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GPT-6 Astra plays World of Warcraft for the first time with agent-wow

76 points · 59 comments · almostlit

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w4yai · 1790957449 · focus · HN ↗
Funny experiment !
There have been bots playing WoW for more than 20 years though.
The protocol has been figured out long time ago and well documented.
1. hn-acct · 1790961496 · focus · HN ↗
  Accessibility api?
aprct · 1790957630 · focus · HN ↗
I wonder what this will do to the shady gold farming industry.
1. [deleted] · 1790957714 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
2. yourself92 · 1790958232 · focus · HN ↗
  Someone at OpenAI is reading this thinking you may have just solved their funding issues
3. tripleee · 1790958345 · focus · HN ↗
  Nothing because the bots that have already been developed over the last 20 years are much more efficient
  1. blindhippo · 1790958877 · focus · HN ↗
    I have a feeling the same sentiment will ring true across most of the software industry in the next couple years. LLMs are cool, but they don't perform better than purpose built solutions at scale.
    StrauXX · 1790959300 · focus · HN ↗
    You can use LLMs to build purpose-built solutions. You can also use LLMs to automate what used to be human tasks.
    sergiotapia · 1790959467 · focus · HN ↗
    I disagree. It works with the wow gold farmers because there is a finite set of known states in a videogame. In real life I don't think that's the case.
    fwip · 1790965355 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    fatata123 · 1791040166 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
  2. xdavidliu · 1790960224 · focus · HN ↗
    i recall reading somewhere that Steve Bannon, yes that Steve Bannon, once ran a mmo bot farm in asia in the early 2010s
JSR_FDED · 1790958301 · focus · HN ↗
You know what I’ve always thought? That playing WoW would become a lot more fun if there were lots of AI players
1. niceguy1827 · 1790958503 · focus · HN ↗
  but none of them could match leroy jenkins
  1. Insanity · 1790959271 · focus · HN ↗
    Don’t you mean “leeeeeroooooy jeeeeenkins!”
2. simianwords · 1790958626 · focus · HN ↗
  Way to miss the point
  1. fatal94 · 1790959240 · focus · HN ↗
    You can be both impressed by the technical capabilities of modern models around novel tasks and lament the future state of MMORPGs (or any social internet hobby) and the potential explosion of bots that this will bring.
  2. core_dumped · 1790959665 · focus · HN ↗
    What's the point?
    NexRebular · 1790960120 · focus · HN ↗
    Bots do chores, we do fun.
  3. xdavidliu · 1790960168 · focus · HN ↗
    i think they are responding to the point, not missing it
3. ActionHank · 1790959120 · focus · HN ↗
  We’re speed running getting the llms to do all the fun so that we can all go live under a bridge.
  1. ch4s3 · 1790959514 · focus · HN ↗
    I look forward to investing in Bridge Coin.
  2. jrockway · 1790959802 · focus · HN ↗
    Nah, there are plenty of chores for humans to do. While the AIs are composing music and writing code and proving theorems, we still have to do laundry and the dishes.
    esaym · 1790960319 · focus · HN ↗
    Dishes need to wash themselves
    copperx · 1790961943 · focus · HN ↗
    You forgot cooking. That's more fun than the dishes.
  3. qlte · 1790964794 · focus · HN ↗
    Vibe Gaming Unlocking new gaming experience with agentic AI What if, instead of controlling every move your game character made, you could tell them what you wanted and watch them live, act, and connect with others on their own in the changing game world?
    <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-vega/" rel="nofollow">https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-veg...
4. eatsyourtacos · 1790959255 · focus · HN ↗
  Check out Erenshor- I love playing with bots.
5. cbg0 · 1790959518 · focus · HN ↗
  There are AI players already inside Follower Dungeons.
6. btown · 1790959970 · focus · HN ↗
  Don't worry: the natural predator of AI botting, Kernel-Level Anti-Cheat Rootkit, has your back. You may not like its methods, but it's fighting alongside you today, and you're going to learn to love it.
  1. jzemeocala · 1790960919 · focus · HN ↗
    for some reason im reminded of the old axiom "The Beatings will continue until morale improves"
  2. vlyan · 1790963096 · focus · HN ↗
    that can be trivially defeated by a second machine that analyzes the captured video feed and sends hardware keyboard+mouse inputs in response. won't be as capable as a bot that can read/write process memory, but will be undetectable client-side.
    fireant · 1791019631 · focus · HN ↗
    "Trivially" is relative. In the case of wow the standard way to do botting is to use the in-game lua scripting (normally used for UI addons) with more functionality unlocked. The difference between introspecting the whole game state and controlling the game in-process with good api vs running realtime visual model on the captured visual feed and using fake keyboard inputs is pretty large.
7. mentos · 1790959993 · focus · HN ↗
  ha well what happens philosophically when bots pass the turing test and no one can actually tell the difference in their behavior vs human?
  1. demaga · 1790960635 · focus · HN ↗
    You start assuming that everyone is a bot, and then you either stop playing or enjoy your PvE experience.
  2. sieabahlpark · 1790962643 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
8. andrewmutz · 1790960289 · focus · HN ↗
  It could actually be fun if done right.
  The worst way to do it would be to have people randomly having their characters farming stuff automatically with AI, and users have no way of telling who is AI and who isnt.
  But there are plenty of times where a player would love something in the game that was smarter than an NPC, but less important than another user. It would be fun to fill out your raid group or party with a few automated players when you can't fill it for real. Or be able to summon an AI controlled character to duel any time you wanted to practice. It would have to be managed by blizzard and the AI characters would need to be visually distinguished in game, of course.
9. tomaskafka · 1790960468 · focus · HN ↗
  Well Twitter and almost any other social network has a lot of AI players and it’s no fun at all …
  1. ajmurmann · 1790963522 · focus · HN ↗
    It might be a lot better if AI players had to identify themselves as such
10. fennecbutt · 1790960603 · focus · HN ↗
  I've always thought playing ANY game would be a lot more fun with AI npcs. Ever since Todd Howard promised we could affect Skyrim's economy (which was a lie) I've always been hoping for dynamic systems in games for npc behaviour.
  Like so many games when npcs have one canned voice line, or the level is lined with doors that won't open because it's not the way you're meant to go.
11. boringg · 1790961010 · focus · HN ↗
  Right? I love playing games with more computer players and less real people. Really makes games more fun! In fact it saves the need to have an internet connection you can just spawn up a million bots and play on your own. Maybe its full circle just going back to C&C vs many computers.
12. vlyan · 1790962314 · focus · HN ↗
  that was the case at some point. Blizzard didn't give a flying fuck about bots for a very long time, at least through Cata-MoP-WoD. Honorbuddy, the most advanced one, could level from 1 to max by questing and appear human to an untrained eye. much less human in random battlefields, where they moved in sync -- I'd once witnessed my whole team except a few strays do that (out of 20 I think).
  it costed, IIRC, 30 bucks per 1 instance for lifetime access. the people behind were a legit company, for some incomprehensible reason -- a fucking GmbH. so they eventually got sued and lost and that was an end of a very long era. I always wondered if anyone had managed to pick up the mantle. maybe that's impossible now that Blizzard doesn't want goldsellers to compete with WoW tokens and started to take bots seriously (or so it seemed during my last relapse a decade ago).
13. jasonlotito · 1790966649 · focus · HN ↗
  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ7Zw-K5B08" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ7Zw-K5B08
  Here you go.
14. Chiron1991 · 1790966709 · focus · HN ↗
  This guy actually gave it a try: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEf-KFO8HkI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEf-KFO8HkI
simianwords · 1790958717 · focus · HN ↗
It’s a bit scary that the only remaining piece is to get this to run at 100ms latency. Then you can unlock driving as well.
simianwords · 1790958772 · focus · HN ↗
Yann leCun in shambles.
singron · 1790958873 · focus · HN ↗
The initial prompt was to complete all quests in the starting zone. I'm assuming it was able to do that? It's not actually explicitly said anywhere.
I'm also curious if it stopped after that goal or if it kept playing.
1. thevinter · 1790958946 · focus · HN ↗
  > I was initially skeptical that this would work. And if it did, it would require hours to complete with dead ends along the way.
  > But it turns out it completed the task easily in 40 minutes with 0 deaths and minimal complications.
  1. singron · 1790973112 · focus · HN ↗
    Reading fail! I re-read the conclusion a few times. I just needed to re-read the following paragraph!
2. almostlit · 1791008674 · focus · HN ↗
  Yup! As mentioned by thevinter it was able to easily complete it in 40 minutes. It also did stop after the quest chain was completed and logged out in sen'jin village (the next stop after the starting zone).
  I uploaded the full gameplay session here: <a href="https://youtu.be/8NmmFdREk5s?si=2YSXLwoYFR6eonBa&t=2340" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/8NmmFdREk5s?si=2YSXLwoYFR6eonBa&t=2340
  If you skip to the end at 39 minutes you can see it finishing its run and logging out.
sick_of_slop · 1790959036 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
aeturnum · 1790959350 · focus · HN ↗
Crazy! I can't imagine what WoW would be like with bots! Another new frontier broken open for AI lol.
Joking aside it is interesting to see that a general model can adapt to a world like this, but I think the contrast between the model being "naive" and then needing to build special-purpose code to allow it to interact somewhat begs the question of the experiment. Customization will always be needed so how interesting is it that an un-customized model can play with a highly customized harness?
1. gritzko · 1790961580 · focus · HN ↗
  Last weekend, I made Claude play Panzer General II. I am pretty sure it will be in the weights soon, so it was valuable as an environment the LLM is not trained for. It accumulated experience in Markdown, made some tools to parse the game data and it got to a decent level of skill. It reached the last battle.
  I tried to make it win the last battle, but that was beyond its ability. Further accumulation of "hard earned lessons" in Markdown only made its behavior more chaotic.
  Still, a very decent result, comparable to what I achieved back in the day (late 90s).
2. almostlit · 1791010631 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
DeepYogurt · 1790959470 · focus · HN ↗
Gold farming is solved!
moomoo11 · 1790959824 · focus · HN ↗
everyone’s talking about gold bots
what about world mobs and ai pvp players?
like how cool would it be to be roaming around and there’s a group of 3 or 4 horde or alliance bots wandering around as a war band or maybe they’re doing a special mission.
or a world boss who could engage in more interesting ways than just a fight.
charcircuit · 1790959839 · focus · HN ↗
Blizzard and not catching botters. Name a more iconic duo.
1. bigyabai · 1790961031 · focus · HN ↗
  Jagex/Runescape and not catching botters
Mistletoe · 1790960275 · focus · HN ↗
I wanted AI to do my taxes and my work and me to play WoW.
deepwoods · 1790960513 · focus · HN ↗
Years ago, I loved playing Puzzle Pirates. There were hundreds or thousands of people active at any given time, the puzzle games were fun, I loved the in-game economy. The game is pretty dead now, but I miss it all the time. I finally have time to play it again, but it's just not active enough to do all the stuff I used to like doing.
I wonder if people would be receptive to bringing games like that back to life with full-fledged AI players - not NPCs, but player-characters controlled by AI. It wouldn't be exactly the same - there was something charming about knowing that the guy you were swordfighting could be anyone from anywhere, talking to people about their IRL world, etc. But as others have pointed out, modern MMOs are flooded with bots that make the games actively worse and have been since well before LLMs became popular.
Plus, games might be a helpful means for folks to get used to the idea that, at this point, you have no idea whether the person you're interacting with is a human being until you meet in person.
1. sabas123 · 1790960945 · focus · HN ↗
  Puzzle pirates used to have AI bots help you too if you couldn't find any crew. God I miss that game :(
2. ljp_206 · 1790962298 · focus · HN ↗
  1) There is a burgeoning genre of game - that is, I know of one, called Erenshor - that simulates the experience of playing an MMORPG, but entirely offline, on purpose. I found it to be a very clever idea, likely made in reaction to many Runescape players who essentially treat OSRS as a single-player challenge with a live element.
  2) I'm very glad to see some Puzzle Pirates love. I was and still am enthralled by the idea of in-game economies, loosely-narrative-driven cooperative play driven by simple independent tasks; it was such a neat idea in such a simple package, I'm surprised it hasn't really been copied with much success, the casual/puzzle games boom notwithstanding. I've been daydreaming of mixing Puzzle Pirates with FTL as a spiritual successor, but it's a game design exercise beyond my ken.
3. kungito · 1791047541 · focus · HN ↗
  id say the best part of puzzle pirates was how the whole economy was based on player agency. the only reason they added bot players was because of dwindling playerbase. ive long dreamt of making a game inspired by it with some of my ideas sprinkled in. i got some experimental version running on pharia.gitaki.com
JohnMakin · 1790961112 · focus · HN ↗
Guess what, we created an AI to play the video game for you, so now you don't have to! Awesome!
Without the /s, WoW has been successfully automated without AI as a completely solved problem for like, 20 years.
gritzko · 1790961130 · focus · HN ↗
> This is not surprising in hindsight and is probably the optimal strategy. The agent extracted quest requirements, quest givers, turn-in NPCs, and spawn coordinates from AzerothCore SQL files to provide the concrete checklist and locations for planning.
> Using this data, it's also able to create an optimal strategy for quest order and preparation.
Bwahaha
DropDead · 1790964590 · focus · HN ↗
For imgur image: <a href="https://archive.ph/mkDiy" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/mkDiy
gdotdesign · 1790966149 · focus · HN ↗
Shout out to AzerothCore. With the Forever hype I needed som WoW fix so I set up AzerothCore, it went smoothly and I have everything running locally. And since it runs locally I can have custom stuff like the ability to learn all professions, increasing movement speed, teleport command, 32 slot bags. It's a lot of fun!
1. almostlit · 1791008370 · focus · HN ↗
  100% grateful for the community and team behind AzerothCore. WotLK was probably peak WoW for me and with an open source implementation it feels like I can bring back that experience and add my own twists.

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