Recently I had to leave the country for the month of April to get a new visa. Fortunately I received said visa and all is well. During the month I visited Canada and then China and Seoul, Korea. I was hoping to post a long-winded travelogue, but didn’t finish it in a timely fashion and decided to trim things down for individual posts.<\/p>\n
One tale I was told that boggled me was this; apparently a very large Chinese MMO operator (begins with S) has a very successful MMORPG that is overrun with botting (the practice of running third-party software robots to kill monsters and thereby gather up more goodies). Nothing new there, bots are common in many games. The Bot for this game is sold for ~$20. Fair enough, you say, underground Bot-hackers need to eat, too.<\/p>\n
The incredible thing is that you can pay for this Bot using the official game-time cards sold by the operator<\/strong>. You can only pay for two things with the card; game-time (and\/or in-game items, I believe their are switching models) and the Bot. Yes, the operator is essentially selling the robot. The implications for concurrent user numbers and revenue (where $20 is a lot more than the ~$2 monthly charge) are profound.<\/p>\n Somebody please tell me I’ve got all this wrong. It’ll help my poor eyes get a rest from boggling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Recently I had to leave the country for the month of April to get a new visa. Fortunately I received said visa and all is well. During the month I visited Canada and then China and Seoul, Korea. I was hoping to post a long-winded travelogue, but didn’t finish it in a timely fashion and … Continue reading Exile observations, China: Operators Selling Bots?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9,2,3,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefloggingwillcontinue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefloggingwillcontinue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefloggingwillcontinue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefloggingwillcontinue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefloggingwillcontinue.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thefloggingwillcontinue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefloggingwillcontinue.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefloggingwillcontinue.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefloggingwillcontinue.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}