EVE General Discussion

Hey DJ,

This is stupid. The only time another player should see if the account has been banned is when buying it. Then they should be able to know if it has bans on record. This will turn into Steam where a crack your friend downloads for a game gets you a VAC Ban Star and every time you play well; you're cheating.

EDIT: Also, most CEOs and FCs of major corps would be tagged.

Haven't read the whole thread, so please forgive me if this has been stated before.

I would like to see botters named and the locations they were working id'd so that *I* as a player know where and what is going on.

When you ban botters are they mostly hi-sec? Jita Traders? Null-sec ratting/mining bots? Or lvl 4 mission runner bots?

Also - if they aren't in NPC corps - what kind of corps are they in? Small renter corps? One man Hi-sec corps? Or Null-Sec alliances?

Who tolerates botters w/in?


For NPC alts I could care less..... maybe it makes no difference, but, as with everything else in Eve, knowledge/information is power.

Assuming CCP is actually going with a "beyond a reasonable doubt" equivalent for standard of proof that someone is botting, this is how I feel it should occur:

1st strike - nothing public. This gives them a chance to reform without consequences.

2nd strike - For the first three months, the account gets an "active" scarlet letter in public on all characters in existence at the time of the offense. This serves the purpose of giving the community the chance to ostracize the offender for the crime he has committed against the community. If the player starts a new character on that account, it does not have a publicly displayed scarlet letter. Or, the cheater can simply go inactive for 3 months. All characters with "active" scarlet letters cannot be transferred to another account.

After 3 months, the scarlet letter is no longer publicly visible.

Additionally, for 12 months after the offense, the account gets a "passive" scarlet letter. It covers all characters (new, old, transferred, purchased, etc.) on that account. It is visible to the CEO/Recruiting Director when the player applies to a corporation. Now, when a corp does its normal security background check on a new applicant, one of the things they can look for is whether the character applying received a massive influx of ISK/goods/plex from a "scarlet letter" account. This helps corps that want to maintain a good reputation stay clean. The player can still recover from his cheating, but doesn't have to suffer public ridicule, death, and humiliation the entire time.

For one year after the second offense, any potential purchaser of a character is informed prior to purchase that the character was previously caught botting.

3rd strike - permanent ban

I wish to raise just one point-- please either flag someone or don't flag them, don't flag them for a year. I am currently in a NPC corp, and might choose to stay for a while. I would rather not have a recruiter wonder if I spent a year in a NPC corp due to flagging.

If I saw a "botter mark" I'd make a special attempt to gank them, over and over and over again. I say do it

I would keep ganking them until I see that the player is finally at the controls. Knowing myself, I would give that player a chance to redeem himself as I police him over time. Kind of like a probation officer looking after a convict. Only, in Eve, the probation system would actually work compared to what we Americans have in real life (which is crappy).

If you are 20 and have sex with your 19 yo girlfriend in the wrong state, you get flagged as a sex offender for the rest of your life. As a result, despite the fact that you have been married to your girlfriend for 20 years, at age 40 you are going to have trouble getting jobs (and possibly have your house torched or car keyed) because you parked in the wrong lover's lane 20 years ago and have your name on the same register as people who kidnap children and use them in snuff porn movies.

Scarlet Letters do not work in real life. The desire for vengeance that drives the small-minded masses to lust after a 'name and shame' scheme is exactly the same motivation that drives lynch mobs.

Victor Hugo wrote about the hatred expressed by "normal" people towards carriers of "letters of release" given to ex-convicts. Jean Val Jean (admittedly a fictional character) could not even get paid the same wage for doing the same work, because he had the "yellow passport" which as an ex-convict he was required to show to any prospective employer.

The only outcome of scarlet letters is vilification and persecution. Scarlet letters will not help reform people who made unwise decisions.

Even in this thread there are people fawning over the possibility of having a visible sign that this target is someone to blame for the rent being too damned high. "Botters are to blame for my being broke" - no, you are broke because you don't know how to make more ISK than you spend, or spend less ISK than you earn. "Botters cause inflation" - no, high demand causes inflation, high supply of ISK can lead to inflation, low level of supply causes inflation: people who run incursions are just as guilty as the botter ratting in a tracking titan. Mining bots cause deflation. Ratting bots raise ISK supply (which can lead to inflation if their demand rises).

