f13.net

Much debated, almost certainly going on but the scale was always uncertain. A "expose" thread with not too much in the way of facts sort of exploded when an active, but bored, botter started revealing figures and methods. Sadly his english is terrible but if you find the topic of the MMO RMT trade interesting might be worth a read. The fun starts on this page (http://www.kugutsumen.com/showthread.php?7212-The-summer-of-10-an-expose-on-RMT/page8).

Highlight is probably the guy claiming an income of 3,000+ euros a month through botting.

Eve is broken as fuck. News at 11.

What I don't get is how they're getting the bots trained enough to be able to fly out and win fights.  The posts are making it sounds easy with "oh I had 16 bots all farming for me", but seems to me that the skills necessary to do that would require months of training on each of those 16 accounts, making it an expensive and time-consuming proposition to even get started.

My favorite suggested solution:

You can just buy characters with ISK still, no?

I think the more important question is what's the best way for me to get a bunch of these bots up and running.  :grin:

Its not that hard to run a combat app. All you have to do is have a way to set "target X  Number down the down the overview list - set fire f1-f8 - turn to Heading X - Warp on command" So you could have any number of ships moving in unison quite easily. The only problem would be transmitting primaries to bots (solved by targeting A-Z) and maybe setting warp points for your bot fleet to fly to. Eve combat mechanics are not really that complex to bot. If you want to do complex maneuvers you might need a pilot, but for a stand and shoot engagement, no. Its basically the same thing as bot ratters and they have been in Eve for years.

As for miners you could start a character training and you could be in a Level 1 barge mining ice inside a month. You could ignore training and engineering etc skills and once the character was in a barge you just got better and better. Besides you could have a character mining in a frigate immediately.

I enjoy how the bot program just turns the actual graphics off. Spreadsheets online indeed.  :awesome_for_real:

You can win fights where you dominate the opponent in raw power.(or at least drive people off). Programming such a system would likely not be hard (especially since you're probably running on the same internal server or same machine, so transmitting data about who to target would not be hard)

The problem is that even simple or complex targeting mechanisms (which don't have access to the raw server data in order to brute force a solution, and even these can fail) will fall victim to humans breaking it. I.E. if your macros are targeting A-Z, as soon as the macro hunters realize this they will give your macros an super-tanked low sig "A" target to shoot at while they remote rep it and nuke you with specialized high DPS ships.

Theoretically it would be possible to create a semi-random target caller but you probably won't get to the efficiency of a human target caller, you can likely still be tricked by tactical maneuvers which you weren't prepared for, and you're going to have to reprogram your optimal target caller each time the overall strategic situation changes(whether that change is for legitimate reasons of power changes or because people simply find new techniques)

If you have a person target calling that changes everything, you can just link all the actions across however many computers you're using to run EVE fairly easily. Of course if you have a person there then you aren't really botting and what you're doing is much more expensive.