Hello fellow readers,
today we will start a new series, that will evolve solely around RMT (Real Money Trade) in Eve Online. I believe for all of us its very interesting topic, that if being under rug swept like till now, could potentially destroy the game experience for many of us. Well bring you interview with the main RMT guy in eve and well have some nice exposures on accounts and characters who bought isk.
The summer of 10 an expose on RMT
my name is Manfred Sideous and I had been wanting to learn more about the RMT underworld. While in charge of -A- I had heard things and seen things and been told many things. However I never understood how all the pieces fit together. How the process works how the fear of being banned isn’t a deterrence. I will forewarn people alot of what I will write here is speculation. However the speculation is based off of conversations and alot of digging around. First before I go into the summer of 10 and how events that happened in Eve were based off RMT let me first show you RMT the hows & whys.
How
Most of us have all encountered our share of macro’s in Eve. They are so common now that regular players have started using them for passive income. CCP has only made trivial attempts at curbing RMT or dealing with bots. Unholy Rage CCP’s much publicized campaign www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=687 was supposed to be the curbstomping of RMT’rs. But was it? The most simple answer is NO they didn’t even scratch the surface.
There are programs players can purchase that will happily shoot NPC’s for you all day long. Examples of such are: www.reboot.gr. As advertised this program will earn the user up to 40 million ISK per hour. All you need is a ship a quiet system and the ISK rolls in.
As you all know players can purchase 60 day game time cards for cash from CCP or other merchants such as Shattered Crystal www.shatteredcrystal.com/code.php/eve_online. As you can see they cost about $35.00 USD. Players can also sell purchased GTC’s on Eve Online forums for 600-800 million isk. www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1424015
That comes out to roughly $1.00 USD per 20mil ISK. The other option for players looking to get there monies worth is to buy via RMT sites like this one for example: www.playerassist.com/eve/ . As you can see you can purchase 1 billion isk @ $ 31.00 USD which comes out to about 32 mil ISK per $1.00 USD. A substantial increase of over 20-40% versus using the CCP approved method of purchasing ISK.
So a average botter can make $ 2.00 USD per hour. Nothing exciting to most people as that isn’t enough money to be worth the effort unless $2.00 USD were worth the equivalent of $60.00 Rubles in your country. What are rubles worth and what will they buy? www.sv-agency.udm.ru/sv/prices.htm . Not bad for letting your computer play the game for you for a single hour you just bought a pack of smokes or a loaf of bread. What if it played for you for 12 hours a day everyday all month. 21,600 Rubles. Thats about 700 bucks a month in USD. The average russian family lives off a income of 600-700 USD or 19K to 21K Rubles.
So how does the average botter sell his ISK. You would think it would be complicated and shady looking from the outside. The truth though is its a completely pain free and easy process. Sites such as: www.mogs.com/players/ simply allow players to create a sellers account. Once a account is created players deposit ISK by various means which is tracked and verified by API. The player then receives his money via paypal or other medium.
Deposit by Various Means?
There are several ways to funnel ISK around Eve. My personal favorite is the contract system. Using characters to spy on other alliances over the years has taught me how to move isk on and off of spy toons without leaving a trace. All over Eve there are contracts made for exorbitant amounts for virtually nothing. A item exchange for a noobship for a billion ISK. A market order for a module or ship greatly overmarked. To the naked eye and too CCP these simply look like a scam and a good portion are good ole ~honest~ scammers. However though moving isk in these manners provides a veil of protection for seller and buyer. If ever asked the buyer is a scammer and of course the seller is the poor sap that was scammed.
So what happens to the ISK once sites purchase it?
After being funneled into collector toons ( noob toons that are destroyed after a period of time). It is then funneled again into a holding corporation wallet via contract system or other means. These corporations generally have 1 person in the corp most times the “CEO”. The CEO never personally engages in any isk transfers of any type. When a buyer places a order for isk a Feeder toon is created. The Feeder toon applies to the holding corp and the CEO approves the app giving the toon roles to the corp wallet. The Feeder withdraws the buyers order amount and then a trade is made. Immediately roles are jerked and after 24 hours the Feeder is kicked and then subsequently destroyed. If CCP ever ask guess what ” The Holding corp was robbed and the offender was kicked immediately”. Whoa-la there is your RMT system in a nutshell.
Clean-up Paragraph
Now I know I made some generalizations mentioning Russians. Most russian players are people just like most of us playing a MMO for fun. There are other groups with large RMT sections most notably Serbians. Now RMT isn’t limited to botting , however botting is a easy way for a individual to get into RMT. Other common methods are plexing market manipulation etc etc leading up to the grand daddy of them all Space Empires.
Space Empires
Everyone has heard these rumors for years now. Accusations and rumors have flown all over with claims that XXXX alliance or YYYYY alliance is a RMT alliance. These are partially false and partially true. Usually the case is most of the players in alliances are legit and have nothing to do with RMT. Usually the case is its a select few at the top collecting tax or income or controlling markets that are the RMT’rs. Its amazing the lengths they go to to hide there activities.
