EVE General Discussion

Just disclose interesting stuff around the people caught, not names, e.g. their corp size, account/character age, etc.

Accepting that I'm in danger of mixing metaphors, making former criminals unemployable by marking them for life has historically never been successful from curing them of their criminal behaviour - it instead encourages it as you remove legitimate sources of income. I don't see how making someone walk around with a metaphorical yellow star on their chest is going to achieve your primary goal here of reducing botting.

I would be against a similar action being taken against those people who have had RMT-purchased ISK taken away. It a) encourages further purchases as it becomes harder to make money legitimately, and b) allows a complete and utter bastard to ruin someone's account for minimal investment by buying ISK from the dodgiest possible website, and having it sent to their account.

I think the current policy has few deterrents for first time offenders. As it stands now, everyone can just try a bot and see if he gets caught. If so: no biggie, just a slap on the wrist. I do think a first-time offender should be given a second chance. But I disagree with giving them a third chance as well if they are caught again.

The fact that the graph from Fanfest shows the majority of botters are caught in Caldari space suggests that most botters caught are first-offenders just trying it out (and not in a very smart way in the most crowded region in the game) which supports the 'let's see if I get caught' attitude).

Peer pressure could be one of the most powerful tools to prevent people from trying out botting, knowing that a 'Scarlet Letter' could cost them their ingame friends and corpmates. A problem with this though is that I doubt many players bot with their main, so in order for it to be any effective it would have to be applied to all characters to be in known possession of that player.

Personally I don't like the idea of mixing out-of-game problems with in-game gameplay. But botting is proving to be such a resistent problem to tackle it may be deemed necessary. But it also means the process has to be extra careful to prevent false positives (and I know these happen), because the damage caused by this can be irreversible.

I am getting 3 guys (not botting) banned for exploiting CONCORD, will they also have purple letters?

They are cheating too.





No, if they warp to 10 macks they are doing it in disco ships which will kill all 10 anyway

Also I see a nice way to exploit it.

1) Get banned for any reason.

2) Go boast how you got banned because you exploited CONCORD | WEB used as scrambler etc. because you were PRO PvPer and whatever.

I bet that there are plenty of players that would love nothing more than to hunt down botters, in an effort to serial-pound their illegally AI controlled passive income generators into flying chunks of internet space dust(514) particles

Outside of the personal fullfillment that some enjoy as a player in policing these serial offenders, it stands to reason that this may potentially be afflicting our current market in a big bad way and we need to be aware of the consequenses.

Without a scarlet letter, you'll simply create a situation where players may report botters, but due to lack of transparency - it may be discouraging to see the botting continue. It creates a lack of trust in TPTB to properly handle the issue.

If the scarlet letters were made public, the players could start policing offenders more violently and consistently thus removing the incentive to become a bot.

Just as our corp history sticks to us (and is an element of the sandbox), similarly there is no reason that we can't have scarlet letters stick. It gives recruiters the option to at least say "aye" or "nay" to a former botter, even though the person behind the bot may have changed their ways.

Without it, we won't be able to respond negativly to it.

How many of our corps are unintentionally hosting botters?

If information is to be shown to CEOs on application, could it please take into account violations from all related accounts?

Anything that would help mitigate damage to third party services from any EULA violations on the part of their potential employees would be something I'd welcome.

Otherwise, have you considered branding avatar foreheads with "AI"? :)

Nevermind about deterring botters, how about rewarding those people that DO report botters!

A Public list probably wont do anything to deter said player from botting again, but it will show to people "yes - we banned this bot - thank you - please keep reporting"

The other message it sends out is..

"Yes, your corp, your space, that person, group of people you never suspected - Where infact botters! thats why they arnt about anymore and thats why you should be more vigilant in the future"

If such a list existed, even if it did nothing else at all but give innocent, law-abiding players a warm fuzzy feeling then CCP are duty bound to make it happen.

As many have pointed out the corp ceo flagging system seems pretty neat, and i agree that s scarlet naming wouldn't really help convert first time offenders.

Where naming and shaming might work though is for repeat offenders (those on their second strike); the corp flagging on the first would allow ceo's to decide if they were going to give this person a second chance, offending a second time lets everyone know your probably not going to learn.

Also as for NPC corpr's i think once you reach a second strike you should be booted from the npc corp into a "botter corp" with a much higher tax for a period of time (6 months+). Although that might just be my vigilante justice side talking ^^

Given the within-account recidivism rate is 8.5%, is this even necessary, except to placate the torches-and-pitchforks-wielding Daily Mail reading crowd?

(Before anyone accuses me of protesting too much, I've never botted)