Botting will always be a thing. CCP can (and should) work to fight it, and everyone should report bots—to CCP—when they suspect they’ve found one, but it’s never going to go away. And overall… no, I don’t expect this will hit bots particularly hard. As @Orca_Platypus indicated, the optimal solution for bots is just to spin up more bots.
Not simultaneously, mind you. Instead, the optimal solution is to see exactly how fast their normal system degrades, then spin up exactly that same number of alts in a system that isn’t being over-farmed, and add a ‘check system multiplier’ step to their process. If the system multiplier in System A is too low, check B. Then C. Then D.
They’ll rotate where they’re farming by rotating what alts are farming, not by actually taking any time to move. And that’ll get achieved the same way they currently replace alts when a bot gets caught: skill injectors bought from SP-farming alts in the same larger farm-group. And hell, that took me all of 45 seconds to work out, because we already know how they spin up the new alts. That’s been well-understood for years.
So it’s a once-time expense that will actually make their alts safer. By rotating which alts are farming, the odds of any specific alt getting caught drop to the same percentage as the time they’re active. They may well decide that ‘expense’ is an investment that will reduce costs in the long run.
And for the record: no, nobody coming onto the forums to ■■■■■ about anything is botting. Botters don’t ■■■■■. They don’t want to draw attention to themselves. They don’t want people noticing them and looking at what they’re doing. It’s the same principle as nullsec spy alts: the spy will be the most useful, helpful guy you’ve got, the one who never screws up, never breaks the rules, never gets people pissed at him. Because they don’t want people digging. Botters are the same way: they want to be ignored.
As for mindless farming… literally every PvE activity in the game can be done that way. Yes, including incursions, the abyss, and sites in t-space. CCP would need to radically change the way their bounty NPCs—not the bounty payouts—work to change that. Which they explored when they started doing things like FoBs and diamond rats. But the moment they do that en masse, they’ll hear endless screaming about solo players and ‘little guys’, because the more challenging you make a thing, the more advantageous it is to bring a few dozen friends along.
