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CCP : MACRO BANNINGS

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Lady Spank
Get Out Nasty Face
#101 - 2012-02-29 17:28:40 UTC
I doubt that example would lead to a ban so I don't see how it is relevant.

(ಠ_ృ) ~ It Takes a Million Years to Become Diamonds So Lets Just Burn Like Coal Until the Sky's Black ~ (ಠ_ృ)
Elanor Vega
Native Freshfood
Minmatar Republic
#102 - 2012-02-29 17:35:54 UTC
Someone is so afraid of banning that attacks CCP without any evidence...
I love this ****. Big smile

Just do it all the time CCP... Big smile
Lubomir Penev
Prey Drive
#103 - 2012-02-29 17:41:11 UTC
Vaerah Vahrokha wrote:

Because mining is such a bad mechanic, there's no 100% foolproof way for CCP employees to be SURE you did not bot.


I find that pods pretending mining for a cycle, docking to station, undocking, pretending mining for a cycle, docking... for hours after their Mackinaw got ganked a pretty damning evidence, well worthy of a first strike permaban.
Doc Fury
Furious Enterprises
#104 - 2012-02-29 17:43:49 UTC  |  Edited by: Doc Fury
Lubomir Penev wrote:
Vaerah Vahrokha wrote:

Because mining is such a bad mechanic, there's no 100% foolproof way for CCP employees to be SURE you did not bot.


I find that pods pretending mining for a cycle, docking to station, undocking, pretending mining for a cycle, docking... for hours after their Mackinaw got ganked a pretty damning evidence, well worthy of a first strike permaban.


^^This

Seen it far too many times, and long ago it used to be funny to watch. Now it's just sad.

☼

There's a million angry citizens looking down their tubes..at me.
Lady Spank
Get Out Nasty Face
#105 - 2012-02-29 17:52:33 UTC
I'm not much of a ganker but I think out of 50 odd exhumers that I have suicided at least 10 of them have displayed that behaviour.

(ಠ_ృ) ~ It Takes a Million Years to Become Diamonds So Lets Just Burn Like Coal Until the Sky's Black ~ (ಠ_ృ)
Ezurae
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
#106 - 2012-02-29 17:54:34 UTC
Chribba wrote:
Great news, hopefully spam bots will get the hammer too...

Looking forward to that blog!

/c


now its Y0TO0 for the next 14-21 days. Fresh recycled, new trial account...
Vera Algaert
Republic University
Minmatar Republic
#107 - 2012-02-29 17:55:36 UTC  |  Edited by: Vera Algaert
CCP Sreegs wrote:
Thanks! :)

I'm writing a dev blog in a day or two that will contain some sweet juicy new details.

As regards the timing of this particular wave, let the dudes on FHC know that Fanfest had nothing to do with it. That's a coincidence.

:edit: also the guy above me

gratz on the bans - but didn't you tell us not so long ago that "unholy rage" style mass-bans are pointless PR stunts?

I thought the bans in May 2011 were supposed to be only the beginning of a continued effort in which different bots get hit every few weeks...

Whatever you did back then it did destroy RR and brought down a popular botting forum for several weeks as collateral damage so I had quite high hopes for that approach.

But other bots were not hit in a similar fashion in the months following that successful take down (or they created no waves at all when they were hit - which is hard to believe) and now you seem to have returned to the "big banwaves" model that allows botters to rely on having a lot of time between waves to recoup their investments.

I'm quite happy that you didn't write a devblog right away by the way - the relative silence (before this thread) gave those of us who got informed about the bans as they happened some time to stock up cheaply on items that are likely to spike in prices over the next 2 weeks. Twisted

.
You're Mum
The New Eden Yacht Club
The New Eden Yacht Club.
#108 - 2012-02-29 18:12:48 UTC
Alavaria Fera wrote:
Krixtal Icefluxor wrote:
You're Mum wrote:
Andski wrote:
It'd help if you didn't, you know, publish botting guides on your site.

Yeah riverini a how to guide is so the best way to combat botting.
As always you are made of win! Well done....:slow clap:

That was utterly idiotic when those were published.

This sounds like something very newsworthy. I suppose he has of course by now pulled his incriminating evidence off his entirely balanced and not at all telling people how to bot site?



nope its still there, not that i read said shoddy web site or anything

CCP’s song: 99 little bugs in the code, 99 little bugs, you take one down patch it around, 127 little bugs in the code
Vera Algaert
Republic University
Minmatar Republic
#109 - 2012-02-29 18:22:56 UTC
Weaselior wrote:
EVE does fingerprint your computer you idiots

non-******** botters use a launcher that spoofs the fingerprint (and monitors the fingerprint code for any changes), hides injected dlls from the client and prevents crashes from getting reported (doing this via the official client setting might be a red flag, who kows?).

