Don't ban the bots, make them content

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
1

Since the Blackout is over the bots come back in hundreds, and while its somehow enjoying to hunt them and having a arms race with them when they change their pattern, i think they are normally just annoying as f*ck since the chance catch them is near null without some effort and huge time investment in a normal roaming gang right now.

Also please don’t get me wrong, this solution is by far not the best, but it would be a low effort solution and would at least help until ccp has some better recognition tool / process to get rid of them.

So what i would like to change right now is two things:

  • First, don’t let Bots generate ISK, either by freezing their wallet as soon as they are marked as bot, or through some flag which sets always the bounty to zero when they killed something. Freezing the wallet has the advantage that the bot can’t access it, but it looks like he is generating something. Setting the bounty to zero is somewhat easy detectable and they will at some point setup some ESI checks to replace these as soon as it happens.
    But right now a banned bot will directly create a new Char and send him out, which needs again to be reported etc…, while this Solution at least delays the ISK flown until it is recognized by the operator.

  • Second, and this would probably require a little bit (more) development effort, i would like to let these marked bots spawn tackle NPC in the anomalies they go in. I think there is or was at least always some trigger which let spawn additional rats in WHs if you use specific ships, so something similar could be used here. Make it like every wave has a chance of whatever percent to spawn two-three of point frigs and that should do the job.

This would help to make at least a bit content out of them, and lowers the frustation of burning through 20 systems with only instant dock ishtars/myrms whatever.

Bonus would be if the npc points would count as hic scram to these marked players, but i guess that would led into some headache for some developers.

Think that was it basically, now you can tell me whats wrong with the suggestions.

Thanks, Yrg

2

… before we even go into your proposed change the issues with your alleged problem must be addressed.

First the bots never went away they were there throught the black out depending on the program used it made it safer to bout bot.

Second catching a bot outs extremely easy of you are hunting for them and it’s still not difficult of you’re simply out roaming you just need to learn how they behave and get a handle on them.

Bots are already content but they are damming to the economy. Freezing the wallet of an account that hardly uses it won’t help anything. Most of the money comes either from items or ore. And those are sold and introduced into the market by other alts. Even if we pretend that you some how prevent this all you end up with is banning with extra steps. Why would you keep botting with an account that can no longer generate an income.

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Since saying that i actively search them and could barely find some doesn’t count, the statistics from ccp show something different, see Monthly Security Report - August 2019 | EVE Online or historic dotlan statistics.

If you mean with the blackout they went all to highsec and botted there, yeah maybe.

yes it is extremely easy if you active hunt them and know what you are doing, but it is time consuming.
With not difficult i would agree if we had 2017, and they still would use 100mn and wait that their drones are back in cargo when you land on grid. But right now even with an 13AU/s insta warp ceptor, if you know in which site they land, it is not a safe hit if you don’t have the timer.

Only reason you get sometimes some of them is that the non professional botters use often old frameworks, awful fits but these are the minority and yeah, sometimes you enter and warp to the site luckily as they just started their warp.

While i partly agree that there is also a lot of mining bots in Nullsec, the most money definitely does not come from items. I just want to point out again to the last report from ccp here Monthly Security Report - August 2019 | EVE Online , see the nice and cozy chart with the 300-400b a day by anomalies.

So yeh, mining bots would only be partly affected by my second item of the proposal.

You don’t, but it is effort on the botter side, and he has first to see that the character is flagged and penalized. I talk here about the guys who run hundreds of bots at the same time, not about the one guy who runs one in the background the 4h he is online and directly moves over the isk.
Right now he tries to login, gets probably an error, creates a new char and vice versa, someone needs to make a new bot report to actually get him banned again.

That way at least gives some days to waste the compute ressources of the botter and brings some kills for the people moving through the area.

4

take a harsher approaches.

option 1 - insta death to concord type rat upon reporting - up to the owner to prove he/she did not do it. (untenable as this would be abused to high heaven) (no loss/kill mail)

option 2a - start to punish the corporation/alliance. if a bot is confirmed. the alliance /corp that it is a part of is fined xxx and the avatar(account) is banned. in instances of NPC corp bots; a perma suspect flag is applied to the character (not registered on the avatars UI)

option 2b - same as above however the bot punishment is given to the alliance who owns the space.

option 2a/b will mean that alliances have to secure thair borders and corporations from people using botting programs.

option 3 - once a bot is reported all all notifications related to system jumps warps grid changes ect are prohibited. effectively blinding the bot and causing it to run on a infinite loop allowing players(active) to easily track down and kill each bot.

option 4 - gimp botted characters in the SP/skill department. a a confirmed bot can not use skill injectors has sill and SP levels set to 0, sets a polarized tag to all hulls(0% resistances), have a script that jumps the flagged toon to random systems ect.

all this time CCP have been dealing with the offending characters, however they bigger issue still remains. a bot is a direct benefit to its parent corp/alliance through taxes. hitting the bigger block will force the hand of those alliances to self police for bots and stop the cust in to their bottom line

5

Hunt input automaters, report them, destroy them and there infrastructure.

6

The fact that bots still hang around mainly has to do with the fact that anyone can create a free account, get that account botting and then transfer the ISK to their main so that their main is “protected” from a ban.

The final nail in the coffin for bots would be if CCP said: Starting from now! Any account that receives ISK or trade with a bot account will suffer serious consequences and, or even termination of their account.

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