Sure. But right now they don’t have to go to such lengths. And CCP can and in the past have caught the laundering in the ways you described. Its trackable if they have the hours to do so. And they would have more hours of they aren’t digging so much through trying to tell a botter and a multiboxer apart.
Now if it is the right direction to go? That’s a different question. But it would certainly aid in the detection of bots.
Null sec botting has always been an issue. When I was in the north 4 years ago our corp leader and several corp members botted constantly. They only had about 6-10 accounts each and was using Ishtars, but still…
CCP can do more to combat botting, if they want. Keep a much closer eye on anyone with 25? accounts (pick a number), mainly based in null sec, heavily ratting anoms and using certain ships. Heavy ratters in null sec are the total giveaway that someone may be botting. If you use certain criteria to eliminate a lot of players, the chances of finding the big botters increases dramatically.
Get rid of local in null sec and that will eliminate the intel bots, unless they can figure out a way to spam dscan.
Take away the static ice belts that multi’s and botters suck up in 6-8 minutes and then wait to re-spawn every 4 hours. Turn them into Cosmic Signatures that can appear randomly in any system. The fact you have to scan them down and move around should knock out some of the botting ice miners that still exist in high and null sec. Create a few more sigs for each region to make up for any shortfall of ice that would potentially destabilize the markets.
For years null sec has been crying about high sec to draw attention away from the fact null sec is ripe with botting corruption. There are some big players in null sec that could and should go down for illegal activity, so hopefully CCP will step up to show some good faith to the real players of EVE.
I never understood why rats give cash bounties. That’s like the ultimate request for abuse. Just use blue loot like in WHs and most problems are solved.
Yep. Cash rewards from mission givers for killing rats makes sense. Just getting isk for popping rats in the middle of nowhere really doesn’t. Most mmos don’t give any isk outside of quests anymore (i.e. boars and rats in the world at large no longer carry gold around in their cheeks anymore ) for the same reasons, makes no sense and encourages farming/botting.
I’m fine with changing this, but I’m just curious. How will it solve the problem? If the rats drop blue loot like WHs, the bots just pick it up, the player sells it… and it’s the same as ISK, no?
Actually the bots were mostly in the drone regions which used to drop stuff that could be reprocessed into minerals and the bots loved that space most of all.
Those bots must have had a full fledged AI if they felt love for anything.
CCP should buy an instance of the bots, test the behaviors, and then write alogrythms based on the bots in the market.
CCP just doesn’t care.
Years ago it was the same thing. Bots everywhere. I managed to get information on hundreds of actual people running bots. I posted that information and was banned for my trouble.
Something about not being allowed to post real life info. Those players continued to bot. And I learned not to post information easily obtained on the internet.
Sounds like pve needs a rework to a point where automation is impossible.
It’s not possible unless you want to put Captcha challenges for every second mouse click into the game.
It’s very possible if they aren’t afraid to change up how basic combat works a bit. It’ll make the average joes life a bit harder (or more fun?) but I think that’s a good trade off.
As long as there is only a tiny amount of repetition in the game will someone come up with a piece of software which will read the screen and send the right inputs at the right time and allow for automation.
And it’s not even bots CCP is dealing with, but they’re also fighting macro use.
Sadly it’s gone way beyond screen reading, in terms of tech curve.
Part of me suspects that the first AI, in spite of all commercial research and grand projects, will one day manifest itself in / through New Eden …
Then again, looking at places like Jita, I wonder again whether there is actual sentience in EVE 
Idk have rats light cynos or something that they light on occasion that gives you a time limit to gtfo or fight titans etc. Make it so one ship no matter what can’t do x repeatedly with 100% success regardless of pimp. Example have a spawn in anomalies sometimes that has space superiority fighters that annihilate drones (even gilas), npc interdictors that drop a five minute bubble on top of you before a capital can align, idk more randomized challenges not just same ■■■■ every time.
Could even make some special dangerous rats that don’t appear on the overview or produce a damage log when attacking you just show an icon in actual space.
Maybe add some skill-shot type npc weapons that you have to move out of or take extreme damage that track you so you have to manually change course not just orbit.
With every additional difficulty added to the already existing sites the rewards could be increased to benefit people who are actively playing while making life harder for bots. They could even change the spawns and make new rats with new effects weekly by just changing some numbers around and adding new npc dialogues to give you an idea of what to expect.
Apologies, I only read about 1/3 of the posts before posting. CCP has done a serious anti-botting campaign in the past. Versus mining bots, successfully completed around 2009 if I remember right. Sure, a long time ago, and when things were probably simpler.
My two cents: We have Project Discovery, where people get ingame rewards for doing research for RL organizations. How about a Project Exterminator or something, where people get rewards (good ones) for hunting and reporting bots? Use the collective time and IQ of the many people in the community for intel? A few people would abuse it (false bot report to mess with another player), but that’s easily solved. For example, three false reports and you’re banned for a month.
Lol. Trolls would go mine in groups of three and pretend to be bots to get people banned.
So set some bots up and report them to get yourself rewards for old bots through a VPN?
Everybody is focusing on making PvE not bottable, but this guy has the right idea. Bottom line, CCP (assuming they cared, which they don’t) just needs manpower to deal with this, because players find bots all the time. And one way of getting manpower is to let the players themselves be that manpower.
There are ways of dealing with this. For instance, perhaps reward payout is linked to the skill points of the botting characters (who will be banned, of course). I doubt many people would want to throw away a high-skill character just to get some ISKs, and even if they did, they couldn’t do it very much before all their high-skill characters are gone.