.
Vaerah Vahrokha
Vahrokh Consulting
#110 - 2012-02-29 18:27:10 UTC  |  Edited by: Vaerah Vahrokha
Micheal Dietrich wrote:

I'm going to play the devils advocate to your advocate.

For starters, permaban =/= all hope is lost. If you can prove without a doubt that it was some background code similar to that of a botting script (though what it could be is beyond me) then you can petition it and get your account back.



How would you prove "without doubt" that you did not cheat? What tools does CCP provide to do so? What tools do you have? None. It's your defaced word against an international corporation.


Lady Spank wrote:
I doubt that example would lead to a ban so I don't see how it is relevant.


Ever used Avira or most other antivirus software? You enable heuristics, you can be quite sure you'll get false positives.
Sure my example is short, but was to give the idea.


Elanor Vega wrote:
Someone is so afraid of banning that attacks CCP without any evidence...
I love this ****. Big smile

Just do it all the time CCP... Big smile


Not able to read at all? The "first strike => guillotine" is the subject.


Lubomir Penev wrote:

I find that pods pretending mining for a cycle, docking to station, undocking, pretending mining for a cycle, docking... for hours after their Mackinaw got ganked a pretty damning evidence, well worthy of a first strike permaban.


Those would indeed be proven botters worth a first strike perma ban.

Though you'd have to be able to insta-summon a CCP GM at the belt and make him look.
Otherwise they have to believe in your report (which could be made up to screw competitors, enemy corp etc.).

Also, not everyone kill someone else just to see IF they were a bot, they will just report the suspicious guy.
Then what happens? Probably at CCP they won't gank the guy to see if he's botting, they'll run heuristics for an amount of time.

I mean, your way to detect a bot is certainly the quickest and functional but it's not the default and probably not the majority and certainly not how CCP can proceed to validate bots.

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FeralShadow
Tribal Liberation Force
Minmatar Republic
#111 - 2012-02-29 18:34:19 UTC
My tear jar! It is almost overflowing!!!! YAY SREEGS!

One of the bitter points of a good bittervet is the realisation that all those SP don't really do much, and that the newbie is having much more fun with what little he has. - Tippia
Ptraci
3 R Corporation
#112 - 2012-02-29 18:44:46 UTC
Vaerah Vahrokha wrote:

How would you prove "without doubt" that you did not cheat?


You don't need to prove that you did not cheat. The logs prove that you did, which is why you were banned. Any argument is just you trying to convince CCP that what they read in their logs is not true. But you don't know what is in their logs.

Botters tend to be greedy and unimaginative. I'm sure that someone who has a bot program set up to bot 30 mins a day probably wouldn't be detected by CCP. On the other hand, 30 minutes a day probably has a negligible impact on the economy, too. So it's a moot point. But the guy who has 20 accounts botting 23/7, uses the proceeds from mineral sales to buy rare in game items that apparently he just gives away to people, well, he's screwed.
Nick Bison
Bison Industrial Inc
Cat Scratch Fevers
#113 - 2012-02-29 18:50:51 UTC
I Love Boobies wrote:
Who needs Hulkageddon when CCP themselves can cause more tears in one massive wave. Twisted


This = +1

Also, bot-tears give me wood.

Nothing clever at this time.
Therese Ishihara
Council of Exiles
Brave Collective
#114 - 2012-02-29 18:54:04 UTC
Vaerah Vahrokha wrote:
Bubanni wrote:
Lady Spank wrote:
Take no action against botters other than to make their characters permanently sanctionable targets for all capsuleers!

You like to bot? Well we know some people that like to pew pew!


How about just perma ban them on first strike? instead of the silly 10-14 day slap they get now + not being able to resell them...


I am going to play devil's advocate on this, as I read it everywhere again and again, pitchforks and torches readied to kill with no second thought.



They could perma ban on first strike if a list of banned software was available or if some button could tell people "HEY GUY YOU ARE ABOUT TO START EVE WITH SUSPICIOUS SOFTWARE RUNNING!"

How do you know if tomorrow you buy a new keyboard and it triggers a bot detection and you get permabanned?
Or you install something that automates some mundane task in another software and its "engine" is shared by one of the bots and thus gets detected by EvE?

Other times they ban by using heuristics (expecially when a player activity is "strange" / reported but no blatant bot engine is found). They cannot perma ban on first strike because of heuristics, heuristics always come with false positives.

Would YOU like to be perma banned out of the blue, just because you played in a way that somehow triggered the heuristic?

You are all so sure that everything goes black and white, but it does not.

Imagine if a bug in the detection engine causes 1000 auto-permabans and then someone proves a bug screwed good players. Imagine the adverse publicity on the game.


