Bots have been in Eve in some form or other for over 10 years and I have always just ignored them but now they have become a nuisance due to Alpha accounts. I used to be able to mine ice with our corp for hours on end every day but now after an hour the ice belts are gone. So we set up a sting. A ton of alphas just mining away without any fear of being shot and after the ice belts are depleted they disappear. Every day the exact same thing at the exact same time.
Low sec and hisec bots have increased as well. Killing these nulsec bots has no effect, they just seem to respawn and keep mining.
For the record some are not bots. However, what has allowed this sudden expansion is due to extractors/injectors. Once they have the toon trained past 5m sp (not hard for exhumers) they can extract excess SP and basically turn all the mining into pure profit with some additional isk from selling off the injectors.
But I want one thing to be clear, in null, depending on where you are they aren’t alphas and most aren’t bots either.
Thank you for your input. It took us a month to determine they are bots and I stand by it. Not all are bots but the ones who are have been pretty obvious. It is quite a sight to see 30-80 Alphas warp into an ice belt and just eat it up with no care at all if some of them getting shot (the rest don’t even warp off) o_O
Please make a detailed ticket to CCP to report you experience. Hopefully, they will evaluate and act to stop this behavior. However, based on their apparent reaction to reported incidents over the last 3 years and the more recent explosion of bots, perhaps you should do the same thing that CCP is apparently doing with any report:
Why is it that every single time someone sees a bunch of characters in space doing a very simple and easy PVE thing they immediately think:
Oh my god ALPHA CLONES
Oh my god BOTS
Two things that are completely illegal.
Alternatively, these characters are Omega accounts (which are way better and perfectly legal to multibox) doing an extra easy task which does not require botting at all.
Maybe you have to say they’re cheating and breaking the rules because you have absolutely no grounds to stand on otherwise? Just fling whatever accusation you can think of at it until something sticks?
Just keep shooting them all. If they’re bots they won’t fight back. There’s no concord. You not only get a good chunk of the ice they mine, you also can salvage their ships and take their drones left out in space. I would think this would be a pretty easy income stream… perhaps better for you than mining the ice itself. Plus you look like a great PvP player with all those killed mining barges on your board.
Alphas can’t mine ice by definition. No T2 frigates of any kind, no ice harvesting drones, and no barges.
This pretty much destroys your argument they are alphas and therefore easy enough to have to continue to make profit. In fact an insured barge with zero implants, the injector farming and whatnot youd still turn a profit if you have, as you said, 30-80 of them if you kill a few here and there.
Now to make it unprofitable you must kill them ALL, every ice cycle.
Bots are programmed to watch local and use safepoints to warp around, making new safepoints while they warp around. But even when they would be bad at this, botters can put the mining or ratting operations any day any hour, they dont have to sleep, computer can be on for whole day and night. So its only a matter of avoiding the hours where human opponent is not asleep.
