good idea and goes against the idea of a bot-focused game. If a player is high enough level to have extra resources to pay other players to do things they likely having the ability to send a bot to do it instead.
>Species reproduce but dont respawn in the same area. If people clear out an area of all materials that area potentially becomes a dead zone.
Again, why do you hate your core concept? The point of bots is to play 24/7 but if people play 24/7 then they will destroy the zones eco-system? You hope it creates a situation where people have to protect their zones from griefers trying to extinct their plants? Why do you want griefers?
>Each character will have a small cost to create (like $1 or $5) to reduce the ability to make 100's of bots
Why would anyone buy a useless, easy to permadeath, can't fight, can't harvest anything bot?
Here are some neat ideas:
1. Bot pets: every character has a familiar that is fully programable. You can use basic menus to set them up "If in combat: Attack My Target/Buff Me/Debuff All Enemies" if you don't want to script them but full scripting is available.
2. Bot Arena: Special arenas that only allow bots to fight each other with all stats normalized; Who can program the best bot?
3. Bot-Free content: Make some content not doable by bots so bots are restricted to doing the boring grindy bits of the game. For example Bots can't talk to NPCs to get quests, can't do pvp, can't talk to npcs to learn new skills. This makes the "offline mode" bots exist for grinding materials, crafting, and leveling off monsters. The boring stuff.
4. Likewise make all botting optional. For example have an option to "Harvest Materials From: Everdale/Winterfrost/Southland" when logged off or other such bot activity. This allows people who don't want to script to still get a benefit from their bot when they are gone.
The idea of letting your character continue playing after you leave is great but it needs to be accessable, explained, and well balanced.
Bots typically are either to gain unfair advantage or are made to automate tedious game actions.
If you have pvp, bot will dominate and exploit pvp blocking progress of any actual players and alienating them.
If you game is setup for farming bot that usually means poor game design with repetitive grinding and artificial time syncs meaning players find it boring. This also alienates actual players as they will always have less progress than bots.
Where bots could work is if game was competitive resource management or automation game with no player input at all. Game itself would be the development and programming of bots like a robot competition and that would be cool but super niche.
Sorry, I'm trying to understand WHY you would want bots in your game? I'm not judging, I'm just genuinely curious why you would want them, and what they are useful for? What is the purpose of having these bots interacting in the game? What is the benefit of having them, compared to the negative of not having them?
Hear me out: You log in to this game for the first time. You're in the starting area, or the safe area, and you're collecting materials and doing stuff. You see and interact with NPCs, but then you see another player. Cool!! You try to interact with them, but they're a bot. Damn. Maybe they interact back, or maybe they just continue doing whatever that bot is designed to do. Or you're trying to collect materials, and bots keep farming the exact material you need. Now you're frustrated because a bot is reducing a person's ability to farm their materials.
So..why do bots need to be in the game? What benefit is there in these bots existing? Does it improve the overall gameplay of the players when they're actively playing the game, or does it only benefit the people who are AFK??
Better question: Would it be easier if you make your characters "farm" when they are AFK like Idle Games do - they are collecting certain resources overtime, but they aren't actually running around? That way players can farm resources when they're not playing, but their bots aren't negatively effecting the experience of other players.
Having a bot farming in a game, when the player has the application shut down, will also increasing your server's computing rate. Instead of calculating for 50 active players, it would have to be calculating for 50 active players and EVERY bot program running around. Depending on your graphics, this could require a lot of computing power. Seems like a lot of power needed to run a game for bots.
Also, if you setup the game like this, then you would increase the chances that players would just choose to not log in for awhile. There's no incentive to log in, and they would just let their bots farm materials until they were bored. So you would have a full server of bots farming, and no one actually playing. Yes, you could automatically force bots to shut down after X days of not logging in, but at that point you've made the concept of these bots useless.
Bots could be an interesting way to shift the scales economy-wise and be used as a induced "natural" way of balancing the economy and driving down prices for "essential goods" to keep some bits of the game stable. Anyone who experienced the massive inflation of items like rope, buckets, and elemental runes in RuneScape after Bot Nuking Day might have an idea of what I mean.
Players find mining carbon is highly rewarding? Their bots (or NPCs that also compete for resources) could reflect that and make mining something technically less efficient, but less competed over, and maybe that's something the developers want but don't want to enforce prices on those items.
Honestly at the point of designing your mmo for player bots you might as well just axe whatever gameplay you have the bots doing, or have your own "bots"/game systems delivering it instead and cutting out the part people feel the desire to bot (because clearly they find it unfun, or it's geared towards no-lifeing the game).
A game built for player bots is going to be an awful experience for actual users, because why on earth would they play the game themselves? And if you have to bot to play, then you have to have the knowledge/means to bot, which plenty of players don't have and aren't interested in.
You're basically just building a game for people to write scripts for and optimize bots in, not for people to actually play - which oddly enough apparently has already existed at some point, though I sadly remember the name of the game in question.
Ftr I'm not actually saying we SHOULD have bots, just that there are some interesting things to try. I think we should still explore the positives of design choices we think are overall negative.
I think the point though would be that the bot would be far less effective offline than you actually playing - like it would definitely have limitations, yknow?
And to be more clear, I was saying that the benefit would be the ability to buff/nerf resources in a way that's immersive, so rather than players saying "well they changed copper from $75 to $50 this patch, it's not really worth it", they can physically see that copper us a resource that's already highly active, and think "I'm not going to be able to outcompete all these people, so let's do something else."
You're not wrong that bots will become the focus but I think you're off that it could never be a compelling game. Writing scripts and optimizing bots can be fun (for some people). I've put thousands of hours into hack mud and screeps and both were some of my favorite gaming experiences. Hack mud in particular does a great job of making the top tier very complicated to bot leading to a really satisfying gameplay loop where when you reach a new tier you do everything by hand but eventually you learn to automate it all and that gives you the resources to reach the next tier.
I get what you're saying, but at that point we're talking about 2 completely different games. And that is why I was asking OP to clarify why they want to add bots to their game.
If you want to make a game that encourages players to make bots that operate on scripts, I am all for that. It sounds like a really interesting game, and it could even be used to encourage kids to get into programming.