So I went hunting down some bot software after you made this comment and made the determination that the heuristics they would have to use in order to detect bots wouldn't even need to look at play time or activity.

All of the bots I've looked at have very specific UI settings that you must have in order for the bots to work. I'm talking book marks, their names, where they point to, window placement, all sorts of crazy things. If a non-bot was using these specific UI settings and their names, it would be one hell of a coincidence.

All it would take for CCP to crack down on bots would be a simple 4 step process:
1.) Find bot software.
2.) Buy it.
3.) Get the UI settings required by the bot in order to work.
4.) Make a DB query.

You could probably get a large number of bot users by simply looking at the bookmarks set by players.
Lors Dornick
Kallisti Industries
#115 - 2012-02-29 18:55:15 UTC
Weaselior wrote:
EVE does fingerprint your computer you idiots

though not background code unless they're planting spyware in which case we have a problem


Actually, I doubt it.

Any form of foul play by CCP would be detected in minutes by paranoid info sec or comp sci nerds (and there's a lot of us playing EvE).

Not to mention the dudes that actually try to make money by selling botting software.

And anyone with a wiff of experience with this kind of issues knows that fingerprinting doesn't solve anything since you can't ever trust the client.

Hell, you can't even tell if the client is connected directly to the server (MITM protection doesn't work if the MITM has full access to the client and it's memory space).

So CCP asks us nicely for memorydumps and such of the the EvE process while allowing us to say no because that's the right and most efficient way to do it.

Bot detection is based on reports and on analysing behavioural data on the server.

CCP Greyscale: As to starbases, we agree it's pretty terrible, but we don't want to delay the entire release just for this one factor.
Krixtal Icefluxor
INLAND EMPIRE Galactic
#116 - 2012-02-29 19:25:23 UTC  |  Edited by: Krixtal Icefluxor
This. from 9/23/2011

http://www.evenews24.com/2011/09/23/rise-of-the-machines-the-human-face-of-botting/

Although it is couched in 'we hate botting' scenario, it's STILL giving step by step advice on 'How To'....and dropped online by Riverini himself.

And an earlier call for those to publish their expertise: http://www.evenews24.com/2011/09/15/wanted-botting-advisors-eve-news24-to-evangelize-the-good-news-of-quick-isk/

Jester's take on the whole matter back then: http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2011/09/normalizing-unthinkable.html

And indeed the major article with most of the real info is, of course, gone.

"He has mounted his hind-legs, and blown crass vapidities through the bowel of his neck."  - Ambrose Bierce on Oscar Wilde's Lecture in San Francisco 1882
Micheal Dietrich
Kings Gambit Black
#117 - 2012-02-29 19:34:37 UTC  |  Edited by: Micheal Dietrich
Vaerah Vahrokha wrote:
Micheal Dietrich wrote:

I'm going to play the devils advocate to your advocate.

For starters, permaban =/= all hope is lost. If you can prove without a doubt that it was some background code similar to that of a botting script (though what it could be is beyond me) then you can petition it and get your account back.



How would you prove "without doubt" that you did not cheat? What tools does CCP provide to do so? What tools do you have? None. It's your defaced word against an international corporation.



My tools are an email account and a phone. All you have to do is inform the company what you were running at the time you saw the ban message and they can test against those items to see if any trigger. If they can recreate what they were seeing from you with the programs that you describe, then you have done a pretty good job of clearing your name. Common 3rd party programs that I've effect people the most is Fraps and Teamspeak. Gaming keyboards, mice, and nostromo's don't seem to be as much of an issue even though they provide the ability to macro.

Out of Pod is getting In the Pod - Join in game channel **IG OOPE **
Ajita al Tchar
Doomheim
#118 - 2012-02-29 19:43:25 UTC
CCP Sreegs, the silent hero working to keep the bots out, work that by its nature can't be publicized every step of the way, and that takes time to show results (not instant "report bot = ban"). Well done.
arcca jeth
Dark Alliance
#119 - 2012-02-29 19:56:54 UTC
I Love Boobies wrote:
Who needs Hulkageddon when CCP themselves can cause more tears in one massive wave. Twisted


you call those flapjacks boobies?! you are in dire need of a re-customization appointment
You're Mum
The New Eden Yacht Club
The New Eden Yacht Club.
#120 - 2012-02-29 19:58:57 UTC
would also be intresting to see how many of those bots that were banned were as a result of people pushing the report a bot butan.

not that i think we should be policing a game that we pay money to play when CCP must have better ways of working out who is a bot and sorting it out themselves.... i still dont think this is anything more than PR for them to be able to stand up at fanfest and say "arn't we great!"

Im hoping that i will be proven wrong... but it happened last year.

CCP’s song: 99 little bugs in the code, 99 little bugs, you take one down patch it around, 127 little bugs in the code