Science & Industry

Just increase the mineral requirements of all bpo's in the game by a fixed percentage. As the number of minerals entering the market increases, or minerals pulled increase, increase the requirement on the bpo's. Yield goes up 1 percent raise requirements 1 percent. It should balance things out.

I'm pretty sure they can monitor what is pulled down to the ore type so they should be able to adjust mineral requirements accordingly. Don't think it would even take much effort.

I think the problem with mineral prices would be less to do with botting than it is to do with more players and more active accounts. More people are pulling minerals. Whether that's from mining or missions makes no difference really, more on the market = less price per mineral. And seriously there are plenty of people eager to kill bots. Get on the forums and report them. Join the channel and report them. Someone will happily kill them.

Really I'm seeing the high end minerals come down in price but the rest are not awful low.. in fact Noxcium is at an insane high. Mining is a passive activity. I do it with my accounts while I work on school work all day. But it's also low income as has already been stated. I typically take two or three of my guys and run a few missions at the end of my day of school work to break up the minotiny and I make almost or more money in the short time I am missioning than I do pulling all day in a barge.

I know you were being sarcastic ... but it seriously is not a terrible idea. It will disrupt bots, and as long as it doesn't demand a user to enter a CAPTCHA at a frequency that is annoying (every 45-60 minutes would be fine), it's acceptable. Bots are supposed to be able to run for days without interruption (other than daily down time) ... a CAPTCHA system would defeat them entirely.

The drops from NPCs need to be reduced or stopped altogether. It's absurd to get more minerals from reprocessing mission loot than mining.

I like this idea, but definitely not an actual CAPTCHA or constantly interactive minigame. Sure you could devise something that would be difficult for a bot but trivial for a human player.

For example, you could say that the targeting scanners can see through all the dust, so have to manual lock your target and would take 1-2 seconds, once your on one rock, you are done. Or could be some silly scifi thing like "realigning/cleaning the plasma injectors" every 30 minutes.

I don't see how someone could be so annoyed with doing a simple task for TWO seconds every 30 minutes if it meant no bots... there are already tons of tasks in EVE that take way more time and are way more tedious.

also bots do CAPTCHA crap far better then most humans. So it wouldnt even bother them, but those of us that actually mine would tell CCP to go **** themselves over the annoyance.

Speaking from the perspective of someone who found even alt account semi-afk mining too excruciatingly dull to keep the sub going, I really think the thing to do is legitimise botmining through something along the lines of an autonomous miner drone that can dock and dump ore.

I'll not go into details of which where how who etc. Point is making it like PI, or scanning, or any other kind of mini game will as people have pointed out get skullnumbingly dull in oh.. 15 minutes.

Recommending officially sanctioned quasi-botting is possibly tantamount to holocaust denial but bots are a fact of life, which is a symptom of a game mechanic that is sufficiently boring for enough people that the risk of botting is more attractive than playing the game.

Of course doing that will decimate bot accounts and make CCP look less ~financially viable~ so probably wishful thinking they'd take the long view there.