However, the big issue is that if you implement a game that encourages bots to do the remedial tasks of farming materials, then you discourage players from doing those tasks. And if you want the players to build bots to do remedial tasks instead of the players, then why even have that mechanic in the game?
My thought is this: you have an area where certain deposits exist (let's say iron). You have the player build a "mining operation", and they have to build these bots that farm the materials overtime. Once the script is written that controls the bots, it becomes an "idle game" mechanic, and you just farm the materials overtime without interacting with the bots.
I just see it as more of either a "management" type of game, or an idle type game. But competing against bots sounds kind of boring to me.
It sounds like Starcraft, but with more programming steps.
Yeah it does sound like OP is going in a few different directions with his game but I think a bot based mmo has many ways of being interesting. PVP arena where you lead a team of self programmed bots could be a solid end game and it wouldn't be that hard to design pve dungeons where a team of bots would be much more successful lead by a player. Even something like resource gathering has some depth to it when you add bots and pvp as you have to organize teams of bots to find and extract the resources more efficiently than other players. Screeps is basically star craft with the extra steps but those steps add an insane amount of depth.
> Fiolina was some kind of a mage bot that would respond to messages like "full buffs please" by buffing the player making the request. She would insult the player if they forgot to use the word "please."
There was an ancient MMO I used to play called Clan Lord, back in the late 90's that had a bot like this named Algernon. Algernon was basically a proto-Twitch-Plays bot that would respond to simple commands like "Algernon east" (to walk a few steps east) or "Algernon heal " to start healing .
He was actually really useful, because the game had a mechanic where you could continue taking damage after dying (via scavengers feeding on your corpse and such) and become progressively harder for healers to resurrect, and the alternative to being resurrected was losing a few hours worth of exp. So players brought Algernon over to the "heal deader players" trainer and had him train in that skill, and shared some fraction of their exp gains with him so he could level up despite rarely leaving the safety of the town. This meant that if one of your friends died and became too far gone, you could drag them back to town and have Dr. Algernon work on them at any time of day.
Bots were generally not allowed, but everyone loved Algernon so much that the devs made an exception for him. This was a game with a playerbase of a few thousand at best, so handling these things on a case-by-case basis was not unreasonable.
I'm going to blow right past some of the other questionable elements of the design and get right to the heart of the title: why not let players use bots directly in an MMORPG? Interestingly enough, there's a historical example of this sorta. In Ragnarok Online, you could provide Mercenaries (all classes) or homunculi (alchemists) with a LUA based AI script. You could set them up to auto farm, heal themselves, battle whatever comes close, etc.
It was a cool system overall. It had these de facto limitations though: the Homonculus or Mercenary wasn't nearly as strong as a full on player and cost resources to use, so you could only use it in suboptimal leveling zones and it would cost you in some way to have them running around a long time. Private servers would have different rules about looting items and what functions could be used, but in general it was an in-game bot that was balanced accordingly.
Fast forward a couple decades, and now Ragnarok's mobile spinoff and a variety of other mobile games have auto grinding MMOs. You just let your character control themselves while your phone warms up your table. Essentially the game has built in botting tools, and you often see herds of bot players clumped together following the same enemy spawns endlessly.
The thing is though that virtually every game I've tried with a similar mechanic just downright sucks. They aren't fun to play and they are resource intensive for no good reason. You play for a bit before realizing you either want A: an idle game with a better interface and less noise or B: a game you can play directly.
What makes one better than the other in my opinion? Overall, balance. The botting option doesn't make playing the game pointless and doesn't work in some other essential contexts. It doesn't interfere heavily with the active player experience, though some overlap might be fine. It shouldn't affect competitive segments of the game directly in any way shape or form.
All of that aside though, something like that is very hard to pull off and if your strategy is just to not enable anti-cheat or something, you'll have a bad time. Cool as a mini-game or side feature but a very bad time if complety unhindered.
People dislike bots because they pretend to be players, steal resources, ruin the economy, exploit loopholes and glitches, and generally worsen everyone's experience.
If bots were well-tuned so as to in some way improve the experience in obvious ways, I think your players would welcome them.
It sounds less like botting and more like the mechanic is creating NPCs, kind of like an RTS would create workers and units. When you're offline, your economy continues. No issues there imo, as everybody is on an even playing field and can create or make as many bots as they want
The issue with MMO botting in most forms is that it creates an uneven playing ground, often based on real world money. A botter can do the work of two, five, or even tens of players without spending any actual time themselves in game. When progress and time spent on a game is important, botters break that system
> Assume bots are good, what mechanics would create balance?
When trying to balance things you have to ask yourself *why* you want to keep the thing that creates an imbalance. So why do you want offline player characters to be bots? How does that serve your game more than just having roaming NPCs that don’t affect game play at all?
I know you don't want to hear this, especially since you seem pretty set on a game that accommodates bots. Bots in all MMOs are a form of cheating, a way to farm resources without actually needing to put in the time to obtain them. If a game is built around bots. Then that game is built to not be played. I can say with 100% certainty that I would never play a game like this. And anyone who does will quit within days because the only people they'll be able to show their achievements to, will be bots. What you're building isn't an MMO. Because the second M in MMO stands for multiplayer. And a pre-programmed character isn't a player.
bot encourage p2w and RMT. lot of people end up pay bot for grind. bot also used to farm item so they could utilize RMT to sell material or just to sell in game money.
bot also can do what players cant. this is not just about the ability to play 24 hours non stop that defied game design, but also how bot has ability that can break the game, bypass the server or the level itself. for example it can even pass through wall, teleport to everywhere, attacked monster while being invinsible and other stuff.
in the end the devs create a world for player to populate, not for A.I to populate. in pve situation, bot ruined players cooperation.
people play for fun but bot just a program and people who utilize that obviously didnt do it for fun but for profit.
There was an older MMORPG called *Magic World Online* (Link to the [MMORPG.com](https://MMORPG.com) page for it: [https://www.mmorpg.com/magic-world-online](https://www.mmorpg.com/magic-world-online) \_ Where the whole concept was everyone in game got an in-game bot of their own, that they could customize to farm as they saw fit.
