I'm all up for reading books, playing games, watching films etc.. I question the need for high frequency trading in those leisure pursuits ;)
The exact same thing happens with value; value is created itself by offer and demand, you can say that mining gold doesn't create any value for society, or you can say that it does, it completely depends on your definition of "value for society". Some may say that finding golp helps thousands of jewelries and jewelry makers, that it brings money in to multinational companies and so forth. But at the end of the day you could say the same about this kind of bots, you are moving money from people that have resources to spend on digital goods transfer to third world countries like Bulgaria. That it also helps to the entertainment, where a lot of trades happens all the time giving entropy to the ecosystem.
I ask you to dig a hole and pay you 10$. I then pay you 10$ (or better still you pay me) to fill the whole. Was 20$ dollars worth of value created?
Company makes MMO that is only fun if you grind to level 60. Guy pays third world country citizen to play the game for him until he reaches level 60. You claim that is a good thing because it gave a job to someone in the third world. I put it to you that is madness akin to digging and filling holes over and over. The company could sell you a level 60 character at no cost to them (changing a few bits on a server) and give the money to the third world citizen in aid (obviously not going to happen) and nothing would change except he could do something productive rather than slave away at a PC 12 hours a day (like we do).
The concept of value is completely related to what you value and absolutely nothing else; if you value having a 60 level character you are willing to pay for that, if the game company does not offer that deal you are going to look another way to pay for it. Is like when someone give you apples in exchange for oranges, is not about creating value, is about exchanging. If you value more the oranges that's completely up to you. Therefore, charity (non-exchange) is a whole different subject.
I'd suggest that to make the hole-digging analogy work, we'd need to assume that there are people willing to pay $20 for the privilege of seeing a hole dug and then refilled (or something similar). And if that's the case, then who's to say the digging and refilling didn't create $20 of value?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_decision#Formal_mathema...
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developing_country
But it has been very enjoyable and educational. When I started I had essentially no programming experience and taught myself as I went along. I find it much easier to learn programming when I have an interesting project to directly apply it to.
I was always averse to trying out botting in the games where it is against the Terms of Use, that is, every game I know (I guess I'm goody two shoes like that.) The closest I know is Magic Online where trade bots are tolerated by the administration, but I just couldn't stand to play the game itself, even though it sounded fascinating in theory.
But the trading system is web-based so it's not too hard to bot it.
If you look at things in terms of making money and contributing to the 'real world' then almost every hobby is a waste of time.
I mean, does it really matter if it's real life or not? Money might be completely unimportant to somebody... if they already make enough from their day job they're free to do whatever's fun for them in their spare time.
It's worth noting, though, that botting tends to flourish in any multiplayer game that allows it to, regardless of the potential for real money profit. Hell, MUDs used to have botting issues when I played them 20+ years ago. [0]
As for why, I'd say that automating a game is a game in and of itself, and depending on the particulars it can be both challenging and rewarding. (Sometimes moreso than the actual game!) So in implementing the RMAH, I think Blizzard made a playable meta-game, and the result was that people played it. The author of this article simply played it competitively. ;)
[0] Probably still do..
speaking from experience, yes, it is much more enjoyable playing the meta-botting game than the actual game!
I used to play Ragnarok Online circa 2000 (on a private server - not the official one). This particular private server is a donation server, meaning if you paid real money, you can buy items from the admins/owners which is impossible to get otherwise. Think pay-to-win style items.
i was in high school at the time, and didn't have money to pay a "donation" to get these powerful items. Now, it's possible to buy these donation only items from player auctions in the game, but i didn't have enough gold to do so. But i did have some programming experience, and found an opensource bot (http://www.openkore.com/index.php/Main_Page) to use. Being a private server meant you can create unlimited free accounts, and so i decided to start a bot army, where banning a character don't mean anything, as the work to create the character is also automated.
Botting in Rag required your character to have a certain level, otherwise, it's not efficient, so the first task is to write a script to automatically level up your botting character, with the right skills and automatically collect the required armour, spells etc. This was the hardest part - full custom scripts needed to be written for each separate requirement. once a large number of bots are created, they are then spread out evenly across profitable maps to farm items to sell to NPCs. Some tricks include auto-teleporting when another player comes into view, which makes it difficult for anyone to spot you (as max view distance is lower than the distance at which your bot receives notice from the server of player entities coming into view).
The second part of botting involve item laundering, which involve rapidly dropping and picking up items from the floor, instead of making a normal player-to-player trade (or bot-to-bot trade in this case). Because this is suppose to be agnostic to bans, i cannot afford to keep any large amount of items/gold on any account being botted. I also cannot afford to have a transaction history linking my main playing account (which i don't bot, but play for real with). So i had to create automated money laundering scripts.
But after having botted for approx 3-4 months, after which i had enough money to buy one of the donation items (which is approx $40 in donation), and it made me one of the most powerful characters that didn't actually pay for donation items in the server, i no longer had interest in playing the game, but the botting kept being really interesting. The the code for the bot was a bit buggy, so sometimes bots would stop responding. But there is a way to reset it from another bot. So i devised a heart-beat into each bot, so that every bot monitors several other bots with redunancy, and restarted each other when failure is detected - this failure is done by sending in game private messages. Eventually, this became an army of 50-80 bots, all running together, cooperating to farm the map the most efficient manner, and heart-beat check each other so that there's very little down time. Ahh, those were the days.