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?

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.

Could you please provide me with some link validating that CCP sanctions cache scraping?

11) Market cache scraping to automatically collect, collate and upload market data.
As long as the IGB-specific procedure to open the market window for a specific item (and thus having the client creating cache data for that item) exists, you can use it. Keep in mind, though, that changes to this may happen and this procedure may stop working at any time. Also, reading and evaluating the clients cache data with third party tools is permitted, however modifying cache files used by the client is not and falls under modification of client files.

Those policies are, at this point, unlikely to change anytime soon, but yes, we may revise them should we deem it necessary.

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 "

Could you please provide me with some link validating that CCP sanctions cache scraping?

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.

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

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.

Hey Sreegs

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.

you're insinuating that I'm such a brilliant puppetmaster that this is all part of my master plan to gain whatever,

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.

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. :)

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.