I can confidently say it'll never be "safe" to bot in this game (as it never was before). I don't foresee a point where GGG stops caring about it and decides to do nothing about it anymore.
There will be always be ups and downs in terms of people getting away with botting, but it's always going to carry a real risk because GGG is willing to take the time to look at data on the server side to identify botters and RMTers.
As far as we're aware of, there's nothing specific in EB they are targeting. Just general stuff to catch a whole bunch of rule breakers at once. They track ips, they track items you "trade" no matter how you trade them (drop, face to face, guild stash), and they most certainly can track normal game data. New accounts are certainly under a lot more scurrility than older accounts, since most of the new accounts they are getting are from banned people and not new people trying the game.
Obviously, botting isn't impossible since we still have a lot of people botting for fun. A lot of people who are trying to do RMT or really build up their wealth via botting are getting hit from a wide variety of server sided detection. Most of these boil down to doing things that would make the account suspicious and then GGG investigates. This game isn't so large they can't manage it yet.
So, if you want to bot for fun and are accustomed to the normal risk of botting in any game, then now is as good of a time as any, since I don't se them letting up on trying to dissuade people from botting and RMT. If you're looking to try and bot a whole bunch of accounts to profit from (or even for the challenge), you're most definitely going to run into issues of GGG thinking you're another RMT supplier they are trying to get rid of. In that case, you'll have to get really creative to try and not get banned.
