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Author |
Thread Statistics | Show CCP posts - 74 post(s) |
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CCP Guard
C C P C C P Alliance
1836
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Posted - 2012.03.01 17:15:00 -
[1] - Quote
When we were young we all knew that in the future, "robots" and "computers" would do all our work for us while we pranced around in spandex overalls. Well, the future is here and apart from the spandex overalls and the prancing we were mostly right. But as it turns out...we are still required to do some things on our own. Like mining. And running missions.
CCP Sreegs just wrote a blog about what happens to those who don't do those things on their own.
Check out the blog right here and if you have any questions, Sreegs and gang will be here to address them. CCP Guard | EVE Community Developer |
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CCP Punkturis
C C P C C P Alliance
1451
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Posted - 2012.03.01 17:27:00 -
[2] - Quote
best. devblog pic. ever. CCP Punkturis | EVE UI Developer | @katrinat |
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CCP Soundwave
C C P C C P Alliance
538
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Posted - 2012.03.01 17:30:00 -
[3] - Quote
******* Sreegs |
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CCP Phantom
C C P C C P Alliance
1043
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Posted - 2012.03.01 17:34:00 -
[4] - Quote
CCP Punkturis wrote:best. devblog pic. ever.
A great picture for a great devblog! CCP Phantom - German Community Coordinator |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
282
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Posted - 2012.03.01 17:49:00 -
[5] - Quote
Grarr Dexx wrote:You say that the recidivism rate for the third strike is as low as 3%, but what percentage of the accounts related to one or two strikes actually remain subbed? These people are spoiled beyond the rules of Eve and the warning system probably forces them to quit altogether.
We have that number as well and it's actually also very low. I'll have it all put together and prettied up for Fanfest but if you can find my presentation from EVE Vegas somewhere I'm pretty sure there's a slide in there that shows all these percentages. At least at the time.
It takes a few months to gather really good data on this so we're going off of old rates, but as someone else mentioned, the general idea is to change behavior and turn people into good law abiding citizens. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
282
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Posted - 2012.03.01 17:52:00 -
[6] - Quote
Vincent Athena wrote:The character transfer lock will have some interesting effects. Up to now the botters have tended to drive up the PLEX, first by having a pile of accounts that consume them, then via RMT. But they also consumed PLEX via character transfers. Now, all those ways of driving up the PLEX are gone. Will we see a PLEX price drop, or even crash? That depends on just how much of the PLEX market was bot driven, and how elastic it is. Interesting times ahead!
I was unaware of the pause in bot killing. That explains alot. Nice to see the system back in business. Keep up the good work Sreegs & Co!
P.S. can we get a higher resolution version of that picture? What is all that?
We have things in place to measure a lot of stuff. One thing we've noticed historically is that when we have the system running the CPU per user count on the server goes way down, which provides a quality of life improvement for everyone in EVE and helps with the lag monster. I'll come up with some nice interesting data in the next couple of weeks to share with everyone.
The stuff in the photo is from an area outside of the city where tremendous piles of fish are hung out to dry, similar to how the rotten shark or hakarl is treated after it's pulled out of the ground. I was on my way to walk around a really cool geothermal area and this was on the way and I couldn't resist. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
282
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Posted - 2012.03.01 17:54:00 -
[7] - Quote
Bubanni wrote:OH ccp, what are you doing to make sure they don't just RMT away the accounts? (sell the account for real money) when they get locked...
RMT is a different problem that we're dealing with and we're not ready to have a discussion about that yet, but it's being worked on and there's a huge gap between "being worked on" meaning "we're doin' thangs" and "ready to tell players what we're doing". |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
282
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Posted - 2012.03.01 18:02:00 -
[8] - Quote
jonnykefka wrote:Sreegsalicious
I too would like a little more data on the recidivism stats. I mean, only 3% go on to further warnings mean that only 3% are stupid enough to get CAUGHT botting again on the same accounts. How many of those with first warnings unsub? How many moved chars around (prior to this latest tweak)? In short, is it that they are actually no longer botting, or that they're hiding it better?
Also, if you really want to teach the lesson, nuke their wallet totals and assets with the first offense. Not entirely, just as much as you can reliably trace to automated activities. They're botting for isk, threaten the isk on the first strike and you alter the risk/benefit equation of botting at ALL by quite a bit. It might dissuade some people from botting in the first place.
As I alluded to in the blog there's things in the works regarding reclaiming illegally gained assets but it's really not mature enough at this stage to comment on aside to reassure you that a discussion's being had and it's pretty much 100% likely that something will be done.
Whether they're no longer actually botting isn't something I can get into without getting specific about how the detections work. Suffice to say that from a purely analytical perspective, I'd be pretty happy as a player if all that was occurring was bad behavior being limited. That's NOT the entire scope, but it is the partial reason for the three strikes rule. Behavior has to change.
I have the unsub numbers but I want to work with current data. It's not high and I'll show it at fanfest which is just a couple of weeks away. I don't recall it off the top of my head. I am old, have a terrible memory and a fever atm.
:edit: I'll also note that those stats will now change as the data that I do have relates only to cases where characters could be transferred. I expect the number to go down. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
282
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Posted - 2012.03.01 18:04:00 -
[9] - Quote
Vincent Athena wrote:OK I got a question: "1000 to 2000 bans": Say one player has 5 accounts, 2 of which were botted, and you ban them. I know you an all 5 accounts, but how do you count that in your 1000 to 2000 total? Is that counted as
One ban because you issued a ban against one player, Two bans because you banned 2 botting accounts, Five bans because you banned all five accounts?
The number is based on accounts. When one account is banned and tagged for botting all of that player's accounts go with it. So if you only bot on 2 of your accounts but you have 5 all 5 are getting tagged and banned. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
282
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Posted - 2012.03.01 18:05:00 -
[10] - Quote
Aquila Draco wrote:] Quote:BUT WAIT, THERE IS EVEN MORE! From now on, and this current wave is included, characters who receive a warning such as this will have the characters locked to the account. This means that once you've received a warning for botting your character transfer privileges have been revoked in perpetuity. This is to prevent people trying to circumvent the rules by recycling accounts. Yes we know people pointed out this could happen last time around and if you'll remember we said "We'll keep an eye on it and if it becomes a problem we'll deal with it". Here is us dealing with it. We'll probably have to come up with some form of timing solution for the future, but as it stands today it's forever. If you care about your dudes don't to bad things. It MUST stay forever. MUST Don't ruin what you have done with some timers that will undo the lock.
There's no discussion about changing it at this time. I'm just leaving us an out because I like to talk like I'm in court and someone's going to read this back to me in the future. It happens sometimes on the Internet. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
282
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Posted - 2012.03.01 18:07:00 -
[11] - Quote
Fictional Hero wrote:That is a lot of words and you didnt say anything that hasnt been said before. I thought the purpose of the Dev Blogs was to tell us stuff, instead you say things like "charts will be at fanfest". It makes it seem that you did this as a fanfest publicity stunt, which you said wasnt.
tl;dr
Lock thread due to lack of content.
or
gas thread ban op.
There's plenty in the blog that hasn't been said before sir as there's some things being done that haven't before. The reason you need to wait for Fanfest for charts and such is any existing data would be old (You'd get that from reading the blog) and I'd like to show current data which takes time to actually exist. |
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GM Grave
Game Masters C C P Alliance
9
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Posted - 2012.03.01 18:07:00 -
[12] - Quote
<3 ESTF
The Love & Order GM Team-¬ have been thoroughly researching the Mayan calendar and writings of Nostradamus. Thus far we foresee that its going to be a bad year for the bad guys... GM Grave | Senior Game Master | Law & Order Group |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
282
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Posted - 2012.03.01 18:11:00 -
[13] - Quote
Chiggy W wrote:Awesome work, and I'm extremely glad that you've prevented the mongs from transfering charaters. I want to pick up on one point tho Quote: "Three strikes is too weak" - Here we disagree but there's a reason why. I've shown charts before and I'll have a set at Fanfest that shows that we're effective at changing behavior by using these bans (with a caveat). What I mean is that a fraction of people actually get a second warning and the amount of people in all time who have ever hit a third was something ridiculous like 3%. There's some new things though related to this that I'm going to be a good egg and share with you though in a separate paragraph.
Have you guys considered the fact that most accounts only get dinged once because they just start up a new account once they get caught? I mean you've got to be a real mouthbreather to continue botting on an account that has been dinged once, so I think the metric that 1 temp ban is enough may be slightly flawed. Ultimately I guess it doesn't matter because even if perma-banned, the hardcore botters/RMT'ers are just going to start another account anyway, but I am certainly interested to know if you guys have considered this point, and how many accounts have their chars sold then go inactive after the first warning. Anyway, keep up the good fight, I love to see this scum removed from game, and please catch them as they inevitably come scurrying back like the cockroaches they are. Great work guys!
We didn't overlook that, but the solution to that is larger than the current discussion as working around that would lead to changes in design or how accounts are handled. We're moving into a world where that becomes less and less of a possibility but that can't happen overnight and the new team's existed for about a month or something. We need to progress in steps and if all I could deliver out of the door was The Ultimate Solution we'd never get anywhere.
