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What is the time frame these bans were done? Is this a running tally since you took this job? What are those dates? I believe it would be better representation of the impact of what your doing by seeing these stats monthly instead of over a longer period of time.

Botter tears, best tears!

Since the other peeps got a reply, could I pretty please get an answer to my previous post about loans and 3rd party collateral? It's not like I am the only one in game handling large amounts of third party items and ISK and we don't have any way to know about their legitimacy.

Wow, that is some good information right there. Shows you how little everyone knew about both the scale and the
effect of these bots. We love information! :-)

Just want to stress again my hopes that they won't be returning in 14 days and that your numbers stay true.

Yours
Lady Godwynn

Thank you for your reply.
I did not mean about the risk of losing ISK. I meant about the risk of being banned myself just because someone cheated / RMT in the "chain" that ends with me holding collateral.

Also, I read that in other MMOs they flag players handling large amounts of ISK and I think the 100B I would get, could make me blacklisted somewhere.

Real world organizations put people in jail.

Here, they might find the super-nuker algorythm to find and kill all the bots of a certain maker. Of course if they publish they found 2773 bots and that "brand" bot makers know they sold 2800 bots, they will be warned it's THEIR bot in particular to have been hosed for good. And thus they will go change it and make CCP's work harder.

It seemed pretty clear to me.

We already know that accounts with large amounts of ISK are carefully monitored for RMT activity. No need to deny or confirm, its logical and obvious.

But some players legitimately posses large quantity of ISK and large quantity of ISK legitimately 'pass through' their account. Often this is how such players gain incredibly large amounts of ISK, because they have whats known as a very high "Money velocity"

Since CCP provides no function of facility for players to check, for certain, that the money they are handling is legal in the first place then in almost all cases illegal money can be passed through several innocent players.

Its not like we can put the currency under a scanner and check it for fraud, its not like you provide a telephone number for us to call you and ask "hey is this ISK Legit?"

Logically, it would be unfair to simply ban an account that happens to have either handled or is handling illegitimately obtained currency.

You are correct that it is logical to assume that in a scenario where there are high volumes of illicit isk changing hands some of this isk could be funneled through legitimate means. If there exists a scenario where you're involved in one of these transactions and you're somehow impacted then you'd have to discuss it with us at that time. As I said I'm not going to make blanket statements based on potential future scenarios and everything will be dealt with on a case by case basis.

I can't really think of an example that fits what's being described as a potential problem today. When we take action we will do our best to ensure that innocents aren't impacted but I won't make promises and I don't see some magical tool that's going to give you the knowledge of whether the isk you're using is dirty or not ever existing.

EVE is a social game. Much like in the real world you make decisions about who you will do business with and there's an entire community of people out there who will give you their opinions about those people. Sometimes they're right and sometimes they're wrong and you get had, but what seems to be being asked for here is really not something I can ever see occurring as things stand today.

This is also a prime example of me not being able to say "There are x number of market botters in EVE and we caught x" but what I can do is say "We banned 10 and players are reporting a noticeable impact on the market". The same can be said for other figures. For instance, as I've said, when we action on botters overall CPU per user usage on the cluster drops.

There's indicators of things being effective even when you don't know the entire scope of the problem. You make educated guesses and hammer things you know to be bad and measure the results. I don't think the same measurement would work for instance with ratting bots because everyone who cloaks when you jump into a system ever is a bot, so player feelings aren't necessarily the greatest indicator there. What we can do though is show a sharp decline in things like mission payouts and bounties as a total picture of the payout pie in relation to average amounts of time spent playing, etc. and that's kind of the direction we need to head.

I concur with some of the sentiments expressed that overall players have a particular attitude and we do have to come up with ways to show that there's some effective work being done. That's actually part of the challenge and it's not always the easiest because it's often based on feelings or guessing the intuitions of others.

Might there be a way to crossreference the ten banned market bot accounts with their past market activity to determine for certain that they were indeed responsible of such a noticeable effect on the markets or if we are coincidentally experiencing a time of less vicious competition? It seems hard to swallow that ten bots were doing so much and this way we could know for sure one way or the other. If they were responsible their owners must be sitting on a massive pile of ISK and assets.