Quote Originally Posted by KageTokage View Post
I feel leery about them implementing any kind of automated countermeasures for bots when the only one currently in existence to my knowledge (The whole "fish sense something amiss" thing) only serves to inconvenience players as all of the fishing bots have a multitude of alternate fishing spots they'll cycle through whenever it kicks in.

The only automated measure I've seen actually have some measure of success are security softwares that link to a MMO's client and will either prevent from you connecting at all or immediately close the game if it senses some kind of outside program interacting with it, but they're really just an additional hurdle for the bot makers to work around in the end and it can potentially alienate people who use more harmless things like parsers.
Those programs only hinder curious people, it does nothing for the script kiddies who are the main customer of the bots. Hackshield is defeated by undermining the CRT (C Runtime) and every other kind of DRM is defeated the same way. Basically something else "launches" the game, sees the anti-hacking software, and then just disconnects the function path so that it just spinwaits while doing nothing yet leaving the "call home" function working as normal, which is why the client closes in those games. As pointed out frequently, these anti-hacking tools simply don't stop anyone. The PC is simply not a secure platform.

If MMORPG's only came out for the PS4, it's very likely (due to the non-encrypted nature of the game's communication channels) that someone would just run the game through a linux box and tamper with it that way.

That's why encryption of the network traffic has to be the first defense against tampering. The developers reluctance to even do a trivial level of encryption is probably because it would hamper their own security tools.