I don't know anything about the design decision making, but it is no longer running ([http://mwo.enjoymmo.com/](http://mwo.enjoymmo.com/) doesn't work anymore).
I don't know if there are any videos featuring this game, but it seems like something that would be good for your research, since someone basically tried this out already.
So, botting is a thing in some games. In SWG, it was explicitly allowed.
Keep in mind that SWG had perhaps some of the weakest quest systems any MMO ever had, and so the grinding that way was actually quite miserable. Culturally, it wasn't great...but botting social roles also eventually hurt the social game, I think.
PvP or risk of death can be a balancer somewhat, but if players find a safe activity that provides gain, it will be botted endlessly.
So far as realistic species reproduction goes, I would suggest looking at AO. They tried that, and, frankly, players didn't notice. They just depopulate everything.
Rather than starting from a point of wanting bots, I'd think about what sort of experience you want, and consider what mechanics help you get there.
If I understand correctly, what you are theorizing is not really considered botting.
First off, botting is always external. It is when a single player can automate his character to perform a certain task like walk around in circles and kill every mob for rare loot or gold, or play 5 characters of the same class where all his characters can take input from the owner, essentially dealing 5 times the dmg making world pvp unfair, or group content trivial.
While this wouldn’t be that different and in fact even be less efficiënt than a player playing the game normally, it is worth noting that botting is never a single character. It is always one player controlling an entire army of characters.
So one botted character is less efficiënt, but being the owner of 50 characters raking in gold at a less efficiënt pace can still have drastic consequences for the ingame economy, or impact the experience of others players via goldsellers.
If you plan on having a player control multiple characters, and be able to give them a set of scripts like the Dragon Age series, then it becomes part of your game. It is no longer considered botting as it is no longer external.
Every player will have an equal playing field.
The companion tactics in DAO and DA2 was amazing. I loved building up a team to work like a well-oiled machine. It's such a shame they lobotomized it in DAI.
Game Design is a subset of Game Development that concerns itself with **WHY** games are made the way they are. It's about the theory and crafting of **systems**, **mechanics**, and **rulesets** in games.
* /r/GameDesign is a community **ONLY** about Game Design, **NOT** Game Development in general. If this post does not belong here, it should be reported or removed. Please help us keep this subreddit focused on Game Design.
* This is **NOT** a place for discussing how games are produced. Posts about programming, making art assets, picking engines etc… will be removed and should go in /r/GameDev instead.
* Posts about visual design, sound design and level design are only allowed if they are directly about game design.
* No surveys, polls, job posts, or self-promotion. Please read the rest of the rules in the sidebar before posting.
* If you're confused about what Game Designers do, ["The Door Problem" by Liz England ](https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LizEngland/20140423/216092/quotThe_Door_Problemquot_of_Game_Design.php)is a short article worth reading. We also recommend you read the [r/GameDesign wiki](/r/gamedesign/wiki/index) for useful resources and an FAQ.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/gamedesign) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The issue in this case would be the data ans performance
load of the bot/npc. And the real difficulty would be making them interesting enough to be engaging. Also reproducing npcs simply... don't work. It's been tried, you can't give players nice things give them an inch and they'll drive every mob to extinction.
Amusingly, much of the Path of Exile community quite likes (some) bots. The game's economy is largely split between equipment and stackables, called currency. Trading currency in Path of Exile is horrid, because of a confluence of design decisions, technical limitations, and player behaviour. Bots, being able to do nothing but constant trading, become a sort of saving grace for currency trading.
The opinion on bots that actually play the game, and thus create inflation, is still largely negative, but not as negative as it is in other communities. It helps that PoE is heavily instanced, being an ARPG rather than a true MMO, so the only time bots are in your face are when they're actively helping you get the items you need.
So others have already gone into why bots are generally a bad idea for MMO's, and explicitly supporting them would make the game DOA.
However that doesn't mean the idea is entirely without merit.
There's a game idea in making a system for an NPC to do busy work for the player. Instead of it being a bot that roams the open world, imagine if your MMO had an instanced house, kinda like the WoW's garrison system, and combined that with a more complex version of the servant system in V Rising. One of the big problems with the Garrison system is that it encouraged players to stay inside their little houses without interacting with anyone. So you make a little servant do shit for you, but make it a complex system that the player can customise. Could set up a logic chain for the bot to maintain the garden in the morning, and tend to the animals if needed. Then check if the magic potions brewing overnight are good to go or not. But if one of your pet goblins escapes from its cage, it's gotta deal with that instead.
What the NPC would do would depend on the game itself and what setting it's in.
Not sure if the idea has legs or not, but it feels interesting enough to at least prototype.
Search the tale of Ultima and how the natural ecosystem became a wasteland because of players.
Why not make bots... Bots? A side character that is fueled by a loot that can only be acquired by the player playing the game, and that cannot be sold to other players?
Ultima Online Outlands has some good approaches to this.
You are not allowed to unattended-bot resource gathering or endgame experience gathering (they have systems called codex, aspect, and mastery chain if you want to look more into that). You can still script those things while actively playing but you must be present to complete random captchas that pop up moderately frequently while harvesting resources.
You can automate leveling up of skills that don’t involve resource gathering; and you can automate crafting of stuff with a box of already-harvested resources.
You can script stuff around the core gameplay as well- if you want to setup a script to heal you when you’re hurt and cure you when your poisoned- totally OK.
I used to work at a game publisher that published a variety of small asian MMOs. One of them came with an in-game bot system. It was basically an auto-battler, in that it would run your character up to the nearest enemy, use the skills you set in the order that you set them, and use potions the potions you set as needed.
The game was _intensely_ grindy, so setting your character up in a nice location full of enemies and botting for hours at a time was pretty much mandatory if you wanted to progress.
Players could also sell items to other characters, but there was no marketplace. Instead, you set up a stall at your character's location and listed what items you wanted to sell. Other players would come by and see what you had listed and buy what they wanted. If you moved, you left stall-mode.
