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Comment by GregorStocks | Hacker News Reader

I was really hoping I could build this on top of MTGO or Arena, just as a bot interacting with real Wizards APIs and paying the developers money. But they've got very strong "absolutely no bots" terms of service, and my understanding is that outside of the special case of MTGO trading bots they're strongly enforced with bans. I assume their reasoning is that people do not want to get matched against bot players in tournaments, which is totally fair. (Also I'm not sure MTGO's infrastructure could handle the load of bot users...)

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I ran a bot for years that I wrote using Java in a few minutes and they never came at me. It just joined a match and played lands 24/7 and won games every once in a while because people leave games randomly. It technically played all colors and some of the trinkets count as spells, etc. This allowed me to never do any of their lootbox like mechanics or other predatory practices.

Regarding actually doing it under the radar there are a lot of ways. They likely are catching most of the players because they create synthetic events using the Windows API and similar, which is also part of the same system being used for CAPTCHAS that are being used to stop web scraping like the kind that just ask for a button press.

This can be worked around by using a fake mouse driver that is actually controlled by software if you must stay on Windows. It can be worked around by just running the client on Linux as well. It can also he worked around using qemu as the client and using its native VNC as those are hardware events too =)

Well, it's hard to do it under the radar if I'm posting it on HackerNews :) I've put enough money into MTGO (and, sigh, Arena) that I don't want to roll the dice on a ban.

That makes sense. I play Arena a bit, but have always rejected the monetization model of not allowing players to pick what cards they want easily or play with proxies or something similar for casual friend games. I have absolutely no interest in their competitive game modes. I was slightly interested in the idea in the early days of buying boosters and getting arena codes, but they messed that up pretty bad and paper magic as a whole has been turned into a game of milking whales similar to predator mobile games or apps. The end result is Arena is something I will jump on to fool around sometimes every few months and remember why I don't want a second part time job.

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