Ronnie, don’t be naive. The botters are openly sharing their uncompiled source code all over the internet. Most of the botting programs are all built off one shared platform that is also open source.
You can download it right now, install it on your computer, and turn your character into a bot all in less than 20min. And if you want to see what they are doing and how, you can open the source code and look, and (gasp) make changes to make your bot unique to you!!!
Now think about that, if you can do that within 20min…CCP can too. They can effectively download the tool(s) the botters are generating and see exactly what they are doing and how they are doing it. It would then take a hot 30min for them to pinpoint specific changes to the EVE client that would break the bot platform. Break the platform that all the bots are built from and you incapacitate the bots en masse without having to ban a single player account and lose any of the revenue you consider to be “legal” in accordance with the EULA.
You don’t need to be Bill Belichick to realize that if your opponent is going to give you their playbook for free then beating your opponent is easier than tricking your kid brother to give you his candy.
CCP is complicit with botting. I’m sure of that.
My only question is to what level? And reverse engineering a memory stack isn’t easy, yes the botters did it over time (years)…but the client side patches that come out weekly could address this easily (too easliy). So the question is, is CCP merely complicit ignoring the simple changes that could eliminate the problem? Or, are they actively trying to do what I’m describing but the platform is continually being updated too because a CCP dev is either leaking the changes in advance or a CCP dev is actually the one creating the platform themselves as a rogue entity?