Comment by DonHopkins

Here's a story about The Sims Online I posted a few years ago, in which I described making a maze solving bot to quickly and automatically generate millions of Simoleons, and an ad-hoc solution to the delivery problem:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730181

I wrote a bot for The Sims Online that manufactured Simoleons, then repurposed it to catalog and describe objects in the game for you with a speech synthesizer. TSO had some ham-fisted money making multi player games that forced players to interact with each other in exchange for Simoleons.

One of them was a maze solving game for two players, where one player is lost in the maze and can see the local walls around them, and the other player can see an overall map of the maze without the player's position, and has to guide them around and figure out where they are and how to guide them out by asking them what they see and telling them which direction to move.

That required a lot of work for two people to do manually, so there was a big reward, but it was trivial and fun to solve mazes programmatically! (Plus it made cool bleeping and kaching sounds as it solved the mazes and printed money!)

I would run two TSO clients at the same time, logged into different accounts in different windows. The bot attached to both of them, then screen scraped pixels and injected events to repeatedly solve mazes by moving the player around until it identified where they were, solving for the shortest path, and bringing them straight home quickly by machine-gun clicking on the arrow buttons.

My housemate had a good eBay reputation, so as an experiment, we tried selling Simoleons on eBay for real currency via PayPal.

I could generate arbitrarily huge amount of virtual currency quite quickly. The bottleneck was selling it, and the problem was customer service.

The problem was that many of the customers were pouty temperamental 15-year-olds using their parent's eBay accounts, who would give scathing eBay reviews if their order wasn't delivered instantly, or they suffered some imagined slight.

And the other problem was that TSO just wasn't designed to make it easy to transfer large amounts of Simoleons from player to player.

You couldn't just "wire" somebody an arbitrary amount of cash via in-game email -- you had to show up on their lot and meet them at a specific real time, and suspiciously hand it over to them $1000 at a time.

There was another better way to transfer cash more efficiently than handing it over grand by grand, and that was with tip jars: You could fill a tip jar with $5000 using the pie menu with a couple of mouse clicks, and then the user could empty it the same way.

So when I had to deliver our first million Simoleons, I came up with a system where I'd go to the lot of the customer and meet them, then ask them to line up a bunch of tip jars in a row. I would then use bot macros to fill each tip jar one by one with $5000, while the customer would quickly empty them as I filled them up, and then we'd go back to the beginning of the row and start all over again, until we'd transferred the entire million Simoleons, in only 200 $5000 hand=>jar=>hand transactions instead of 1000 $1000 hand=>hand transactions.

One time when we were making a big delivery of cash, running the gauntlet of tip jars in our customer's living room (which I admit looked pretty fishy), and their housemate came home, saw what was happening, and wisely sussed up the situation that there was some kind of deal going down, that she wanted in on.

So she put her own tip jar down at the end of her housemate's row of tip jars, and I blithely deposited $5000 into her tip jar several times, which she immediately snapped up.

When I realized what happened, instead of contracting The Sims Mafia to do a hit on her, I congratulated her for her loose morals and ingenuity. It was such a great hack, and I totally fell for it, and had more Simoleons than I knew what to do with anyway. It's all about good customer service!

It was a fun experiment, but other bots and offshore farmers were starting to work the system too, and customer service and delivery problems made it not worth continuing.

So the unemployed Sims bot wouldn't feel bored, I retrained it into a more practical assistive utility called "Simplifier", which knew how to recognize and navigate the Sims user interface to show, scroll through, and enumerate all the many items, wallpapers, floor tiles, etc, in the catalog.

Simplifier demo starts at 3:15: https://youtu.be/Imu1v3GecB8?t=3m15s

It took snapshots of the icons, and read the text off the screen to capture the title, price and description (it was all in a bitmap Comic Sans font, so it was easy for a bot to recognize, if not for your eyes to read), and made a searchable illustrated database of all your built-in and downloaded content.

Simplifier addressed the problem that many players would download thousands of objects from web sites, or make their own custom objects with tools like Transmogrifier and RugOMatic (shown earlier in the demo video), but it was impossible to search or keep track of them through The Sims interface.

And it was useful for Sims web site publishers to make illustrated catalogs of their own objects.

You could also operate it in manual mode, where you press and hold on an icon in the catalog, and it reads the object description to you with a speech synthesizer.

That was useful for kids learning to read, old farts with bad eyesight, and snobby designers who hate Comic Sans, who would enjoy having the object descriptions read to them.

Schneier on Security: Virtual Mafia in Online Worlds:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/virtual_mafia...

Randy Farmer and Bryce Glass: Building Web Reputation Systems: The Dollhouse Mafia, or "Don't Display Negative Karma"

http://buildingreputation.com/writings/2009/10/the_dollhouse...