Well there is a blogger who scans the website for botters. He hasn't posted any of them whining about gankers really. They did whine alot when sreegs launched his assault on them.

On his latest one, he said they complained about people reporting them, or other botters reporting them when they move into another botters territory.

Here is his site. The Nosy Gamer, go ask him if he has read them whining about gankers and how much a threat they are.

I would tend to agree with this sentiment. Mostly because the threat of being ganked for a bot is vastly different then the same threat for a player. A bot who can mine 23.5/7 can easily lose a ship and make up the difference that day where the player who may only have a few hours of time to play each day and is much more less efficient than the bot will take longer to make up the money lost by being ganked.

You didn't hurt my feelings But I hope that you don't demand that CCP Sreegs write the blog. CCP Stillman just gave a presentation at Eve Vegas that I hope he turns into a dev blog. That said, botters really don't post about getting ganked. There was a thread on one forum, but it stopped getting updated once Team Security really cranked their operations up. They do freak out about Hulkageddon, though.



According to the botting forums I read, there is a name for bots who mine 23.5/7: banned. People who bot for more than 8 hours a day and post about getting banned are usually mocked, which cuts down on the tears. Last week I read one bot dev tell the users of his courier bot to not use it more than 6 hours a day and to not run it more than two hours in a single session.

Were they happy about the recent EHP increase?

Now, would you like him to create a dev blog with generic ramble (and herd it through corporate filters) or would you like to to keep his mouth (keyboard) shut and get on with his work of actually hitting people where it hurts (for them)?

If anything, the security team needs a PR member with the job to create Dev Blogs and provide fake info ;)

Oh, have I just outed Sreegs? ;)

The vast bulk of kills when BAT Country did the caldari ice interdiction were bots. Its very simple to pick them out just by the way they act. The easyest is the pod that thinks its still in a barge and keepson warping to and from the station. A shocking amount of them would reship and go back to mining while we were still active. I think the record was 7 barges from one guy in a single day.

The scale of mining bots is shocking right now but they are by far not the only large scale operations going on.

The problem (I think) is that Sreegs simply can do casual answers on the forums.

Because if he did it would get parroted and twisted on every wannabe newssite (as in mitts or ev24).

And most likely dissected and analysed on at least 19 different blogs (and Jester would most likely find at least three ways himself :)).

So I don't think that Sreegs actually can't just lob out some random figures and hope that people will be happy.

Whatever he writes will be seen as Canon from CCP.

So, TL;DR: He has a lot to lose by stating a change in trends unless he can whip up serious hard data.

I'm the only one with the data. I do all the backend work, data gathering and analytics. So if you want data, I'll be the one to crunch it, be it Sreegs or myself that publishes it.

Again, I'll look at the data and see if it makes sense to discuss. But not until I'm back in the office later this week and have time to discuss it with Sreegs, who's kinda busy this month.

This indeed.

Thanks for the work, any eventual data and your willingness to discuss the issues with us.

I think you might want to wait until he gets back to his computer at work, as he said he is still in Vegas, and he left out data that was on his computer at work. There is also much crunching involved apparently; I'm not sure if it's bones, or chips, but there's crunching.

Hmm... Bumping

Say though one more time

He said nothing about appropriate, he forgot to give the breakdown by region at Vegas but would like that to be part of what he gives out.

I guess gank needs nerfs and not buffs like they're giving to at next expansion. Because idiots being idiots the word miner=bot and I expect a lot of usual same boring common old rabble about inflation and miners and bots...

Buff gank mean take away players interested in that activity, be it afk cigarette coffee poo whatsoever, but doing it a couple hours a day. But will change absolutely nothing about bots still making huge amounts of isk and easily covering their losses.
Excellent move from CCP and gankers about shooting their own foot. I can smell it from here.

So, I just spoke to the GM Team regarding this to get some clarification:

Firstly, people who are bumped always have the right to petition. It is the right of any player who feels that they want to petition an issue to do so.

However, with regards to the rules in EVE Online our current view is:

Bumping is not considered harassment.
Bumping is not considered griefing.
Bumping is not against the rules.


It's actually been used for a long time to prevent warping as a rudimentary form of tackling when you don't have a point, or don't have sufficient disruption strength to keep someone pinned.

Along with that, the people that are doing this for the best part are in player corporations. If you don't like what they're doing, declare war on them so that you can punish them, or pay a merc corp to do so on your behalf if you don't want to fight.

There are plenty of options to counter this, if you use your imagination.

As much as the previous gankageddon on hulks: none but make clean place for the biggest botters in eve. Why would you spend so much energy and time with space pixels and fake threats&fears unless this costs you real money?

The one doing because of some sort of veldspar bushido code is an idiot the one pretending he's a good guy and care more about the "ho so important internet space ships economics" in my eyes acts more like a real money trader/botter than the other way around.

Thx for giving me so much credit and let me refrain it again: you have as much impact on bots whatsoever as you had before with other tactics: little to none.
And again the only impact you refuse to admit you might actually have is on some players number of subscriptions.

I'm quite sure you already have the old same answer and rabble about it, no one serious around expects you to admit it and already knows you don't care since it's not your problem but CCP's one.
Therefore if you really had some interesting impact I guess they should have already gave you a forum medal or invite you for some Eve economics Noble price.

GENTLEMEN! AND LADY!

clam yourself!

we will have the answer once a dev answers!

Don't get me wrong, I'm also waiting that data. You probably forgot about it but I previously said that if the mining barges buff would make of high sec botland per excellence as you and Zim stated, I'd come back to say I was wrong.

Now I'm only hoping if the numbers show it differently that you are a nice guy and actually post your assumptions were wrong, but I already know you will not and actually will find a little number somewhere to justify your arguments even if you have to make the blind guy on obvious numbers.

well maybe if we go off topic?

they seem to appear for that.

Waiting for dev...

This is actually pretty close.

I got sick in Vegas and was out sick for 4 weeks. That caused me to completely forget about this.

I ran the numbers. And if anything, we're seeing a lower number of bots we're catching in high-sec, in favor of 0.0. But I don't think the trend is big enough for it to be more than speculation. To give you an idea, a best fit line on the data I have is like this:

High-sec: y1 = -0.0011x + 0.773
0.0: y2 = 0.0008x + 0.1651


You can sort of deduce from that how low-sec plays out. But regardless, I don't think we can really draw any conclusion from this data.

Sorry to hear about your illness. 4 weeks? Rough, and totally not fun.

Thanks for responding. Questions:

Are Y1 and Y2 the number of bots caught? Per hour? Per day? Per week?
Is this per solar system or for the entire area ? Or is it per 1000 players?

Is x the system security? Or day of the year, or...?

Why the conclusion that most are caught in null sec? in both equations the effect of x is small, so the constant dominates. High sec has this at 0.773. Null sec is about one quarter of that value: 0.1651.

I think I have said to you some days ago what now is stated by numbers.

The big cargo hold is all what real miners always wanted (since mining is so boring, then make it easy to AFK it).

Big cargo = no need for a bot to empty the ship for you, 1 manual unload per hour allows lots of AFKing without automated programs.

Yeah, so CCP catches less bots in high-sec now as the average bot-aspirant AFK miner is indistinguishable from a bot?

I'd counter that by saying that, as a rough rule of thumb, the more exciting and interesting a given gameplay mechanic is, the harder it is to bot it effectively and the less incentive. Making mechanics utterly predictable and repetitive (eg: mining, anomalies, missions) not only makes botting very easy, it provides a very strong incentive to do it in the first place. The more intelligence, intuition, decision making and pattern recognition required to accomplish a gameplay task, the better.