I haven't absorbed all the slides yet, although I think regular readers will follow along without too many difficulties. But the presentation did have three slides that referenced YouTube videos that I wasn't too sure about. So yesterday I spent a couple of hours watching the videos. Since I haven't really put together a post that comprises all of this information in one place, I figure some people might find the information interesting.
The first video, "Hacking MMORPGs for Fun and Mostly Profit," features Mike Donnely, the creator of the WoW Glider bot, the most successful bot ever sold. The video introduces the botters view of the world. Just a warning for all the Inner Space fans. Mike Donnely tells an Inner Space story from 40:12 - 44:00.
The second video, "Securing MMOs: A Security Professional's View From The Inside," is given by someone who worked at Bioware for 7 months. Not exactly the most professional presentation but informative nonetheless.
The final video is of Greg Hoglund, the founder of HBGary and author of a bunch of security books. The video below is from when he was promoting his book, Exploiting Online Games: Cheating Massively Distributed Systems, back in 2007. I'm not sure but I think I know why CCP Stillman chose this video. I set up the link to start at a very interesting place.
Hopefully between CCP Stillman's presentation slides and these YouTube videos people will get a better understanding of some of the issues surrounding botting and grey market RMT.
UPDATE: CCP Stillman provided this input via Twitter...
@noizygamer The point of those videos is basically to point out all the public work that's been done about MMOs so far.
— CCP Stillman (@CCP_Stillman) September 23, 2013
@noizygamer And those videos is the only actual material I could really find that was interesting or relevant.
— CCP Stillman (@CCP_Stillman) September 23, 2013
@noizygamer The point being: Nobody really likes to talk about this problem. That's a shame. It's an interesting problem set.
— CCP Stillman (@CCP_Stillman) September 23, 2013
