A very simple and basic thing occurred to me as a possible solution for the issue of bots. Before I get into it I’d like to start with a historical example themed for the season and hopefully that will help better explain my idea.
This isn’t an article for theological apologetics, but rather to explain the true historical aspect of the Holiday. You may believe what you want concerning the religion, but let’s keep history historical. Around this time of year you always get these obnoxious try hard pseudo intellectual types spouting garbage by copy/pasting some impotent infantile gibberish off of some scorned not entirely historical blog concerning the origin and meaning of Christmas.
“Jesus wasn’t born on December 25th and Christmas is the pagan holiday of Winter!”
Stay on target…stay on target…
From the accounts of Scripture we can assume he was more than likely born in the spring or summer. So the historical Church knew Jesus wasn’t born on December 25th. So how did it happen that Christmas got moved to December 25th? Well the early Christian community lived in a world that was vastly pagan. Pagan sacrifices to this and that got were common place and one of the major Pagan holidays landed on December 25th. Some of the Christians would often do their Christianly duties and Church going and then go have fun at the pagan holidays taking part in events that didn’t exactly mesh with Christian theology. In an attempt to make the followers choose, either Christian or pagan, they placed Christmas on December 25th. You can’t be in two places at once. So in effect, Christianity attempted to replace paganism, not merge with it as some like to argue quoting out of the DaVinci code. There are other things I can get into such as the misconception of Constantine’s role at the Council of Nicea and other things.
So back to Eve. The question is, why do people bot? Why do they have mining bots for example? Because mining sucks. It’s boring. You sit there and zap rocks for hours and hours. It’s WORK. How do we stop botting? Well CCP has done a wonderful job of curtailing it but the bot makers will always adapt and the bot users will always be there shelling out the cash in order to make their Eve mining more bearable.
Now what else can be done to stop this? Well we can take a page out of CCP’s method of curtailing RMTing; PLEX. You’ve all seen the advertisements: ” Why take risk with 3rd parties that over charge when you can buy PLEX?” And that’s a good argument. CCP provides a reliable alternative that gives the players what they want.
But what is the bot alternative? Why a bot of course! That’s right, CCP should make mining bots for us. Well not exactly. Instead of a program that flies a Hulk and zaps rocks, and docks up any time someone enters local, i’m thinking of something else based off of the siphon units that came with the latest expansion that adds further interaction between players. Going with the “farms and fields” concept, we can refer to this “siphon mining unit” as ‘the peasant.”
Well the peasant would fulfill a similar role as the medieval counterpart as a semi passive income source. These peasants will be deployable objects that are customizable in their fit. You would deploy it in an asteroid field and “activate it.” Upon activation it would be stuck in place for the period of an hour or whatever would be agreeable for the developers, in which you cannot move it.
This presents us with interesting scenarios. If the system is empty of enemies, a miner can do his job faster and go on to do “fun things” in Eve. At the same time it also provides targets for pvpers. Small frigate and cruiser gangs can go roaming and striking the income of their enemies very directly. The defending side will have to form up its own defensive fleet in order to protect their peasants thus interacting further with would be attackers.
Of course I understand that there would be other aspects to balance. The peasant would have to be effective/cheap enough to be a viable alternative to botting. Yet at the same time it still needs to be worth something to motivate the hunters to go out and go after these things. Having them be customizable means they will have loot to drop. We also have to see if we want to have new skills involved or co opt older ones from the already existing system.
So by providing a viable and attractive alternative, and easing the grind of the Eve miner, we can dwindle the number of bots in Eve as well as introducing new ways for players to interact with one another. Furthermore, if we are to adopt the “peasant” into the Eve universe, the results may help us develop ways to add further interaction between players by perhaps further modifying or even replacing the current pos/moon equation
– Seraph IX Basarab