Point being I think that yes, we do consider that fact and yes we'd like to make it less and less of an option. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
282
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Posted - 2012.03.01 18:13:00 -
[14] - Quote
Shandir wrote:@Sreegs - what is the current policy with regard to ISK / Assets on a proven botter's multiple accounts? Do you /dev/null all their ISK, or some of it, or none? Do you asset strip them? Do you take ISK/Assets from the botter's non-botting accounts, and do you do this only for ISK you can prove comes from a botting account?
I personally think that when a botter has multiple accounts, you should strip the botting account dry of all ISK (possibly even leave them negative if they transferred any out you can't reclaim) and any items they could potentially sell, as well as stripping any ISK that was transferred via any method between accounts/characters. Probably should be more lenient to single-account botters, as they are more likely to just up and leave, but still try to strip any botting related ISK and don't be light on the estimation.
Today, as in like right now, assets aren't touched but I don't see it staying that way. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
282
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Posted - 2012.03.01 18:14:00 -
[15] - Quote
Lord Zim wrote:Could you tell us how much isk there is in the game in total and pr character, and how much minerals there is in total in the game (in refinable state and non-refinable state (supers etc)), and how this has progressed the past 5 years?
CCP Diagoras has probably produced stats like that. I'll ask around tomorrow. Don't have it immediately available to me. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
292
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Posted - 2012.03.01 18:24:00 -
[16] - Quote
Marlona Sky wrote:Good job. Still would love for you to release some information on where, alliance, corp and or names.
Naming and shaming has been and will continue to be part of an internal dialogue but for the time being it's something we've been avoiding. I understand completely why people would want to see that but I also understand completely why it's pretty dicey to be doing it. As it stands the policy is not to do so. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
292
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Posted - 2012.03.01 18:31:00 -
[17] - Quote
Vincent Athena wrote:CCP Sreegs, at the last fanfest you had a content person on your team. Do you still have such a person now? Any discussions on changes to game content to make botting either harder or less inviting?
The team you're referring to was the ESTF which was a multi-disciplinary group of volunteers working on the problem in our spare time. The team is now formalized as a part of the development process and while I don't have a "content" person per se on the team I do have an ESTF-ish stakeholder group that I reach out to if we need things.
What you're asking about as regards content does happen and actually works both ways, where sometimes if a content change is being made we'll be consulted to ensure that it's not enabling terrible things. Best answer I can give as I don't have anything right this second to point at, but I'll mention it when I do. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
292
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Posted - 2012.03.01 18:34:00 -
[18] - Quote
Woo Glin wrote:It would be interesting to see the distribution of suspected bots/bans by profession (mining/ratting/market) and the system security status. It would tie in well to a lot of the current CSM issues like isk inflation, supercapital proliferation, and improvement of mining as a career choice.
That'll be on my list for the graph elves to work on. I'm pretty surprised I've never built that chart before. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
303
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Posted - 2012.03.01 18:57:00 -
[19] - Quote
Vaerah Vahrokha wrote:I got a question as well. Isn't "1000 to 2000 bans" a bit too little? Considering people usually have 2 or more accounts that'd be like 500 unique botting people. Doesn't it sound a bit too low? Considering that in some systems there are 10+ bots?
There's really no way to answer this. It's something that will have to play out with time. The last time around we were seeing that 2k average on a bi-weekly or so basis with low levels of recidivism but I suspect that locking the character transfers and some other goodies we're working on will reduce that.
Really time will tell. The only psychic prediction I can make with any reasonable accuracy is that I will be drinking entirely too much at Fanfest! |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
303
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Posted - 2012.03.01 19:03:00 -
[20] - Quote
Kane Hart wrote:Jita Spammers are annoying but you can't really class them ass botters as much as you can class them as macro users who actually a lot of times are actually at their pc watching a moving and using a g15 and etc... The problem why I assume the developers don't ban the chat macroers is because there is a fine line there where it might be an aggressive action against actual scammers and cause a **** storm.
I saw a dev on jita chat the other day they seem to just lol at it just like most of us do. It's part of and how eve has been a long time.
I assume if they were going take action they would have to first do a famous dev blog announcing g15 keyboards and other things were extremely not tolerated.
As it stands now I assume CCP are going ignore it for ever and really the only way to cut down jita spam and macroers is to maybe stop falling into their scams? lol
Sorry I keep missing this. It's not being ignored. It's also not my department. I'll follow up on it tomorrow. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
310
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Posted - 2012.03.01 19:21:00 -
[21] - Quote
Steve Ronuken wrote:naming and shaming introduces a whole DPA issue. I'd pretty much say 'They can't do it', from a legal perspective.
I was trying not to pretend to be a lawyer but the DPA and issues related to that are indeed discussion points. :) |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
311
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Posted - 2012.03.01 19:40:00 -
[22] - Quote
Dalmont Delantee wrote:CCP Sreegs wrote:Steve Ronuken wrote:naming and shaming introduces a whole DPA issue. I'd pretty much say 'They can't do it', from a legal perspective. I was trying not to pretend to be a lawyer but the DPA and issues related to that are indeed discussion points. :) Data protection issues on ingame names/corps/alliances? Not sure that counts...:P More likely a PR issue, especially if all the negative talk about certain alliances/corps being botters pans out as being true :P
Yes, there can be DPA issues with in-game names. I really don't want to devolve into that conversation because I'm not a lawyer and someone would find something I'm wrong about and I'd just be sad and wrong at the same time, but I will say the DPA is a PART of the discussion. |
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CCP Phantom
C C P C C P Alliance
1049
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Posted - 2012.03.01 19:54:00 -
[23] - Quote
Lord Zim wrote:It would be awesome to see just how much monetary inflation there's been, it feels like it's been a tonne the last 3 or so years.
Our previous QENs contain a lot of detailed information especially, but not only, about money, inflation, ISK sinks and faucets. Fresh numbers (but no QEN though) will get released next week. CCP Phantom - German Community Coordinator |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
312
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Posted - 2012.03.01 19:56:00 -
[24] - Quote
ps3ud0nym wrote:I have a three questions.
1) The first is in regards to the confiscating of large assets. When this is implemented will this include Supers and Titans bought with botting ISK? If so, how long do you think it will be before we can look forward to some titan pilot tears?
2) Will you be looking at botting activities retroactively? If not, why? It isn't exactly fair to go after current botters and give those who have gained the benefits of botting but aren't CURRENTLY botting a free pass.
3) Has CCP discussed at any point a "If you can't beat them, join them" sea change and looked at providing more automation for dull and repetitive tasks such as mining (perhaps making killing bots a new form of PVE)?
1) I would say that however this is implemented the size of assets won't matter, but I can't speculate on timeframes or even 100% guarantee it today. I'll just let you guys be pleasantly surprised if it happens. EXPECTATION MANAGEMENT
2) Best I can say here is that we CAN go retro but no decision has been made there yet.
3) We're always happy to discuss game design changes, but that's not my department and I can't really comment on it except to say yes we've discussed and continue to discuss design changes. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
312
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Posted - 2012.03.01 19:57:00 -
[25] - Quote
Rojo Ocho wrote:Nova Fox wrote:Now when you said locked does them mean they cant bio mass either? Sreegs, was wondering if you could confirm this or not. Thanks.
I need to check on this. Can't answer right now. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
312
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Posted - 2012.03.01 20:01:00 -
[26] - Quote
KrakizBad wrote:Jarnis McPieksu wrote:KrakizBad wrote:Any comment on whether market bots were also hit? Inquiring trading minds want to know! As a trader, I can say from how the market has changed in Jita, yes. Plenty of incidental evidence, I agree. I just want to hear it officially. It's also possible the last round of patching screwed up their performance, which has happened before.
I haven't run the stats yet as I was on vacation but we do look for market bots. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
316
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Posted - 2012.03.01 20:05:00 -
[27] - Quote
Vaerah Vahrokha wrote:CCP Sreegs wrote:Rojo Ocho wrote:Nova Fox wrote:Now when you said locked does them mean they cant bio mass either? Sreegs, was wondering if you could confirm this or not. Thanks. I need to check on this. Can't answer right now. Disallowing biomass would be irrelevant, since the account is flagged so even re-creating the characters they will still be flagged anyay.
There's a number of things that would lessen the impact of allowing biomass not the least of which is the stacking penalties and the lost time which increases the cost of the enterprise, but I also can't answer from my memory whether we tagged that or not. :) |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
338
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Posted - 2012.03.01 21:25:00 -
[28] - Quote
Vincent Athena wrote:Gevlin wrote:Playing with the numbers so you say that only 3% of the accounts which used bots were perma band because they would not change their ways. And those 3% equal to between 1k and 2k of players. Also any player caught using a bot once can never transfer or GÇ£SellGÇ¥ a character from their account.
This meant that be 33k to 67k players were caught using bots, and now have their character locked to their account.
Eve has a recovering 350k worth of subscribers, so 10% to 20% (Bold rounding) of eve's player base has been caught using a bot and has stopped using these bots via one way or another. To the looks of it 3 strikes would remove the possibility of False positives.
Unholy Rage banned 6200 Accounts in the summer 2009 requiring a lot of resources and had a few false positives that became public.
Not bad result from 1 team over a 3/4 of a year's worth of work. I am looking forward to the chart **** presented at Fan Fest. I think he means 1000 to 2000 accounts received a ban of some sort. Most a 2 week ban, and 3% a perma-ban.
