EVE General Discussion

I'm against name and shame because false positives may stigmatize a player

However, I think that Corporations should get tagged with a "Botter inside" once one of its botting members is caught. It's easy to spot a botter at a corporation level, and such a measure would push its members to report the cheater.

This way, the botter could leave his corporation to prevent it from gaining such a flag. One of the main advices given to former addicts is to change their group of friends. Such a measure would add further consequences to their acts and could lead them to truly redeem themselves by changing their habits and social entourage but above all, it would prevent other corporations from allying with cheaters.

I stopped reading the posts after page 7 so forgive me if this had already been said.

There are a lot of good ideas in this thread. If CCP implements a "Scarlet Letter" policy it would need to be after the second offense in order to give that individual the chance to turn around, otherwise if it's implemented on the first offense, it would make it very very hard for that player to "Go Good". Here's why....

Once the player is flagged he's not likely to find a corp that would want to risk having a known botter in the corp. This in turn leaves the player ostricised and pretty much alone in an NPC corp where there is little sense of belonging, sense of accomplishment, sense of team work and dedication, or financial help. Those are the tings that provide a healthy social climate in a game and keep players coming back. Without them the player may feel disenfranchised and find himself using a bot for monetary gain in order to fill the gap. Or he simply quits all together driving them away from EVE.

Flagging the individual with a NEW EDEN wide criminal flag after the third offense and allowing player justice is one I would love to see implemented. Put a bounty on their ships and pods and if they are dumb enough to log in and undock players have a chance to earn some isk from killing and podding them. How you could implement this with the bounties without exploitation is something I can't think of right now, but at least allowing a criminal flag so players can seek revenge on those who would destroy our game would be great.

double faced hypocricy by CCP
Who are you protecting , probably some favoured null sec alliances
It is no secret CCP is blatantly showing favouritism to certain group of players , actually if there hadn't been such a poutcry against a certain person , you wouldn't even banned him for 30 days
and not only them CCP seems to ignore their own EULA and TES if it comes to people getting griefed till they leave the game

sad very sad pretty sure you have lost more subscriptions during the last 6 months because of your own stupidity than from banning bots and RMTs

and don't bother reporting me or giving me a ban april 6th my last subscription ends
pretty much tired of any things you say and promise CCP , i hope you go down pretty fast soon
and stop spamming my mailbox with offers

I would like to be able to screen recruits for rmt and botting and stuff like it, yes.

Does a botter use his main to bot?

If yes, then sure, a scarlet letter could have an effect. A character like that might not be much good for anything though since there is a lot of hate for them. But in some circles it might get a "bad boy" cool factor to it, sort of like some pirates wants -10 sec status so they will look really evil. With a scarlet letter one will be the evilest of them all.

But if a botter use an alt for it instead, a scarlet letter will fail. The real botter is still invisible, he just rakes up what isk he can from the bot before discarding it for a new. Rinse and repeat, no real harm done, just time lost.

So a scarlet letter may not have the desired effect. The smart botters (who are the real damage dealers to the game) still go free and remain invisible. The stupid / duped botters find themselves in a position that can have ruined their character.

And to repeat what others have said before me: the risk and consequences of a false-postive is simply not worth it.
The bot catching division could get into too much trouble with a player outrage. Having it run silently in the background is better for everyone than risk its work with bad PR. What if an upset botter atempts to create a false-positive scandal to get even?

I agree with 2nd time caught equals ban, that is a good idea. Breaking the EULA once is bad enough. Twice is a habbit.

My initial thought on the Scarlet Letter was "HELL YES!" but then I thought about it over a couple of days.

I, personally, would love to know who all has been botting. It would make targeting them for griefing, decing, harassment, or other vile things I enjoy doing, much easier. And yes, I would seek out toons with the Scarlet Letter just to make their lives in New Eden a complete pain.

I then started to think about what they would actually do: They would stop playing.

At first that may seem a good thing. Someone trying to cheat the system and ruin it for others shouldn't be a part of the game. But, that's what the ban function is for. Giving me knowledge of their past indiscretions will simply turn me (and others) into vigilantes. These 'attacks' against the known botters (who have already been punished at least once) would not even be toon vs toon attacks, or a desire for wealth within New Eden. These 'attacks' would be directed towards the person sitting at the computer trying to play Internet Spaceships.

I personally don't want that kind of knowledge, because I know what I would do with it and how it would be turned directly towards and against another player.

