Bots are created by players. In some games they are the only venue for creativity. That ability to create can be highly addictive, without even the need for the motivators of real money or virtual success.
Let’s work through this particular bot problem.
First. Stop spending so much time on bots. You will lose your love of the game if you don’t stop focusing on the worst part of online games.
Second. Bots will always exist in games that have players. Bots show what players want. If there are more bots than players it still shows that some players are willing to play hard and pay big for success in your game, which isn’t a bad thing is it?
Third. Only the game developers can make changes that help decrease bots. Nothing players do will have any meaningful, long-lasting effect. Hence your post, I guess, but I’m not sure that posts on forums have any significant effect on game developer actions, partly because bot users and bot creators tend to use all forms of communication with the game developers. So messages can become a little muddied.
In summary, nothing you do will help. That’s okay, relax and kill the bots when you want to, but don’t get frazzled by them, because in that PvP a single person can never win against the tens of thousands a bot maker can create daily. Let us hope that one day a game dev will gain some insight into bots that lets them create a workaround against them.
Same issue with mining. Friend of mine recently stopped that activity because there are hundreds of bots in every belt 24/7. Many players reported them, nothing ever happens, no matter how obvious they are botting.
CCP please get your ass up and throw the bots out, or the real players will leave this game for good!
Called it.
Like many people, I’ll not be renewing my sub until CCP properly fixes this crap.
Goodluck
An easy bot deterrent/fix as far as FW goes, would be for plex rats being able to SCRAM ships inside, as it would pretty much make every single bot alive in space, a free kill for player hunters.
But CCP simply chickens to the all the farming crybabies to allow such a change to happen, not to mention all the Pvp babies who would moan of not being able to warp off after a fight because of a plex rat respawning at an inappropriate time…
not fw bots here, seem to be mission running bots but the second most popular eve stream as i type this is https://www.twitch.tv/hanfixarkabeln
its just a streem of a guy pointing out bots running distribution missions @CCP_Peligro, you helped us last time, could you please look into this
I don’t think we can even shoot those with a war deck if they are in NPC corp so podding them might be difficult
Remove free to play/alpha clone, problem solved.
Free to play is the most obnoxious business model for the players but the best one for the corporates.
i like the fact that it makes eve more accessible, i started as an alpha and now run 2 omega accounts but it defiantly makes the botting problem worse. perhaps the old model of a month or so free would work better so a legitimate player can have a taste whilst botters find they can’t train to do stuff without paying. i doubt they will do that though, there are legitimate alpha players they would loose entirely
I’m an alpha 
Theres no going back Im affraid…
This isn’t something that can be fixed once and then folks walk away. Most of these bots are RMTers so there is real money attached to what they’re doing and they will find a way back to doing what they did before. Keep reporting the bots as much as you can. This like wack-a-mole.
It’s simple really instead of a 3 day ban it should be a perma ban as it is for rmt. If players thinking of botting for the first time realise that it’s a perma inc they may just keep away from the darkside.
It’s already breaking the EULA, so trying to scare them with a permanent ban would do nothing to stop them. These people make a living from doing this; a simple scare tactic is not going to stop them.
Just get rid of distribution missions. I don’t know many people that do them. Same thing for mining missions.
Actually no, it is pretty darn simple to fix but the will just isn’t there or simply in a different place.
FIX: Enable rats to scram hostile ships inside a plex, and let the players do the rest. Problem solved.
But I’ll always support that CCP has had a hand in benefiting from RMT and simply wont do anything so radical to eradicate it, as it’s another source of income for them.
Instead they massively ban the farm, then they make a public appearance on the forums to make it look like they care, and then the same bot farm is back a week later.
Wait a few months, massive ban again, public appearance …
Rinse, repeat…
The easiest way to fix this Bot issue is nerf the LP payouts for plexing and increase the LP payouts for PVP.
That doesn’t fix everything, including the botting for distribution missions, and it interferes with the existing gameplay of people who aren’t botting.
This isn’t a case of them being unwilling to do things to fix the problem - they’re banning something like 10 botters a day on average.
The botters will adapt - they always do. The best way to stop them is to ban them.
Brisc, without tipping off the botters… how does the system work? In the case of FW many people “reported” the bots every day. Probably hundreds of reports a week.
So, I envision the bots in FW and in null are reported … hundreds of times a week… thousands of times a month. I envision an employee at CCP receiving these thousands of “bot reports” 24/7/365… does he / she say "ok… thousands of more bot reports this month on toons botting 23 hrs a day with 0 kills and hundreds of deaths… hmmm I better investigate for 3-6 months’. That is what I envision.
Lastly… how are players able to discern that a player who is in a faction warfare complex etc 23 hours a day 7 days a week with 0 kills and hundreds of losses is a bot… CCP cannot discern that?
I envision a lack of CCP resources assigned to bust the bots 24/7… they have the manpower… but do not assign it.
(So, FW bots lower the worth of LP and LP/ISk ratio. RMT, players RMT and also keep real players out of complexes i.e. atrons named worm)… botting effects every single player in eve… its all connected.
Lastly… it does not take players months of investigation to find the bots. Come on man lol
Team Security doesn’t really explain how they do what they do to us. But Peligro has said over and over that the bot reports are critical to them wing able to do what they do. And given there have been thousands of folks banned per the last security update in the last two months alone, they’re obviously working.
The numbers CCP released are
- 2316 account bans for account hacking.
- 4009 account bans for botting related activities.
- 2595 account bans for RMT related activities.
from October 1st to December 12th
I was surprised that it was that many tbh.