I think the problem with your perspective is that you are vastly underestimating what a bot can do, and how much effort botters are willing to do to get their paycheck.
That’s simply not true. There may not be any bots capable of doing this now, but that’s just because there is no need for them now.
I’m a developer, and even though I’ve never actually written a bot for games, I know enough about the mechanics behind them that I would have no trouble writing this myself. I doubt very much that experienced bot makers would even need more than a few days to do this.
The bot could always force you to either reveal yourself or get stuck.
- Get ratters/miners safe when a sig is detected.
- Re-purpose a relic bot to scan down and identify the sig.
- If it’s a WH, make a bot to roll the thing.
- If the WH rolls without incident, and without noticeable discrepancy in the WH mass, resume ratting/mining.
- If the WH was reduced noticeably, assume hostiles got through and enter a “camped” state.
You would essentially be forced to kill the rolling bot and confirm your presence to stop the hole being rolled, and at that point the bots would simply stay safe. You’d be no better off than you are now.
It wouldn’t really matter. If you don’t see them leave through a gate or a WH (and as per the above, you would know) whether or not a player is logged in in system or not is of little consequence. You would stay safe until that player leaves.
Cloaky camping is common enough that bots already have procedures when they are detected. The bot would simply have to assume all players that don’t leave are camping and act accordingly. - In fact this would eliminate logout traps as a tactic, as the bot would simply assume you are still logged in and not warp anywhere until it can determine otherwise.
They’d have to be cautious, but eventually the cost of staying docked will outweigh the cost of the ratting ship. It’s all a matter of numbers for botters. System isn’t safe to super rat anymore? Put a few VNIs in system and see if that shakes something loose. Maybe a carrier or two.
At the end of the day they’ll still be botting, and unless you’re willing to spend forever camping them in, these changes won’t stop them. - We could very well perma-camp all botting systems right now and effectively stop botting completely. But we won’t. And this won’t be any different. You’d just be presenting botters with different challenges.
Changing game mechanics is simply not the way to go for dealing with botters.