In recent years, online gaming has become one of the most popular Internet activities, but cheating activity, such as the use of game bots, has increased as a consequence. Generally, the gaming community disagrees with the use of game bots, as bot users obtain unreasonable rewards without corresponding efforts. However, bots are hard to detect because they are designed to simulate human game playing behavior and they follow game rules exactly. Existing detection approaches either interrupt the players' gaming experience, or they assume game bots are run as standalone clients or assigned a specific goal, such as aim bots in FPS games.

In this paper, we propose a trajectory-based approach to detect game bots. It is a general technique that can be applied to any game in which the avatar's movement is controlled directly by the players. Through real-life data traces, we show that the trajectories of human players and those of game bots are very different. In addition, although game bots may endeavor to simulate players' decisions, certain human behavior patterns are difficult to mimic because they are AI-hard. Taking Quake 2 as a case study, we evaluate our scheme's performance based on reallife traces. The results show that the scheme can achieve a detection accuracy of 95% or higher given a trace of 200 seconds or longer.

Related paper:
- Game Bot Identification based on Manifold Learning
- Identifying MMORPG Bots: A Traffic Analysis Approach
- Detection of MMORPG Bots Based on Behavior Analysis

Kuan-Ta Chen, Andrew Liao, Hsing-Kuo Kenneth Pao, and Hao-Hua Chu, "Game Bot Detection Based on Avatar Trajectory," In Proceedings of IFIP ICEC 2008, 2008.

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