I got into programming in 6th grade when I was addicted to the online game Runescape. My parents only allowed me to play 2 hours a day, so i downloaded some bots to farm gold for me.
Within a couple months i got perm banned for macro abuse, and wanted to create a smarter bot. I began making simple edits to scripts to add randomness. I kept getting banned.
By highschool i was putting more effort into coding bots than playing the game. I even started teaching myself how to do some client side modifications via ASM java bytecode injection.
I never made a really great bot, but it was a ton of fun. Over a decade later I am a software dev happy as could be.
Some of the best Runescape bots were all written in SCAR (https://scar-divi.com/). A friend of mine used them for months at a time all on one character to get 99 in many skills. He was never caught and never banned. The scripts were very sophisticated- human style mouse movement, mouse clicks, random event solvers, etc.
Within a couple months i got perm banned for macro abuse, and wanted to create a smarter bot. I began making simple edits to scripts to add randomness. I kept getting banned.
By highschool i was putting more effort into coding bots than playing the game. I even started teaching myself how to do some client side modifications via ASM java bytecode injection.
I never made a really great bot, but it was a ton of fun. Over a decade later I am a software dev happy as could be.