ok I'm selling spiky bats three pringles and a shrub each

Will rupies and speghettios suffice?

(edit: on topic - I think the cache reader discussion is important but would be better off in a separate thread, maybe I'll create one on MD later.)

John wants to have a word with you.

Lets face it, anyone who is defending the botter and trying to attack CCP Sreegs and his team just screams "Im a botter stop whacking us with that hammer".

Well at least we now know who the bot lovers are. I look forwards to the next few weeks of mass bannings and isk vanishings that happens every time the botters wage a troll war against CCP Sreegs.

stuff

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.

I've never agreed with it. My stance of "Don't modify the client" hasn't changed since day one. That GMs for some reason have a different interpretation than I do is irrelevant.

In my opinion cache scraping is illegal. You won't be banned for it today. I didn't see any questions asked what I saw was insults and accusations. Sorry if you have a different interpretation of polite social discourse.

Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. John was using automation to modify his market orders, that was obvious from Kelduun's post linked from the OP. Automation of any form outside of what the client provides and what CCP explicitly allows (which as far as I know only includes the Logitech G15 keyboard) is against the EULA and grounds for action by CCP.

I would like to see much more bot tiers, but oh well.
Anyway, as per using cache files for eve central or so, I would love to pull those mineral and module prices via API from CCP...problem is its not possible yet and I personally dont feel like typing 500-1000 numbers in my spreadsheets every day to see whats worth building manually.

Lets face it, anyone who is defending the botter and trying to attack CCP Sreegs and his team just screams "Im a botter stop whacking us with that hammer".

I would like to see much more bot tiers, but oh well.
Anyway, as per using cache files for eve central or so, I would love to pull those mineral and module prices via API from CCP...problem is its not possible yet and I personally dont feel like typing 500-1000 numbers in my spreadsheets every day to see whats worth building manually.

From how understood it, John had a tool to read the cache of market orders, calculate the new price and show this information inside the IGB. So all he had to do was: copy-paste the values into his market orders. Last time I checked, reading the cache, calculating values in a 3rd party tool and doing some copy paste was not a banable offense. So CCP changed their mind in a hindsight and made it punishable.

I got this impression from here: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2601144#post2601144

However, I could be misinformed. John may have used more advanced automation to do even less work by himself (i.e. changing the orders fully automatically). I wouldn't know.

I don't mind losing John as a presumably valuable player, I don't mind E-Uni losing isk they hadn't earned, I don't mind macro users being banned - but I do mind if rules are applied with double standards. If that was the case here, I don't know.

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.

There are a number of things wrong with the assertions being made in other forums, which is a topic I'm sure the author of these posts is familiar with because we discussed them prior to his rather selective reporting of the incident. Here's the facts as we need be concerned from an eve perspective:

1) John was botting. That is not even close to in dispute.
2) We committed an error in not removing the isk before it got to EVE-U. However we did rectify this problem and our logs show that it was discussed and approved prior to either them receiving the isk or petitioning. We apologized to EVE-U however the petition was escalated as high as it could be and the decision remained. We cannot typically share this information with them as it's really none of their business.
3) The only authority higher than the Director of Security for these complaints is the Executive Producer and then the CEO. This is a higher level of escalation than the Customer Service arm and IA automatically looks at our work. I'm not sure why we feel we should be able to escalate higher than the highest reasonable authority but the fact is that this team operates with significant oversight. We believe the issue here to be more that this particular CSM feels he isn't in the loop, something which is quite frankly the only proper way to do business in a unit that handles secrets.

Frankly we're a bit disturbed by the allegations made here given that the person in question waited until they exhausted every resource possible prior to posting this then lamented the lack of an escalation path. Not getting the answer you like isn't a lack of an escalation path and never will be.

I'd love to know what I was selectively reporting exactly, barring the things I cant post, but still...

Replying to each of the points:
1. Then all we needed to be told was "The ISK came from botting". I had asked if this was the case, and was bushed off repeatedly, being told that "its nothing to do with you", despite us actually having the ISK. In fact, this has happened a couple of times in the past when we have had donations which came from botting or RMT, and as the CEO I received a courteous mail outlining what had happened and why the ISK went missing.
2.a) The only words which could be construed as an apology were related to the one week response in the original petition. At no point has an apology for not removing the ISK earlier been made. I'd love to post the text of the petitions and/or other things, but that would get me banned.
2.b) The petition was responded to by one member of CCP staff, at one level, and on asking for it to be escalated, was told there is no escalation at all for the security team. As mentioned, I asked around if anyone knew of another escalation path, and reached dead ends, and statements that there is literally no higher authority than themselves. Again, I can't post this proof.
3. At no point was this explained, anywhere, by anyone. If it had been, then it could of been handled quietly. I'll leave the rest of that section detailing that members of the security team being oversight for the security team as exercise for the reader to determine if they think this is a good idea or not.