The 3% number was based on old data. I can't attest to the current attrition rate until we've had time to attrit. Tomorrow I'll take a peek at how many of those were final strikes. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
338
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Posted - 2012.03.01 21:28:00 -
[29] - Quote
Carlos Aranda wrote: blue cop day. 3strike my a_ss.
I see some bots banned - finally after countless petitions and report bot. You know, how frustrating it was, to see then online every day, though it is impossible to not see, what was going on, if you only ever checked once? I see a shitton still online.
I am not one of the usual credentulous players, who just believe it, if somebody once in a year writes: now he is really, really serious 1000+ banned blabla.
"haracter transfer privileges have been revoked in perpetuity"
That is good.
I will be satisfied, if I fly around and do no more see obvious bots. But I have already a bunch of new ones in my addressbook after just 1 new roam. They changed the system, they have some new very young tengus, the old ones are offline, so maybe banned. This is not, what I call successful work.
The bannings were only off for a few months during the reorg. There's really not anything to not believe as the alternative would be to assume I'm just making up data and if you believe that there's nothing I will ever be able to do to please you.
You'll also note I use terms like "process" and "slow burn". If you think you're going to log in one day and everything that you've personally decided is a bot will be gone then there is also nothing I will ever be able to do to please you.
I'm not asking you to be happy or sad or really feel one way or another, but I'm trying to manage expectations and I'm going to be realistic about it. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
340
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Posted - 2012.03.01 22:21:00 -
[30] - Quote
Camios wrote:First, most important: CCP Sreegs looks like a seal being really happy about the fish.
Second: can you trace the money-asset stream between characters? Hard core botters use account registered with fake names and use various means to hide their main non-botting accounts, but their main accounts must get the money from the botting ones in some way. If you can trace movements, the botters are forced to launder the money in some way. There are many ways to do this in a sandbox, but this increases the effort needed to keep the "good accounts" clean; and you can anyway act on the laundry.
There are lots of ways to trace lots of things. Giving specifics would be a bit silly this early in the game. There's also some newer tech coming into play I'll be talking about at fanfest that will make the ridiculous FAKE EVERYTHING EVER ON YOUR ACCOUNT anonymity vanish. I'm not saying what we're doing yet so don't ask, but merely pointing out that we know it's a problem and have for some time. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
341
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Posted - 2012.03.01 22:36:00 -
[31] - Quote
Carlos Aranda wrote:here is an extreme example: http://eve-kill.net/?a=corp_detail&crp_id=113284&view=losses&m=11&y=2011http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=12237649one of their transports to empire. Alloys worth 11 bil. I know several guys, who passed them, tried to kill them and watched them. We were all very frustrated, that the GMs just closed our petitions and did nothing for so long, though it was so obvious. These were very good setup, almost impossible to catch. Now finally after several months, these bot tengus seem to be banned. You need appr 7 months to check this and ban them? Plz tell me, you did not ban them just 14 days? What happened with all the ISK, they made in this months? Why on earth should they get only a 1st strike and not right away a permaban + all ISK deleted? If you fly around in their territory, you see the same human must still have tengus. They are online and out there. Just no more in this systems. These systems are atm. dead. By the time you realize, this must be bigger, you might consider some control, what is going on in that alliance: Who profited of this, too? Or did they sent you a petition, that something is going on in their space? I doubt that.
I'm not a GM and never have been. I cannot speak to what may or may not happen with petitions. If our system for dealing with bots was to have a bunch of dudes sitting there staring at people when they get petitioned it would pretty much be the dumbest system to do anything anyone has ever implemented.
I've explained the three strike system already at least twice in this thread.
My point being that we didn't just now get to your petition. Your petition wasn't involved at all. We detected the bot using special secret tools and now it's gone along with however many thousand others decide to log in. I'm sorry you have some frustration regarding a past petition but I can assure you that has nothing to do with myself, my team or this system. :) |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
341
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Posted - 2012.03.01 22:38:00 -
[32] - Quote
Frabba wrote:I probably missed this earlier in the thread, but what happens to the other characters on the accounts which were banned for botting? Are they also going to be locked down?
Yes. The account itself will be unable to transfer characters. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
341
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Posted - 2012.03.01 22:44:00 -
[33] - Quote
ps3ud0nym wrote:CCP Sreegs wrote:Camios wrote:First, most important: CCP Sreegs looks like a seal being really happy about the fish.
Second: can you trace the money-asset stream between characters? Hard core botters use account registered with fake names and use various means to hide their main non-botting accounts, but their main accounts must get the money from the botting ones in some way. If you can trace movements, the botters are forced to launder the money in some way. There are many ways to do this in a sandbox, but this increases the effort needed to keep the "good accounts" clean; and you can anyway act on the laundry. There are lots of ways to trace lots of things. Giving specifics would be a bit silly this early in the game. There's also some newer tech coming into play I'll be talking about at fanfest that will make the ridiculous FAKE EVERYTHING EVER ON YOUR ACCOUNT anonymity vanish. I'm not saying what we're doing yet so don't ask, but merely pointing out that we know it's a problem and have for some time. I know you keep telling us that you can't tell us anything... is this really the best course of action? Throw it open, let everyone see and figure out ways to make it better. Certainly would mollify some of these people's ideas that the bans and detection will be rather primitive and rely on anecdotal evidence.
Based on my experience yes it is the best course of action. Plenty disagree but today bots are getting banned so I get to be right and anyone saying I should tell them every detail of everything we do is wrong.
I don't want to be dismissive because you're probably sincere. Were I to be trolling this thread I'd come in with something cool like SECURITY BY OBSCURITY because that's a catchphrase that people misinterpret as meaning that all systems need to be open or they're inherently insecure and I could probably argue with me for quite a while about it by taking that bait.
In this case it's a videogame universe with a very specific set of capabilities and a very small team of people working on a rather large problem. We're not going to waste even an ounce of our time satisfying curiosity if there's even a glimmer of a chance it will make us have to do more work getting back to zero. I'm happy to see some examples of anyone else in this industry who handles the situation differently though.
Hopefully that makes sense. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
342
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Posted - 2012.03.01 23:05:00 -
[34] - Quote
Marlona Sky wrote:Is it possible for you to tell us what the botters primary activity was? In a percentage like "67% were miners, 12% were market...". As an example.
Yeah that kind of thing I'll report but I'd prefer if possible to wait a couple of weeks to do it. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
343
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Posted - 2012.03.01 23:28:00 -
[35] - Quote
ps3ud0nym wrote:CCP Sreegs wrote:ps3ud0nym wrote:CCP Sreegs wrote:Camios wrote:First, most important: CCP Sreegs looks like a seal being really happy about the fish.
Second: can you trace the money-asset stream between characters? Hard core botters use account registered with fake names and use various means to hide their main non-botting accounts, but their main accounts must get the money from the botting ones in some way. If you can trace movements, the botters are forced to launder the money in some way. There are many ways to do this in a sandbox, but this increases the effort needed to keep the "good accounts" clean; and you can anyway act on the laundry. There are lots of ways to trace lots of things. Giving specifics would be a bit silly this early in the game. There's also some newer tech coming into play I'll be talking about at fanfest that will make the ridiculous FAKE EVERYTHING EVER ON YOUR ACCOUNT anonymity vanish. I'm not saying what we're doing yet so don't ask, but merely pointing out that we know it's a problem and have for some time. I know you keep telling us that you can't tell us anything... is this really the best course of action? Throw it open, let everyone see and figure out ways to make it better. Certainly would mollify some of these people's ideas that the bans and detection will be rather primitive and rely on anecdotal evidence. Based on my experience yes it is the best course of action. Plenty disagree but today bots are getting banned so I get to be right and anyone saying I should tell them every detail of everything we do is wrong. I don't want to be dismissive because you're probably sincere. Were I to be trolling this thread I'd come in with something cool like SECURITY BY OBSCURITY because that's a catchphrase that people misinterpret as meaning that all systems need to be open or they're inherently insecure and I could probably argue with me for quite a while about it by taking that bait. In this case it's a videogame universe with a very specific set of capabilities and a very small team of people working on a rather large problem. We're not going to waste even an ounce of our time satisfying curiosity if there's even a glimmer of a chance it will make us have to do more work getting back to zero. I'm happy to see some examples of anyone else in this industry who handles the situation differently though. Hopefully that makes sense. Hey.. I am not THAT big of a troll XD. that totally makes sense. To be honest, I am not sure exactly how you would be able to throw the system open in such a way that you would be able to gain the benefits of crowd sourcing without a great deal of work; however, I think it is an important question to ask in regards to resource management. What I am concerned about is the number of man hours available to those who write and use bots (nearly infinite even with Sturgeon's Law), verses the number of man hours that you have available in a year in your team to combat it. How do you guys intend to address that gap in development capabilities (other than being "The smartest guys in the room")? PS: In case it doesn't come across. I think you guys are fantastic and fully support what you are doing.
We'll work on it until we run out of time v0v. I think the motivation of botmakers in our game is grossly overstated as opposed to some others where your potential customer base is immense. Even the dudes who do it as freebies tend to be more swagger than anything else. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
343
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Posted - 2012.03.01 23:31:00 -
[36] - Quote
CCP Sreegs wrote:KrakizBad wrote:Jarnis McPieksu wrote:KrakizBad wrote:Any comment on whether market bots were also hit? Inquiring trading minds want to know! As a trader, I can say from how the market has changed in Jita, yes. Plenty of incidental evidence, I agree. I just want to hear it officially. It's also possible the last round of patching screwed up their performance, which has happened before. I haven't run the stats yet as I was on vacation but we do look for market bots.
Still don't have exact stats but I did confirm we nuked some market bots. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
343
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Posted - 2012.03.01 23:49:00 -
[37] - Quote
Vaerah Vahrokha wrote:Aquila Draco wrote:Please shut up with stealth "my bot runs for 16 hours a day every day for months now - will it be banned" No human will mine for 3 months every single day for 16 hours a day. LOL... you will oversleep some day in that 3 months or something i presume. And you will few msgs in local in that 3 months, or click wrong every now and then or something.
1) What I do is in my signature, it's not hard to read it. 2) What people do with their time is not your business to judge. It's not a per hour paid service so if someone wanted to play 23/7 he's fully entitled to do so (he will die in the process but it is his choice). There's plenty of people who work at home or are at work in a position to run low involvement activities while they do other menial stuff (I.e. I know a guy who is paid to stay in a place and check that an alarm system won't ring and at end of day he has to start an server backup, period.). Those guys will exactly play 8 hours a day, at very identical times and won't chat in local. What will discern them vs a botting behavioral pattern? What tools are they given to objectively and undisputedly prove to CCP they were not botting?
If you feel you're wrongfully banned you petition. I've yet to see any false positives in our work and were one to come up I'd be pretty interested in seeing what it was. On the flipside the first thing anyone does is claim innocence. I'd suggest that were this to occur you should petition and we'll see how it plays out as I'm not sure speculation is going to get us anything more than additional questions. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
343
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Posted - 2012.03.01 23:52:00 -
[38] - Quote
zcar300 wrote:Speaking of RMT. Are the big RMT web pages legal? I mean they must be right? Because they advertise everywhere and no one has taken them down. I haven't looked into it but they seems to sell in game items for real money. That's what RMT means right?
I won't really discuss that here for legal reasons but you can research the subject pretty easily on the internet. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
343
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Posted - 2012.03.01 23:52:00 -
[39] - Quote
And I'm off to bed EVE Dudes. I'll pop back by in the morning. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
361
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Posted - 2012.03.02 01:06:00 -
[40] - Quote
Patient 2428190 wrote:Why do you feel the need to lie? Of course it was timed to be before fanfest. Nothing quite gets everybody pumped up and the circlejerking in full swing like a bot banning wave.
You only do a mass banning maybe once a year. Each time you do a mass banning, you claim its an ongoing process, but nothing changes until another annual ban party comes by. This happened last year, this happened with Unholy Rage.
Do you think anybody who would construct these bots wouldn't recognize the pattern?
Nothing you've said in this post is accurate. We did and have shown that we did a large amount of activity on a regular basis for months. I've given you some examples of where to find that information in this thread. We openly stated in this very blog that during a period of reorganization it was shut off. Were I a dishonest lad you'd have never known things were shut off. Were we clamoring for pre-fanfest attention you'd have gotten fanfare about the event rather than having to hear about it from other players, unless you're insinuating that I'm such a brilliant puppetmaster that this is all part of my master plan to gain whatever, in which case thanks!
You deciding it never happened doesn't make it so and I'm sorry if that was somehow not clear enough to you but there is enough of a portion of the playerbase who will choose to invent facts rather than digest them that it really becomes an exercise in futility to respond and difficult to have an open dialogue where I can present honest information. I'll go ahead and give it a shot anyway and suggest that you read the thread and if you don't like something we've done then state your case as it relates to the facts given rather than being rude and spreading misinformation. There's plenty of other threads on the internet to do that in. This isn't one of them. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
361
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Posted - 2012.03.02 01:11:00 -
[41] - Quote
Camios wrote:CCP Sreegs wrote:Based on my experience yes it is the best course of action. Plenty disagree but today bots are getting banned so I get to be right and anyone saying I should tell them every detail of everything we do is wrong. I don't want to be dismissive because you're probably sincere. Were I to be trolling this thread I'd come in with something cool like SECURITY BY OBSCURITY because that's a catchphrase that people misinterpret as meaning that all systems need to be open or they're inherently insecure and I could probably argue with me for quite a while about it by taking that bait. In this case it's a videogame universe with a very specific set of capabilities and a very small team of people working on a rather large problem. We're not going to waste even an ounce of our time satisfying curiosity if there's even a glimmer of a chance it will make us have to do more work getting back to zero. I'm happy to see some examples of anyone else in this industry who handles the situation differently though. Hopefully that makes sense. I'll be blunt. People do think that EVE is FULL of bots. They have some reason in doing so, because there are some big stories about it out there, and because everybody who has mined or ratted a bit (or even played with the market) knows how repetitive that gameplay is. This is players making bad PR to EVE, with a reason. The rumors might be all rubbish, and all the folks could be wrong, but who cares? After all While you and your team may have just to fight against bots, your company has to fight against bots and against an unfavorable judgement of the playerbase on your effort (you know what i'm talking about). In this picture, your claim "we banned less than 2000 people" has some technical value but it cannot help the player that wants to understand how far are you from "winning the bot war". Giving away informations on what systems you put in place would instead be a move in restoring the trust of the playerbase. People are asking just because they want to believe in you. Another way to show how your good your methods are is giving us an estimate of how many bots are still out there, and the percentage you can detect. Use statistics, and find a number with an uncertainty bar, and tell us. People are not going to applaud when they think there are 25000 bots in EVE and you banned just less than 2000; they might be appy if there are less than 5000 bots in EVE and you banned almost half of them. But if you, for some reasons, cannot give us that number, well, in order to gain the playerbase trust you'll have to show us something else.
Thanks for being blunt but I've already explained that if "in order to gain the playerbase trust" I have to divulge our methods then you're simply not going to trust me. That's assuming that you personally speak for "the playerbase".
I will say that, as I've said in the past, I could only make a completely idiotic guess at how many bots there are. If I knew that they'd all be gone. I have been reminded about why I hate giving people numbers, as you are quite accurate in stating that you don't have the perspective to use them properly. The last time we did this I gave out none and everyone was all "JUST GIVE US SOME NUMBERS WE DONT NEED PERSPECTIVE WE WANT NUMBERS WE LOVE SPREADSHEETS".
We're just going to have to agree that this is as happy a medium as you're going to get for the time being and I'll apologize if that's not satisfactory to you. :) |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
361
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Posted - 2012.03.02 01:13:00 -
[42] - Quote
Tarryn Nightstorm wrote:CCP Sreegs wrote:Marlona Sky wrote:Good job. Still would love for you to release some information on where, alliance, corp and or names. Naming and shaming has been and will continue to be part of an internal dialogue but for the time being it's something we've been avoiding. I understand completely why people would want to see that but I also understand completely why it's pretty dicey to be doing it. As it stands the policy is not to do so. Could you explain why--"Security for Dummies" version, please--this is the case? Thank you.
There's legal issues involved and the metagame component which will then bring into play accusations of favoritism to name two quick ones off the top of my head. I'll try to get a bit deeper of a response tomorrow when my brain turns back on. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
363
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Posted - 2012.03.02 01:17:00 -
[43] - Quote
Asuri Kinnes wrote:Tarryn Nightstorm wrote:CCP Sreegs wrote:Marlona Sky wrote:Good job. Still would love for you to release some information on where, alliance, corp and or names. Naming and shaming has been and will continue to be part of an internal dialogue but for the time being it's something we've been avoiding. I understand completely why people would want to see that but I also understand completely why it's pretty dicey to be doing it. As it stands the policy is not to do so. Could you explain why--"Security for Dummies" version, please--this is the case? Thank you. Something to do with (I think) PDA? I don't know what it's about, and am a little confused about it myself - not sure what the PDA is, or why it would stop them from naming "in-game" names. Don't have to give the player name, just the in - game names (but that would also get you corp/alliance info too..) Not sure why they can't.
DPA is the Data Protection Act and it is basically a European thing that sets some rules around the privacy of your personal data. The problem is that MY NON LAWYER UNDERSTANDING IN PASSING there's some ambiguity involved in situations like in-game names and the information divulged in relation to that. That's probably complete garbage but I never studied law and never intend to.
In essence the simplest decision in naming and shaming is just not to have to worry about whether it's legal or not because there's other negatives as well.
The conversation's not over, but that's the conclusion that we've come to as of today. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
363
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Posted - 2012.03.02 01:23:00 -
[44] - Quote
Xorv wrote:Oh and another thing regard to bots. It's a good thing CCP is taking some action against those players that engage in such activity, but the best thing CCP could do is make game changes that creates an environment unfavorable to bots in the first place.
Remove Local Chat Intel from Null Sec and add random false positives to DScan.
Fix Wardecs and make NPC corps somewhere only for raw newbies or automatically part of a Faction War system.
Take the leash of the Sandbox and players themselves will sort most of this out on their own.
Game design isn't my department. I'll caveat what I'm about to say having said that and also stating that I'm not responding directly to your above suggestions.
We're simply not going to design our game, played by piles of people legitimately, around a few bad apples. We may make changes because they make sense from a gameplay perspective or to spice things up or for a plethora of other reasons, but we're not going to sic the design team on making it impossible to bot via complete randomization of everything or captchas or *insert flavor of the day barrier to getting things done in a videogame here*.
Not addressed at you directly but it is a statement I wanted to get out there and your post gave me the shot. I'll also say that, yes design is a component of our strategy and while it may seem contradictory to what I said above it's not I just can't give specifics today. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
383
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Posted - 2012.03.02 01:46:00 -
[45] - Quote
Vaerah Vahrokha wrote:Adding to my post above with a practical example.
There's a 3rd party tool that has been announced weeks ago (has 20 or so forum pages!) that completely automates in game market prices gathering. It really opens the right window for you, fills in the right item for you, then switches to the next and so on.
With such cumbersome default UI, a player seeing such software would rejoyce!
But wait, is this software - residing on the official EvE forums but never "checked" legit? Or is it a bot? What to the dozens who use it?
You are correct that there may be applications out there that we haven't specifically stated are good or bad, allowed or not and we should work to rectify that. I was actually just talking with someone about a different app the other day.
My perspective has always been that we make a client to interface with our server and that's what you're allowed to use, BUT I'm not the only person involved here and it's not purely my decision so I'll take the feedback you've given in that regard and see if we can do something useful with it. :) |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
391
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Posted - 2012.03.02 10:30:00 -
[46] - Quote
Patient 2428190 wrote:CCP Sreegs wrote:Patient 2428190 wrote:Why do you feel the need to lie? Of course it was timed to be before fanfest. Nothing quite gets everybody pumped up and the circlejerking in full swing like a bot banning wave.
You only do a mass banning maybe once a year. Each time you do a mass banning, you claim its an ongoing process, but nothing changes until another annual ban party comes by. This happened last year, this happened with Unholy Rage.
Do you think anybody who would construct these bots wouldn't recognize the pattern? Nothing you've said in this post is accurate. We did and have shown that we did a large amount of activity on a regular basis for months. I've given you some examples of where to find that information in this thread. We openly stated in this very blog that during a period of reorganization it was shut off. Were I a dishonest lad you'd have never known things were shut off. Were we clamoring for pre-fanfest attention you'd have gotten fanfare about the event rather than having to hear about it from other players, unless you're insinuating that I'm such a brilliant puppetmaster that this is all part of my master plan to gain whatever, in which case thanks! You deciding it never happened doesn't make it so and I'm sorry if that was somehow not clear enough to you but there is enough of a portion of the playerbase who will choose to invent facts rather than digest them that it really becomes an exercise in futility to respond and difficult to have an open dialogue where I can present honest information. I'll go ahead and give it a shot anyway and suggest that you read the thread and if you don't like something we've done then state your case as it relates to the facts given rather than being rude and spreading misinformation. There's plenty of other threads on the internet to do that in. This isn't one of them. I'll admit I don't know your schedule or what your team is doing behind the scenes, I'm not working at CCP, I'm just one of those lolcustomers you collectively tune out on the road to :AWSOME:. I just have what you get to say/write as for what is going on. As I recall of last year's events, bots were banned, dev blogs were written and you were sent out to the forums. You then hosted your talks at fanfest about security, talked more about the process, what's going on and what's in the future. Then, all communication pretty much stopped. Now in the weeks leading up to this fanfest, the process/machine gets turned on and you get thrust back into public view. Bot banning, dev blogs, your forum posts start happening. All of this will probably dovetail into your talks and presentations at fanfest (I'd imagine) Unless I'm seriously missing something, the timing has everything do with fanfest. If history repeats itself, we'll get more information now, at and shortly after fanfest then a whole lot of nothing in the way of communication.
I find it unfortunate that we haven't found the proper communication venue to reach you personally and specifically but your statement that communication simply ceased after fanfest is not even accurate as relates to dev blogs or these forums, nevermind the multitude of other venues we use to communicate such as external speaking engagements. I don't want to get in the way of a bitter meme-chain and as I said there were a couple of months where there was some restructuring going on, but to insinuate even that no communication has occurred for 6 months would be wrong much less over a year. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
391
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Posted - 2012.03.02 10:32:00 -
[47] - Quote
Vera Algaert wrote:malaire wrote:Asuri Kinnes wrote:If it automates player actions it's a bot. Nothing unusual there... Nothing grey about it either. How do you define "player action" ? Opening market window for certain item is usually "player action", but that can also be done with javascript API call. So would you consider using that javascript API call "automating player action" ? exactly Ausri, visit http://eve-central.com/home/upload_suggest.html with your IGB for an example Here's a forum thread (by malaire) on a practical application of the javascript API in connection with a cache reader (both ccp sanctioned tools).
Could you please provide me with some link validating that CCP sanctions cache scraping? |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
391
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Posted - 2012.03.02 10:58:00 -
[48] - Quote
malaire wrote:CCP Sreegs wrote:Could you please provide me with some link validating that CCP sanctions cache scraping? Petition created by "malaire" in Exploits category with subject "Is this javascript using market "bot" allowed?" on 2011-08-18 07:39, answered by GM Karidor on 2011-09-17 18:04 I would love to quote exact answer here, but unfortunately that is against forum rules.
That's fine. The main reason I asked was more based on an earlier discussion about how these things are communicated than anything else. Thanks! |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
392
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Posted - 2012.03.02 11:06:00 -
[49] - Quote
Endeavour Starfleet wrote:Can we keep this topic about real solutions about botting instead of it becoming another "Nerf teh local" silly topic. Botting is a different matter than you not being able to get that juicy kill because a real player is paying attention. Removing local wont kill botting. Hitting report bot is the best thing we can do. If you are running into juicy bot targets report them and let CCP get teh bot remove mail. Now about this whole "Bot banz before teh Fanfest" thing. I do believe CCP has had some communication on the subject between these waves but I will say this. While I applaud your efforts on this CCP you have to keep up the pressure on these botting idiots. And continue to talk about it and continue to urge people to use the report bot function. There has been far too many able to say "CCP likes botting because of PLEX" on this forum and it needs to stop. Constant communication will help. I agree that 10 bot bans is better than a single message on the forums. However you simply cant let such rumors grow because they actively sap the morale of the active players. Even if it is as simple as "Ok report the botting idiot and let us get to work "
I don't disagree that we need to be better at communicating. It's something we've highlighted internally quite often and why I spend days following these threads. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
394
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Posted - 2012.03.02 11:27:00 -
[50] - Quote
Malcom Dax wrote:CCP Sreegs wrote:Endeavour Starfleet wrote:Can we keep this topic about real solutions about botting instead of it becoming another "Nerf teh local" silly topic. Botting is a different matter than you not being able to get that juicy kill because a real player is paying attention. Removing local wont kill botting. Hitting report bot is the best thing we can do. If you are running into juicy bot targets report them and let CCP get teh bot remove mail. Now about this whole "Bot banz before teh Fanfest" thing. I do believe CCP has had some communication on the subject between these waves but I will say this. While I applaud your efforts on this CCP you have to keep up the pressure on these botting idiots. And continue to talk about it and continue to urge people to use the report bot function. There has been far too many able to say "CCP likes botting because of PLEX" on this forum and it needs to stop. Constant communication will help. I agree that 10 bot bans is better than a single message on the forums. However you simply cant let such rumors grow because they actively sap the morale of the active players. Even if it is as simple as "Ok report the botting idiot and let us get to work " I don't disagree that we need to be better at communicating. It's something we've highlighted internally quite often and why I spend days following these threads. Releasing some sort of monthly statistics on the number of bans might be a good way to keep the playerbase informed as to the fact that this is ongoing.
That's something we've discussed but we always end up back at the point where there's no context for the numbers. If we don't know the scale completely then the numbers really don't have much meaning. That said something is better than nothing so once we've had a few days to let this percolate we'll sit down and see what we want to do long term. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
394
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Posted - 2012.03.02 11:37:00 -
[51] - Quote
Lady Godwynn wrote:Hey Sreegs
As the focus of this thread has mainly been on PVE bots, I would just like to mention that us traders have noticed a significant drop in botting activity in market hubs these past days. If this is what EVE is like with less bots, then I shudder to think about having to play with all of them again after having seen what it's like not to.
The effect of PVE/Mining bots is perhaps not as instant as they aren't up close and personal and affect the macro level of the game more with increasing mineral prices / inflation. PVE bots have an effect on the economy of EVE but they are not in your belts/missions/anoms interacting directly with other players. In the marketplace you have to deal more directly with them as you see the same account update more orders than is humanly possible.
Finally, I got a comment on this observation from another player in an MD thread that said that the void created by the bots would just be filled by human players .01 isking me all day long. if so, then that's pure win for CCP as more people, perhaps turned away from Jita trading by bots, would try their hands at one more aspect of the game that they didn't use. Nothing would please me more than to play market games with fallable humans rather than scripts.
Yours Lady Godwynn
Thanks for these posts. We've seen a lot of feedback directly related to market botting and how the trading quality of life has been increased tremendously since we did this. Because of how tremendous the feedback was regarding market bots specifically I asked Stillman to take a peek at what the scale was specifically with that bot type and the result may very well be telling when it comes to discussing perspective and impact and why we have a hard time reporting numbers related to these things.
Of all the accounts tagged exactly 10 were market bots. That's preliminary and there may have been some other detections we're missing, not really scientific, but a quick once over of the data shows that the impact that you've been seeing on the market has been caused by 10 accounts, which is pretty astounding.
I don't have any conclusions drawn from that yet as I only just got the information but I found it interesting enough to share with you guys since it seems to be something you've netted as having had an immediate positive impact and the scale of the activity from a number of people involved perspective was so low. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
401
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Posted - 2012.03.02 12:53:00 -
[52] - Quote
Vaerah Vahrokha wrote:Since the other peeps got a reply, could I pretty please get an answer to my previous post about loans and 3rd party collateral? It's not like I am the only one in game handling large amounts of third party items and ISK and we don't have any way to know about their legitimacy.
I'm not quite sure what you're asking for here. It seems to me that you're involved in business ventures which carry with them some risk. In those ventures you're clearly dealing with people you can't trust and if I'm tracking this correctly you're asking me to ensure you that if bad people do things we won't reverse the transactions and I simply won't ever make a blanket statement like that based on potential future scenarios. Everything is dealt with on a case by case basis and every business venture carries risk. CCP does not subsidize that risk for you and it's to you to determine that the isk you're gaining is being gained legally. If you're engaging in markets such as loans which are beyond the intent of our systems by design then that risk is yours.
You could make an argument that CCP should design some form of guaranteed loan system but that wouldn't be my department. Every time you make a transaction outside of the scope of our controlled systems such as the market or contract system you are choosing to accept that risk. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
403
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Posted - 2012.03.02 13:38:00 -
[53] - Quote
Angus Minkiahead wrote:CCP Sreegs wrote: Thanks for being blunt but I've already explained that if "in order to gain the playerbase trust" I have to divulge our methods then you're simply not going to trust me. That's assuming that you personally speak for "the playerbase".
I will say that, as I've said in the past, I could only make a completely idiotic guess at how many bots there are. If I knew that they'd all be gone. I have been reminded about why I hate giving people numbers, as you are quite accurate in stating that you don't have the perspective to use them properly. The last time we did this I gave out none and everyone was all "JUST GIVE US SOME NUMBERS WE DONT NEED PERSPECTIVE WE WANT NUMBERS WE LOVE SPREADSHEETS".
We're just going to have to agree that this is as happy a medium as you're going to get for the time being and I'll apologize if that's not satisfactory to you. :)
The point I expressed was not a picture of my feelings, but of what I felt was the mood of part of the community. I bet you already knew it, but I think you don't distinguish between the "haters/naysayers" and those that are sincerely worried and would like to have some real information. About numbers, every real world organization that fights any kind of crime usually has an estimate of how big the phenomenon is, even if they can't find the exact number for obvious reasons. I understand that there are many reasons for you not to tell anybody about the estimations you have, but at least there should be a criterion to evaluate your work on a corporate level, at least as a way to decide how many resources must be devoted to security issues. The contradiction I see is that you don't need to write devblogs and make fanfest presentations to do your security job (since you don't need to collect feedback on stuff you can't tell us about). So for what reasons do you write these apart from telling the playerbase "we are working hard and we are succeeding" for PR reasons? But the hilarious part is that you can't state how you are effective and as I already said we can't understand from ourselves (since you are not helping us in this). Good luck anyway, we'll never know how effective you are.
There's a member of the community a few posts above you who seems to feel otherwise as an example. Thanks for the well wishes however and enjoy yourself! |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
403
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Posted - 2012.03.02 14:01:00 -
[54] - Quote
The Snowman wrote:CCP Sreegs wrote:I'm not quite sure what you're asking for here. It seemed pretty clear to me. We already know that accounts with large amounts of ISK are carefully monitored for RMT activity. No need to deny or confirm, its logical and obvious. But some players legitimately posses large quantity of ISK and large quantity of ISK legitimately 'pass through' their account. Often this is how such players gain incredibly large amounts of ISK, because they have whats known as a very high "Money velocity" Since CCP provides no function of facility for players to check, for certain, that the money they are handling is legal in the first place then in almost all cases illegal money can be passed through several innocent players. Its not like we can put the currency under a scanner and check it for fraud, its not like you provide a telephone number for us to call you and ask "hey is this ISK Legit?" Logically, it would be unfair to simply ban an account that happens to have either handled or is handling illegitimately obtained currency.
You are correct that it is logical to assume that in a scenario where there are high volumes of illicit isk changing hands some of this isk could be funneled through legitimate means. If there exists a scenario where you're involved in one of these transactions and you're somehow impacted then you'd have to discuss it with us at that time. As I said I'm not going to make blanket statements based on potential future scenarios and everything will be dealt with on a case by case basis.
I can't really think of an example that fits what's being described as a potential problem today. When we take action we will do our best to ensure that innocents aren't impacted but I won't make promises and I don't see some magical tool that's going to give you the knowledge of whether the isk you're using is dirty or not ever existing.
EVE is a social game. Much like in the real world you make decisions about who you will do business with and there's an entire community of people out there who will give you their opinions about those people. Sometimes they're right and sometimes they're wrong and you get had, but what seems to be being asked for here is really not something I can ever see occurring as things stand today.
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
409
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Posted - 2012.03.02 14:36:00 -
[55] - Quote
Jarnis McPieksu wrote:CCP Sreegs wrote: Of all the accounts tagged exactly 10 were market bots. That's preliminary and there may have been some other detections we're missing, not really scientific, but a quick once over of the data shows that the impact that you've been seeing on the market has been caused by 10 accounts, which is pretty astounding.
I don't have any conclusions drawn from that yet as I only just got the information but I found it interesting enough to share with you guys since it seems to be something you've netted as having had an immediate positive impact and the scale of the activity from a number of people involved perspective was so low.
10 market bot bans but how many other botters quickly taking theirs offline in the hope of not getting whacked... Also 10 accounts can do a lot if they keep playing the market game 23/7 on maxed out market order capabilities and obviously concentrating on high volume items - stuff where larger number of active traders see the effect of automated trading constantly undercutting you.
This is also a prime example of me not being able to say "There are x number of market botters in EVE and we caught x" but what I can do is say "We banned 10 and players are reporting a noticeable impact on the market". The same can be said for other figures. For instance, as I've said, when we action on botters overall CPU per user usage on the cluster drops.
There's indicators of things being effective even when you don't know the entire scope of the problem. You make educated guesses and hammer things you know to be bad and measure the results. I don't think the same measurement would work for instance with ratting bots because everyone who cloaks when you jump into a system ever is a bot, so player feelings aren't necessarily the greatest indicator there. What we can do though is show a sharp decline in things like mission payouts and bounties as a total picture of the payout pie in relation to average amounts of time spent playing, etc. and that's kind of the direction we need to head.
I concur with some of the sentiments expressed that overall players have a particular attitude and we do have to come up with ways to show that there's some effective work being done. That's actually part of the challenge and it's not always the easiest because it's often based on feelings or guessing the intuitions of others. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
409
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Posted - 2012.03.02 15:29:00 -
[56] - Quote
David Forge wrote:Might there be a way to crossreference the ten banned market bot accounts with their past market activity to determine for certain that they were indeed responsible of such a noticeable effect on the markets or if we are coincidentally experiencing a time of less vicious competition? It seems hard to swallow that ten bots were doing so much and this way we could know for sure one way or the other. If they were responsible their owners must be sitting on a massive pile of ISK and assets.
We'll certainly do some digging in this direction. Probably not until Monday though. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
409
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Posted - 2012.03.02 16:04:00 -
[57] - Quote
pmchem wrote:CCP Sreegs wrote:Vera Algaert wrote:malaire wrote:Asuri Kinnes wrote:If it automates player actions it's a bot. Nothing unusual there... Nothing grey about it either. How do you define "player action" ? Opening market window for certain item is usually "player action", but that can also be done with javascript API call. So would you consider using that javascript API call "automating player action" ? exactly Ausri, visit http://eve-central.com/home/upload_suggest.html with your IGB for an example Here's a forum thread (by malaire) on a practical application of the javascript API in connection with a cache reader (both ccp sanctioned tools). Could you please provide me with some link validating that CCP sanctions cache scraping? Well, actually, yeah. There's a good example out there. Reverence is a tool specifically designed to read the Eve client cache. It was created by Entity, who I understand has some pretty good connections at CCP. It has existed for years, had many many forums threads, and its OP specifically states: "Special thanks go to CCP for granting permission to release this product, even though it is heavily inspired by EVE Online's design." https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=6501So either this quite well-respected (even famous!) player is lying and this illegal tool has been allowed to flourish in the technology lab forum for years and years while being used by dozens of third party developers -- or CCP sanctions cache scraping. Market uploaders using the IGB similar to eve-central's uploader are quite common, really. Eve-central's has been around for years too. If you feel they haven't been properly sanctioned, I hope you take the opportunity to do so! They are not the droids you're looking for. edit: I presume the petition referred to in this post sanctioned cache scrapers and using the IGB for market uploads? https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=881205#post881205
Yeah I got what I needed out of those replies. I was just curious how we were communicating this because you guys seemed to know and I didn't and it saved me a trip downstairs. :) |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
409
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Posted - 2012.03.02 16:20:00 -
[58] - Quote
IsTheOpOver wrote:First of all, I'd like to applaud CCP Sreegs and CCP for banning bots. The last few months have been somewhat depressing as the bots running rampant (despite petitions, gankings, whatever) seemed unhindered. The "War against bots" thread that was very active right after fanfest had been dead and buried for the better part of a year. It truely seemed that CCP did not care. This is very good news and a step in the right direction. CCP Sreegs wrote: We're simply not going to design our game, played by piles of people legitimately, around a few bad apples. We may make changes because they make sense from a gameplay perspective or to spice things up or for a plethora of other reasons, but we're not going to sic the design team on making it impossible to bot via complete randomization of everything or captchas or *insert flavor of the day barrier to getting things done in a videogame here*.
Except for calling Eve a videogame (it's a computer game) I agree with your paragraph there completely. Please do not add captcha to the mining process (or anything else that a bot would be created to circumvent and make it even more of a pain in the ass to legit players) Now about the 3% number. C'mon man. Instead of saying "3% of the botters did not change their behavior and had to be permabanned", it would have been much more accurate to say "3% of the botters were too stupid to not sell character, start new account, buy new character and continue on botting." The whole idea of botters being "reformed" by a ban and not changing their ways is rediculous. It might fly with the board of directors when describing how you didn't have to turn off 10,000 paying accounts, but to the average player in eve it's quite insulting. Cheaters are gonna cheat. Penalizing players for a maximum of 1/2 month subscription time for earning 100's of billions of ISK via illegal botting is obviously not a deterrent. Now that you have implemented the "character freeze" for offending accounts, this should help things. But really it's just upping the penalty to 3 billion (or perhaps more for a ratting character) that the botter would not get back by cashing in his old character on the Bazaar. If this is going to continue to be a once-a-year thing (see you next Fanfest!) then the problem will continue as the botters will make that 3b back soon enough and be back out there doing evil. I'll be optimistic that the whole Incarna/reorg/whatever was the reason for the lack of progress in this matter of the last year and that from now on things will be better. As a legit player who puts a lot into this game, I appreciate my efforts not being mitigated by cheating botters. Keep up the good fight!
The 3% number was quoted out of hand and was not meant to be taken as law. The 3% number was also quantified. I will say that the difference between the 3% number I gave and the numbers you just mentioned related to bots and character transfers is that yours were invented out of thin air and mine came from actual measurements. I don't give these numbers to any board, council of elders or anyone else. These numbers at the time were pulled solely because we wanted to start taking measurements of effectiveness on our (mostly)volunteer time for what was a (mostly)volunteer effort.
I know that we did spend some time keeping an eye on character transfers and that initially it wasn't a problem. It might be fun to go back and run the actual numbers, but I find it to have been as good a measurement for it to have popped up in a "how not to get caught" guide as for us to devote time to writing queries. It was bad and we fixed it.
As you say only time will tell and to be honest I don't even see curbing the activity as so much of a challenge of curbing people's preconceived notions of that activity.
So big takeaways are more communication and that was something we've always identified as necessary. It can't be a flood of information because I have 100 jobs to do but it can't be nothing either, because in essence a lack of communication has been translated as a lack of activity whether that's true or false, good or bad. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
409
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Posted - 2012.03.02 17:44:00 -
[59] - Quote
Xantor Bludberry wrote:Vaerah Vahrokha wrote:Why did you link a RMT site? Are you crazy? Because I personally have the impression that the CCP did not see and live in what is an illusory world. Yes, there are bots, but the RMT is so difficult, "how do we track?" Ok, here's a SAUCER FOR THIS ****! Kill them!
We're very well aware of the various websites out there people may use to illegally purchase product. There's a bit more to it than that but it's really kind of off topic. I'd be happy to have a discussion about RMT at the appropriate time. Grab me if you're heading to fanfest even. :) |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
409
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Posted - 2012.03.02 17:55:00 -
[60] - Quote
Carlos Aranda wrote:I sleeped 1 day over this - and I can tell you, I am still raging about what our PR-blue cop Darius Johnson tells us here.
You confess between the lines, you did nothing several months at least vs bots and cheaters. You do not confiscate or track their ill-gained ISK. All you do, is giving them a 14day ban and hope, they now really, really find their rightous way to be no more cheaters. This is not, how power works!
Acknoledged you did some work and fu_cked u_p - then the result is overall still f_uck u_p and not minus x minus = plus how you want to sell it to us.
I have a question for you:
How many days you think a botter with a tengu needs to break even, if he calcs in, that you ban him and he is losing the account with the tengu+char for it?
All you did, you catched some small fish and bragg about it.
I told you, from my experience many of them had the bots for months ,becuase you did nothing against them. Even if they get banned, it is still a huge profit for them.
We can disagree without being disagreeable. Please try to maintain some degree of civility as per the forum rules. Being directly insulting really doesn't engender me to want to respond to your posts.
To your points as I can grasp them:
Confessing between the lines - The notification that the system had been off for some time was directly in the dev blog before a single post was made. I have no idea how this can be construed as trying to hide anything.
14 day ban - Our numbers showed that to be effective and that was the policy that was chosen at the time. We also stated we'd change that policy if it was found to not be working, which is why changes have been made. In addition it is not merely a 14 day ban it is an escalation of bans. We also reserve the right to increase this and may very well do so, but only if this proves to be ineffective.
"All you did, you catched some small fish and bragg about it.":
A) We didn't brag about anything. This blog wasn't even going to be written. The detections were re-enabled quietly and the blog itself was written to directly respond to things players had noticed and were talking about. I'm not sure how that can be considered bragging but if you think the better move is to simply let people make up stories about what's going on without an explanation I will inform you that you are incorrect.
B) The scope of what we've caught and missed remains to be seen. I'm not in the business of speculation.
"Even if they get banned, it is still a huge profit for them" - That also remains to be seen. They don't seem very happy at the moment at all the nothing you claim they've lost.
Have a wonderful weekend! |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
409
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Posted - 2012.03.02 17:58:00 -
[61] - Quote
Soporo wrote:Nmae and shame the Corps and, especially, the Alliances who are shown as the worst offenders and you will change the rather morose perceptions people often have about anti-botting efforts.
As I said this is constantly being reviewed, but a casual reading of this thread will highlight that this isn't as simple as just deciding to do so. There's a tremendous impact on all players not just botters and much of that impact could be negative or flatly illegal. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
409
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Posted - 2012.03.02 18:00:00 -
[62] - Quote
Xantor Bludberry wrote:CCP Sreegs wrote:We're very well aware of the various websites out there people may use to illegally purchase product. There's a bit more to it than that but it's really kind of off topic. I'd be happy to have a discussion about RMT at the appropriate time. Grab me if you're heading to fanfest even. :) I'm not quite sure what the concept of "RMT" is well correlated the word "discussion". I believe that there should be an expression "total destruction". I, as a Russian, a very unpleasant, in fact, ever hear the words addressed to us that we are totally stuck in RMT. You know, there's a game "World of Tanks." There is no RMT. Because money is not transferable. Perhaps this is a harsh measure, but perhaps, for what it is worth the time period to implement?
That's the EVE conundrum really. One of the core concepts of the game is that everything can be built, sold, bought and transferred among players. With that comes the ability to do bad things and it's really to us to solve that problem. I agree it would be simpler to turn all your items purple and bind them to your character so you can't give them to anyone ever, but then it wouldn't be EVE it would be some other game where you could more than likely still purchase things on websites on the Internet. :) |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
409
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Posted - 2012.03.02 18:13:00 -
[63] - Quote
kakmonstret wrote:Another metric that could be interesting and maybe give a hint on th effectiveness of different system is to relate to the "Report a bot" system.
So how many of the bots banned had previously been reported by a player? How many characters have been reported in total by players? My guess is that the latter will be huge and probably quite useless. But the first could be interesting as my hunch is that players might be good at finding bots, sadly I think we have a large amount of false positive in that reporting to.
If a large portion of bots actually are tagged as such by players maybe it would be worth it to use more costly methods for finding bots in this group?
Yep we have this. I haven't looked at it yet and I really dont' want to go crazy until we get at least one more round of data. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
409
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Posted - 2012.03.02 18:14:00 -
[64] - Quote
ps3ud0nym wrote:CCP Sreegs wrote:Xantor Bludberry wrote:CCP Sreegs wrote:We're very well aware of the various websites out there people may use to illegally purchase product. There's a bit more to it than that but it's really kind of off topic. I'd be happy to have a discussion about RMT at the appropriate time. Grab me if you're heading to fanfest even. :) I'm not quite sure what the concept of "RMT" is well correlated the word "discussion". I believe that there should be an expression "total destruction". I, as a Russian, a very unpleasant, in fact, ever hear the words addressed to us that we are totally stuck in RMT. You know, there's a game "World of Tanks." There is no RMT. Because money is not transferable. Perhaps this is a harsh measure, but perhaps, for what it is worth the time period to implement? That's the EVE conundrum really. One of the core concepts of the game is that everything can be built, sold, bought and transferred among players. With that comes the ability to do bad things and it's really to us to solve that problem. I agree it would be simpler to turn all your items purple and bind them to your character so you can't give them to anyone ever, but then it wouldn't be EVE it would be some other game where you could more than likely still purchase things on websites on the Internet. :) Once, a looong time ago. I read about this interesting activity. It is called sleep. Kinda strange, but you just lay down someplace comfy and close your eyes and somehow some pictures appear (like playing EVE but with more boobies). You should give it a try sometime! Christ man! Don't kill yourself to answer our silly questions!
