First, ice bots. People are cheering the end of ice bots because they are now in anomalies instead of belts. I still wonder at the fact that people would even bot ice considering how little profit it brought in. If someone's paying a license fee to use bot software (and they do), then they are doing something far more profitable like mining in asteroid belts. But I usually only deal with the top end botting software, so maybe all the bots people complain about are homemade. After all, currently a mining bot would only perform very simple tasks.
So what's the future? The good news is that the move from belts to anomalies will definitely kill the less sophisticated bots. The bad news is that the increased profits will attract the attention of bot makers who actually have a clue. The barrier to entry in this club is the scanner. If a bot dev can read the scanner, I see no problem getting the bot to the ice. From there getting the bot to mine is just like asteroid mining except the bot dev doesn't have to worry about changing out crystals.
The big problem for botters is that ice is no longer infinite. That means trying to scan down the anomalies as soon as they respawn. That will probably lead to an increase in detection and bans by Team Security offset by those who give up on botting ice.
EDIT: I found a response from the developer of the Eve Pilot bots:
Slav2 (9 May 2013) - "CCP bored that players prone to write petitions if they see ice miner bot, and found a way to hide these bots in anomalies. Some home made delay based ice miningbotsmacros will be broken of cause, that is good for profy botters."
In a related topic, I wonder how long high sec grav, er, I mean ore sites, will last. If a bot can detect ice anomalies, then the software can now ore anomalies and get some better grades of ore. I just wonder how long it will take for a bot dev to implement that feature.
Next comes the radial menus. I think that those have the potential to cause OCR bots problems. However, while running around SiSi I didn't see a need to use them, to that handicap will come at a future date.
Finally comes the elephant in the room: Inner Space. I know that people claim that Inner Space, or more specifically ISBoxer, does not violate the EVE Eula or ToS. But Lavish Software on its wiki actually lists such behavior as a feature...
"Memory Modification - A memory modification service allows Inner Space and extensions to easily and safely modify the memory of the host process. An extension can also provide a memory protection service, which protects memory modifications from any detection by the host."That not only describes a violation of the EVE Eula and ToS but also why so many bot developers across so many games find Inner Space such a valuable development platform. But as long as ISBoxer remains a semi-legitimate software that doesn't attract bans by CCP, then Team Security can only automatically detect and ban Inner Space extensions known to run bots or contain game-breaking code like an autopilot warp-to-zero hack. I can actually see Lavish Software making more money off EVE than it currently does due to the need for more sophisticated bots. All a bot maker needs to do is create a new extension that CCP doesn't know about and the bot then only needs to worry about behavioral detection.
I really want to see how CCP handles the situation, especially since CCP is so resistant to application developers making real life money off of EVE. The fact that Lavish Software is allowed to make thousands of dollars off of EVE every year with software that violates the EULA/ToS is strange.
I hope this post doesn't depress anyone looking for bot tears. When Odyssey hits Tranquility I'll look a the reaction in the botting community but I really don't expect to find many, if any, tears. I just hope I'm not reporting on bot laughter.