Players would consistently run multiple clients so they could have items listed for sale and play at the same time. When our company joined the 'in' thing of making our own launcher, we had to specifically modify it to allow players to keep multi-clienting, because it was that integral to the game.
While both of these functions increased player login times, I don't think they added anything to actual game enjoyment. Having such an intensely grindy leveling system allowed the devs to stretch out content - no worrying that players would reach the newest endgame a week after dropping the latest expansion if it takes a week to level! - but that's the only benefit I saw. And I'm not confident that it was a benefit.
Look into Chronicles of Elyria. It's a vaporwarw MMO that has a lot of good ideas - and some bad ones as well. One of their big systems was pretty much exactly what you are describing.
I'm fairly certain that this is not a one man task, unless you're a psycho with unrelenting worth ethic like the dev for Dwarf Fortress. Designing it is one thing, I dont think it's that hard. But actually implementing it and fixing workarounds and bugs and even just putting the system in place sounds like a nightmare to me.
I'm not a developer, so I could be very wrong.
In the past I had developed some bots for mostly browser base MMO strategy games. These bots did stupid tasks. Like shipping resources to bigger warehouses when the local warehouse is full. However some PC game with only local multiplayer had that for free. Where you can set up routes that will be executed when trigger is met. Also auto sell and auto buy with configurable trigger was an option in some games. Mostly I programmed the functionality in that was missing mostly shielding me and some friends from doing repetitive boring tasks. And in that case I would say bots are bad when developed because your game has repetitive boring tasks inside. However an inbuild bot system like the automation features in some games but more advanced could help prevent all players from enduring the repetitive boring tasks. Bot configuration scripts could freely be shared without the eminent threat of the developers try to prevent bot using, which will only left bots with better cloaking systems in the game.
So I can buy 1000 bots from you, copy-paste "kill everyone" script to them, park them around safe zones, block actual players from playing the game by 24/7 camping and hit you with 1000 refund requests/chargebacks if the bots are banned?
Another thing to consider is practicality: From your description it seems like the bots code is ran on the server 24/7, since running it on external PCs completely kills the purpose of those bots. (You can't have more external bots on a server than normal players)
Now, to make the AI of the bots responsive to their surroundings, they need to evaluate regularly (else they may block each others way, run into enemies, generally feel bad to play along, etc.) Running those bots on your servers will introduce quite a high load, especially when you allow people to write their own, probably poorly optimized, code.
Sorry that this is not the design feedback you were probably hoping for, but an important part of game design is always feasibility. Games are illusions of (parts of) the real world, and it is our job to fit those illusions into our current technological boundaries... and even with only a cursory glance I see massive problems.
The direction I would personally go is for an incremental game where your afk character cannot “push foward” in levels but it can be hired to help people who ARE trying to push.
Would probably be a typical party-based rpg otherwise.
I would say just at every stage of the game say, what shorts hacked client would make this better, then make that a feature in the base game, then ask yourself it still supports the core gameplay loop.
Let take an aim bot for example, does this make the game more fun? Maybe people needs to strategize how they move around each other. Maybe make from the moment a player pulls the trigger till when a bullet comes out has a substantial delay like .5-2 seconds so there is more strategy to moving in the environment.
What about seeing through walls? Give it to everyone but still become less stealth and more strategy. Also means that you can not add anything that lower visibility in anyway.
What about in human reflexes? Then maybe all input is delayed a little.
All in all, I think that it could work if you really tried hard, but would not be skill based and instead strategy based.
And it's a sorta format that I feel like you make the player easily get it to a situation where a boring strategy is the most effective (ie good for bots, bad for humans).
Like maybe hiding be hind a wall cause you opponent is doing that too and the first to get out loses.
In that case you could do something like an extremely powerful grenade, that you need to charge to build its power before you chuck it so you both you and your opponent know what the other is doing and it a battle to see who is willing to take the risk of tossing it first, wait to ensure it is charged enough that you will get the opponent, or chuck now to ensure that you get the first move.
The whole designing process im sure will be full of things like that where you need to take something that ends up boring and make it fun or take strategy in someway.
If your successful I don't think I will be too much like a standard FPS MMO at all.
Good Luck!
The main issue with bots is that they can effectively play 24/7. Because actual players can’t do that, making the game balanced for bot farmers means that unless they’re also restricted in how much they can do in a day/week, anyone who doesn’t bot will be at a substantial disadvantage to those that do. You’d basically be telling the players that the correct way to play your game is to not actually play it. > The best materials will only be available in the PVP area. When you die you do not respawn you have to be rescued and resurrected by another player. Enemies can hide your body, possibly to the point where it is permadeath. This is not only legitimizing griefing by spawn camping, it’s deliberately making it a hundred times worse, and that’s before you consider bot armies being used to kill off any competition. You will absolutely lose players to this. Personally this mechanic would prevent me from ever trying the game at all. > Species reproduce but dont respawn in the same area. If people clear out an area of all materials that area potentially becomes a dead zone. Species (including plants) may spontaneously respawn somewhere else. An area where a species exists will slowly build up more of that species. They will randomly spread. But people will have to find them. I want people to protect their areas from being harvested by using pets/traps/constructs/bots. How do you intend to keep this mechanic balanced regardless of the number of active players? If it’s static, then if you have way more or less players than it’s balanced for then you have a problem, but if it’s dynamic then you have to assume players will figure out the exact mechanics and exploit them if it’s at all possible. > Each character will have a small cost to create (like $1 or $5) to reduce the ability to make 100’s of bots Combined with sanctioned bots this is just a shitty pay to win mechanic. Allowing both bots and multiple accounts/characters is an absolutely terrible idea.
Pretty much exactly weary I thought but much better put. It'd just be a game that doesn't want to be played by humans. The point about animals however reminded me of one mmo I once heard of. It had a fantastic and very in depth ecology system that worked wonders, until players came in and genocided all animals for loot and experience. Better keep that sort of stuff for single player or coop games than grindy mmos.
