Carebears and bots walk hand in hand

Considering that EVE is supposed to be a harsh competitive world, it is surprisingly not. While there is easier to be competitive than in WoW for example, most players gain their wealth doing carebear stuff. The purpose of such features is to allow bad players to have something to do and progress in the game, preventing the baddies from canceling subscription. The perfect example of such features is farming "heroics" in WoW for valor points: the task can be completed literally on /follow. Let's try to give exact criteria for the "baddie friendly carebear" feature:

1. It gives the players a task and rewards him for performing it.
2. The task is readily available in unlimited amount when the player wants it
3. The player can pick the difficulty of the task or the task is trivial (though maybe time-consuming)
4. The task does not include any kind of competition from other players and no player is motivated to stop the one doing it (random griefing doesn't count, he is not after you because of your mission)
5. The activity has no other effect on the game world than rewarding the player. You sell no ore, you perform no service or harm to another player, you just got some ISK/wowgold from an NPC.

The most important thing to recognize is that farming limited spawns (resources or mobs) is not carebear, even in a game with no PvP: the target is limited, so the farmers are competing with each other for the loot in two ways, at first by actually getting the spawn, secondly at the marketplace where the loot sells low due to oversupply. The reason why farming is replaced by quests/missions in MMOs is exactly to protect the baddies from competition with other players. No matter how many people run random HCs in WoW or missions in EVE, there is always a next instance, and there are unlimited rewards available to anyone, which is only mitigated by overall game world inflation (ISK in EVE, ilvl in WoW).

However it has a very nasty side-effect: botting. If a task is easy but boring, better let a bot do it. So these functions are used by bots (or AFK players without technical bot program) to create ingame wealth to illegally sell it or boost their real character with power it shouldn't have.

In WoW practically every game feature is carebear as they are available in unlimited amount of instances, they have absolutely zero impact on the world, besides rewarding the player and they are totally uncompetitive. Even random BG is such function, despite formally being direct PvP: you don't have to compete for rewards as you get honor points even if you did 0 damage, 0 healing, 0 objective cap and your team lost. Only arenas and RBGs are competitive and top raiding was made competitive by players creating third party toplists.

Considering that EVE is supposed to be a "harsh world where you shape the galaxy", the amount of baddie (and bot) friendly features are overwhelming. Most people are "carebears", gaining their wealth from missioning or ratting (grinding mob spawns which are available in every difficulty in unlimited amount). No wonder that botting in EVE is even more prevalent than in WoW. In WoW you can't sell most gear and everyone swims in gold so botting is usually done by players who want to increase the power of their own character without playing. Since you can buy anything from ISK, including game time, botting ISK is profitable so it's rampart.

WoW cannot be "saved" as it is purposefully carebear friendly. However EVE is not. Officially. Jester is looking for an elegant solution to stop botting, here you go:

• Get rid of all mission agents above lvl 1. Lvl 1 is good for 1 week newbies to learn the ropes, everyone else should be doing something real. The Navy Raven bought from LPs is no less "welfare epic" than the valor-point given WoW loot.
• Limit the availability of random NPC pirates (beside those who belong to lvl1 security missions). Seriously, why do the Guristas have endless support of pilots and ships? I'm damn sure that millions of them are slaughtered every month.  They should have a limited resource count and should be able to set up operations according to this. If they are low on resources, they can't start new deadspace operations or incursions.
• Seriously rework mining into its own minigame that requires constant player attention, making botting hard. Like you switch in asteroid view, you must target components of that asteroid, blindly mining all makes you hit low-yield parts or even explosive gas clusters that damage your ship or blow the asteroid into useless little pieces in the space.

If we do these, the following options remain for a pilot to gain wealth:

• Mining: it's affecting other players as provide the backbone of the economy: materials. It is in competition with other miners and pirate players going after them
• Trading/manufacturing: it's also affecting other players via providing them buys and sells and it is in competition with other traders/industrialists
• Hauling: it's affecting other players due equalizing prices between regions, it's in competition with other haulers and pirate players going after them
• Pirating: it's affecting other players obviously and it's in competition with other pirates and fighters
• Profitable fighting: it's affecting the life of miners and haulers they escort for a price or as members of their corporation, and clearly affecting the life (or rather death) of the pirates. They compete with other fighters for the jobs and with pirates and fighters of enemy corps for survival
• System ownership: it's affecting the whole playerbase (see the running theme here?) and provide service to everyone, place to mine for miners, to trade for traders, to haul from and to for haulers, jobs for mercenaries. It's in competition with other system owners which is resolved in epic battles (or hidden political moves)
• Exploring: it's affecting the life of the miners who use the grav/ladar site locations, the traders who buy the salvaged stuff and the wormhole corporations who use WH locations. They are in competition with other explores (and the pirates who hunt them like everyone else out there)

Since everything would be PvP (either battle or market/political competition), botting would end overnight, I mean good luck botting PvP! It would also solve a problem that is permanently on CSM discussions: the "highsec carebears" having too much protection. With these changes being a "highsec bear" would be equal to "being broke", so only true newbies would do that. Everyone else would have to engage in some form of PvP (combat, market, politics) if they ever want to fly anything bigger than the starter mission destroyer.

What will happen to xXxipopulolxXx who don't want to mine Veldspar, don't want to haul, too dumb to trade and has 1:3 kill:death? I mean, he just wants to jump on the "awsom ship" he grinded missions for to "hav som pvp fun lol", how could he have fun (undeserved feeling of greatness) now? By buying ISK for PLEX! Which is a win-win-win for them, the good players who sold the ISK and CCP as PLEX cost more than subscription.

Clarification: carebear is not equal to M&S. It's an extreme risk and competition aversion, overall "let's all be friends" attitude and not lazyness or stupidity (though correlation exists). M&S need a huge kick in the butt, carebears just need a little push. Also, "hard" doesn't stop boting since the worst thing that can happen with a bot trying hard task is that it fails to do so and stand there empty. Competition stops boting since there the dumb bot can lose your ship which is worse than not boting and staying docked when not there.


PS: how could you gain faction standing without missions? You could donate ISK to the faction, or join the militia and kill enemy faction militia members, gaining the ISK value of the destroyed enemy as donation. (You should be able to be in a corp and a faction militia in the same time, assuming the corp and the faction has positive standing).

Where would the ISK enter to the playerbase without missions showering welfare ISK? NPC corporations could buy minerals, products and sleeper loot for a fixed low price. The factions could also place bounties on enemy militia pilots who killed lot of their militia.

PS2: quick business update: 1.16 B (500M gift). The reason for the lack of increase is spending 184.5M on books for myself.

PS3: the pug update: BWD HM 5/6 now as the hunter couldn't kite and the mages had no frost spec. Seriously, what's the odds of 2 mages having no frost spec?