EVE General Discussion

I agree with what earlier people mentioned: because of the possibility of meta-harvesting (e.g. copying bot flags to a third-party database), any explicit individual-level bot flag will effectively be permanent, even if CCP's records clear it after a while.

Given the current statistics about offenders cleaning up their act, I think that the bot flag should not be traceable to an individual character.
A permanent flag will hinder rehabilitation too much (Offtopic: quoted statistics on recidivism that I found are incomplete. Of the players/characters that stop botting, how many quit outright? Is retention worth the trouble?).
For indivuduals, the three-strikes punishment (or any more effective variation as decided in the future by CCP) is sufficient.

It seems that for most players the reason they want information is because they want to prevent association with botters.
For me, that works two ways: I don't want botters to join my organisation and I don't want to join an organisation rife with bots.
This already means that (CEO) screening of individials, even if the meta-harvesting is ignored, would not be sufficient.

On the whole, I think organisations need a lot less protection than individuals.
In the current reports, more details should be included.
Through the multitude of fansites surrounding Eve, all kinds of rumours will be created anyway, and these rumours are far more likely to damage innocent reputations than factual reports from CCP.
Casual players deserve to be able to be informed just as much as those who have alts in every major alliance and subscribe to the entire Twitterverse.
Currently, casual players are more likely to encounter the FUD than the facts.

Please provide naming and shaming statistics on a meaningful, aggregated organisation level.
This could be done just by naming corps and alliances (please also mention if directors were implicated as well) in regular blogs or something.

To prevent any insinuations about biased reporting (is that just meta or meta-meta?) the reports could also be automated.
One way to achieve this could be the creation of invisible flags that are only reported in aggregated form: something like 'Average percentage of corp members with recent botting history in the past three months'.
You'd still need to be careful about preventing individual details being distilled from this (e.g. if the percentage rises from 0% to 1% when the 100th member joins, that might give something away...).
Location-based is also an option: I'd love to see a universe-map of botters on the EVE website (you have that thing there now anyways, and the info will then not enter the sandbox directly).

If you're going this way, you will also want to give organisations a tool to prevent unwitting association with botters.
I suggest letting corps set a flag 'Do not allow botters to apply unless their crime is X days old' in their recruiting settings.
When a botter wants to join, the botter is notified and the application never reaches the corp.
This way, the refusal can be enforced by CCP on behalf of the corp, without leaking information.

I think it's reasonable to assume that botting and RMTing can be linked. Let's face it, you have to make a very conscious decision to do either.

With the recent bans and negative wallets being thrown around, I think it's imperative that these people be flagged as such so others can avoid any transactions with them. It doesn't seem right to risk your own assets by dealing with someone doing these activities and you have no way to see it or protect yourself from it.

Even if I petition and am able to prove my innocence, why should I have to go through any hassle because of their EULA breaking activities?

my $.02

Botters should be 3 strikes and out.

-Pre Strike- Suspected Botter - No action yet but close observation. (reported by players but not CCP confirmed)

-strike 1 - the current temporary ban, and then give them a "white letter" that no one can see. At the same time allow corporations to put a filter into place that blocks the white letter. The person attempts to submit the application and its just flat out autorejected. No one can see it and the corp doesn't get told the person tried to apply. The flagged person can then make up whatever excuse they want yet. - Increase mining cycle time by 10%, and reduce bounty/reward payments by 10%.

-Strike 2- Longer Temporary Ban- Upon Return - Publicy Seen Red Letter- Also Penalize bounty/reward paymentsby 33% and increase mining cycles by 33%.

-Strike 3- Banhammer strikes. Also all other accounts paying with same credit card should also automatically be pushed up to strike 1 white letter status.

Release patch. Deactivate all accounts until they have read and taken a short quiz about botting and rmt.

First time 2 week ban and Permanent Scarlet Letter.
Second time GTFO.

Being so easy on botters is why there are so many.
Stop being stupid. Make them go away.

How about a compromise:


"anonymous flagging".


When a corporation has botters in it, the number of botters will appear in their corporation statistics. They don't get a name and a face, just a number of botters. It will be up to the CEO to determine who the botter is. For example, a CEO has 10 people in the corp known to bot, based on the information he can see. But he is not told exactly who it is. EVERYBODY who pulls up stats can see that too.

So a CEO who just lets anybody in without proper vetting might see his organization becoming full of known botters, and that might even cause it to be targeted. Those who do not bot, and don't want to be associated, might want to leave, or demand something is done about it.

