Missions & Complexes

For those 12-13 hours you still have to be at your computer every so often to empty your cargo hold and haul the ore to a station/pos etc. Killing respawning NPCs 23/7 while not being at your computer is not the same thing.

And how many times have you been banned for this?

I have to disagree.

For one, CCP Sreegs isn't a developer.

Secondly, if innocent drone users are having meltdowns because they mis-read a news item, perhaps they should spend some of their AFK drone time learning how to read.

Two interesting game mechanics might address the problem and make the game more fun.

First is random spawning super bosses. The most interesting would be a small sleeper or incursion level fleet. These can spawn anywhere. Anyone who is awake and paying attention can escape. Otherwise this roaming boss will just pod you and your little drones 2. For those who are awake and can scramble the appropriate response fleet they get the possibility of sleeper or incursion loot but only after a nasty and costly fight.

As it is incursions are too predictable and not sufficiently menacing. The same goes for sleepers. Where ever there are worm holes there should be the danger of something really dangerous coming in.

The second game mechanic is flying for Concord. I have always been disappointed that there are no Concord or DED agents. Unlike standard mission agents Concord missions would have a definite Game Policing function. The main twist is that these Concord actions would not be just AI based. In general this mechanism would give developers a dynamic interface where any game / player behavior anomalies could be addressed.

As it is Concord, criminal flags and the bounty system are no real threat and have no real teeth.

There was no botting issue here. This was started by your algorithm thinking that someone was a bot, them challenging that, and the decision being made to decide they were a bot despite no botting software, macro software, game hacks, or the like. Instead of fixing the issue with the botting algorithm (suggested fix: if the client isn't sending server commands it's probably not botting because it's not doing anything), team security decided to take over running enforcement of edge cases where 100% legitimate game behavior allows for something the game designers decide is a bad idea.

There's no good reason for team security to be involved because they don't know what has/hasn't been decided in the past, they don't have layers of review to handle hard cases fairly (if something's a hard case, like 100% legitimate game behavior doing something unexpected you want several sets of eyes on it reviewing it independently, such as regular and senior GMs). Team Security should deal with stuff the GMs are incapable of handling: botting detection, RMT, hacks, and the like that does not involve 100% in-game behavior. Things involving pure in-game behavior is what the GM team is designed to handle and it's their job to handle.

As for the "designed/non-designed" thing (which is nonsense: half of EVE is about doing things that were not designed, from hotdrops to defensive SBUs), here's this:

Say I idle in a NC. system with the name "down with goons" and a bio saying all donations go to fighting goonswarm in some verifiable way, say by a public api (though I keep a percentage, making it personal income). Every so often people go "damn straight down with those goons" and send me money. Am I a bot? I'm just parked in space, cloaked. I suspect I would be, because I'm logged into game making money and the combination of the two would trigger your algorithm (since it clearly doesn't take into account failing to send any commands at all to the server).

Hell, I make passive income every day from simply holding various items that will appreciate in value: fortunately your algorithms don't detect that sort of thing or I might get banned for holding guidance systems as they steadily appreciate in value even if I'm unsubbed.

Well, this does seem an ass-backwards way of dealing with the situation CCP

Be sensible and remove these static sites

Make these plexes despawn

Give the rats a finite number of respawns

So basically, fix the game instead of calling out these players as a teacher would to school children

Dont expect players to play how you want them to in a sandbox

It was edited once because people misinterpreted my comments to mean that we were banning activity that we aren't. This seems to still be the case. There is a very specific situation which caused this detection which is essentially warping into a particular cosmos plex at downtime, dropping your sentry drones, applying reps to them then leaving your computer until the next downtime. This is possible because in that particular room the drones respawn.

This is going on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That is bad. If you haven't already heard from us then to date you haven't been doing it. However, there have been cases where people HAVE been doing this and complained that there was no announcement put out about it. Here is the announcement.

This potentially impacts more than the one COSMOS plex which is why the specific COSMOS plex was not mentioned in the OP. Were I to mention it then they would move to a new plex and we'd be dealing with the same rage from them because THIS IS A DIFFERENT PLEX.

True enough they DONT have to, but I mean if they are going to go out of the way to look for a specific afk action that fits a broad spectrum of pilots, it only stands to reason they would cover other forms of afk as well

So what your saying is you havn't banned anyone for doing this yet? Because people have been doing this for years (very few of cause can do it because of the limited amount of these sites)

I think it's fine that CCP now decides this isn't okay anymore, and change the mechanics so it can't be done anymore, but as long as you don't ban anyone for using these simple game mechanics (drop drones, rep them, go afk)

You could simply make it so sentry drones got abandond or disconnected after 1 hour or so... that would fix the problem completly (and if people found a way around that, then they were cheating)

This makes sense. Thank you for the explanation.
You'll just have to understand community's outrage regarding this matter. It's a very delicate situation that opened some old wounds.

Best of luck in hunting down the bots.