<3 almost done then I'll go kill some people or something on the internet |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
409
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Posted - 2012.03.02 18:15:00 -
[65] - Quote
Mioelnir wrote:CCP Sreegs wrote:My perspective has always been that we make a client to interface with our server and that's what you're allowed to use Oh really? Isn't it more like a pc game, soon a console game, a number of websites like evegate, an XML API and maybe a JavaScript API (more a client interface really)? Because if we take that statement literally, everyone interfacing his evemon, eft or pyfa with the API uses an interface to the server that is not allowed.
I was oversimplifying so if we're going to be forum lawyers about it, yes we make a client AND an API in order to interface with the server. :) |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
434
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Posted - 2012.03.09 14:42:00 -
[66] - Quote
Parthonax wrote:Who cares CCP you are killing your own game anyway Bots are not the the real reason this game has become dull and one sided
Your own failure in giving newplayers a reason to keep playing your own idiotic policy in encouraging griefing and your biased opinion and way you favour nullsec alliances , favoring them over the majority of your subscribers ,
that what will kill your game not bots You probably already lost more subscribers because of these facts than the whole incarnia debacle and , these latest bot purges together
Hi welcome to the bot thread. Please stay on topic. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
434
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Posted - 2012.03.09 14:49:00 -
[67] - Quote
Xorv wrote:
Thanks for the reply Sreegs, your efforts in dealing with botters and communicating with the EVE community here is genuinely appreciated. Still very underwhelmed by the punishment , 14 days is barely a slap on the wrist for someone who has gone out of their way to get a third party program with the specific intent to cheat in the game.
While it is understood you did not respond to my specific suggestions, and I appreciate why,. I will say this, EVE needs holistic treatment that addresses the disease not merely treating the symptoms, and that can only be done at the design level. A lot of us are hoping that Inferno moves in that direction and really delivers.
Not directly at you but since this is a common refrain, 14 days works. It simply does. You may not like that it works but it does and we'll show you the numbers that back that up. In addition there's some other fun things that are happening like that character lock, as well as something fresh I'll announce once it's ready. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
437
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Posted - 2012.03.11 03:18:00 -
[68] - Quote
eXeler0n wrote:Good thing! It would be a nice idea to give them a -10 security status. So they have to work for the bad things they have done :) And everybody can shoot them ^^ And tag them as botters until they are outlaws :)
Most botters (off the top of my head it's 3am) are in 0.0. Sec status doesn't matter. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
437
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Posted - 2012.03.11 03:21:00 -
[69] - Quote
Vaerah Vahrokha wrote:I got a question as well. Isn't "1000 to 2000 bans" a bit too little? Considering people usually have 2 or more accounts that'd be like 500 unique botting people. Doesn't it sound a bit too low? Considering that in some systems there are 10+ bots?
This highlights the perspective issue. We banned 10 market bots and the market people in this thread stated they noticed a tremendous difference...
We build our system to deal with certain things and we can show results based on that. We can't give overall perspective (nor can any other company out there). If I could answer this question then I'd know how many bots there were and I'd ban them all. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
441
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Posted - 2012.03.13 23:16:00 -
[70] - Quote
Ballamann wrote:yeh but why is it possible for me to detect bots by flying though 0.0 and using dotlan? Why is that not possible for the ccp guys? because every bot brings money every month like every other acc. -> They are not interested in banning somebody? they just do it to pour oil on troubled waters. and question ur selv why they do it just 2 times a year and everytime in front of the fanfest!
greetings
I don't believe that using Dotlan is in any way a valid measurement of botting activity. If you decide that it is then all I can do is argue with you and you're simply not going to agree with me. Believe it or not everything isn't some giant conspiracy amd if you're using financials as a measurement we believe we benefit more financially from doing something about the problem.
Your statement regarding twice a year is just clearly false as other posts in this thread have pointed out. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
441
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Posted - 2012.03.13 23:18:00 -
[71] - Quote
Chribba wrote:CCP Sreegs wrote:Vaerah Vahrokha wrote:I got a question as well. Isn't "1000 to 2000 bans" a bit too little? Considering people usually have 2 or more accounts that'd be like 500 unique botting people. Doesn't it sound a bit too low? Considering that in some systems there are 10+ bots?
This highlights the perspective issue. We banned 10 market bots and the market people in this thread stated they noticed a tremendous difference... We build our system to deal with certain things and we can show results based on that. We can't give overall perspective (nor can any other company out there). If I could answer this question then I'd know how many bots there were and I'd ban them all. Did you happen to ban some spambots this morning too perhaps... because Jita was really nice there for a while. /c
We've always done work against spambots. Sometimes it just takes some time to get through the system. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
441
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Posted - 2012.03.13 23:19:00 -
[72] - Quote
Endeavour Starfleet wrote:Inovy Dacella wrote:CCP Sreegs wrote:Vaerah Vahrokha wrote:I got a question as well. Isn't "1000 to 2000 bans" a bit too little? Considering people usually have 2 or more accounts that'd be like 500 unique botting people. Doesn't it sound a bit too low? Considering that in some systems there are 10+ bots?
This highlights the perspective issue. We banned 10 market bots and the market people in this thread stated they noticed a tremendous difference... We build our system to deal with certain things and we can show results based on that. We can't give overall perspective (nor can any other company out there). If I could answer this question then I'd know how many bots there were and I'd ban them all. If players claim they can detect bots so easily, is it possible to make bot detecting a part of the game? Perhaps with some knid of bot detection software we could identify and report them to Concord, which in return could verify and issue a kill permit on the bot. Then we can pod kill them, loot them and collect the reward. So you just want killmail and don't really care about the needed action is banning right? And autodection rarely works. If botters learn how it works they will go 99 percent before ban and still RMT and destroy the market. Report bot is the best tool for the players right now. The players notice the signs over time on the harder to find ones.
The reporting feature provides us with a lot of useful information. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
441
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Posted - 2012.03.13 23:21:00 -
[73] - Quote
Jovius Marginus wrote:Here's an idea. How about some retribution evestyle before they were banned. Lets say that for a period of 24hours before the ban goes through, all chars on the acount are killable in highsec and a nice flashy red. This will give the bonus of us being able get some retribution eve style, they also have the added punishment of losing assets.
Stuff like this gets discussed all the time but it's really difficult for us to implement things like this. |
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CCP Sreegs
C C P C C P Alliance
441
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Posted - 2012.03.13 23:25:00 -
[74] - Quote
Abyss Azizora wrote:Endeavour Starfleet wrote:Abyss Azizora wrote:Ballamann wrote:yeh but why is it possible for me to detect bots by flying though 0.0 and using dotlan? Why is that not possible for the ccp guys? because every bot brings money every month like every other acc. -> They are not interested in banning somebody? they just do it to pour oil on troubled waters. and question ur selv why they do it just 2 times a year and everytime in front of the fanfest!
greetings Pretty much agree with this. I see eve bot banning as more of a promotional thing than a concerned effort. I would LOVE to be proven wrong, but I still think CCP only bans a few rather than the masses in order to keep them paying. I know finding every bot is impossible, but when I can and often do point out/report a dozen+ bots a day (And a week later they are still there.) while playing for only a few hours, and while in the process of doing other things, I damn well know a dedicated development team should be banning nearly 500 bots a day, every day. (They would come back with new accounts every day from botted PLEX, so that's sustainable numbers.) I don't necessarily blame the people in the development team, more the suits in charge, that see bots as people paying to ruin the game, but also filling CCP's wallet. I am just going to say that in my opinion you know very little of how complex the botting situation is so please stop posting libel about CCP. BTW. One of the main goals needs to be to "scare" the botters more than anything. Many run their bots full bore and more news of bot bannings will get them to start making their bots less delectable by changing their behavior. This causes a massive drop in output so many being forced to do that or reported or banned WILL help EVE. #1 Get rid of the easy to find empire bots. #2 Get rid of the easy to find null and WH bots. #3 Try to find some of the harder yet bigger to find bot networks that are involved with RMT and ban them. This generates news and scares botters. #4 Finally through the above try to encourage blues to report blue bots. This will help catch more botters. While I fully admit I am not in any way in charge of banning bots, nor have I ever been in any game... If they really wanted to ban bots, 90% of bots would be gone in a month tops, they also wouldn't be giving this moronic temp bans for botting, it'd just be an outright perma-ban. And if CCP are somehow having an issue with this, hire me, and I will personally take care of almost all the bots in a month.
Just gonna leave both of those out there. If this was a simple thing to deal with we'd already be there. I'm sure I could be accused of a lot of things but relishing wasting my time has never been one of them. The conspiracies fall apart when you accept the fact that the easy way out in all of this would have just been to leave the problem alone. We simply didn't feel that was the right thing to do and I've personally put in a lot of time and effort to ensuring things stay that way.
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