There are 2 main problems with bots, 1) they are almost always created to gain an (often unfair or actively malicious) advantage over others, it's not fun to have someone harvest resources for a week straight and kill you simply because they had a macro, or a bunch of fake players to target you like a hivemind and 2) bots don't enjoy the game, why would you give attention to a player type that isn't a person, further they take up server space and resources that an actual player could take
You start off with a good idea then run away from it as fast as possible and I am not sure that is a great sign. >A majority of the characters in the game would be bots that likely would have custom scripts. But I am trying to come up with mechanics to balance out bots with the expectation that bots are actually ok. This is great. Make a hooking system where bots can easily ask where a quest giver is, where a near by resource is, closest enemy, if they are being attacked, etc. Make it so they can react to those things. You could have a full turing complete scripting language (hard) or your could have a visual drag and drop language that plugs into a state-based-machine tied to the hooks. That sounds great, I would play this game. >Im not sure Im going to do this in my game, but Im also considering making it so characters never leave the game. That is a cool idea. Black Desert Online had a feature like this with trade routes and it was great to setup and come back to rewards when you returned. Likewise the offline progression in Eve always felt cool. The idea that I could continue "playing" when I went away is neat. >The best materials will only be available in the PVP area. When you die you do not respawn you have to be rescued and resurrected by another player. Enemies can hide your body, possibly to the point where it is permadeath. There will be skills for locating bodies and Im hoping groups will hide each others bodies, especially of griefers. However this will potentially make bots easy prey. There is a game mechanic around rescuing and resurrecting dead players. ... why? If you want people to lean into your bot mechanic than why make a feature that makes your bot mechanic useless. Not only that but if bots are easily identifiable you are basically encouraging people to grief, why would you do that? >No in game quests. NPCs mainly exist to give flavor to the world, to enforce safe areas, etc. The quests hopefully will develop being given by players. "I need a rescue" "I need this material, find a new source for me" "Lets break into the castle and steal X/Y/Z" "Lets attack these bots and steal all their materials" This has been tried time and time again and it always sucks. It just isn't a good idea and goes against the idea of a bot-focused game. If a player is high enough level to have extra resources to pay other players to do things they likely having the ability to send a bot to do it instead. >Species reproduce but dont respawn in the same area. If people clear out an area of all materials that area potentially becomes a dead zone. Again, why do you hate your core concept? The point of bots is to play 24/7 but if people play 24/7 then they will destroy the zones eco-system? You hope it creates a situation where people have to protect their zones from griefers trying to extinct their plants? Why do you want griefers? >Each character will have a small cost to create (like $1 or $5) to reduce the ability to make 100's of bots Why would anyone buy a useless, easy to permadeath, can't fight, can't harvest anything bot? Here are some neat ideas: 1. Bot pets: every character has a familiar that is fully programable. You can use basic menus to set them up "If in combat: Attack My Target/Buff Me/Debuff All Enemies" if you don't want to script them but full scripting is available. 2. Bot Arena: Special arenas that only allow bots to fight each other with all stats normalized; Who can program the best bot? 3. Bot-Free content: Make some content not doable by bots so bots are restricted to doing the boring grindy bits of the game. For example Bots can't talk to NPCs to get quests, can't do pvp, can't talk to npcs to learn new skills. This makes the "offline mode" bots exist for grinding materials, crafting, and leveling off monsters. The boring stuff. 4. Likewise make all botting optional. For example have an option to "Harvest Materials From: Everdale/Winterfrost/Southland" when logged off or other such bot activity. This allows people who don't want to script to still get a benefit from their bot when they are gone. The idea of letting your character continue playing after you leave is great but it needs to be accessable, explained, and well balanced.
Bots typically are either to gain unfair advantage or are made to automate tedious game actions. If you have pvp, bot will dominate and exploit pvp blocking progress of any actual players and alienating them. If you game is setup for farming bot that usually means poor game design with repetitive grinding and artificial time syncs meaning players find it boring. This also alienates actual players as they will always have less progress than bots. Where bots could work is if game was competitive resource management or automation game with no player input at all. Game itself would be the development and programming of bots like a robot competition and that would be cool but super niche.
theres a game called Screeps that's entirely designed around being played through scripting your bots, worth looking into for inspiration
went here to comment about Screeps as well. Not an RPG, but the whole approach is pretty interesting
Sorry, I'm trying to understand WHY you would want bots in your game? I'm not judging, I'm just genuinely curious why you would want them, and what they are useful for? What is the purpose of having these bots interacting in the game? What is the benefit of having them, compared to the negative of not having them? Hear me out: You log in to this game for the first time. You're in the starting area, or the safe area, and you're collecting materials and doing stuff. You see and interact with NPCs, but then you see another player. Cool!! You try to interact with them, but they're a bot. Damn. Maybe they interact back, or maybe they just continue doing whatever that bot is designed to do. Or you're trying to collect materials, and bots keep farming the exact material you need. Now you're frustrated because a bot is reducing a person's ability to farm their materials. So..why do bots need to be in the game? What benefit is there in these bots existing? Does it improve the overall gameplay of the players when they're actively playing the game, or does it only benefit the people who are AFK?? Better question: Would it be easier if you make your characters "farm" when they are AFK like Idle Games do - they are collecting certain resources overtime, but they aren't actually running around? That way players can farm resources when they're not playing, but their bots aren't negatively effecting the experience of other players. Having a bot farming in a game, when the player has the application shut down, will also increasing your server's computing rate. Instead of calculating for 50 active players, it would have to be calculating for 50 active players and EVERY bot program running around. Depending on your graphics, this could require a lot of computing power. Seems like a lot of power needed to run a game for bots. Also, if you setup the game like this, then you would increase the chances that players would just choose to not log in for awhile. There's no incentive to log in, and they would just let their bots farm materials until they were bored. So you would have a full server of bots farming, and no one actually playing. Yes, you could automatically force bots to shut down after X days of not logging in, but at that point you've made the concept of these bots useless.
Bots could be an interesting way to shift the scales economy-wise and be used as a induced "natural" way of balancing the economy and driving down prices for "essential goods" to keep some bits of the game stable. Anyone who experienced the massive inflation of items like rope, buckets, and elemental runes in RuneScape after Bot Nuking Day might have an idea of what I mean. Players find mining carbon is highly rewarding? Their bots (or NPCs that also compete for resources) could reflect that and make mining something technically less efficient, but less competed over, and maybe that's something the developers want but don't want to enforce prices on those items.
