Re:I recompiled the client with a built-in miner b (Score 1)

I said no such thing. Of course it's not. It's impossible to make a secure client unless you can prevent access to the code entirely. Python may be a bit easier to decompile than C or C++, but you can always decompile or at least disassemble code written in any language. If the code is available for the CPU to execute, it's available for people to look at and play with. Encrypting code, checking file integrity, etc. are nothing more than annoyances to make it a bit more difficult to change the client.

True security for MMOs must be implemented on the server. And to be quite honest, CCP have done a good job there. As much as their client is very easy to hack and graft a new bot onto, their servers are (or were the last time I messed with the game) far more secure than any other MMO I've hacked.

Most MMOs rely on the client to manage most movement and activities of the user. WoW- and Everquest-style MMOs are notorious for allowing speed and teleport and fighting cheats, because the fast-twitch style of combat makes it impossible to have the server mediate all movement and actions. So the client makes the character move at the right speed, times out actions at the right speed, etc. and tells the server "I'm at this location now" and "I just launched this attack."

That model is incredibly vulnerable. They "secure" the system via auditing and looking for unlikely patterns (very quick movement, too many attacks in a minute, etc.). It lets them catch cheaters, but it doesn't let them prevent it.

With Eve, on the other hand, the client doesn't tell the server anything but what the player wants to do. It tells the server "I want to move in this direction" and "I want my engines on at this power level." The server manages all of the movement and tells the client where the player is and what it did or didn't manage to do. (The client does manage its own physics state as well, but this if for display continuity purposes only and it gets periodically resynched from the server.)

All you can really do in Eve is automate what a normal human could do. The bot still has to play by the rules. And the combat in Eve is sufficiently slow that it's really not any more effective than paying someone in China to sit there and do the same actions; it's just cheaper and more fun to write a bot.

I don't say this in defense of CCP--because they've had their share of screwups and have a terrible track record when it comes to wildly oscillating game rebalances--but in defense of their general model, which is more correct and less vulnerable to cheating than most. Cheating takes the fun out of things. No one wants to write a chess program that moves knights diagonally when it feels like it. But writing a computer-based player that has to play by the rules is _fun_.