Most notable and most exposed was Sir Lordex. The aluminum Tycoons son. He was part of Red Overlord but before you pass judgement most people in Red Overlord never understood what was happening or even aware. Lordex went so far as to employ the sevices of Nync. Employee “whatcha talkin bout willis”? In order to have a quiet and secure empire in which to farm from Red Overlord had to appear “Scary”. Nync’s sole purpose was to accomplish this image. He was paid a salary to gallivant around Eve “Nyncing” people and being a meanass scary Russian. This he did with brilliance only one problem though. Loose lips sinks ships and as you all know the GIA broke the story of Lordex’s operation. Lordex was pretty sloppy along the way and apparently had made mistakes and CCP caught him and banned him. Only that doesn’t stop someone with a successful business. So they caught him and banned him each time he tried to setup shop until the rich kid finally had his fill and left eve in disgust.
Poor Nync now without a paycheck what to do he pondered. Then as a desperate act he tried to stage a Coup in ROL and grab the alliance wallet and control over the alliance. Unfortunately he was stopped and stripped of roles and removed. That as you can remember was early summer late spring of 2010. So Nync liking his ” Money for nothing and Rubles for free” decided to move over to White Noise with Psychooo another russian guy who in the past is rumored to have done some nefarious things IRL. Together they would build a new empire. Other things were happening though in Eve. Old grievances were settled and Red Alliance put themselves back together. Suddenly Nync Uax and Mactep were all on good speaking terms again.
First though White Noise needed a stable area in which to build there empire. Turns out Uax and Mactep didn’t like having Atlas next door because they were always a threat to muck up the drone empires which are as profitable as regular empires but harder to run and maintain. Things like pesky wars really can gum up the works and slow production.
So a offer was made to Atlas I actually hosted the meeting. Nync and Psychoo asked Bobby Atlas to give up Insmother and Wicked Creek. For this there would be no war and White Noise would become a ally. The deal breaker however was that Red Alliance got a region. Now there is nothing more in Eve Bobby Atlas hates other than Red Alliance. Bobby went apeshit crazy on teamspeak and started screaming ” Fuck them motherfuckers Im not giving them shit . Ill quit my job and live off welfare and goverment cheese and stomp there ass in the ground im not giving them shit”. At this point my jaw was on the ground knowing that Bobby had just signed us up for a war with A newly united RMT coalition. Fuck me ” welp bobby I gave you my word -A- and Atlas will stick together” I said. The next day I made a CAOD announcement with a Youtube video link to rightsaidfred ” your my mate”.
Interview with Bobby Atlas can be found on our site – www.evenews24.com/2010/12/02/the-enigmatic-mystique-of-bobby-atlas/
Things were going well in the defense of Atlas space until the Legion was hired tipping the balance. Fast forward a few months and the new empire is created. The RMT coalition is strong and fighting off the NC as best as possible with the Legion still employed.
♥ Manny
Sources
www.xe.com/ucc/convert.cgi?Amount=170.&From=EUR&To=USD&image.x=41&image.y=18&image=Submit
www.mogs.com/eve-isk/Tranquility
www.sv-agency.udm.ru/sv/prices.htm
Disclaimer* There are lots of details I still don’t have and most likely nobody will ever have unless someday one of the big players decides to write a memoir of there time in eve. The idea of this thread/article had been swimming around in my head for a long time. It was finally just watching the lengths the people would go to protect/hide there empire and just how naive most people are about it. Ultimately my brain just needed to spit this out and it makes for pretty good conversation even though I fully admit that a good portion of it is based off of bits and pieces ive collected with some speculation and deductive reasoning thrown in to reach conclusions.
post the stuff horus said on kugutsumen
pretty interesting read
Very glad someone is willing to take the time to start discussing a very complex subject. I think, for me atleast, it will be much more for interest’s sake rather than “Rawr, let’s take action! CCP fix!”
Awesome read, <3 Manny
Horus on page 8 – that’s what broke the story wide open.
evebattles.com/newspost/the-bot-scandal
check that out
Page not found – 404 Error
I … am perplexed. I never actually imagined that things are so …. rotten, and that there are gold-farmers (in essence, that’s what they are, only a bit more …. advanced) that took the gold-farming business so far …. amazing.
I’m looking forward for Part 2 ….. if the Russian mob won’t “fix ya’ up”.
a note for all who read, i not say i am the the biggest rmt. probably there is people who do even more than me. i am simply the only one that is talking about this “shadow things”
I usually say “Don’t these people have a day job”, but for these people it IS their day job : /
actually its pretty easy to leave macros running while at an actual day job.
There are such jobs where you can easily do both botting (sic) and your official job simultaneously.
All this Horus guy said is:
“There is a new bot and it’s awesome. It costs just a few bucks a month but believe me, you’ll make much more. I bought a flat using it. Every alliance does this so go and buy it.”
Of course there are bots but don’t forget that selling those bots is a buisness also. And all of this looks like advertisment campaign to me.
except that bot is not mine, i not developed it..
i am only a “customer”
well let’s here the NC RMT part and the IT RMT part.. Funny how its JUST the ruskies that are the assholes of eve. