Selling Out for Just 8 Yuan: What is the Real Price?

Out of pure curiosity, because I recently wrote a wicked little program, I searched Baidu today for “Happy Farm Bot” and found tons of pages. However, once I clicked into them, I noticed that most of the bots had already been patched and disabled.

It seems the Happy Farm development team’s efforts have been paying off lately. Though, clearly, they haven’t pulled out their ultimate weapon yet, since the Flash client can still be decompiled and analyzed for clues.

Even so, a listing on Taobao really blew me away: “Original price 20, now only 8 Yuan,” openly selling a Happy Farm bot.

Many gamers might not find anything wrong with this. They’d think, “If someone has the skills to write a bot, they deserve to sell it as hard-earned money. What’s the big deal?” Honestly, in the past, I would have thought the exact same way—and if I had the chance, I probably would have sold my own bots too. But ever since the infamous “Coral QQ” incident, I lost that kind of guts out of fear of getting “harmonized.” Back then, I still felt bad for Coral QQ’s developer, viewing him as a casualty of unfair business competition.

It wasn’t until I started my job and began developing web games myself that my perspective flipped. Seeing an indie game I just launched get hammered and exploited by bots is a truly awful feeling. It accelerates the game’s death. Every game is like a living organism—it grows slowly and eventually dies naturally. But a bot is like a drug that forces the game into a premature grave. Seeing a game you poured your heart into die like that is heartbreaking for any developer. If players could put themselves in the developer’s shoes, they’d feel the same way.

Getting back to that 8-Yuan bot: the coder probably thinks that selling it is both a quick way to make a buck and a great way to showcase their skills. I get it. As programmers, we often crave that rush of validation. It reminds me of a magic show I saw on TV a few weeks ago. A contestant proudly told the judge, Lu Chen (刘谦), that after watching a magic trick, he figured out the secret within minutes and recreated it. The judge immediately sent him off the stage. During the segment, the host made a highly convincing point: just because you can reverse-engineer a trick doesn’t mean you’re more skilled than the magician. The person who invented the trick is the true master.

It’s the same here. Using a bit of programming knowledge to write a bot just to show off is completely misguided. Putting legal issues aside for a moment, let’s look at the ethics: if nobody built the games in the first place, how could your bot even exist? While bots differ from game to game, their core principles are identical—they’re just simple, cheap tricks. Yet so few people appreciate the sheer blood, sweat, and tears developers pour into making the games. It makes me wonder: what exactly is being sold for those 8 Yuan? Saying that you’re selling out your own integrity doesn’t feel like an exaggeration at all.

When I shared those game helper scripts a few days ago, my goal was simple: to help everyone demystify and learn how they work. These things are infinitely simpler than writing an actual game or a full software suite from scratch. I believe if everyone understands this and looks at it through both a moral and legal lens, the market for bots will dry up. More importantly, we’ll finally learn to respect another crucial right: intellectual property.