EVE General Discussion

I believe you've said that you're using a 3-strikes plan for botters. Why not make the scarlet letter part of the second strike? Here's my reasoning:

A 1-strike individual has a good chance of becoming a "good guy." He has seen that botting really is punished, so there is an incentive to stop. If he does stop then everyone wins.

A 2-strike individual has been warned (and punished), but he still continues to cheat. This shows both a habitual pattern of wrong behavior and a disregard for the rules. This type of person will often continue to break the rules without regard for those around him.

By placing an "habitual botter" tag on repeat offenders (2 strikes), you allow corporations to protect themselves from these selfish players.

I'm all for a public scarlet letter, not only should it apply to the character that bots but also to the corp and alliance that houses said botting characters. Also make them criminally flagged to all other players for 6 months I have zero tolerance for players using bots.

Question is, whether you wants to rehabilitate bad players or wage an all out war on bots.

edit; from "wartargets" to "criminally flagged"

You're calling a botter an "enthusiastic ratter", so let's keep it this way even if I don't like your definition of boter.
If you accept bots in your corp knowing this, then your corp wallet should go negative too if the guy is caught again, and don't start your rabble about "I didn't knew it" if the guy is flagged.

Because with 10min e-mail address and very often a lot more tools you can find in some corporations/alliances forums, you can perfectly create a bot alt and not be detected by regular tools watching IP or MAC address, because I know how easy it is to change those ones.

Hacking and cheating is a way of living or a state of mind, you just can't change those guys to good guys if they do it more than once, so whenever you hit those just hit hard, ban and biomass char's take all isk destroy all items and disband their corp/alliance take all corp/alliance assets.

No, if you do something then you do it right and don't close one door to those jerks and let another one open, you close it definitively and decisively, CCP would look like idiots if they do it differently and I trust forum alts to bring that up when it happens.

APB Reloaded is publicly naming and shaming. It's a FTP game, and has been riddled with hackers. They've gotten better at taking them out, and the long lists of names on their forums is good to see, giving people confidence that steps are being taken. Hacking in that game is quite obvious, unlike in Eve, and in addition to that it's a FTP game that anybody can start playing so hackers just make a new account and start all over again.

Well, anyways, i just wanted to give you a game that uses name and shame, Sreegs.

"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?"

Alot of corps , atleast i hope alot donot condone RMT or anything to do with it. By naming and shaming them we can kick people who do it from our TS and also from our community. Alot of people trade chars legally and the only way we know who they are is thier voice on coms and if you name and shame these ppl using i sold my char as an excuse for being banned will no longer be used .

Botters are in a NPC corp. This people don't care about social flags..
Botters are on multiple accounts. Accounts caught over that, should have their characters removed them from their Player corp if there is one

Flags are not really good, because there are minors, who do make mistakes and will maybe never return.
Also the metagaming. It could be possible that players bot to receive that flag with the intention to damage reputations of Corps and Alliances
I fear you open a can of worms with early flagging.

But as a final Punishment an Event Idea:
Take possesion of all bot accounts. Move their characters with their actual used ship into a unreachable Wormhole system
put them all in a corporation.
Once a month A special deadspace gate to that system opens in the trade hubs, which limits to t1 cruiser and lower ships to enter.
Who finds and shots the most botters gets a nice price.
Players have fun killing each other and the "botted" botters. And CCP has a nice stress testing environment on the live server :)

Botageddon :)

I'm not sure if its posted yet or not.

You could always place a concord bounty on botters and make it a proffession in eve.

Botkillers will emerge, and maybe even corps dedicated to this proffession alone...

just a thought.

The game seems to go further and further from the one that impressed me being so close to reality.. Both the recent boomerang and this anti-bot campaign make it look more like a game. Let players punish players for this! Don't become the gods of such a beautiful world.

And boomerang... It seemed to have so nice economical consequences.. I was almost going to try gank someone

I can't admit to looking at every single response to this but I've skimmed over a lot of posts and one thing that sticks out like a sore thumb is the level of "WE MUST PUNISH" and general righteous indignation. I notice quite a few people saying they'll happily pay for a merc corp to go chase botters...why not do it yourself if you feel so strongly, or are you too busy care bearing?

People need to get off the "punish them forever" bandwagon that is so popular in the US these days (and look how many people they've imprisoned in their own country purely as punishment rather than rehabilitation) and start looking at this rationally. If someone tried botting, got hit with a temporary ban and decided it's not worth the risk (i.e. no more botting ever) then why the need to name and shame? Given that said ex-botter is probably playing legitimately since they obviously haven't left the game (paying for a sub or playing to pay) then continuing the punishment after the initial ban will just p1ssthemoff and CCP loses a customer, so from a commercial perspective it's kind of dumb. If people continue to bot then hey, simple solution - perma ban all their accounts (i.e. what already happens now).

Hard core botters are mostly RMT based corps with very few actual people who have been around a long time and will be there as long as the game mechanics and code base allow this. It takes nothing to set up a network of bots and there are so many ways of disguising where your PC(s) are located it's not funny. Given that the incentive still exists for massive scale botting (i.e. RMT dollars) then in my view there are only 2 semi-realistic options to fix this.

One is to change the EVE client to remove the possibility of code injection and/or mess with OCR bots by keeping things on the screen dynamic enough for that type of bot not to work. Chance of this happening? Not high given the complexity involved - if it was easy do you think CCP wouldn't have already done this by now? We aren't talking about simple tweaks here. And of course any changes to the client need to be made carefully so as not to completely wreck gameplay.

So, what's the other way? To paraphrase the current debate about "solving" drug problems, start treating this as a health issue rather than a criminal one and you will probably get better results. I'm not saying that botting isn't criminal within the context of EVE, certainly it results impacts both players and CCP alike. But like the drug trade, if you take away the incentive (i.e. the stupid amounts of money to be made for doing virtually nothing) then you'll see the botters eventually disappear once the effort vs reward balance swings in favour of effort. To do this, CCP would need to start selling ISK directly to players. I'm not talking about buying plex then trading for iskies in-game. I'm talking about paying real money to get iskies. The trick is to sell it at a rate that is low enough to make botting not worthwhile for the RMT crowd, but not so cheap that your create massive inflation due to currency oversupply. Essentially you just replace one RMT organisation with another (CCP!) but when you think about it, conceptually this isn't really that much different from selling graphics cards for plex.

Other than that, I guess all that can be done is continue to catch the RMT bots and perma-ban when found.

My 0.05 ISK worth :)

Well scarlet letters might be visible but lack details. Think about generalizing (not just RMT) the flag to simply say

"this person has previously engaged in bannable actions which could potential ensnare other players in penalties -- number of days since last offense occured xxx "

(CCP can also be harsher and use "days since last ban ended xxx"


PLUS
to separate the one time curious or possibly semi-innocently ensnared from habitual offenders consider adding


"number of prior bans zzz"

or to confer information on seriousness of offense(s) as well as repeats

"total number of weeks previously banned for all offenses is zzz"


Frankly if they are habitable offenders, the public deserves to know as most will work the gray areas hard
(i.e. harsh scams, tantrum ganking, etc). Some will try to get others to carry out risky parts of potentially bannable
activities while waiting to fall off CCP radar.


Finally I would think scarlet letters should attach to ACCOUNTS not just toons. Some bannable actions don't take that much toon training.