not if they are alpha clones.
I would imagine the Alphas operate in systems that have friendly citadels or towers.
It’s all the same thing, anyway. They’re impossible to catch.
They all docked up in friendly PoS. They are imposible to catch.
Its really, really sad and disheartening.
i was making more ore less the point they can’t cloak…
1 Like
Sounds like you’re a candidate for the Null Raiding party…
Null doesn’t defend donkey boners. Just need to actually attack.
If you make Gilas impossible to bot with, the meta will just shift to something else. Either back to the VNI cuz at that point it’s the best alpha drone cruiser, or up to myrmidons and dominixes.
Even if CCP completely castrates the alpha drone lineup, then bots will move onto missiles. If you then castrate the entire alpha missile lineup, bots will move onto turrets and they WILL design bots that can handle the transversal and range management turrets have to do. You simply can’t win by nerfing or making unavailable the current botting meta ship.
Furthermore, some bots ARE omega, cuz there’s botting Ishtars around. Bots are profitable enough to plex their omega, which leads to the fundamental problem with saying “Nerf X ship or make X ship omega only”
You can’t get rid of the problem by endlessly nerfing the hulls that are used to bot. Botting will only be impossible when it’s also impossible for any ship at all to do any ratting, which is obviously not what people want. No matter what you do, there will be bots capable of doing in-game content for ISK. The only way to fight bots is to improve the detection and banning of them
7 Likes
The solution would be doing the local blackout for 0.0 again.
5 Likes
Remove local as an intel tool, oh look where has 60% of null gone?
If you are in null sec might I recommend you get a bot of your own?
Just ignore bots, all major null blocks use them and CCP is more than happy with the baseline.
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Maybe CCP should provide a bot API out of the Box for Omega. Imagine people would be able to simply Program bots for a whole alliance from scratch with hundrets of bots fighting with enemy bots over ressouces… a completely new business and competition model for CCP!
Your analysis is accurate, but the conclusion is wrong. Soon or already now, you won’t be able to distinct players and bots for simple enough activities like ratting and mining. Hence detection option will be a thing of the past, and I think it is already mostly.
The only viable option IMO is to make activities more interesting and complex, so a human brain (multiple human brains) is either necessary to do the activity or a human brain can disrupt it.
The ESS went into that direction, but it seems not oppressive enough to botting. Let’s go full tags only reward, no ISK payout anymore at all, and see what happens.
Other ideas: more tackle rats (multi point), make warp core stabilizers a 1B ISK item, give combat timers (remove POS).
3 Likes
The solution is obvious: we need captchas for activating weapons.
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You are a total defeatist.
Makes me wonder why.
depends on the activity.
With BAD skills you can do 20M/h since gila has main effect without skill requirement… Then you can place BM that another alt will come salvage/loot (or the owner) and that’s like 50M more for 20min of salvaging, every 2H, so total is 50+40 = 90M for 130min so 40M/h .
Say they farm for 8H a day, it means 300M/day/bot. Almost 10B/month/bot.
I agree that anomaly rats should tackle more, but no to your WCS idea. Making them cost 1b is a bad idea, either remove them entirely, or make them give your ship 0 DPS so they can’t be used on anything that wants to fight. And yea, activities should be more engaging. The fact that the main way people in nullsec make ISK is endlessly repetitive and unengaging (ratting and mining) is very unfortunate
So having any account in local will completely shut down all bots in that system? Seems easy enough…
But yea, I get what you’re saying… it would be better if we could actually kill 'em
Why do you think there are so many complaints about cloaking? 
5 Likes
It’s a gamble, sooner or later you will be banned but your account could get away with it for a long time
Either way it’s still a lot of effort setting it all up, with no real point unless you’re aiming to sell ISK for real money (it’s not that hard to earn ISK to support yourself, or even plex multiple accounts, without botting)
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It’s honestly incredible that CCP was able to dupe their playerbase so well. The average EvE player was literally just replaced with a BOT. And now all the new players think pretending to be a BOT is how you’re supposed to play.
We have really got to start being WAY harder on CCP as a community.
2 Likes
Yeah, triple stabbed Ishtars are a decease. I was thinking about increasing the incentive to hunt and kill those, who decide to fit stabs. Look at those gank haulers. But removing combat capabilities if fitted would help also with other situations. In general I favor balancing by PvP, because it creates contents instead of just reducing the solution space.