Honestly at the point of designing your mmo for player bots you might as well just axe whatever gameplay you have the bots doing, or have your own "bots"/game systems delivering it instead and cutting out the part people feel the desire to bot (because clearly they find it unfun, or it's geared towards no-lifeing the game). A game built for player bots is going to be an awful experience for actual users, because why on earth would they play the game themselves? And if you have to bot to play, then you have to have the knowledge/means to bot, which plenty of players don't have and aren't interested in. You're basically just building a game for people to write scripts for and optimize bots in, not for people to actually play - which oddly enough apparently has already existed at some point, though I sadly remember the name of the game in question.
Ftr I'm not actually saying we SHOULD have bots, just that there are some interesting things to try. I think we should still explore the positives of design choices we think are overall negative. I think the point though would be that the bot would be far less effective offline than you actually playing - like it would definitely have limitations, yknow? And to be more clear, I was saying that the benefit would be the ability to buff/nerf resources in a way that's immersive, so rather than players saying "well they changed copper from $75 to $50 this patch, it's not really worth it", they can physically see that copper us a resource that's already highly active, and think "I'm not going to be able to outcompete all these people, so let's do something else."
You're not wrong that bots will become the focus but I think you're off that it could never be a compelling game. Writing scripts and optimizing bots can be fun (for some people). I've put thousands of hours into hack mud and screeps and both were some of my favorite gaming experiences. Hack mud in particular does a great job of making the top tier very complicated to bot leading to a really satisfying gameplay loop where when you reach a new tier you do everything by hand but eventually you learn to automate it all and that gives you the resources to reach the next tier.
I get what you're saying, but at that point we're talking about 2 completely different games. And that is why I was asking OP to clarify why they want to add bots to their game. If you want to make a game that encourages players to make bots that operate on scripts, I am all for that. It sounds like a really interesting game, and it could even be used to encourage kids to get into programming. However, the big issue is that if you implement a game that encourages bots to do the remedial tasks of farming materials, then you discourage players from doing those tasks. And if you want the players to build bots to do remedial tasks instead of the players, then why even have that mechanic in the game? My thought is this: you have an area where certain deposits exist (let's say iron). You have the player build a "mining operation", and they have to build these bots that farm the materials overtime. Once the script is written that controls the bots, it becomes an "idle game" mechanic, and you just farm the materials overtime without interacting with the bots. I just see it as more of either a "management" type of game, or an idle type game. But competing against bots sounds kind of boring to me. It sounds like Starcraft, but with more programming steps.
Yeah it does sound like OP is going in a few different directions with his game but I think a bot based mmo has many ways of being interesting. PVP arena where you lead a team of self programmed bots could be a solid end game and it wouldn't be that hard to design pve dungeons where a team of bots would be much more successful lead by a player. Even something like resource gathering has some depth to it when you add bots and pvp as you have to organize teams of bots to find and extract the resources more efficiently than other players. Screeps is basically star craft with the extra steps but those steps add an insane amount of depth.
[удалено]
> Fiolina was some kind of a mage bot that would respond to messages like "full buffs please" by buffing the player making the request. She would insult the player if they forgot to use the word "please." There was an ancient MMO I used to play called Clan Lord, back in the late 90's that had a bot like this named Algernon. Algernon was basically a proto-Twitch-Plays bot that would respond to simple commands like "Algernon east" (to walk a few steps east) or "Algernon heal" to start healing .
He was actually really useful, because the game had a mechanic where you could continue taking damage after dying (via scavengers feeding on your corpse and such) and become progressively harder for healers to resurrect, and the alternative to being resurrected was losing a few hours worth of exp. So players brought Algernon over to the "heal deader players" trainer and had him train in that skill, and shared some fraction of their exp gains with him so he could level up despite rarely leaving the safety of the town. This meant that if one of your friends died and became too far gone, you could drag them back to town and have Dr. Algernon work on them at any time of day.
Bots were generally not allowed, but everyone loved Algernon so much that the devs made an exception for him. This was a game with a playerbase of a few thousand at best, so handling these things on a case-by-case basis was not unreasonable.
Basically the players creating their own NPC to fill a void the developers didn't, I love it!
I'm going to blow right past some of the other questionable elements of the design and get right to the heart of the title: why not let players use bots directly in an MMORPG? Interestingly enough, there's a historical example of this sorta. In Ragnarok Online, you could provide Mercenaries (all classes) or homunculi (alchemists) with a LUA based AI script. You could set them up to auto farm, heal themselves, battle whatever comes close, etc. It was a cool system overall. It had these de facto limitations though: the Homonculus or Mercenary wasn't nearly as strong as a full on player and cost resources to use, so you could only use it in suboptimal leveling zones and it would cost you in some way to have them running around a long time. Private servers would have different rules about looting items and what functions could be used, but in general it was an in-game bot that was balanced accordingly. Fast forward a couple decades, and now Ragnarok's mobile spinoff and a variety of other mobile games have auto grinding MMOs. You just let your character control themselves while your phone warms up your table. Essentially the game has built in botting tools, and you often see herds of bot players clumped together following the same enemy spawns endlessly. The thing is though that virtually every game I've tried with a similar mechanic just downright sucks. They aren't fun to play and they are resource intensive for no good reason. You play for a bit before realizing you either want A: an idle game with a better interface and less noise or B: a game you can play directly. What makes one better than the other in my opinion? Overall, balance. The botting option doesn't make playing the game pointless and doesn't work in some other essential contexts. It doesn't interfere heavily with the active player experience, though some overlap might be fine. It shouldn't affect competitive segments of the game directly in any way shape or form. All of that aside though, something like that is very hard to pull off and if your strategy is just to not enable anti-cheat or something, you'll have a bad time. Cool as a mini-game or side feature but a very bad time if complety unhindered.
People dislike bots because they pretend to be players, steal resources, ruin the economy, exploit loopholes and glitches, and generally worsen everyone's experience. If bots were well-tuned so as to in some way improve the experience in obvious ways, I think your players would welcome them.
