People still insist that they are making money from using bid bots, I myself do not see it. People would be better off just powering up. And I still think that most of the bid bots are aimed at the up and coming minnow, all this does is slow down the growth of their SP, yeah, they may get a REP boost, but what good is it being a REP 60 Level with less than 500 SP?
Yeah that rep boost is pretty useless. At least it's fairly easy to tell those two kinds of high rep folk. Though my rep was also partially bought with bid bots lol... It's weird too because high rep you do have a psychological association with someone who has been around awhile or knows a lot. Plenty of counterexamples ;)
And it is also true that their language seems to target minnows. That's pretty odd eh? Their message in the end though is that you don't need a whale level of $$ or whale connections to buy influence. But yeah, the way many new folks go about it is very counterproductive it seems.
I've been meaning to look around for ways to analyze historical botters and what their returns actually were. Do you know of anything?
Asher (@abh12345) is pretty good at figuring things out, I don't know if he has done an analysis on REP vs SP vs Account age yet or not, that might tell something, but I don't know if you could set up a data pull of bot votes or not. You first have to know who the long term bot users were to figure their ROI out. A tough one to figure out.