The primary advantage of the scarlet letter would undoubtedly be as a deterrent and I support the concept for that reason.

Maybe the scarlet letter could be removed after say 1 year of good behavior?

This the distraction from the mittens thread? Any word from ccp about the issue

It adds another "risk" weight to botting. Many corps won't touch botters, especially as bot-acquired assets are seized. If the practice of "scarlet letters" is itself advertised, it basically means anyone who chooses to bot does so knowing that they will lose all of the assets they gain and probably have to biomass their char if they ever get caught. It's all risk vs. reward calculations, so up the risk and the overall behavior of botting will likely become less common.

Fine, here is something for you. What about the authentication dongles you gave out at fanfest 2011, or if it was 2010?

Well, are the other deterrents working?

From the fanfest presentation, I see a lot of downward spikes on patch days, followed by a speedy return to 'business as usual' levels.

I think 'behave for a year and the letter goes away' is a decent enough incentive to straighten up and fly right.

As CCP were saying at fanfest, as people are saying about Mitts.

It's all about consequences.

You do something bad there are consequences, as long as it's made clear to people beforehand I say do it.

Scarlet Letters should be implemented, but not visible to all players.

These should only be visible to corp CEOs when a pilot has put in an application to the corporation. Something along the lines of a notice that the applicant has had strikes against their account for botting.

This allows conscientious CEOs to turn away players with whom they seek to prevent their corporation members from exchanging ISK with. I say this because botters tend to be notorious for a certain type of transaction which is not allowed. I don't think any CEO would want potentially dirty ISK being passed directly from a "marked" botter to their corp members through trades, contracts, or what have you. There's also the possibility that one player's knowledge of botting could easily be shared to others (I think, Darius, you are familiar with a certain Space Captain Schettino who crashed his corporation into the rocks by spreading knowledge of botting).

Lying about your intentions ("Oh I'm not joining this WH corp to clean out the hangars") is one thing, but being able to lie about actions taken against your account is another.

TL;DR - Strikes not visible to everyone, only CEO/Directors of corps when a player with strikes against their account applies to that corporation. This allows them to make smart decisions and not accept players they would not otherwise.

Wow Someone's crankey just posted here yes there is many threads but lack the blue mark from a ccp employee has posted
Fixed your post also thing called manners?

This is a pipe dream, and you guys keep protecting and trying to reform criminals are doing it at the expense of existing players and future participants in Eve as well.

You know what Facebook does when they take action? No appeal.

Google? No appeal.

The evidence needs to be solid, but if someone is botting, they need to be thrown out of the game because they are potentially ruining the experience for thousands of other players (butterfly effect and all that jazz).

This would be a solution to the 'preventing them from becoming a good guy' problem. They indeed need to be publicly shamed for participating in the destruction of our market though.

oh and if we see some guy ratting in our 0.0 belts who logs out every time we enter system... we'd be able to report them easier if they were marked this way.

CCP's own deterrent isnt really enough. Does CCP monitor botters that have been caught on a regular basis? I really doubt it. But us players could.

I don't get it - who would shotgun apply to every corp in sight if their account was flagged for botting?

The only benefit that could come from this would be the resale value.

Three stars is bann so when selling a Char you look for no star chars.

I don't mean that CEOs should be able to pop open someone's info and see their strikes.

I mean that when a player puts in their application to a corporation, the server checks for strikes, and if strikes exist, they are mentioned as a warning in the application management interface for the corp CEO/Directors.

The only time that a marked player would be standing on the gallows in the rain like Hester Prynne is when they put in their application to a specific corporation.

I'm not familiar with the current API, but I don't believe any fancy API apps currently allow you to see strikes against an account, so I assume that information is not publicly available.

If you you get what I'm saying.

Edit:





Yeah, that's exactly the idea.

If CEO's are doing recruitment then they probably need to delegate roles a bit better. Anyone with roles to accept applications should be able to see it. But that isn't enough, most of the time people who apply have already been accepted because they went through the recrutiment process and were already accepted. The actual application is just there because it is necessary, but holds no substance in terms of the recruitment process.

This info being avaliable through the API would be ideal because any sane corp who does recruitment uses the API to check things.

Where else would you envision seeing Scarlet Letters? I'm full of creativity and exceptionally thin semen this evening

The only thing I can think of (as seems to be the general consensus) is allowing CEOs to realize that a botter has applied to their corp.

