Crime & Punishment

The Legend of the VCBee will live on through younger generations:
http://eveinfo.net/wiki/ind~6531.htm#Orvolle_Patrol
(before my time)

Great job CCP! Emergent gameplay wins! ..I mean it is afterall what this game is about. Thank you and supported +1

I think this would be obvious. In the scenario given, the bumping of those that did not pay the ransom until they leave the belt would be ok. If you follow them to another system once you have cleared the current system and are clearly applying a tactic against ALL ice miners and including them in that, that would be ok. If you persistantly follow the same pilot system after system, griefing the same guy/gal and ignoring others, then that would be seen as harassment.

I aspire to that level of awesome.




Again it would depend on the reasoning, it's still open to the same level of interpretation, the only difference being this time there is a consequence ie: the loss of the ganking ship

Anslo must be frothing at the mouth right now, while simultaneously looking for a way to spin this.

He's definitely active - for some reason he fears me enough to delete a simple comment I posted on his ineffective blog.

Botslayer Goblin will need to change his Bio so that it no longer claims CCP is 'sanctioning' the activity. It should say that CCP confirms that such activities are legitimate gameplay,and does not violate any rules.

That said, Botslayer Goblin is not a 'throw-away' character.

The bit that stood out to me from that bio was the mention of punishment and bot. I think player organisations shouldn’t be encouraged to suggest or imply that they are able to take action against players who violate the rules of the game. Violations of rules should only be handled through the appropriate official channels, it wouldn’t seem unreasonable if that was made clear.
Ganking a ship flown by a bot affects the character and you could argue that depriving a char of isk is punishment but in the case of botting it is the account holder and not the char that requires punishment, which cannot be achieved by player interaction.


Also since the bots are likely based on subsumption or similar basic logic they would leave a pattern but the clarity of the pattern would be degraded the more the bot was interacted with making it harder to spot in any human or automated analysis of behaviour. At the worst case it encourages the development of more sophisticated AI’s which wouldn’t help, the more simplistic they are the better as that leaves the window open for mass detection and mass banning. Interfering with them seems to only be self defeating in the longer term.

There is also the more human issue that if person thinks someone else is doing something for them then they tend not to do it themselves, that in effect means that in the systems where bumpers operate the player could be less inclined to report a suspicious char since someone else is yapping away in local professing that they are already doing something about it. The reality appears to be that anything but the reporting of suspected bots with a collection of sensible observations is the goal of the organisation; it would be somewhat of a dead end activity if it actually did so.
As well as that there is the curious method of detection that is asking in local if someone is there as if a response or not demonstrates the presence of a human. Given the level of complexity of the questioning even the more basic chat bots available would be able to survive it, certainly for long enough that the bot master could intervene. Encouraging more advanced bots is still not a good idea even in this paragraph.

A risk exists of introducing a demand for answer phone style chat bots for the casual miner that would be all but impossible to detect but allow miners to afk without interference. Demand is the first step towards supply. I might fire up the retriever and cut and paste between local and Jabberwacky as an experiment, although they may guess if I have to ask it “Do you have a permit?” and it responds “I have a permit to carry concealed Toddlers.” as it just did.

Really it would seem more accurate that the bio mentioned that the organisation serves as a long term bot development, security, concealment and expansion task force rather than suggesting that it provides a punishment for botters. It seems a better idea to leave bots to CCP and the player population rather than attempt uncoordinated overt actions that may well have undesirable consequences.


As far as the mechanic of one ship bouncing off another I don’t see that is an issue, perhaps irritating at times but it doesn’t seem fundamentally wrong.

I haven’t said anything of kind, CCP can ban accounts where as player organisations, no matter how well marketed, have no ability to do so. Gank them, call them rude names or whatever turns you on but it is all pointless if they are not reported to CCP. It is an account issue rather than a character one.
I do think that there is a lack of awareness that there is a bot reporting system at all, or how to use it effectively, it wouldn’t hurt if it were given some mention. It’s one of the things that miner bumping does disrupt, the casual miners are in the best position to spot a bot and report it effectively, flying in and blowing everything up doesn’t have the same long term effect but there is nothing to say you cant.

With this ruling, the act of bumping is now a "emerging game mechanic", That is fair, My question is, the act of charging to not use this emerging game mechanic on a person, extorsion by definition, is this not a illegal activity? And the fact that they charge to not bump you, do this not show intent is to extort fees from miners? This would be harassment by definition. the idea that I will bother you until you move away unless you pay me. If of course they owned the sector, then their ability to define what ever fees they would like would be without question. Is CCP now indicating that they are ceeding the ability of a corp to OWN or control the commerce in a high-sec system?