The only way to really know, is to recruit somebody and then check the stats. If you recruited "Joe" and the next day you see that your corp has a known botter in it, then you know it's "Joe" and you can boot him or handle it per the sandbox "rules" (your own way).

If you recruit say 100 people, because your a big corp and you have a war coming perhaps, and the next day you see you have 20 known botters in your corp, you now have a problem to deal with. The CEO is going to have to use detective work to see who was the botter and if they are doing it again.

Now, since there is no way to flag corp thieves except to see if they got named and shamed in the C&P forum, the "who's the botter" issue becomes an issue that takes some interactive game play, something that is often promoted in this game. It would make recruitment more interesting, make corp-hopping more difficult as mass recruitment becomes more risky for larger corps.

It's also good for competition: if I am getting OMGWTFPWNED in a war of attrition by a corp that has no known botters in it, meaning that they can maintain their wartime infrastructure while under attack - hence they have skills, good logistics and internal support, I have to man up and accept that I am bested. But if I am getting completely routed and see that the corporation doing it is full of botters, then I have something to say when they go into CAOD or in their own forums how "fail" I am. Sure, they are "winning", but they have botters, meaning any victory and e-peen/leet status they might have is thrown out the window. This is something that both sides of a conflict can consider. A CEO who prides himself on corp success in a war would know that it's all of nothing if everybody can see that he has botters. Some poor winners, who want to talk smack about being "so leet", would have to STFU when you can point out that they have botters and hence from that unlimited ISK and resources. War, which this game is all about, is all about resources and anybody who metagames resources through botting is cheating. Losing to a cheater is expected, but we have to know if we are dealing with cheaters.

So in this way, there is no permanent scarlet letter on an individual, but some record follows them, and they will have to stay in an NPC corp forever (and hence be a target anyway) or find a way to convince CEO that they have changed their ways. Meanwhile, corps that have a penchant for botting and/or don't care, will be publicly known to be full of botters, and therefore more "targetable" in anti-botting/suicide gank drives and that would be the price to pay for potentially gaining an edge over your competition through the use of bots. I would even expect that a lot of people not inclined to suicide gank will do so against members of corps that are full of people who got caught for botting, and that would be good for the game.


I hope this could be considered as a compromise that most players could live with.

i support this 100%, and i also agree that the mark of shame should be permanent. it would be cool if every other month or so, a dev blog was released listing all the names of those who have been shamed, to add to their shame. also, a player that has been branded should have their entire corporation be notified via eve-mail, kind of like a war-dec notification.

what i would gain from these implementations is the joy in knowing a botting account will forever be branded as such, and i honestly think that the social stigma will reduce "casual botting" dramatically as a lot of these casual botters care about their self-image - they aren't all chinese isk farmers, after all.

thanks for all the good work. the tears on the forums of "other eve websites" is too good to be true. i need a bigger receptacle to contain it all.

I would find and gank those botters.

I would say that corps or alliances where excessive botting has been identified should be named, rather than individuals.

Where it has become the ethos of the corp/alliance to perform botting in order to fuel their escapades, I think the public can benefit from knowing where the strength of this body was drawn, particularly in null sec where space is being fought over.

The obvious follow-through for individuals being identified would be a witch hunt, which is hardly beneficial to anyone.

Well it would make it easier for players to kill the Bots that's for sure.

But maybe CCP could have a word with CONCORD to make killing "Confirmed Bots/Macros" in all sectors Legal (This also would include Podding as a well trained Character with Implants to mining can mine far more) so they can be killed anywhere high or Low-sec for a Bounty. The Bounty Range depending on the Security Status of the system they were killed in.
The lower the Sec containing highest priced OREs put a higher bounty on the Bot/Macro encouraging people to actively seek them out as well.
This of course means having something solid in place which stops innocent people being flagged as a Bot/Macro just for the fun of it.

This would allow the players to become more involved and make removing Bots/Macros less costly to the player themselves when having to Gank a bot in a Concord Protected system Losing Isk and Standing.

This thread is long as ****, and I most definitely have not read all of it.

But I wholly support the Scarlet Letter idea, it will be an additional deterrent. I know this is just echoing what most people are saying in the thread, but I agree with all of it. Less botters mucking up such an awesome game is better for everybody.

All of the most obvious and best effects of the branding have been stated on the first page, so I shan't repeat them.

IMPLEMENT THIS ASAP.