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Some very good work done here. Sad to see CCP Sreegs leave.

Nice blog. A little light on the numbers side, but that's fine. Good news with the change to the three strikes rule.

awesome!

Would it be possible for you to enlighten us on how an investigation of a bot is conducted in the means of if someone reports one through the "report a bot" function - seeing as there's no way for us to specify what kind of botting said report is about, eg pve bot, courier bot, macro, spambot etc etc

I've reported countless of spambots through that feature without results, so I'm curious what or how such a report is being handled really (and if you can't/dont want to tell np I'll just keep my good faith in that eventually they are banned in a big sweep).

Keep up the great work and h5 to the new team!

/c

stay frosty!

Edit:
Wow, ~510 banned accounts in October alone.

So long Sreegs! Nice having you!

One part of the current policy that is missing (at least I hope its still part of policy) is removal of ill gotten ISK. Is that still being done?

Looking at the EVE University debacle, yes it most certainly is.

It absolutely is, and is done automatically in all cases where the amount can be determined by our backend system. It's rare that manual intervention is needed, but does happen.

The 2 step will work nicely, you wake them up with a 30 day ban you do it again shame on you ban!

thats a pretty important question, there is a bunch of tools out in the wild that can access some kind of cache. does that count as a client modification ?

some kind of posting to clear that up would be greatly appreciated


o7 Sreegs, fly safe !

One thing that has always seemed to be a shortcoming in CCP's war on bots in the lack of deterrence. Lets say a month from now a new player picks up the game, plays for a few weeks and then gets the idea to bot. What deters him from doing so? The EULA? Most likely he did not read it. This blog? Buried under dozens of others, and he may not even be looking for them.

So he buys a bot program. That gives money to bot writers, which is not a good thing. He tries it and gets banned. "Oh, I guess I should not do that any more." OK, he learned his lesson and will now fly right. But would it not be better if he did not try, even once? Then:

The bot writer would get no money. If you can take the money out of bot writing there will be fewer bot writers.

The security team will have less work to do banning people, giving them more time to make their tools even better.

With fewer people trying botting, there will be on average fewer bots in the game.

I suggest that you place on the log-in screen a special area which gives:

The number of Strike one bans this week.
The number of Strike two bans this week.
The number of RMT bans this week.
The amount of ISK removed along with the bans this week.

That would provide continuous and persistent deterrence to botting.