EVE General Discussion

There is more than one occurrence where people with Ishtars get banned, even though they don't had any bot running.

Actually sitting afk in an anom letting drones kill NPC's is a banable offence. a few weeks ago someone was complaining about it

So its not a false positive its working as intended.

I do know someone who was a false positive during the RMT bannings, he logged in to find himself negative a bill or so.

Next logged on his wallet was back to normal and an apology from CCP and a plex

Hello OP. I'm the guy who asked you to let CEO's protect themselves and their corps at the fan-fest.


My thoughts on this still stand; CCP is a small company with a small number of people able to or willing to look into this full time.. let the community self police and let it be known that a CEO, his directors, and his trusted HR people all have the power to keep people with RMT in their blood out of the best corps and social circles in eve due to the fear of CCP spanking everybody they are affiliated with will bring. Or just let us protect ourselves and keep eve, eve-like.

Or just make anybody with the RMT scarlet letter always -10 sec status so anybody who wants to can shoot them.


Or create a custom NPC corp for RMTers, and make it so no other NPC corp will accept them. Then make this RMT-Only NPC corp the only one people can wardec.

And fine the corp sheltering RMT bots so their taxes don't make them a profit.

Hello all
I've spent the last 90 minutes of my day reading the first half of the blog- then jumped to the last page just to make sure I wasn't posting completely blindly. If I missed something, then oh well, flame on..

Based on my general observation of what has been posted, I'm reading that we the players need some way to protect ourselves, as individuals, corporations, and alliances from the effects of removing a botter's impact from the economy. Because of the manner that CCP has chosen to penalize botters, I feel that they have the OBLIGATION to the players to ensure that we can protect ourselves

Obviously we want to kick the botters to the curb and biomass the RMT accounts. General consensus is that casual botters generally will stop after an initial warning and that career botters won't stop after any amount of botting. Based on this, I think that CCP should change their suspension policy. I'm suggesting that offenders get banned after two confirmed violations. There is no sense for a third opportunity- if you've been warned once by CCP for botting and get caught again, then toodles, you are not welcome here

A real concern here though is what happens in game to everyone else when the punishment is applied. Flagging a botter to players at any level is wanted, but it would adversely affect the in-game interactions with that person permanently, and in a way feel I feel is appropriate only between CCP and the account holder. I too would love to go on galaxy-wide bot hunting parties, but at the end of the day it only makes ALL players a little more paranoid than they need to be in the EvE universe. On the other hand should someone, be it a market buyer, contract seller, or CEO of a corp or alliance, be penalized by this person's actions if they do not know that CCP considers the player to be a botter

I think what might be a better way to deal with botting is on first strike to make the person's characters ineffective for 15-30 days. The player can log in, but they don't train skills, their shots always cause 0 damage, they can't buy or sell stuff. This is in addition to reducing their wallet by the worth of the isk they gained while botting or RMT. This reduction of ISK could be offset, at CCP's discretion, buy removing the in-game possessions the player directly acquired using those illegal activities. The person is then effectively only good for collecting wrecks and even then can only give them to fleetmates. This would give the player a level of humiliation among his/her immediate peers, but would not carry a permanent, publicly visible flag that they messed up. The player would also have the option to sit out of game for the duration of their suspension. Second time and they're gone anyway. As for external lists, they would not be reliable, as CCP would have provided no verifiable data that the person has been penalized, so it would be hearsay. If it was a botting corp or alliance, they would obviously be hurting if a huge chunk of their members suddenly became unable to do anything for a couple weeks, or the supercaps they bought from RTM suppliers vanished (in addition to their toons becoming nerfed)

The main advantage to this is that mobs, to the extent discouraged by CONCORD, will not go around directly punishing casual botters for any amount of time. It may cause the botter to get tossed from this corp or cause an alliance to split up because of poor decisions by a CEO, but hopefully someone not in any significant position would potentially be able to take their lumps like an adult and learn from it. And as I have said before, if they don't learn they get turned to biomass the second time

If you DO want to have fun, allow botters to login in once after their second 'ban' and make them fair game to everyone in addition to nerfing them, and don't allow them to dock. Also cause any new accounts opened by that client to immediately suffer the same fate. That would be fun

SS

Personally, given the other effects already in place, I think the only effect of a "name and shame" would be to effectively brand the individual. Assuming some form of searchable database were compiled (either by the community or, ideally, in game) they would certainly be blacklisted from my corp and I'm sure from many others. Of course there is the possibility of people with similar names to a banned character being caught in the backlash unless it's linked to other attributes (their portrait, employment history...etc.).

A compromise situation might be to list the regions that those banned for botting were operating in at the time of the ban - it would allow the "that's 'x' Alliance space! I knew they harboured bots!" and "Yeah, that crew who've been raping belts next door are 'x' percent of this region's bans, and I reported them." without, as suugested, a "disincentive to becoming a good guy".

Increasing awareness of things like the character transfer block and its permanency is probably more important, the number of speculations I've seen regarding (for example) the number of mining characters available in the character bazaar and its relation to recent ban-waves highlights that there is room for improvement in that regard. And making it broader than the forums and the dev blogs is essential.