Finally, not getting any answer is what causes people to look for an escalation path, at which point being told there is no higher authority (which is now revealed to have been a falsehood) is what causes unnecessary drama like this.

The missing apology, and the missing explanation were what was being asked for. Its nice to have them, finally.

Update 2013.02.12:

Quoting from the thread on the EVE forums:

CCP Sreegs wrote:
There are a number of things wrong with the assertions being made in other forums, which is a topic I'm sure the author of these posts is familiar with because we discussed them prior to his rather selective reporting of the incident. Here's the facts as we need be concerned from an eve perspective:

1) John was botting. That is not even close to in dispute.
2) We committed an error in not removing the isk before it got to EVE-U. However we did rectify this problem and our logs show that it was discussed and approved prior to either them receiving the isk or petitioning. We apologized to EVE-U however the petition was escalated as high as it could be and the decision remained. We cannot typically share this information with them as it's really none of their business.
3) The only authority higher than the Director of Security for these complaints is the Executive Producer and then the CEO. This is a higher level of escalation than the Customer Service arm and IA automatically looks at our work. I'm not sure why we feel we should be able to escalate higher than the highest reasonable authority but the fact is that this team operates with significant oversight. We believe the issue here to be more that this particular CSM feels he isn't in the loop, something which is quite frankly the only proper way to do business in a unit that handles secrets.

Frankly we're a bit disturbed by the allegations made here given that the person in question waited until they exhausted every resource possible prior to posting this then lamented the lack of an escalation path. Not getting the answer you like isn't a lack of an escalation path and never will be.



I'd love to know what I was selectively reporting exactly, barring the things I cant post, but still...

Replying to each of the points:
1. Then all we needed to be told was "The ISK came from botting". I had asked if this was the case, and was bushed off repeatedly, being told that "its nothing to do with you", despite us actually having the ISK. In fact, this has happened a couple of times in the past when we have had donations which came from botting or RMT, and as the CEO I received a courteous mail outlining what had happened and why the ISK went missing.
2.a) The only words which could be construed as an apology were related to the one week response in the original petition. At no point has an apology for not removing the ISK earlier been made. I'd love to post the text of the petitions and/or other things, but that would get me banned.
2.b) The petition was responded to by one member of CCP staff, at one level, and on asking for it to be escalated, was told there is no escalation at all for the security team. As mentioned, I asked around if anyone knew of another escalation path, and reached dead ends, and statements that there is literally no higher authority than themselves. Again, I can't post this proof.
3. At no point was this explained, anywhere, by anyone. If it had been, then it could of been handled quietly. I'll leave the rest of that section detailing that members of the security team being oversight for the security team as exercise for the reader to determine if they think this is a good idea or not.

Finally, not getting any answer is what causes people to look for an escalation path, at which point being told there is no higher authority (which is now revealed to have been a falsehood) is what causes unnecessary drama like this.

The missing apology, and the missing explanation were what was being asked for. Its nice to have them, finally.

At least you have spreadsheets. With BCs manufacturing tool now broken and not looking like its going to be fixed I might have to see just how much spreadsheet voodoo I can remember from school

He used a bot.

Having worked in internal investigations for over a decade at very large companies I can inform you from experience that this statement is patently false in common practice. I've actually never even heard of this scenario, though I agree with its spirit.

They don't need to provide info to the masses. He was botting and got the isk taking away, thats as much info as we need.

From how understood it, John had a tool to read the cache of market orders, calculate the new price and show this information inside the IGB. So all he had to do was: copy-paste the values into his market orders. Last time I checked, reading the cache, calculating values in a 3rd party tool and doing some copy paste was not a banable offense. So CCP changed their mind in a hindsight and made it punishable.

I got this impression from here: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2601144#post2601144

However, I could be misinformed. John may have used more advanced automation to do even less work by himself (i.e. changing the orders fully automatically). I wouldn't know.

I don't mind losing John as a presumably valuable player, I don't mind E-Uni losing isk they hadn't earned, I don't mind macro users being banned - but I do mind if rules are applied with double standards. If that was the case here, I don't know.

A private convo between CCP and Kelduum (who was involved directly) isn't the masses. This issue has now been brought to the masses because this very basic and simple information wasn't conveyed in the first place. It's unnecessary, pure and simple.

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.

I doubt you have proof for this claim, but it's ok. The story sounds like he was indeed using a bot and got what he deserved.