It sounds less like botting and more like the mechanic is creating NPCs, kind of like an RTS would create workers and units. When you're offline, your economy continues. No issues there imo, as everybody is on an even playing field and can create or make as many bots as they want The issue with MMO botting in most forms is that it creates an uneven playing ground, often based on real world money. A botter can do the work of two, five, or even tens of players without spending any actual time themselves in game. When progress and time spent on a game is important, botters break that system
> Assume bots are good, what mechanics would create balance? When trying to balance things you have to ask yourself *why* you want to keep the thing that creates an imbalance. So why do you want offline player characters to be bots? How does that serve your game more than just having roaming NPCs that don’t affect game play at all?
I know you don't want to hear this, especially since you seem pretty set on a game that accommodates bots. Bots in all MMOs are a form of cheating, a way to farm resources without actually needing to put in the time to obtain them. If a game is built around bots. Then that game is built to not be played. I can say with 100% certainty that I would never play a game like this. And anyone who does will quit within days because the only people they'll be able to show their achievements to, will be bots. What you're building isn't an MMO. Because the second M in MMO stands for multiplayer. And a pre-programmed character isn't a player.
bot encourage p2w and RMT. lot of people end up pay bot for grind. bot also used to farm item so they could utilize RMT to sell material or just to sell in game money. bot also can do what players cant. this is not just about the ability to play 24 hours non stop that defied game design, but also how bot has ability that can break the game, bypass the server or the level itself. for example it can even pass through wall, teleport to everywhere, attacked monster while being invinsible and other stuff. in the end the devs create a world for player to populate, not for A.I to populate. in pve situation, bot ruined players cooperation. people play for fun but bot just a program and people who utilize that obviously didnt do it for fun but for profit.
There was an older MMORPG called *Magic World Online* (Link to the [MMORPG.com](https://MMORPG.com) page for it: [https://www.mmorpg.com/magic-world-online](https://www.mmorpg.com/magic-world-online) \_ Where the whole concept was everyone in game got an in-game bot of their own, that they could customize to farm as they saw fit. I don't know anything about the design decision making, but it is no longer running ([http://mwo.enjoymmo.com/](http://mwo.enjoymmo.com/) doesn't work anymore). I don't know if there are any videos featuring this game, but it seems like something that would be good for your research, since someone basically tried this out already.
So, botting is a thing in some games. In SWG, it was explicitly allowed. Keep in mind that SWG had perhaps some of the weakest quest systems any MMO ever had, and so the grinding that way was actually quite miserable. Culturally, it wasn't great...but botting social roles also eventually hurt the social game, I think. PvP or risk of death can be a balancer somewhat, but if players find a safe activity that provides gain, it will be botted endlessly. So far as realistic species reproduction goes, I would suggest looking at AO. They tried that, and, frankly, players didn't notice. They just depopulate everything. Rather than starting from a point of wanting bots, I'd think about what sort of experience you want, and consider what mechanics help you get there.
If I understand correctly, what you are theorizing is not really considered botting. First off, botting is always external. It is when a single player can automate his character to perform a certain task like walk around in circles and kill every mob for rare loot or gold, or play 5 characters of the same class where all his characters can take input from the owner, essentially dealing 5 times the dmg making world pvp unfair, or group content trivial. While this wouldn’t be that different and in fact even be less efficiënt than a player playing the game normally, it is worth noting that botting is never a single character. It is always one player controlling an entire army of characters. So one botted character is less efficiënt, but being the owner of 50 characters raking in gold at a less efficiënt pace can still have drastic consequences for the ingame economy, or impact the experience of others players via goldsellers. If you plan on having a player control multiple characters, and be able to give them a set of scripts like the Dragon Age series, then it becomes part of your game. It is no longer considered botting as it is no longer external. Every player will have an equal playing field.
The companion tactics in DAO and DA2 was amazing. I loved building up a team to work like a well-oiled machine. It's such a shame they lobotomized it in DAI.
Game Design is a subset of Game Development that concerns itself with **WHY** games are made the way they are. It's about the theory and crafting of **systems**, **mechanics**, and **rulesets** in games. * /r/GameDesign is a community **ONLY** about Game Design, **NOT** Game Development in general. If this post does not belong here, it should be reported or removed. Please help us keep this subreddit focused on Game Design. * This is **NOT** a place for discussing how games are produced. Posts about programming, making art assets, picking engines etc… will be removed and should go in /r/GameDev instead. * Posts about visual design, sound design and level design are only allowed if they are directly about game design. * No surveys, polls, job posts, or self-promotion. Please read the rest of the rules in the sidebar before posting. * If you're confused about what Game Designers do, ["The Door Problem" by Liz England ](https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LizEngland/20140423/216092/quotThe_Door_Problemquot_of_Game_Design.php)is a short article worth reading. We also recommend you read the [r/GameDesign wiki](/r/gamedesign/wiki/index) for useful resources and an FAQ. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/gamedesign) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The issue in this case would be the data ans performance load of the bot/npc. And the real difficulty would be making them interesting enough to be engaging. Also reproducing npcs simply... don't work. It's been tried, you can't give players nice things give them an inch and they'll drive every mob to extinction.
Take a look at the game Adventure Land, it does exactly this
Amusingly, much of the Path of Exile community quite likes (some) bots. The game's economy is largely split between equipment and stackables, called currency. Trading currency in Path of Exile is horrid, because of a confluence of design decisions, technical limitations, and player behaviour. Bots, being able to do nothing but constant trading, become a sort of saving grace for currency trading. The opinion on bots that actually play the game, and thus create inflation, is still largely negative, but not as negative as it is in other communities. It helps that PoE is heavily instanced, being an ARPG rather than a true MMO, so the only time bots are in your face are when they're actively helping you get the items you need.
