EVE General Discussion

Some of you may remember my previous Jita chat analyzes, the 24 hours in Jita report as well as the One week in Jita report.

So with years passed by, what happened, how does it look, is spamming in local any concern?


tl;dr - Jita is full of spam, and spambots. Just like before.



For all that wants to look at numbers and stuff themselves without reading my boring text, the link is below.


Six months in Jita (table columns are clickable for sorting)


So, what did I find?
Much like previous times, there's a ton of talk, a lot of it what appears to be highly automated (something also pretty much confirmed).

The period analyzed is from 2012-01-01 until 2012-06-30. During this period 79,787 different pilots were found, together speaking 3,204,660 lines of chat, an average of 12,2 lines/minute, or roughly one line every 4,9 seconds.

The "in depth" analysis has only been made towards the top 100 speakers in terms of number of lines spoken.

And not surprisingly, the top 100 pilots do speak a lot - they among themselves are responsible for 30,4% of all chat in Jita during the entire period. So roughly every 3rd thing said in Jita at any time during these six months will come from one out of those 100 people.

With the top person saying 1,83% of all that's said in Jita - Samantha Marley. So then you might say, sure but there are people that speak a lot, discussing world news, politics, their daily life, and yes actually there are a few among those top 100 that do. In the case of Samantha though, she spoke 58,724 lines in total, but only 40 different things were said, and also she were only active for a total of close to 100 days out of those 182 days analyzed (but then she's a confirmed bot as well).


What do I mean by confirmed bot?
Ok this one is tough, I can't really confirm a bot, I'm not CCP, I have not really any say about bot or not (and i'm sure some people might find themselves on the list and go I'm no bot - and maybe you're not). What I mean by confirmed bot is that in my best judgement looking and posting characteristics, both what's being said, how many times it's being said, and how often, posting timers, I am fairly sure that the person is posting with the aid of some type of software.

An example would be a pilot that consistently is able to post a few lines per minute for hours and hours and never missing to post or a person that posts their messages exactly 73 seconds apart, not missing to hit that spot over and over - possible for a human, probably but highly unlikely.

So there you have my definition and how I reason when I've put a "Yes" under the bot column.


So onwards there is a graph showing how much is said each day and it goes a bit up and down, and interestingly to see the Goon's burn Jita causing a HUGE spike that "out-talked" the spammers by far

To this we also have a list of what's being said the most times, overall, looking at chat from various channels and hubs, words like "lol", "hi" ":)" are usually at the top places - not in Jita of course.


In Jita, the phrase "[Multiple Items]" was said the most times, 113,639 times by 4,249 different pilots - that's not surprisingly though, it's a trade hub after all, the biggest even.

However, the second most thing said is "30 Day Pilot's License Extension (PLEX) x 3 1.2b" - now this is not shown here since contract links only work in-game, but it's a scam contract, said 47,542 times, by 11 different pilots!.

Same goes for 3rd place, "[Want To Sell PLEX 388Mill]", said 29282 times by 11 different pilots.
First on 4th place we find the common "lol", being said 21,808 times by 8,267 different pilots.



So what does all of this mean? Well probably mean nothing to most since you might already have commented below saying minimize local, or who reads Jita, there's a thing called block - before even getting this far But for those who did read this far, in my opinion this shows that spamming, with or without bots isn't being dealt with at all.

Who should deal with it, well I would for one feel CCP can spot spambots quite easily and just looking at my list and seeing how much is being posted by these bots local spam can be drastically lowered with simple means.


I feel, that this kind of use of local ruins social aspects of EVE and our communication, I am seeing this grow and becoming more of a problem, while I see no actions from CCP's side. I see the same spambots that I reported over and over again, still posting there things every 20 seconds, even after being reported the first time 2 months ago.


But that's all for this report, you can see many things in the research link above for yourself and I'd be happy to try and explain and answer any questions you might have.

Maybe we can hope for a bit less spam in 2013, but looking at trends, it doesn't seem likely.

/c

too much time on your hands chief

I am seriously impressed with the amount of work you put in there Chribba. Impressed but not in the least bit surprised I think I'll sit and take a good long look through this, thank you for your continued efforts my good man

79k is the reason. Even if a tenth of them were full on bots, the company can hardly be bothered to dump that many subs.

That is the core of the bots in mmo's. The company gets money. It won't be gotten rid of.

Good work, and keep trucking, maybe I will be proven incorrect.

This is just confirmation, as if it were needed, that CCP silently looks the other way where spam bots are concerned. Ah well, that's just one reason I rarely venture to Jita.

Great analysis.

Is the raw data made available?

What kind of statistical method did you use in your classification of bot vs non-bot.. is it just some threshold of repetitiveness? If so what is that threshold?

The fact that Samantha stops dead at around 17th May may be a sign that she got banned. I would like to see an analysis of how many people you have classified as botters have subsequently stopped posting (presumably because they got banned too). It would be a good measure of how effective CCP's anti-botting campaign is at targeting chat bots!

I fail to see how these bots put any actual money into CCP,
because they obviously have the ISK for paying via PLEX ...

I think all the Concordokkens have shaken your brain. He's referring to all the website traffic and ad revenue. Though I personally doubt it keeps him from having to work.

Well done Mr. Chribba.

I have *no* idea about his sites, tbh ...
I know that he got plenty, but i've never cared of actually looking.

So my bad, i guess. I apologize. :)