I remember, yes. And I remember how it killed our small gang roams. It sucked big time.
Yes, “first two weeks”. Then only 10 players from WH were still roaming 0.0 sec in hope to find anyone. Great success I’d say.
1 Like
We noticed a dramatic drop off in player activity as well from the chinese botters we were hunting around the scalding pass/wicked creed area we would frequently mooch in. That was the entire point right, because eventually they started parking their AFK intel bots on grid with the gates which pinged when they saw someone. Sometimes dramatic action needs to be taken if you want to achieve any results as the playerbase and the basic game design contains so much inertia and resistance to change. IIRC some people selling ISK via RMT actually make more money doing this than they do at a regular day job, they have an intense incentive to break the game and then keep it broken. This can materialize in a number of exciting ways like that WOW youtuber who started to get some credible IRL threats to his safety being made because he was exposing a goldfarming botting cartel.
It’s not actually that you didn’t see anyone, its that they deployed more sophisticated methods of detection than they needed to previously and they have a literal bottom line to protect that theyre absolutely not going to do legitimately. The whining and crying about how people were going to permanently unsub because of it was a class-A demonstration of why those entitled, perfectly safe krabs are a poison that needed to be exposed. Sadly it seems not much can be done about it, as all groups are complicit in it and CCP publicly called out the FRAT leaders more than once for facilitating botting so eagerly.
It was a great success as it could have opened up space for people who actually like the game and don’t treat it like a job but they didn’t do it long enough or hard enough and the result is that in the years since pop count dropped to 9k. A more dangerous EVE is absolutely essential but it looks like noone actually wants it in their backyard.