The Subject of botting has returned to being one of the most heated eve community topics with CCP Peligro tweeting out information early last week after a wave of newly created bots in Greater Western Co-Prosperity Sphere and Fraternity. Treasury were banned.





This prompted some community discussion and CCP Peligro delivered more information later in the week. On May the 9th, CCP Peligro tweeted out this pie chart showing the top 25 alliances by permanently banned user from eve-online from 2006 where the data collection started.

The 25 Most banned Alliances appear as follows;

Shadow of xXDEATHXx – 13%

Solar Citizens – 10%

Brothers of Tangra – 10%

Solar Wing – 8%

Northern Associates – 6%

RED Citizens – 5%

AAA Citizens – 5%

Fraternity. Treasury – 5%

Ultima Rati0 – 4%

Pan-Intergalatic Business Community – 3%

Initiative Associates – 3%

ROL. Citizens – 3%

Kids With Guns Alliance – 2%

Red Alliance – 2%

Rolling Thunder. – 2%

Stainless. – 2%

Wings Wanderers – 2%

xFive ShadowSx – 2%

Circle of Hell – 2%

Citizens Squads – 2%

Claimed – 2%

Cohortes Triall – 2%

Greater Western Co-Prosperity Sphere – 2%

Hand of Despair – 2%

Inver Brass – 2%

What is immediately obvious here is that every single alliance listed on this list with maybe the slight exception of Red Alliance is a rental group or a group which relied heavily on mercenary protection (pseudo renting essentially with protection fees). What I think is a more interesting approach and where my take is on this is to look into each one of these rental alliances and the area of space in which they rented or occupied.

Here is a really shitty image I spent 60s in MS Paint making. I color coded the various regions in eve using the following criteria

Green: Region has NPC stations present.

Yellow: Region is neighbours with lowsec or a region with NPC stations.

Orange: Region has no NPC region neighbours and you must travel entirely through an adjacent region to reach a NPC station.

Red: Region has no NPC region neighbours and you must travel entirely through TWO adjacent regions in order to reach a NPC station.

If you take a quick look at this image you’ll see that there are only 2 regions that meet the red criteria. Omist and Detorid. In 2018, Kids With Guns Alliance, and Fraternity. Treasury both were among the most banned alliances in the game for botting. It comes to no surprise that these alliances at the top of the ban list also live and use space in proximity around these 2 highlighted, difficult to access regions.

NPC Stations and NPC space is important as it allows players who wish to harass the locals and create conflict locally the ability to stage and launch attacks from them.

Problem areas (highlighted in orange) are regions where any hunters or small gang players generally avoid. These are isolated regions that house either the most risk averse minded players and often the most likely to be inhibited by bots due to the safety in exclusion that they provide. Paragon Soul, Feythabolis, Tenerifis, Immensea, Wicked Creek, Insmother, The Spire, Malpais, Outer Passage, Oasa and Cobalt Edge are all regions that are difficult to roam to, and also happen to be the home of the alliances that have accounts that get banned for botting. Every single one of these regions has had an eve sub-reddit post about them in the last 6 months.

Here is a map provided to me by Innominate, using a color key to display systems based on how far away from the nearest NPC region.

Here is another but this time displaying capital jump ranges.





Now back to our list. The Top 5 Alliances, unsurprisingly, all have held control over the drone regions and the south east of eve for almost a decade throughout their combined history. Just these 5 groups make up nearly 50% of the entire list of banned accounts in alliances in the last 13 years! I’d recommend viewing this sov time lapse youtube video which shows the alliance sovereignty influence map from 2007-2017. Take a look back at that banned alliance list and see how the vast majority of them pop up in regions that I’ve highlighted, and appear in space appearing on Innominates maps. It’s clear that there is an undeniable link between difficulty to access space and the amount of botting that happens in the region.

So how do we solve this and test the hypothesis?

My Proposal would be the following.



Tenerifis: Add a NPC constellation with stations somewhere on the eastern side of the region. Tenerifis borders 2 of the red regions identified on my map (Omist and Detorid) and is a good central location. On the eastern side Tenerifis has connections to both Omist, Immensea and Detorid, providing good access to all three would serve as a great staging point reducing a lot of the NPC stationless space identified on Innominates map.



Place an NPC constellation in Tenerifis somewhere in this circle.

Drone Regions: Adding an NPC constellation to this area of space has been a long requested feature of the PVP community, it is by far the most unassailable space in the game, with systems being tightly clustered within jump range of each other for an established capital force to easily defend but at the same time being several actual system jumps apart and full of chokepoints making it difficult to navigate and roam for sub-capital invaders.

Place an NPC constellation somewhere in this cluster of systems (Malpais ideally) The Drone Regions could also probably use some added regional gate connections to improve the number of jumps to travel from region to region.

Hopefully this could lead to more explosions and less botting.

Anyway I hope you enjoyed this piece and I’m interested in hearing what you think about how geography and botting are interlinked.

