It would be a much better idea to make every wormhole last for 24 hours, keeping the per ship mass limit, but no total limit. This would allow people to easily roam into botting lands.
Of course, there may also be a couple more visits from nullsec blocks to WH staging systems, but that would help restore WH space to CCPs original vision of nomadic lands instead of C5/C6 rental empires.
An excellent change to combat the botting scourge.
The mechanics of no local, while are interesting, really bring about a bigger problem, which is having to spam scan every 10 seconds.
I will not personally support null local until the scanning system itself (directional scanners) is removed or completely recreated so that spamming a button is NOT REQUIRED AT ALL, NOR PROVIDES ANY BENEFIT.
the truth is, you dont need to delete local, and wormhole space needs to lose it and go to null local system. its already unique enough with out senseless brain dead designed mechanics.
A better option to kill null bears, is to simply removed player created channels. All 3rd party software runes on them, and all intel channels do.
Removed these and adding station scanners would be a much better way to deal with this.
Not all it would kill. At various times I’ve had other player created channels open which have had nothing to do with null-sec intel. There are, after all, many public channels for corp recruitment, incursions, languages other than English, other communities, etc.
How to fix botting in null sec?
Easy!
Remove Local and all the bots will die!
Players who are aware, will survive!
Is that really so hard to figure out?
Remove local and the RMTers will simply have Alpha bots not only at every gate, but also spread out around to make sure no one surprises them by coming through a wormhole. It’s NOT that easy and the first thought, without further consideration, isn’t necessarily a good one. Most ot the time it’s just a mindless, knee-jerk reaction.
I am well are that a bugged local helped exposing plenty, but assuming they won’t adapt to that is silly.
Fixing the Bot problem should be CCP’s duty. Period.
They also won’t remove local periodically to feed someone easy kills. A LOT of bots go down daily, killed by smart guys, with local up. Still unless CCP removes the botting account, and the OWNER account, problem persists, as soon bots get new ships.
Could call CCP’s witchhunt after bots easily “hypochrisy”. Just can’t be bothered to. Not after all the years here.
Remove Null, shut down the star gates.
And blame it on the Jovians
You are correct but unfortunately time is relative. Even if you stopped goons and test ect, botting today it would not be be fair to ask frat to stop for example as they have several years catch up to do.
If you wanted to ban botting at this stage nothing short of a full server restart would be required. Never ever going to happen. The other solution would be to create a new region of space where the rules of this game were enforced.
This new region would be accesible to new eden only via a pod. Nothing gets in and nothing gets out. No local, no T20’s, no reimbursements, no pets just pure hard core eve. The name of this paradise, the Brewlar Zone.
I’m not really familiar enough with Null mechanics to judge how effective this would be. However many many suggestions over the years, and actual ‘experimental’ data at times when local was broken/delayed in Null, seem to show that this would have some degree of effect on botters and semi-AFKers (anom farmers, miners etc).
I have also been putting together a list of ‘things EVE needs’ and ‘more destruction’ plus ‘ISK sinks’ are fairly high on the list.
So if this item was a signal jammer consumable, that delays you showing up on local for X time, and was an (expensive) ISK purchase from some sort of NPC vendor… well, as Fluffy Moe says, it’s a step in the right direction.
Edit: To be clear, I think this might be an interesting mechanic to add to a much too safe region, for various ‘emergent content’ purposes. I don’t think it will actually do much against botting; as Solstice said, they will find ways to adapt.
Botting needs to be addressed at the level of source code/client alterations, at the ‘activity tracker’ level of distinguishing bot behaviour from player behaviour, and at the CCP management level of deciding to actually take real action against bots, instead of (for example) turning off level 4s for Alphas and pretending that accomplished something.
Not sure Eve ever had a obligation to let people catch up, it has always been hugely tipped in balance of characters/groups that have been here longest, if they can stay that way.
As for
Never going to happen
Here’s the thing. You’ll not fix botting, you’ll just change it.
An AFK dommie is paid for in about 3 hours. If they run it for 4, they come out ahead, and there’s zero incentive to stop running them.
If you got your ask, all you’d do is push the carrier/super ratters into dommies. They’d still bot.
cheats are in every game and it’s a never ending battle dealing with them. i’d say we could fix half the problem if corps reported people they have in them that are botting. nuets wouldn’t last pissing time in null botting, they’d be spotted flagged and killed. but them blues who are being naughty, yea they need to be reported and dealt with by their corp leaders.
that i think would go at least half way to solving the bot issues in null.
i don’t believe for one minute their leaders are not aware of people who can pull in stupid amounts of isk with pretty long periods of ratting with little of no communication from these botting shites while in game.
poeple know who they are 
In theory botting could easily be removed through market forces, activities that are bottable would devalue themselves.
And in concept, you can’t price a bot out without pricing out the players too. We’re talking about T1 battleships, and unlike players, bots have absolutely no issue with putting in the extra time to get profitable.
You need to take away their tools, or it’s moot. Make sites unpredictable, remove the profit from any mechanism that does not require regular player input.
For example, rat spawn quantities and locations are now random. They could spawn right on top of you, even 300km away from the site if that’s where you are. Or they could spawn 50-100km away, if they’re something like a guristas rat with a cruise missile launcher. And when you kill them, you get tags instead of bounties, which are ignored by MTUs. Do away with the crap-tier loot that drops, it just gets in the way.
AFK doesn’t work anymore, botting will still work but it’ll be undeniably slower. Carrier super and titan ratting (solo) won’t work anymore.
Then you can’t roll a hole
Except the gangs of eve battle it out over access to easy pickings
I would like that, save for the fact that we already know it would be goons. They’ve got the most teeth to bring to bear when they want to, it wouldn’t even be close.
In a game where there wasn’t a roided 17 year old playing in the little league, it’d be an excellent conflict driver. Here, it’d just be the 17 year old roidmonkey stuffing his face with the spoils of victory that nobody else had a chance for.
Heh, my nephew - who is one of the poor experimental animals I’ve tried to get interested in EVE over the years - was reading over my shoulder while I caught up on this thread.
“How to fix botting in Null Sec?” he said…
"… that’s easy.
Just make it more profitable to bot somewhere else."
Which of course, doesn’t help the core issue. I just thought it was interesting as a different perspective.
While I can laugh at and appreciate the sentiment, sadly they need not divest from one to start in another.
Indeed. I thought that was the hidden value in the statement for me. Fixing botting here or there, this type or that type, won’t make much difference. The bots (and the AFK farmers) will go wherever there is botting/AFK opportunity, and they will adapt to small inconveniences such as the local-jammer.
EVE could cut the profitability of botting by 50%, and that would most likely result in the creation of 25% more botting accounts, as well as finding more ways to bot on free Alpha accounts.
EVE needs a more holistic approach to botting, that attacks the activity in its’ base design. And CCP needs to stop pretending they are taking action against botting with minimal efforts designed for show, and decide they are going to take the heat of actually addressing botting as a whole, and the pushback they will create from those who feel they are botting/AFK farming/multiboxing ‘legitimately’. And even not-so-legitimately, but still on Omega accounts.