Sreegs, I'd like to put my support behind the scarlet letter idea.

Why? Because it feels like Eve. No other reason.

In Eve's fictional background, AI research is strictly frowned upon due to its tendency to spontaneously assert sentience, mutilate its creators, and fly off to nowhere. It stands to reason that CONCORD would look very un-kindly upon attempting to automate not a simple drone, but a fully functional and tactically terrifying capsuleer warship. As such, CONCORD flags these individuals who irresponsibly surrender their ship controls to crude AI, and flags them for capsuleer termination in the name of maximum efficiency.

Absolutely not. Don't assign hangar roles blindly and you won't have corp thieves to deal with.

name and shame wont help the problem

bots will move away from corporations and stay in npc corps

players behind the bots will get better at hiding their true identity, bot isk, sell for money, buy plex with money, sell plex for isk, really difficult for CCP to find their true identity if stuff like TOR and Virtual Machines is used to hide the true ID and details of the computer

an anonymous list (3 market bots in jita, 40 ratting bots in XXX, 50 mining bots in YYY were banned today, they lost a total of ZZZ isk and assets worth XXX isk since they were aquired via botting) of those in their first and second strike and a a public list of those characters permabanned might be a good idea to state clearly that CCP is actively fighting bots

Just because corps are structured differently doesn't mean that some would see a large benefit from having API information knowing if someone was a botter. In terms of corp recruitment process, unless a corp has a specific open door policy, such as EVE UNI or Red vs Blue, then most likely there will be some sort of interview before hand.

Restricting how info about someone who is flagged as a botter will only make it harder for the people who recruit. If after a long interview process they were to only find out on their actual application that they were a know botter, that would mean a lot of wasted effort on recruiters part because some may have a strict no-botting policy.

Funny, care to explain my recent trip through deep Russian space then? ~10 systems in a row, each with Raven and Exequeror. The second you enter system, Raven heads to POS, Exequeror cloaks. Only characters in system, each made on the exact same day, all members of two different corps. But oh, I suppose that's perfectly normal, and those were all legit players, right?

All of this stuff is ******* pointless if CCP is going to keep failing so hard they can't even break injection bots. ******* Runescape has got everyone forced to work in Color and OpenGL now, yet CCP flails along paddling the fail boat trying to do resource intensive manual investigations and bans. If they'd actually just break bots and obfuscate their code better, they could stop paying us lip service and show real results.

It would allow me to block those players, ignore contracts from them and generally ensure I don't need to interact with people that try to ruin EVE for the rest of us that play the game legitimately. This is not the same as scamming, can-flipping or similar but a deliberate breach of the EULA. I'd rather not play with those kinds of ass-hats and if I can prevent myself from actively interacting with them or supporting them through such interaction that would be great.

It does not matter to me if this is the first time they have been caught or not; the anti-botting stance is fundamentally entrenched in almost every single MMO out there. They cannot claim ignorance and I don't care if they repent or not - they actively chose to break that contract with CCP and the other players of EVE Online.

so you say that you can still identify me if im using TOR via 3g on my laptop for my bot and my normal Cable internet on my desktop for normal gaming, running two accounts who never ever have touched each other ingame and dont have anything in common on the account management site ? thats pretty interesting and i would like to hear more

concerning PLEX i think i have to agree with you, they are likely the single most powerfull weapon against professional RMTers but will do nothing about the guys who are simply to lazy to go and farm their ships via hard work like everybody else

CCP uses hardware fingerprints as well as IP's. But it's still quite the fallacy on their part to try and pretend like people don't fake that as well. They've said bans are also on actual people, not just an account. But even if so, nothing stops Russians who bot EVE for a living from just using their grandmother for billing.

This. But make it no local. There's absolutely no easier fix for CCP to address botting than simply not sending clients info on players in a system until the player is detected by scanning/entering grid. Unless I'm missing something, it's the blatantly obvious fix here, and it disappointing me that CCP won't actually make it happen. Sure, nullbears will cry. Who cares?

Ah. I missed that. But you got any information on authenticators being available to those that didn't go to fanfest or is that something that will be revealed in the devblog?

If no other MMO is naming and shaming, Trend Set to me just naming and shaming them seems like a minimal change on your behalf and its more ammunition against the problem.

Please, may I draw special attention to those posts made by the player-run businesses/investments - as they're among the most directly endangered by unknowingly interacting with botters.