I don't think escalation is the issue here, rather the fact that you don't explain your actions. Making any action seem suspicious.

My issue is precisely your policy of not discussing moderation with other parties. You can claim that you are merely operating within that policy which is all nice and dandy and true, but I think that policy is wrong in the first place.

Ugh, I have spoken. I will now leave.

you don't see a potential conflict of interest in IA being part of a team it is tasked to investigate?

With this games interesting.......history, do you REALLY blame half the allegations made. I mean, all of them, not just in this thread.

Thank you for responding substantively instead of closing the thread. I'm sure everyone here wants to see the right thing done. In this situation it's your word against the players. Is there anyway the playerbase can be given assurance that the process is not arbitrary besides simply asking us to have faith in CCP?

CCP Sreegs already said they knew 100% that john was botting. I don't get why deciding to punish him would be an "arbitrary" decision.

You can use the in-game browser to display market data, which makes it a trivial task to write software that detects when you need to update you orders. All you need to do is use javascript to cycle trough the item you want to sell, this updates the local cache which you can parse to get the items sell prices. From there on all you need to do is verify the weather or not you have the lowest price.

You can list the correct price need to undercut by .1 isk, or maybe even manipulate the copy/paste buffer directly to contain the correct value. In the end all you need to do is find the correct order, edit and paste the value. It probably takes more then 2 sec for reach order, but you can do a lot of orders each minute.

This is a public know and legal way of managing market orders.

I meant ever, with everything, not just that one time 7 years ago.

There's alot of them that crop up, mainly in the "Tinfoil hat community" which is unfairly treated btw...

He wasnt botting CCP interpreted his actions as botting because they didnt understand what he was actually doing in theory 'attack what you dont understand' in this case

the actual misconduct as far as I can tell was not removing John's isk while he was banned (which also allowed E UNI to get their hopes up) - being warned by the ban that his botting had become unfeasible he could have easily RMTed all his ISK before you managed to confiscate it.

This has been discussed before on the official forums, where dev/gm posts said this method was not against the rules as the player edits the market order.

Perhaps we would have more confidence in your opinions if you hadn't shown complete cluelessness regarding your own policies (and the common practices of the market community) before.

(edit: nope, I don't buy your "just checking to see how these things are communicated" comeback, it was extremely weak.)

Then Adnski is making it up while he says that the money wasn't there when the 'ban' was applied. Not even CCP has argued that it didn't.

Speaking of self righteous...

Are we to interpret this as official policy change on the issue of cache scraping? 9 months ago, you were fine with it, have things changed since then? If so, I guess enjoy gloating over wrongly banned market accounts.

Answer the question. Are these above couple posts you making cache scraping a bannable offense from here on out, or are they not? This isn't that hard, and you talking in circles isn't getting any of us anywhere. As you so happily proclaimed in a previous post, decisions like this are up to you. So make the decision before you start banning innocent people.

Do you, CCP Screegs from here on out make things like:

http://dev.eve-central.com/contribtastic/start

a bannable offense? That's the only question myself, and several others are asking.

Induction is not a valid form of deduction. No matter the amount of times you do right, does not prevent the possibility of you doing wrong.

I don't believe in CCP misconduct in this case. I believe that this guy was a botter. That is not the issue. I was trying to point out that if your sec team had convinced this E-U guy (a third party) that there was sufficient proof of the botters deeds, this thread wouldn't be here. He was not technically even a third party since he was holding the isk. But no, there is this policy about discussing moderation in place. (which this thread is breaking already)

After a while, people will remember only the suspicion, not the particulars. In this thread someone already implied security incidents that happened long time ago, that people can't remember the particulars of. This is why I believe that policy is wrong. It will always make you look bad. And you can only alleviate the suspicions by breaking that very selfsame policy yourselves.

"The world is not based on reality, but the perception of reality" - sneakers, 1992

I don't see where I insulted you (at least not using any terms you hadn't already used yourself), and I think I've been perfectly polite. My questions also seemed to be clearly stated in my quoted and unedited post. I didn't accuse you of anything either, unless I'm missing something. I merely asked that you make CCP policy abundantly clear, in the interest of protecting innocent players accounts from any wrongful bans. Surely you can see the reason in that.

Regardless, thank you for answering the question. It's all I really wanted.

Technically I think you can achieve this without modifying the client itself fwiw.

Mallak Azaria i think the issue here is not how botting is defined currently as per the EULA, its the ad hoc redefinitions to suit ccp sreegs whims.

in relation to cache scraping i might add

if the guy in question was 'updating his market orders in game' using a macro program to do it faster than normal gameplay, he deserves the wrath of the security team. if he was merely pulling data passively like many others do then imho CCP sreegs is acting unfairly.

If you read my posts you might have noticed that I am not defending the botter.

My posts centered around three issues

(1) CCP IA being part of the security team rather than standing outside the company's regular hierarchies. As I pointed out before it is standard to have Internal Investigations report directly to the board of directors, CCP having their IA team report to some middle management dude is highly unusual and highlights the weak position of CCP IA.
CCP Sreegs chose to address this point with ridicule implying that employees at other companies (who follow best practices) are "unemployable" and not trustworthy.

It seems to me like CCP Sreegs has provided in this thread most of the information that Kelduum asked for in the first place, and that if this information had been exchanged in the first place, none of this would have been brought up in the forums.

