Legend: Legacy of the Dragons Forum

The game rules say in article 3:
§3. External programs

It is not allowed to use external programs to improve or automatize game features (bots, cheats). This includes:

1. The use of external programs for trades and commercial services.
2. The use of external programs for receiving and processing resources.
3. The use of external programs for leveling up.

The rule's intention is to prohibit players (or others on behalf of players) from using technology or other non-human means to accomplish game things that are meant to be accomplished only through human input. Every game click is meant to be physically clicked by a finger or toe, not by a computer code that mimics human clicking.

One example is people using some little program to automate their character's picking of flowers or rocks or fish. Instead of spending hours staring at the screen and clicking their cursors on the icons to pick them, they run illegal code that automates the picking process so they can look away and perhaps watch the sunrise or read a book. The proper procedure is to stare and click the whole time. It's not fair to the people left staring that others walk away and don't pay attention to the game flowers because then those cheaters have more relaxed brains and less valid work ethics. They can also have their characters pick tons more without ever suffering fatigue or hunger or any other human reason to stop picking.

The same method of using external code to allow a character to hunt endlessly or to change their tally of experience points or to select 'buy' or 'sell' of items without a human taking part is unfair for the same reason. It allows whoever is playing that character using the code to get around human limitations. Just like when the computer program AlphaGo won the Go game championship earlier this month against a human competitor, all the fun gets sucked out and the competition is no longer interesting or fair to the other humans.

The innate advantage that computerized programs have for doing repeating, mind-numbing tasks makes them better at it than humans. There is no numbing of an artificial mind if it's originally designed to do numbing things like click a lot. If a few cheating players use that advantage to avoid the boring and time consuming parts of the game, they gain an unfair edge over players who don't.

(In)famously employed by many notable high-level/ranked Turk, COM, and ES players, external programs are exactly what their name would suggest: any non-human outside "bot", "hack", or "cheat" often intended to automate or augment WOD features.

More specifically, the article in question is as follows:
§3. External programs

It is not allowed to use external programs to improve or automatize game features (bots, cheats). This includes:
The use of external programs for trades and commercial services.
The use of external programs for receiving and processing resources.
The use of external programs for leveling up.

The punishment for breaking this game rule falls under category 9 of the punishments page and is outlined below:
Using third party software

Including but not limited to:

Use of third party software that allows one to collect resources
Use of third party software that allows one to perform automated game actions
Use of third party software that allows one to fight monsters

Punishment: Curse of Rejection

Buying out fee: from 500(diamonds)

Notably, this is the only punishment where the buying out fee is explicitly listed in diamonds (where the reason why is obvious, because the primary point of external programs is to gain unfair advantages in game, most often in the form of gold, the fee for every single other punishment).

When we consider why people use external programs, some reasons immediately spring to mind (from general to specific):
1. "Easy" accumulation of gold, items, rep with no human effort/paypal required.
2. Along with the former point: the automation of fights (for rep or to gain experience quickly), professions (more for money)
3. With the rise of referral rewards, and especially the Pkhadd mount, a novel way of using external programs is to quickly create many characters to simultaneously grind levels and specifically, HoF rep. There is reasonable cause to believe that such a case is happening right now on the human side, given an influx of low level players with similar play patterns, lack of armor, and profiles. Many of those rewards are deliberately meant to be incredibly unaccessible, and the fact that some people have the pkhadd mount brings into play this rule.

Clearly, all of these reasons show the inherent unfairness of external programs; botters gain the same benefits as people who have toiled long hours doing professions or reputations and perhaps more relevant to the admins, people who have paypalled hundreds if not thousands of real-world dollars into WoD.

To address the elephant in the room "the samples of external programs", the most famous "bot", known as WoDLeXtreme likely composes a very significant portion of botters in WoD and thus, a large amount of the bans that have been given out for botting. One only needs to see the quite-popular Turkish Facebook page advertising the service to gauge how popular this bot was in the past, but at least right now, their website is down and admins are cracking down on users of this bot.

Although admins obviously keep their method of bot detection under-wraps, the detection of bots like WoDLeXtreme is likely at least dependent on a couple factors. Firstly, if we take a look at lososerg's list of saved fights, one method of detection looks at "suspicious fights", mostly when a very-high level character uses pots in a very abnormal, even "robotic" manner or grinds a large number of mobs in a short time, but fails to respawn after an unexpected loss. Another method is more suited towards professions, looks at mouse movements and the "time" between clicks, because actual humans tend to have quite a big variance in those two parameters. On the other hand, "bots" necessarily have a pattern in the way a location is moved around and the time between clicks on resources is very uniform.

Although our tireless guards and admins are continually looking for suspicious play patterns that would suggest the usage of external programs as roughly outlined above, new "bots" and "cheats" that remain undetected are almost certainly still being used in game due to two factors: one, the potential reward is too high in terms of gameplay and two: expertise needed to create such a bot isn't too demanding, especially for fight bots which, even taking into account variability in terms of crits/dodges etc., are little more than mouse click macros.

In summary, if we allow bots to ever really have a permanent foothold in the game, we necessarily divide the player population into the botter "haves" and the non-botter "have-nots". Such a scenario would alienate a very large segment, even majority of WoD's already small playerbase and drive away the paypallers that keep the servers running. Eloise did a very good job detailing the unfairness of external programs, and I hope I did the same explaining more about the specifics and motivations of such external programs and their users.

It means we can't use any external programs to facilitate our progression in the game.
Such as auto-clickers, or bots to hunt monsters or pick ressources while you're doing something else like having a life.
How is it unfair? External programs can save you hundreds of hours in picking or hunting. So it is unfair for those who spend these hours on the game, while those who use external programs benefits the same advantages of the hunt and collecting, while doing something else than playing the game, thus making tons of golds without even being present in the game

The aim of that rule is: BE FAIR!!! a Bot (from the word robot) program is atool that can simulate human activities on the web, and usually are used automate some boring activities (like picking resources, or hunting monsters), or can It's clear if you use such kind of tools, you can take unfair advantage on other players.

Article 3: Explain the rule in detail and give samples for external programs.
Article 3 taken from Game Rules.
§3. External programs
It is not allowed to use external programs to improve or automatize game features (bots, cheats).
This includes:
1. The use of external programs for trades and commercial services.
2. The use of external programs for receiving and processing resources.
3. The use of external programs for leveling up.

This rule emphasize that any sort of external programs usage are prohibited.
If caught :
1. The character will be set upon a Curse of Rejection indefinitely.
2. A buy out fee of 500.

The term "external programs" are refered to a programs that enable an automatic/recored action.
An example of such program related to WoD is WoDLeXtreme.


Why is the use of external programs not fair towards other players?
Using such a program gives a large advantage to the user. The most obvious advantage, as an external program user, is the time spent on obtaining resources or hunting monster. Since they can just leave those actions to the automated programs as long as they are logged in to the game.