I didnt bother reading the whole thread, so this may have been suggested. I don't have the CCP dev skill of forum skimming.

Botting is a three strikes operation.

make it as such.

1st Offence : A warning, and removal of ISK and Assets.

2nd Offence : As above + Scarlet Letter

3rd Offence : As above + banned.

This deals with people who didn't know properly about botting (I recently stopped a friend from getting into it, he didn't know it was wrong), and only removes the gains from it. The scarlet letter on the second offence is made clear to people on their first offence, and they then know the risk. Might help drive down that 8% re-offender number that was quoted.

Perhaps the scarlet letter can be implemented so that corps can set it to auto - kick people with it, and Alliances can be set to auto kick corps that don't have that option set, and then end up with someone with the scarlet letter. Then again, perhaps that is too far, but these people by the time they get the scarlet letter have shown a willingness to ignore the rules, even after a warning and having assets removed,

Finally, if you wanted to make the scarlet letter time based, so that perhaps it dissapears, or becomes less visible (only in detailed looks at a players profile, instead of on their portrait or whatever).

I personally liked the idea of at least the corp the person is in to let it be publicly known so we can police ourselves a little and keep tabs on them. So if they do bot a corp mate knows that they do have a history of it and can kick them or my personal favorite blow them up then kick them for doing it again and making a bad name for the corp.

I'm in favor of doing it, for several reasons:

- Cheating should have lasting consequences, and stoppping after being caught once or twice doesn't have any really signifiant one.

- If someone bought isks, and by doing so implicitely supported bots and account hackers, I do not want him in my game. I do not want to relate with him in any way, shape or form, regardless of how long ago it was.

- There are currently a lot of accusations being flung around, with basically every major alliance being repeatedly accused of harboring major RMT operations. So much mud flying that it's becoming hard to determine where there's reaosonnnable supsicion and where's there's only slander. A public list would ease up a lot on the false mud-throwing, and put strong pressure on the real RMT-friendly individuals.

Mr. CCP Sreegs of St. CCP Game Development

Realy you are in bigger mess then you see..

[quote]"What would you, the player, stand to benefit from being able to identify which characters had ever been caught botting, whether or not they were still engaging in this activity?"[/quote

It is completly uninteresting ! Only for making jokes of that character... Would be more usefull if you clearly mark scammers to prevent other players from being cheated and deceived. Why you are not interested in preventing scamming ?? You do not see that EVE community is pile of mess ? Local in Jita is ONE BIG SCAMM!! You like this **** ? Actually that ****** individuals was created by allowing them to deceive others. And next, logical step is botting, rmt, exploiting and what you do not like... You ACTIVELY DEVELOPED community where SOCIOPATHY IS community STANDARD !

Fight with THIS ! Fight roots not fruits ! You realy need long term plan for ingame-relationship management and community development ! Actual status is like beteen thiefs in RL: "I can trust you that you will steal from me if you have a chance" - end of relationship chain... Developed by CCP

And one more thing: pirating - your Universe is actually BASED ON THIS ! Militia do not patrol to kill pirates but fight other militia. And actually militians are pirates too. What a idiotic system ! Provi like guard thing is what you should implement into game - by implementing revards do their job and building community. I am aware, that conflict is what makes Eve interesting but you can do something smarter than what actually is... That random misions developed 10 years ago is sad... Create few more regions with mobs powerfull and unbeatable and TA DA ! Real quests requiring thinking ? Thousands and milions ideas can be introduced ! Including RL things like micro-payments..

Once again: marking othere players as botters is less usefull then marking scammers. It is common developers mistake to think all that technical details or what is interesting for share holders is esentially important for players :) Like with the "The Launcher" - it is minnor quirk for players, such details should get off the way of plain gammers. Eg. pleas even DO NOT MENTION anything WWW related until it will include mini-game_client-like-functionality...

Sorry for bying such angry on you but CCP have potential :) and seeing it is wasted is pity

And I personally like dev-full-technical-details-blogs, it is good thing. But not crucial for what ingame is..

N.M.

Players that get SL'd can do one of two things:

(1) continue cheating, in which case they will quit or sell the char

(2) stop cheating, in which case being SL'd will only exlude them from 99% of group activities

Therefore, SL is useless from both a punishing and a rehabilitation perspective.

The issues related to alternative and not so obvious mechanisms such as using a hidden flag to prevent search results are moot since someone will inevitably assemble a webpage somewhere with a convenient search function no matter how this is implemented.

The issues related to the players self regulating are awesome, but we already have this when people report a player for cheating/botting/rmt so don't see where a SL would further support this unless someone wants to run a corp following and harassing these people around - the few that haven't quit/sold char and are still trying to play...

The best and probably most useful SL is the internal hidden one that prevents a player caught cheating from selling characters.

Everything else is best left hidden, first because there is a huge deterrent effect to undercover operations, second because efforts spent on implementing this are less resources employed catching cheaters, third because in a sense we are gamifying cheating and shouldn't do that since it is not part of the game, last because pointing fingers has historically achieved no other purpose than creating subjugated minorities and this doesn't work when you can opt out of the account/game.