Tin foil hat says they probably took the isk for their own characters since they cant give themselves t2 bpo's any more.



Lack of oversight generally does lead to corruption, see also the quote




And while the above tin foil hat theory I've suggested may or may not be true, the fact that there seems to be no oversight, in a sandbox game like EVE, is highly alarming.

I'm also curious why E-Uni was treated like a 3rd party when they were indeed the ones who actually had the ISK taken and incurred the loss. I'll admit we don't have the full story, and yes the post by the CSM may indeed be slanted to his side. However the fact remains that he was treated very poorly for a player of the game.

Whats more alarming is that he would be treated the way he was while also being a member of the CSM and as an instigator in the game, helping bring content to thousands of EVE's newbs every year. While I don't think he deserves special treatment, most companies would recognize their "platnum members" and try to go above and beyond to make sure there are no misunderstandings with them.



Closing a petition while a player still has real concerns and/or questions represents terrible customer service. Beyond that, the time intervals between responding were absolutely horrendous. Does it really take so long for someone to hand out the same responses you said you gave everyone else. 8 days for an initial response? That is absolutely unacceptable. The resulting responses also took in the magnitude of days, often multiple. That is disgraceful in customer service. Especially one where there are paid subscriptions that could run out in that much time.



You took 1/4 of a plex time to simply respond the first time. In a game where you expect players to pay to play in some form or another, that is really very terrible.



I will admit that my interaction with customer service so far was beyond exemplary, however the main customer service team seems to operate completely independent of the security team, which seems to have missed the customer service memo on how to properly treat paying customers.

And unlike most games, with EVE, if you lose a paying customer, you are probably losing about 2-20 accounts. So pissing off even one can be an ever risky situation.

Many times a player just wants to know the corporation is listening to them, and isn't some blind mafia or corporate bureaucracy that thinks it is infallible. Telling a customer you will check your work, and look into it (and actually doing so) may take a bit more time, goes a VERY LONG way in customer service.

(This may have actually been done, however neither party mentioned that it was or that it was even a possibility, and is what the CSM member probably meant by oversight. When you escalate an issue, you usually expect a response that indicates that there are other people looking into the problem for you, to insure that no mistakes were made.)



The Eve rep posting here helps to remedy the situation to some extent, letting us know they do actually care. Though it could be that they're just worried about the bad press.

Beyond that, the responses from the GM I saw thusfar were significantly more curt and, at times, just plain rude. Certainly not the type of responses I would have expected from someone representing a company and trying to remedy a customer service issue.

I recognize that forums like this are an imperfect communication device, and its impossible for us to actually discern your real intent and tone of voice with each word you posted. However some of them came off as less than ideal.

I hope this issue is indeed resolved amicably with all parties, however it will probably always end up being a customer service incident that I truly hope the CEO and executive developer are aware of, since, as you mentioned, they are the only ones who can effect change on your department, and hopefully help them with customer service.

words

Why don't the 14 days ban appear with removal of ISK ?

And you and I (as well as Kelduum or anyone else) would still have a right and reasonable expectation to ask "is all 300b illegal, can some still be saved?" and not be shut out of the process entirely.




That's speculation and your personal opinion, and you seem a bit tilted. Show me the parts of the post that support this claim.



Again... I'm not asking for full disclosure. I just believe that amount of ISK deserves more than a one liner or canned response. The response that was provided in this thread was more than enough, and did not in any way disclose how he was botting, how they caught him etc.

Kelduum posted as much as he could and said that he wasn't receiving much information back. I don't think it's "entitlement" to ask simple questions in this matter. We are not "entitled" by having read CCP Sreegs responses in this thread. He replied to my statements saying that he said all this to Kelduum. Kelduum says in his original post that he didn't get that information.

In the end it seems that it's word against word. Did CCP Sreegs just say "we don't discuss this with 3rd parties"? Instead of taking the time to mention the few lines he said here? (Which doesn't give away any priveldged info) Or did Kelduum get the full story then go through all of this just to stir up drama?

I know who I believe... You make your choice.

No. CCP Sreegs is never wrong. He is God, he is the Grim-reaper, his word has power and when he speaks then it is judgement time!

the board of directors is the proper check on management malfesance that threatens shareholders but if you have any shareholders who care about this i would love to meet them and encourage them to invest in Weaselior's High-Yield Investment Program (these meetings and investments must take place in countries with no us extradition treaty or securities laws)

1- IA Is almost always under the president, not the board of directors. Anyone with the basic understanding of corporate structure would know this.

2 - Where CCP puts their IA doesn't really matter as long as the IA is working as intended, which in this case it is. CCP could, and probably does, put IA under the HR department because it directly related to employees and their relation to the company.

3 - CCP Sreegs is not in a position to move the IA anywhere based on the advice from someone from the internets. He is also probably annoyed that this is even an issue. Botters and non-PLEX RMT get their money taken. That's been their policy for forever.

4 - If E-UNI is afraid all of their money is going to be taken away because they're taking donations from suspected, or even provable botters / RMT traders, perhaps it would be in the best interest of E-UNI to audit their donor lists and only accept funds from people who didn't come off a 14-day ban?

5 - When Goons are siding with CCP you know you don't have a case.