Lego Robot Plays Boring F2P Games So You Don't Have To

IanDavis

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Aug 18, 2012
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Lego Robot Plays Boring F2P Games So You Don't Have To


Using Legos, an Arduino board, and a bit of tin foil, this guy makes his in-game money overnight.

F2P games offer a tricky proposition. The traditional model, instead of requiring your cash, simply demands your time to progress. The issue is that those same games often have ludicrous scaling methods, so what once took a few minutes now takes entire days to complete. At this point, most people either plunk down the cash or quit entirely. Not Uli Kilian. Instead, he built a lego robot to do his bidding, racking up in-game cash overnight.

In Kilian's case, that game is Jurassic Park Builder. Like most FarmVille clones, it requires the player to tap on things every few minutes to get a modicum of coin. The entire contraption is built from some technic Legos and an Arduino board powered by a nearby laptop. One motor moves the iPad back and forth every few minutes, while a tin-foil covered arm comes down and taps. It's even programmed to drag the interface over so the arm can tap on the next dinosaur. Kilian has a row of 11 dinosaurs, each generating cash every five minutes. Every morning, he wakes up to find hundreds of thousands of coins waiting to be spent.

Sure, it's cheating, but it's the sad kind of cheating since it's indistinguishable from actually playing the game. Perhaps the impressive bit is that this is Kilian's first experience building something like this. "I heard about the [Arduino] boards two weeks before and I knew I was going on holiday," he told Wired. "I'm a 3D artist so all the stuff I do is virtual and I really wanted to do something in the real world, and I'd never done anything with micro-controllers before."

While it may not be as impressive as the Lego robot that [a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/133033-LEGO-Robot-Defeats-Rubiks-Cube-in-3-Seconds]solves Rubik's cubes[/a], that's not something that Kilian needs help with. He currently holds a Guinness World Record for solving 100 Rubik's cubes [a href=http://rubiksrun.com/]while running the London marathon[/a].

Source: [a href=http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-04/15/lego-jurassic-park-robot-ipad]Wired.co.uk[/a]


[http://pv.webbyawards.com/2014/web/general-website/games-related]

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Legion

Were it so easy
Oct 2, 2008
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Well he has already cornered a necessary market apparently. With the "Game Guru" of Candy Crush claiming that such games are the future of the medium. By the time that comes around he could have refined his model to a nice, cheap to make version to sell to everybody. He'd become a millionaire.
 

Cliff_m85

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Feb 6, 2009
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This makes no sense to me.

He gets this exceedingly cruddy money-grubbing game and spends hours building a rig to manipulate it when he COULD just be playing a fun game....

*scratches head in bewilderment*
 

Cliff_m85

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Feb 6, 2009
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Legion said:
Well he has already cornered a necessary market apparently. With the "Game Guru" of Candy Crush claiming that such games are the future of the medium. By the time that comes around he could have refined his model to a nice, cheap to make version to sell to everybody. He'd become a millionaire.
"Here you go sir, your video game. Would you like to purchase something to play it for you?"
"ABSOLUTELY!"

-.-
 

Ed130 The Vanguard

(Insert witty quote here)
Sep 10, 2008
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Cliff_m85 said:
This makes no sense to me.

He gets this exceedingly cruddy money-grubbing game and spends hours building a rig to manipulate it when he COULD just be playing a fun game....

*scratches head in bewilderment*
This is a guy who holds a record for completing the most Rubik's cubes during a marathon, I think you're missing the point of this creation. It isn't the end result that that matters, it's the work that he did in order to create the robot which he derived enjoyment from.
 

Lazy Kitty

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May 1, 2009
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While the automation itself is really cool, it's a sad thing that there are games that would warrant such automations.
 

Kenjitsuka

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Sep 10, 2009
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I found his voice very much reminding me of Claus from American Dad, but with more wheezing and slightly creepier.
I don't think this is cheating, btw. If you want hardcore cheating, get into Farmville and be amazed what old house mothers get up to with their browser extensions and more!
 

Baresark

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Dec 19, 2010
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What an amazing human being... who has never felt the touch of a woman.

Just kidding. He should put up instructions so others can do it too. That way no one has to play those shitty games, but they will get all the downloads they want to prove they are successful. It's a public service that removes the need for people to subject themselves to those games while giving the company their arbitrary metric for success. We all win.
 

BloodRed Pixel

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Jul 16, 2009
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NO! This is not cheating, this is shoving them f***ing F2P publishers/devs/PRs some of their own medicine up their a**es.
 

rembrandtqeinstein

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Sep 4, 2009
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Botting is not cheating, its a sign of poor game design. And lazy developers complain about it because they are too lazy to add mechanisms to prevent it.
 

Pipeline

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May 5, 2013
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IanDavis said:
The plural of lego is also lego.

OT: This is certainly impressive. Isn't there an expression "the only way to win is to not play"? I guess that's true here. He's not technically playing, but he's still winning.
 

Shymer

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Feb 23, 2011
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I have a HDD that records programmes that I never watch - and voicemail that records messages from automated diallers that I don't want to listen to - and an email autoresponder that forwards spam to anti-abuse email addresses and anti-spam blacklist providers. The only real shame is the waste of energy achieving nothing.

This plays games that I wouldn't want to play. However it involves building robots! That's cool.

I think I'll get some of this kit and spend some time with my sons building some game playing robots. Then we'll go and play football followed by a film and some castle crashers.