EVE Information Portal

I understand as well as anybody that it's the weekend and a certain amount of alcohol must be consumed in the next two days.

First of all, I'd like to applaud CCP Sreegs and CCP for banning bots. The last few months have been somewhat depressing as the bots running rampant (despite petitions, gankings, whatever) seemed unhindered. The "War against bots" thread that was very active right after fanfest had been dead and buried for the better part of a year. It truely seemed that CCP did not care. This is very good news and a step in the right direction.



Except for calling Eve a videogame (it's a computer game) I agree with your paragraph there completely. Please do not add captcha to the mining process (or anything else that a bot would be created to circumvent and make it even more of a pain in the ass to legit players)

Now about the 3% number. C'mon man. Instead of saying "3% of the botters did not change their behavior and had to be permabanned", it would have been much more accurate to say "3% of the botters were too stupid to not sell character, start new account, buy new character and continue on botting." The whole idea of botters being "reformed" by a ban and not changing their ways is rediculous. It might fly with the board of directors when describing how you didn't have to turn off 10,000 paying accounts, but to the average player in eve it's quite insulting. Cheaters are gonna cheat. Penalizing players for a maximum of 1/2 month subscription time for earning 100's of billions of ISK via illegal botting is obviously not a deterrent.

Now that you have implemented the "character freeze" for offending accounts, this should help things. But really it's just upping the penalty to 3 billion (or perhaps more for a ratting character) that the botter would not get back by cashing in his old character on the Bazaar. If this is going to continue to be a once-a-year thing (see you next Fanfest!) then the problem will continue as the botters will make that 3b back soon enough and be back out there doing evil.

I'll be optimistic that the whole Incarna/reorg/whatever was the reason for the lack of progress in this matter of the last year and that from now on things will be better. As a legit player who puts a lot into this game, I appreciate my efforts not being mitigated by cheating botters. Keep up the good fight!

Yeah I got what I needed out of those replies. I was just curious how we were communicating this because you guys seemed to know and I didn't and it saved me a trip downstairs. :)

I sleeped 1 day over this - and I can tell you, I am still raging about what our PR-blue cop Darius Johnson tells us here.

You confess between the lines, you did nothing several months at least vs bots and cheaters. You do not confiscate or track their ill-gained ISK. All you do, is giving them a 14day ban and hope, they now really, really find their rightous way to be no more cheaters. This is not, how power works!

Acknoledged you did some work and fu_cked u_p - then the result is overall still f_uck u_p and not minus x minus = plus how you want to sell it to us.

I have a question for you:

How many days you think a botter with a tengu needs to break even, if he calcs in, that you ban him and he is losing the account with the tengu+char for it?

All you did, you catched some small fish and bragg about it.

I told you, from my experience many of them had the bots for months ,becuase you did nothing against them. Even if they get banned, it is still a huge profit for them.

agreed.

It is not like the 0.0 people do not know, who is bot-friendly and who not. CCP, Darius and also other CCP-moderated forums just prefer not to talk about these unpleasant people, often stop discussions about it, because it could be bad for their reputation.

This way they only protect the botters. make the problem worse, make ppl like me, who see them every day, at least angry, many other honest players just leave to find a better game.

The numbers I mentioned were not taken from thin air. You can get a perfectly able mining character for 3 billion on the Bazaar pretty much any day of the week. 14 days is about 1/2 of a month. Forgive me if I can't accept that a botter making billions is going to be set straight by such a petty fine when it was so easy to get started again (perhaps out the money for buying a different bot program). (if you want to say my "97% of botters did this" was taken out of thin air.. okay )



It's not the communication, it's the rampant botting that has plagued the game for the last year visible by anyone who's playing the game. Actions not words.

Thanks for taking the time to respond personally to our concerns, even if some of us are a bit antagonistic.

CCP Sreegs and the rest of the team killing bots,

I just wanted to say once again, thank you. I am especially excited because a friend of mine who helped get me into this game quit five years ago due to his frustration with bots. All he really liked to do was mine and build ships and such. He was more about the whole process of building with the very stuff you mined. Anyways, he quit because the botters made it impossible to compete. I showed him your blog and pointed out some dotlan graphs and such and now, he said he is going to reactivate his account. He wants to dust off his pick ax and get busy building ships.

Now granted the moment he sits still in a belt I plan on suicide ganking his Hulk for epic lulz , but the point is, your work is causing players to return to the game.

Keep up the good work!

Oh really? Isn't it more like a pc game, soon a console game, a number of websites like evegate, an XML API and maybe a JavaScript API (more a client interface really)? Because if we take that statement literally, everyone interfacing his evemon, eft or pyfa with the API uses an interface to the server that is not allowed.

So this thread has 10+ pages already. I'm really lazy today so could someone make combined "top 10 tears" quote.

We're very well aware of the various websites out there people may use to illegally purchase product. There's a bit more to it than that but it's really kind of off topic. I'd be happy to have a discussion about RMT at the appropriate time. Grab me if you're heading to fanfest even. :)