And it wouldn't end with people like myself, who seek out to blowup and pop a person. Someone with the Scarlet Letter would find themselves unable to join many corps, if they tried to form their own the only people who would really want to join in with them are awoxers looking to kill a blue/green botter.

The end result would be ruining the player's chance of ever enjoying EvE again. They would either have to start up a new account, or more likely, drop the game all together.

When someone who enjoys sitting at a belt mining for hours quits EvE that's one less easy target for me to pop (for profit).

Please, no Scarlet Letters.

If CCP's punishments for botters aren't enough, CCP should do more against them. Not turn that power over to the players to go on witch hunts.

Everybody knows EVE is a cold harsh place to live in. Lets extend that EVE that we already know to the rest of the game.
First offence temporary ban + pemanent flag of botting. If get caught a second time then perma ban! There is no need to do a three times strike here. If you did not learn the first time, will you really learn the second time? Unlikelly! This is why.

The flagging for botting must also be something that stands out in the character. I mean it must stands out as much like bad security level stands out or must stands out like having a bounty!

When it stands out, it does not have to say botting or have some serious message. Instead can be somthing that causes laughter or even ask a question. A broken heart logo in the corner of the character avatar will be helarious as people will ask why you got that in monacle!

Broken Heart!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You're mixing real players with bots.

Bots should be banned, griefed, dec'd - whatever and whenever. Mercilessly. Bot accounts are illegal and should be treated like pariahs.

The accounts that bots supply with isk should *not* be banned, imo. Or scarred with a Black Spot, or whatever.

The whole point of this new effort to houseclean is a) to reduce the number of bots and therefore b) to "persuade" players who run bots to actually go about making isk in a legal manner.

Same with RMTers. Stop the rot without losing subscriptions - that is and will always be CCP's focus.

EDIT: While we're at it, I'd like to see insurance payouts re-introduced to players who gank botting ships then report the bot to CCP- provided the bot is subsequently confirmed & banned by CCP's own methods. Might be a pain to administer that, though :s

I see where you are coming from. But I can not completely agree with you. While there are people who do serious botting as a means of RMT or other affairs, there are also the players who want to get ahead but don't want to buy PLEX.

There are many other games out that have botting, even some games that have built in automation for what could be considered botting in EvE. When a new player jumps in there's a good chance they didn't read the full EULA, they haven't spent hours digging through the forums, and they would miss that little bit of information about Scarlet Letters, naming and shaming, and other HUGE negative impacts that would befall them if they performed these actions.

People can be new, and people can be stupid. People can screw up and miscalculate. They can see the 'flashy' (are they flashy?) isk fountain of botting and think that it is just what they need. As soon as they get Strike One from CCP the real player behind the toon has a chance to stop what their doing and fly straight again. If they are branded with a Scarlet Letter that is as good as a perma-ban since it gives us, the players, knowledge (and thus power) over the people who did dumb things.

But Coolsmoke, I'm not saying that there shouldn't be some harsh punishment for botting. The Scarlet Letter goes outside the bounds of the game and puts you, myself, and any other player, into their own hot-seat as we go forth griefing and harassing what could be a real player (thus we would be violating the EULA ourselves). So if the new system is not enough to deal with botting then CCP should step up their game against botting, but leave us out of it (aside from reporting them, of course).

I know this thread has probably gone on long enough, but for anyone sitting on the fence regarding botters, here are some quick figures for a typical mission botter scenario:

Player X runs (a fairly typical) 5 mission botters in CNR's, each running 20 hrs/day and earning around 40mill isk/hr.

5 x 20 x 40 = 4 billion isk/day or 120 Billion a month.

A fair, if not major, proportion of botters RMT some of this isk. With the rest, they buy plex for their accounts and after that, pretty much whatever they damn well please. There's no disputing the fact that botter iskies are a major contributing factor to inflation.

With the current run on bot-spotting and banning, botters are trying a mix of methods to prevent detection - the most obvious being a reduction in the time spent constantly running missions.

But even at 10 hours a day, each bot player is pulling in 60b/month.

There are a LOT of botters in Eve. Pretty much any L4 mission hub in Caldari space has them.

It takes 20 days from account creation to run a T2 & faction fitted CNR in Level 4 missions. "Mission bot software" is highly sophisticated and customisable, and constantly being adapted in order to better reflect the actions of a genuine hands-on player.

Find them, report them and ban them all