[tngranados]

When I was a teenager, my friends and I played this free MMO game online. A friend was told by another friend of him about a bug in the game. This bug would let you receive the reward of a certain mission without marking it as complete, so you could get the reward as many time as you wanted.

Me and my friend started exploiting the bug like crazy, spending hours literally just doing that. The problem was that the process to exploit this bug was very convoluted and a pain to do manually.

I had no experience of programming nor anyone around who knew anything about it, but I felt that there must be a way to do the whole process automatically. Computers are meant to automate stuff, right? Anyway, I started investigating online and found AutoIt, which is a BASIC-like scripting language that allows you to automate GUI stuff.

I then began building a script that did literally what I had to do manually to exploit that bug. And literally means literally. The way I made it work was by scanning colors in coordinates (to check whether a window it's opened, etc), moving the mouse and clicking. The script was full of duplicate code. I didn't knew about loops. All I knew was if conditions and mouse actions. I even remember having to go to a forum and asking for help (in super broken English) because I wanted to keep the program running indefinitely (they told me to use `while true`). But it worked.

Anyway, I spent about two weeks of after school afternoons building this bot. Then, when I had it working, got banned in a matter of days :^)

This might not seems like much, but I remember it fondly as this was my introduction to programming and the reason this became my career. I'm still holding onto the (terrible, terrible) script.