It's definitely not how people act these days, at least with indie/solo game developers.
Can you guess what I did in the early days to eventually grow the server to over 2000 real active players?
Maybe some portion of the 2000 organic players were also running bots?
I ran some personal bots back in the Diablo 2 days with D2Loader and some shareware bot plug-in I bought on a shady site for like $12 in ~2003-2004 or so. Wish I could remember the name.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100813125735/http://d2loader.b...
Apparently there are modern versions of D2Loader type software. I haven’t really followed the game or the bot scene much these days, but I like the cat and mouse game in general across the physical and virtual space. Red teaming scratches that itch I guess.
So that if there were only 6 online it’d report 123. Took only a few weeks before I was able to disable it and report the real values.