War on Bots - Update

It is time to review the ongoing war against botting in Eve-Online.  It now has been months since CCP announced their ongoing war, and it would be interesting to see if it was just propaganda to silence the masses. Hopefully, CCP is keeping their word and making it extremely difficult to bot, but we shall see.

Bot 1 Status: Unknown

This bot claims to be working, and they just released a new update.  They claim that it works perfectly with Incarna 1.1, but the site itself looks like terrible.  It does have a forum, but they only have three posts in the public forums since September.  This site cannot be confirmed to be working, and it appears to be a scam.

Bot 2 Status: Working

This bot looks pretty professional, and it has active forums. The site itself looks slick with a lot of information, and there are a few tips on avoiding bans.  This makes it seem like it is possible to get banned for using the bot, but it is not a sure thing.  There are a few posts of people claiming to receive two week bans for using this bot, and others who claim they have no problems yet.  This bot also includes a trading bot...

Bot 3 Status: Working

This bot is a Russian mission running bot, and it appears to be fully functional.  There are a few discussions bugs and settings to make the bot run more efficiently and nothing about avoiding bans. Again, this looks fully functional with little risk of being banned.

Bot 4 Status: Unknown

There is no way to tell if this bot is legit or a scam.  It claims that it is 100% undetectable and working for the Incarna patch.  There is no forums to tell how active this bot is, but it claims to use optical reading and supports up to 3 clients at a time.There is no way to be sure how well it works and if it is actually getting detected.

In Conclusion

It appears that the war on bots is not going any more effective then any other game.  They released one or two small different patches to detect some of the free common bots, and it probably cut down a lot on the casual botting.  It did little to nothing to stop any of the professional botting, but that is sorta to be expected.

CCP managed to kill off the free public bots that were getting out of hand, but the ones that people pay for continued to work.  Maybe, this is because there is a market out for them, and it is just a very lucrative business.  Bot makers simply could have found out what anti-botting measures CCP put in place and circumvented them.  These circumvention measures do not seem to be 100% effect, though, and it is still possible to receive a 2 week ban. The ball is now in CCP's court.  It all depends on CCP releasing an update to their detection measures.

There is a disturbing thing about the war on bots, and that is bot number  3.  The Russian bot is still active.  It is the same Russian bot that was still working in the first War on Bots post, and it seems to be just as active.  This bot is really active with a lot of posts on the forums daily, and it would be nice if they did something to detect this bot.