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Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

It is like all those ".io" games (ex: https://agar.io/).

You are supposed to play online against other players, but many of these games put you against bots instead. This is evident when you lose internet and the game still runs. The original idea was to first populate the game with bots and progressively replace them with real players as the game become more popular, then developers realized that if they could get away with bots, they didn't need multiplayer at all, just the illusion of it.

Side note: AFAIK, agar.io is real multiplayer, being one of the most popular game of its kind certainly helps. Of course, like in almost all online games, there are still player-run bots, but at least, it is not just JS code running on your machine.

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You know what strikes me as a cheap way to run a bunch of bots to populate servers? Send users a wasm binary for running a bot and run several bots on a user's computer in the bg while they're playing themselves. Maybe check for resource usage and such, though. You can populate enough servers to keep a constant rate of growth up to some reasonable plateau because the amount of bots scales neatly with the amount of players, keeping a constant feeling of crowdedness as you spool up more real servers.

Eh, maybe just have the bots be part of the server software. They're not that expensive. But cool idea.

In gaming, trusting the client with any responsibility will almost always result in hackers causing grief for you.

Nah, bots are really cheap compared to simulating the game. You need to run the whole thing on the server all the time anyway, so you might as well keep a few dozen bots alive while you're at it.

It's only when hundreds of actual people show up that the machine needs to do any real thinking, and by that point you will turned all your bots off anyway.

Source: I built and run https://joust.life/

If you're having fun, then what's wrong with that?

It's pretty hard to start game which's fun is based on PvP, yet you have no players

so bots are the way to go I guess

Not being honest about it is the frustrating part.

Consent is what's missing from these situations. Nothing illegal or major, but I don't think it's a good thing to cheat the people like this.

An approach I liked was with some community Team Fortress 2 servers. They kept a constant minimum player count, say 10, and replaced the missing players with bots. However it was clear to see that they were bots, the TF2 client was explicit about this.

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