They have brought it back around to more D2-ish style gameplay in the most recent patches.
It is a much better game now, regardless.
1. AutoIt bots that simulate human interaction
2. Other bots that manipulate game memory (usually caught by the anti-cheat dubbed 'Warden', more on that later)
The reason most bots were PindleSkin bots, is because the PindleSkin unique monster spawns on Act 5 and can be accessed through a red portal. The level generated is always the same, so the path taken to the monster is always the same.
1. AutoIt bots simulate keyboard input and mouse clicks, and can check pixel colors at an x,y location on the screen. This alone allows you to navigate to the portal, enter it, and reach the monster. Enter a predefined number of key strokes and mouseclicks to cast spells and kill the monsters, and afterwards collect the loot.
Some examples of usage: Check the health and mana spheres pixel colors. You could estimate what percentage of HP or Mana your character had, by using some basic math, since the HP and Mana spheres were symmetrical. If the percentage was below a threshold, send keystroke 1, 2, 3, or 4 (this tells the game to drink a potion from one of those slots in your belt).
Checking inventory space and unloading items into the stash was done in a similar matter. The inventory is a 2d grid of squares, and each square has the same pixel color at the center. You'd count how much space you have by checking the pixels of each square and building a 2d array. You could also figure out how big an item was in terms of inventory space, by checking the empty spaces before and after lifting it off your inventory, and subtracting to get the difference.
Collecting the loot was initially done by using a d2loader pick-it hack, which injects into game memory, and uses a predefined list of items you want it to pick up. Now since this modified the memory, it was easily detectable, so when blizzard released the 'Warden' anti-cheat, it became useless.
Some guy by the name manus-magnus came around and released a new PindleSkin bot, written in AutoIt, which had a built in OCR. He was able to literally scan the items that were dropped, turn them into text, determine if they are rare, unique, or normal (based on pixel color), and whether to pick them up based on the pre-configured data the user specified.
He also took advantage of the ability to modify sprites on the client side, and add colored blocks to key points of interest places on the level. This allowed him to use these colored blocks as markers and navigate to reach the monsters he wanted to kill. All without manipulating game memory. I believe his bot included the 2 other unique monsters on Act 5 (Shenk and something else?)
Blizzard had such a hard time catching this bot, some believe it is the reason they added a 20 game / hr limit, and if you exceeded it, you got a temporary 15 minute IP ban.
2. Non AutoIt bots relied on injecting into the game memory, and using a maphack to find the monsters on randomly generated levels. They were a lot more powerful, as they were able receive a lot more information from the game, but were usually banned swiftly. I don't know that much about the implementation details of the non AutoIt bots.
If you want to find more information, you can search around the AutoIt forums for a pindle skin bot, or search online for manus magnus pindleskin bot.
The TLDR is that a bunch of people get together and pool in Stone of Jordan rings, and then decide which servers they'll spawn the clone on, and once they're all sitting on a few of those servers, the initiate the selling and "popping" (spawning the clone) on the server.
No one knows what the exact number of SoJs is, so a community was created and it used irc.dclone.org as the IRC server to manage all of this and collect data over time. This gave some historical data on how many SoJ's were sold for a certain IP address before that server "popped" (the clone spawned)
Each Diablo game you create, has a unique IP address.
Let's say you're on a server with IP 123.123.123.XXX
When you sell SoJ's, all servers that end with XXX will eventually spawn a Diablo Clone and receive the "XYZ SoJs have been sold to merchants" message.
People would gather on irc.dclone.org and pool together say 100-150 SoJs on the NON-LADDER mode. Items were cheaper on NON-LADDER, so the SoJ's were sold on a NON-LADDER server, but, the people who organize the event, would in advance hog the predetermined servers that end with XXX on LADDER mode. That way, they'd get the annihilus charm the clone drops and it'd be worth more.
So in essence, you're selling the SoJs on the NON-LADDER servers, but their effect propagates to the LADDER servers. Thus, your returns are much higher.
In order to find these servers, you'd use a similar AutoIt bot to basically create a game every 3 minutes and use some basic netstat commands to extract the IP address and once a game has the .XXX address you want, the bot will idle in it, until your group spawns the diablo clone.
A private diablo clone spawning event would typically go in the following order:
1. Get number of people to transfer SoJs to one account (buy-in is usually 10 SoJs/person assuming ~10-12 people party)
2. At time T, the SoJs selling will begin
3. Announce the IP address XXX at (T - 5 hours), this will give you 5 hours to search for game servers with IP address XXX.
4. Start selling SoJs at time T
5. Clone Spawns, everyone kills the clone in the games they have found, and collects the annihilus charm.
When I was doing this regularly, an unidentified annihilus charm was worth $20-$30 on ebay, one with perfect or near perfect stats could go up to $100.
Blizzard really screwed themselves( and the players ) with the Auction House.
MMBot or Roots Pindle Bot? I was a forum mod and helped folks out with tech issues on the mmbot forums, and was in the community before Manus Magnus released MMBot to our forum admin. I still talk to Nicotine (MMBot siteadmin) every once in a while.
MMBot was closed source from what I remember.
Up until about the last few years of it's life when the full source was released. The only other autoit bot I was aware of was Roots, which is how I came to be involved with the forum in the first place.
I ran D2JSP (YAMB) a lot once I had enough wealth and a good enough cd key hookup to rotate and mule constantly banned accounts and bring up mf hammer pallies fast enough.
As far as I am aware, the mac address is burned onto the hardware by the manufacturers, and there is no way of changing it. (Unless you are using a VM and you can give it any mac address you want)
How did you change the mac address?
ISPs assign IP addresses based on the MAC ADDRESS of the device connected to the modem.
You're spoofing the MAC ADDRESS, not changing the actual address of the hardware device.
A quick websearch indicates that even on Windows it's not a problem.
I used to run farming bots for Diablo II when I was 13-16 years old and had about 20 copies of the game. Bots would run all day (while I was in school), and all night. I'd wake up early in the morning. Check the loot and transfer it to mule accounts, then restart the bots and go to school. I'd then try to trade items for general commodity items, like high runes, or certain skill items that were used as a form of trading currency due to their high demand.
The bots had some custom features that would let you bypass IP bans by logging into your router's settings, changing the mac address, and restarting your internet connection so you can get a new IP address.
One of the bots I used was written in the AutoIt Scripting Language. Since the bot was open source, I was able to see how the code was structured and modify it myself.
I attribute my introduction to programming to this farming bot, and I believe is one of the reasons I chose to study Computer Science.
The cherry on top was that I made about $600-$700 when I was 14 or 15 years old by selling a lot of farmed items on ebay.
Personally, Diablo III was a big disappointment for me. The game felt quite different from a lot of aspects. Common loot was now split into player specific loot, too many crafting recipes, unique items were garbage, etc...
I'd be happy to answer any questions regarding Diablo II or even the hacking/botting community around it.