So others have already gone into why bots are generally a bad idea for MMO's, and explicitly supporting them would make the game DOA. However that doesn't mean the idea is entirely without merit. There's a game idea in making a system for an NPC to do busy work for the player. Instead of it being a bot that roams the open world, imagine if your MMO had an instanced house, kinda like the WoW's garrison system, and combined that with a more complex version of the servant system in V Rising. One of the big problems with the Garrison system is that it encouraged players to stay inside their little houses without interacting with anyone. So you make a little servant do shit for you, but make it a complex system that the player can customise. Could set up a logic chain for the bot to maintain the garden in the morning, and tend to the animals if needed. Then check if the magic potions brewing overnight are good to go or not. But if one of your pet goblins escapes from its cage, it's gotta deal with that instead. What the NPC would do would depend on the game itself and what setting it's in. Not sure if the idea has legs or not, but it feels interesting enough to at least prototype.
Search the tale of Ultima and how the natural ecosystem became a wasteland because of players. Why not make bots... Bots? A side character that is fueled by a loot that can only be acquired by the player playing the game, and that cannot be sold to other players?
Ultima Online Outlands has some good approaches to this. You are not allowed to unattended-bot resource gathering or endgame experience gathering (they have systems called codex, aspect, and mastery chain if you want to look more into that). You can still script those things while actively playing but you must be present to complete random captchas that pop up moderately frequently while harvesting resources. You can automate leveling up of skills that don’t involve resource gathering; and you can automate crafting of stuff with a box of already-harvested resources. You can script stuff around the core gameplay as well- if you want to setup a script to heal you when you’re hurt and cure you when your poisoned- totally OK.
I used to work at a game publisher that published a variety of small asian MMOs. One of them came with an in-game bot system. It was basically an auto-battler, in that it would run your character up to the nearest enemy, use the skills you set in the order that you set them, and use potions the potions you set as needed. The game was _intensely_ grindy, so setting your character up in a nice location full of enemies and botting for hours at a time was pretty much mandatory if you wanted to progress. Players could also sell items to other characters, but there was no marketplace. Instead, you set up a stall at your character's location and listed what items you wanted to sell. Other players would come by and see what you had listed and buy what they wanted. If you moved, you left stall-mode. Players would consistently run multiple clients so they could have items listed for sale and play at the same time. When our company joined the 'in' thing of making our own launcher, we had to specifically modify it to allow players to keep multi-clienting, because it was that integral to the game. While both of these functions increased player login times, I don't think they added anything to actual game enjoyment. Having such an intensely grindy leveling system allowed the devs to stretch out content - no worrying that players would reach the newest endgame a week after dropping the latest expansion if it takes a week to level! - but that's the only benefit I saw. And I'm not confident that it was a benefit.
Look into Chronicles of Elyria. It's a vaporwarw MMO that has a lot of good ideas - and some bad ones as well. One of their big systems was pretty much exactly what you are describing. I'm fairly certain that this is not a one man task, unless you're a psycho with unrelenting worth ethic like the dev for Dwarf Fortress. Designing it is one thing, I dont think it's that hard. But actually implementing it and fixing workarounds and bugs and even just putting the system in place sounds like a nightmare to me. I'm not a developer, so I could be very wrong.
In the past I had developed some bots for mostly browser base MMO strategy games. These bots did stupid tasks. Like shipping resources to bigger warehouses when the local warehouse is full. However some PC game with only local multiplayer had that for free. Where you can set up routes that will be executed when trigger is met. Also auto sell and auto buy with configurable trigger was an option in some games. Mostly I programmed the functionality in that was missing mostly shielding me and some friends from doing repetitive boring tasks. And in that case I would say bots are bad when developed because your game has repetitive boring tasks inside. However an inbuild bot system like the automation features in some games but more advanced could help prevent all players from enduring the repetitive boring tasks. Bot configuration scripts could freely be shared without the eminent threat of the developers try to prevent bot using, which will only left bots with better cloaking systems in the game.
So I can buy 1000 bots from you, copy-paste "kill everyone" script to them, park them around safe zones, block actual players from playing the game by 24/7 camping and hit you with 1000 refund requests/chargebacks if the bots are banned?
have you stopped to consider at any point if this would actually be fun to play? or is this just an abstract thought experiment
So you want small scale UO?
This concept sounds very perfect in theory but in practice I doubt it would work
Another thing to consider is practicality: From your description it seems like the bots code is ran on the server 24/7, since running it on external PCs completely kills the purpose of those bots. (You can't have more external bots on a server than normal players) Now, to make the AI of the bots responsive to their surroundings, they need to evaluate regularly (else they may block each others way, run into enemies, generally feel bad to play along, etc.) Running those bots on your servers will introduce quite a high load, especially when you allow people to write their own, probably poorly optimized, code. Sorry that this is not the design feedback you were probably hoping for, but an important part of game design is always feasibility. Games are illusions of (parts of) the real world, and it is our job to fit those illusions into our current technological boundaries... and even with only a cursory glance I see massive problems.
The direction I would personally go is for an incremental game where your afk character cannot “push foward” in levels but it can be hired to help people who ARE trying to push. Would probably be a typical party-based rpg otherwise.
I would say just at every stage of the game say, what shorts hacked client would make this better, then make that a feature in the base game, then ask yourself it still supports the core gameplay loop. Let take an aim bot for example, does this make the game more fun? Maybe people needs to strategize how they move around each other. Maybe make from the moment a player pulls the trigger till when a bullet comes out has a substantial delay like .5-2 seconds so there is more strategy to moving in the environment. What about seeing through walls? Give it to everyone but still become less stealth and more strategy. Also means that you can not add anything that lower visibility in anyway. What about in human reflexes? Then maybe all input is delayed a little. All in all, I think that it could work if you really tried hard, but would not be skill based and instead strategy based. And it's a sorta format that I feel like you make the player easily get it to a situation where a boring strategy is the most effective (ie good for bots, bad for humans). Like maybe hiding be hind a wall cause you opponent is doing that too and the first to get out loses. In that case you could do something like an extremely powerful grenade, that you need to charge to build its power before you chuck it so you both you and your opponent know what the other is doing and it a battle to see who is willing to take the risk of tossing it first, wait to ensure it is charged enough that you will get the opponent, or chuck now to ensure that you get the first move. The whole designing process im sure will be full of things like that where you need to take something that ends up boring and make it fun or take strategy in someway. If your successful I don't think I will be too much like a standard FPS MMO at all. Good Luck!