EVE General Discussion

actually its not as simple, any corporation that does something like that would made itself responsible for any repercussions this has.

there's no point in even discussing this... you have to understand that those repercussions can be as simple as some dude turning off the pc, to punching wall and all the way to stuff too grim to mention.

sorry if im being too cynical about this, but if joe lawyer points at a crying mother and says "this evil CCP corporation paraded her son so that an entire community could bully him! how could they!" its pretty much over, anywhere in the world that happens.

so it wont happen, ever. in fact if a player does the detective work to find who is botting and where the proceedings are being funneled, and decided to share it with the community CCP will intervene and protect the players who were botting. they have to.

Characters have no families nor lawyers.

You're being short sighted here.

Stop being obtuse.

So I guess you RL name is Tippia and I can google you RL address just like that?

Let me put it this way, let just say CCP do realise the names of x number of characters who have been banned for purchasing illegal isk or involved in RMT.

That player was in a major alliance. Somebody in that alliance knows the real life name of the person before the character and what country he lives in. They decided it would be funny to post this information on reddit / SA Forum / K.com etc

Now you now longer have the separation between the in game character and real life, and as we all know to well there are some people who play this game who really really really can not separate between the two.

So yeah whilst many people would love CCP to name and shame those who are banned for things RMT, just purely from a business point of view the risk is simply not worth it.

Think about this way, how long has RMT been around for and how many companies have you ever seen have a name and shame policy?

Are you implying that there is no way that from a character name anyone can get a RL name?

Your kind of right, it is ridiculous, however that is the world we live in. A world where anybody will take anybody to court for stupid reasons and win.

Here is an example.

A woman in the UK is taking her council to court because her dog injured itself whilst running in long grass chasing a cat. Her argument is that the area was open to the public and its the councils responsibility to ensure it is maintained and you know what, she will most likely win.

Again, if you were CCP would you really put bother to name and shame knowing the risk even if it is very small. You gain nothing by it by doing it expect the possibility of court action, regardless of how small.

There are FW bots out there for sure, and we have some extra checks in place for those. They aren't overly prevalent at the moment.
They fall under mission bots for the automated ESTF system, which only accounts for an estimated 20% of our bans; so you are far more likely to be caught in a manual sweep. We have bits and pieces of detection code just about every activity in New Eden, and we are constantly making improvements and additions to this arsenal.

As for whether or not there were large amounts of them at some point, I'd say yes they used to be more popular, a few years ago perhaps.
Historical data on types of bots used is something we've talked about in dev-blogs and presentations before.
It's very interesting to see how these numbers change over time, with changes to the game by CCP, and also as a result of in-game events, driven by players.




No worries at all, I'm here to answer questions! The slides are 56 pages long and it's quite a lot to digest. The more misconceptions I can clarify the better! This is very much a topic of awareness and communication on CCP's behalf.



You got it!




Very interesting question. I'll have to get back to you on this one. It's not a traditional ISK sink, but ultimately the results are the same; vast amounts of ISK and assets removed from the game world entirely.



Thank you! And yes, I should have said 30,000 accounts instead. That is the number we are measuring in this case.

Trial account abuse is something we take very seriously. It's not allowed, as per the EULA, and we will usually permanently ban trial accounts abusing bots right off the bat.
Ventures are very popular even on paid accounts, it's a specialized mining ship, which is also easily obtainable through the tutorial.
There are some stats on the average age of banned accounts in our fanfest presentations, I've seen this go from 6+ months to an average of ~2 months or so.
This limits botters options in terms of using more advanced ships. It's also resulted in botters requiring more accounts to compensate, which in turn (usually, anyways) makes them easier to detect.

We ban on a daily basis, and the automated system is running at all times. The ESTF caught and banned 15 accounts overnight.

Our first attempt at larger sweeps and batch-banning was "Unholy Rage" back in 2009. Here's an interesting read on that subject, by CCP Grimmi (Lead GM Grimmi, at the time):
http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/unholy-rage/

We found that large sweeps like this had a decent immediate impact, but it was not sustainable in the long run. A "slow-burn" approach has since been adapted, which I prefer.

As an example, this "methodology" if you will, allows us to apply constant pressure to illegitimate operations within EVE Online, such as organized RMTers. This has proven to be more efficient in terms of actually getting rid of these groups, as they will struggle with rebuilding once we crack down. They are there to make money, and if we make that hard enough they will often leave in search of "greener pastures".