Stop looking for other people to blame for your problems. If you want to gank miners, just gank miners. Don't go looking for external validation of your ganking. You just go out and gank because that's what you enjoy doing. The justification for your ganking should be in terms of "removing competition", not "serving justice to those who deserve it".

Even more amusing is the number of people claiming that their enemy engages in botting while their own alliance doesn't. That's almost enough reason for me to want to support Scarlet Letters for anyone caught botting who is in a null sec sov-holding alliance. Won't that be an eye-opener when you log in one day to find your alliance has more convicted bot-users than your sworn enemy? Whose alliance was that big blue slice of the botting pie? Probably yours.

Sometimes the facts get in the way of prejudice, you know. You are better off believing that the enemy are the ones using vile techniques, rather than knowing that your side does it more. The Mittani claims that null sec war is fuelled by xenophobia and cultural hatred. In the real world, you extinguish such fear and hatred by getting people to learn more about each other. Using Scarlet Letters would achieve the same thing: thus Scarlet Letters would disarm the xenophobia and cultural hatred and lead to less conflict in null sec, and that is a bad thing.

Why not just gank them regardless of having a bother mark or not? Do you seek external justification for your actions? Why can't you be more internally motivated (i.e.: grow some balls)?

Ganking someone because they got caught botting doesn't seem to be a nice way to encourage the ex-botter to keep playing the game. I would be more inclined to help them find ways to control their spending or make more ISK using legitimate (if not honest) means.

Its obvious that youre someone who doesnt fully understand the mechanics of how botters operate, so I'll try to explain it in a way you understand through an example: Someone goes onto character bazaar, find lowest possible SP tengu pilot with good ratting skills and nothing else, buys it for a few billion isk. Sets up the new character on a seperate account, runs it for a few weeks. They take the isk earned, use it to buy assets then transfer assets to their main. Bot character gets caught a week or 2 later and isk is removed from their wallet. The botter still has all the ill-gotten gains and made back the isk used to buy the character within a day or two after getting it. The character that is caught, sitting there with a -15 billion isk balance, is biomassed. Rinse and repeat.

Why do people bot? To gain assets that they otherwise couldn't afford. How do you remove the incentive to bot? Remove, or severely lessen, the chance of gaining said assets. Simply going after isk in the wallet is insufficient.

I'll try to respond to your post, but just to keep this thread a bit cleaner, I'm not going to quote everything that you said

1) "pretty much known" is fancy forum speak for "I'm guessing this is how they do it, but I really don't know". You and me both know it. Neither of us are security experts, and honestly, despite the criticism, there's probably only a handful of people in Eve with the ability and experiance to do Screegs job, most are just forum warriors.

2) I don't think or expect that CCP would make a public apology if they did make a mistake. This is something I'd like to hear more about from Screegs. Have you guys ever found you've made a mistake? Have you been corrected by that player and/or his petition? What is done in the case that you do find yourselves in error?

On second thought I have heard of someone petitioning a macro ban and getting it reversed with an appology from the GM. https://sites.google.com/site/khromtor/oldrigs Now, there may have been some trouble involved in getting it reversed. I'll be honest and admit that after getting home at 10pm I don't feel like re-reading the entire page, but the first section contains the part I'm referencing.

3) You're correct about the time, my mistake. However, the amount of money lost has nothing to do with the "Scarlet letter" as those people lost the same amount regardless of the verdict here, same with the POS. As I've said before, they can be petitioned, and the above goes to show that CCP does admit when they make a mistake and proof can be offered (although I don't know if anything was, or even needed to be, refunded in that case).

4) You could argue the same (slandering enemies) about any player run service. Yet they still all exist because they've built a trustworthy subscriber base and haven't violated that trust. If they wanted to Eve-Kill could add a few extra capital ship losses to the IRC killboard, but they don't. Eve Boards could probably find a way to do bad things with the API's they've been entrusted with, but they don't. Eve News 24 could run articles about how terrible IRC is, but they... oh wait j/k You get the point. Saying that Eve players could do evil things with data that's given to them is a given, we're Eve players. Yet someone will build a trustworthy subscriber base by reporting only bots with some kind of citation or verification.

If a 100 page threadnought gets started about botting it won't be the first. The difference I see here is that players can take that data, go into this system, and verify the results for themselves. Then that alliance, if they truely are bot free, can take action themselves by kicking all the botters they can find. Or, if they were just trying to put on a good face, but don't truely care, the rest of eve can come in and evict them. Again, it's placing the power in the hands of the players, which I think is a good thing.