The Rise of the Machines: The Practical Guide Primer.

Eve botting has been all the rage lately. From articles about anti-botting crusades, to articles showing you the human face of botting, youve seen it all by now. Ever wondered what bots actually are, at the technical level? Ever wonder why people bot, how they bot, or why they bot? And most importantly, ever wonder why people code bots? Im about to lay it all out for you in this series.

The Empire State of Botting

In May of this year the popular RoidRipper faced a wave of bans that put it, and the publicdemands community, temporarily out of commission. With the apparent increased CCP monitoring activity, most open communities went underground, and as a result instead of one central, free bot that everyone uses we now have thousands of privately made, custom bots that compose the majority of the eve botting-sphere. With paranoia rising as many believe that CCP is actively watching the public botting boards, the community also seeks refuge in the closed-source, commercial bots, somehow rationalizing that CCP doesnt have $10 to spend in order to get access to them. All hope is not lost, however, and amidst this state of heightened apprehension, free projects have spawned that have proven to be more extensible, robust, and effective than RR ever was.

Tools of the Trade

Roughly speaking, theres two approaches that bot developers take when developing bots for Eve Online. The most common approach for privately made bots is image and character recognition(known in the community as OCR, although not technically correct). OCR bots simply scrape the screen and attempt to match what is on the screen to pre-selected images in order to determine the current game state. RR was one such OCR bot. Note: The now defunct RRs code can be found here: Common tools used for OCR bots include Sikuli, Auto Hot Key (AHK) and Autoit. Some of these tools, particularly Sikuli, make the creation of OCR bots appear a pursuit lacking sophistication and skill. But while OCR bots are looked down upon as being among the least sophisticated bots out there, the obscure bugs and the ever changing colors from computer to computer make maintaining a public distribution using this technology more challenging than any other type of bot. The second and perhaps the most used approach for commercial bots is python injection. Python injection is the most powerful, easiest to maintain, and dangerous technology available. A python-injected bot is usually composed of two pieces, a DLL(dynamic linked library) that is injected into the Eve client, and some sort of user front-end to allow the user some control over the application. Injected bots can run minimized as they dont need to scrape the screen like OCR bots do and they dont need to push input events into the queue since they call the clients methods directly. This is what is sometimes referred to as pure injection or hard injection. Injected bots are also more efficient than OCR ones because there is no overhead for analyzing images.

Keeping it Real.
The detection paradigm works as follows: 1) User reports. User reports are the first, and only line of defense for CCP against botters. If a botter is not reported it is very likely that that botter will go undetected forever(absent doing some really idiotic things like dumping the entire market in a region without pause for example). 2) Play time, CCP makes reported accounts that go over 10-11 hours of playtime a priority. 3) Technical review of the logs. By reviewing error logs from stacktraces submitted from the client, CCP can sometimes determine whether a client is running an injected bot or not. Depending on what step 3 of this procedure yields, CCP will either put that account under the three strike rule, or permanently ban all accounts on the same computer. If you havent already noticed, CCP has a strong interest in keeping track of what accounts run on the same pc, and network. In order to tag offending players accounts CCP uses a fingerprinting mechanism that collects system information in order to generate a semi-unique fingerprint that can later be used to ban every account that the player has been running from that same machine. CCP will also, under extreme circumstances, permanently ban all the players accounts by IP. This is something that CCP will not ordinarily do as it exposes them to banning people on the same network that might have nothing to do with the offense(such as roommates, other people in the same dorms of a university, etc). Its worth mentioning that when they do take this approach and you happen to be that guy who got banned because he was in the same NAT as an offender, CCP will not allow you to appeal your ban and will give you no recourse whatsoever. The take home point here is: Pray that there are no hardcore botters playing Eve in your Unis dorm. Staying safe from banning, and multiple bannings specifically, requires us to take a multi-tiered approach. First theres the issue of the fingerprint. By keeping CCP from tagging all your accounts to the same machine you might be able to avoid future headaches. One way of doing this is to run your accounts in separate Virtual Machines. Another, and perhaps better way is to use Civians RedGuard. The other thing that you must do to remain absolutely safe is to use a Virtual Private Network provider in order to keep your botting IP separate from your main accounts. By keeping your botting IP and fingerprint separate from your mains you can ensure that nothing regrettable happens. Aside from the technical level, there is one simple step that will keep you from getting banned- Dont get reported. If you mine in less traveled systems or rat/plex in 0.0 the chances of you having to deal with CCPs banhammer greatly decrease, this is also the case if you happen to maintain your botting activities in densely populated areas, as High-Sec. Profits A lot of talk and speculation surrounds the issue of botting profits. The reality is that a bot cannot make ISKis faster than a player can, its just not possible. What a bot can do is save you the grind and boring-ness that is Eve Onlines pve content. So you like to pvp right? And you like to fly your shiny toys in pvp, right? And you absolutely hate killing those npcs for hours to do so, amirite? Then botting is for you. Instead of spending the only available play time that you have ratting/missioning/doing incursions, you can set your bot up and go to work. When you return from work you can cash in the ISKies and go kill some nubs. On a typical 8 hour workday, using Dannys Raticate for Eryan2, at a moderate 10mil/tick you can come home to 320mil ISK per bot. I dont know about you, but I would have to be having a pretty horrible week of pvping if I lose 2.24B. But say youre really that bad at pvp, just get another bot. Now youd have to lose 4.48B a week in order to have to do anything other than pvping. See where I am getting at? And you can do all of this without raising any suspicions by staying under 10 hours of botting per day. Lovesounds: Futuresex Love it or hate it, in Eve Online, as in the Matrix, the machines are here to stay. Hope this article helped you cut through the bullshit and mysticism surrounding this subject and I hope you didnt emo-rage too hard while reading this. In next issues Ill expand on the methods described above and a little trick or two. - emist.

From: http://evenews24.com/2011/10/24/the-rise-of-the-machines-the-practical-guide-primer