EVE General Discussion

Please do. There is a basic flaw in CCP's current war on Bots: New players do not know about it. Old Dev blogs are buried. New players do not go to eve Vegas, or fanfest. The only way they find out about CCP's efforts are word of mouth (which given the average reliability of the typical eve player, they may not believe) or by trying botting and getting banned.

CCP Stillman, you need continuous, persistent and visible deterrence to botting, visible by all players, even new ones. They should be deterred from even looking for botting software, even once. Bot writers will happily take money from naive players who think they can bot, and laugh all the way to the bank. The only way to stop that is to insure new players know the consequences. If the bot writers stop getting new customers, they will go do something else. With no eve bots being written, it will become much harder to bot.

Continuous, persistent and visible deterrence.

Datamining and query optimization are not such common skills anymore (or I wouldn't make such money doing it). It's too old-school for kids, and requires a certain way of thinking.

As stated, checking millions of records a day is nothing with the current computing power. We don't run calculators anymore, and bot-hunting can always be running on last-days backup, on a separate system, not to burden the live databases.

I would have helped on this, but as Vertisce, I play EvE to forget about work.

Still I am sure that with some anonymization of account data, it could be opened to a secured out-of-CCP base of trusted "inspectors". I'm sure CCP could recruit good hunters in the player base Some good ideas could come back to CCP (players mindset is often more twisted than devs).

Thanks CCP and Team Security for hunting them for us... makes the game much better each time a bot disappears (without sound, in space)

I cleaned up the first few posts of this thread as they contributed nothing to the discussion and simply served to derail the thread.

Onwards!

CCP Has their ways and with all that's on their plate...only so much they can do.

*posting in a thread with chribba :)

Agree on this concern. Spambots might or might not be easy to spot but those come from somewhere and are so obvious I can barely understand why apparently nothing is done against.
And that "somewhere" might as well be the start point to find new intelligent bots for other activities in game, like spam target with whatever at the point you crash and get killed without any evidence of what happened (yes this happens), crash gates, overload nodes without any evidence of large fleets running 20 systems around and lots of other funky stuff, missions FW bots etc etc.

A lot of people must realise how gigantic "bots" market and activities is, they simply imagine bot is the ship depleting rocks because a couple idiots said so (idiots or boters themselves?), might actually just be the top of the iceberg and actually represent a tiny percentage of real bots (that are nothing else but cracks) affecting the game much more that the real afk dude in his mackinaw reading some book and didn't noticed his cargo is full for half an hour.

Now I can safely ask my self how many exploiting faction warfare are nothing but real boters, at each and single new milk cow you find in eve you can be sure when you notice it or someone talks about it, it makes months or weeks some other dudes not saying a single word, never posting here with their real IG char, are already exploiting it to the ground and making hundreds billions of profits.

Market bots, simply these ones hurt 500% more players in game than any called mining bot often being a single guy doing this activity while doing some other thing at the same time.
But it's so much easy to say "hey he didn't answer me therefore is a bot because I SAID SO". Idiots have always the same arguments, empty ones based on assumptions and they would kill half of the planet based on their assumptions, that's why they are so dangerous for this game and should never be taken seriously by any one starting by CCP.

Thanks for the advice on how to best break the TOS and avoid CCP detection.

It's not exactly top-secret, classified Pentagon information. Like I said, anyone who knows what he's doing will already go undetected, and people who don't know what they're doing will just get their stuff from botting forums.

If it's that obvious then why so many accounts sub with untraceable payment methods?

Do you realise you can get a fake mail address, create an eve account and sub with pay pal account on another fake mail account?
How many of these do you think CCP really has the time or manpower to take care of?

And finally, if there's such a persistence from some players talking about RMT and bots it's probably, I really mean probably, because it's not that obvious you actually think?

While I agree that botting activities can be obfuscated, the end goal of botting is the same. Maximizing ISK with a minimum of effort, while funneling that ISK for nefarious uses. There are many ways of catching a botter/RMTer other than just looking at the account. You can follow the money backwards, too. I'm sure CCP has a budget for "buying" isk from RMT sites, and then figuring out where it came from.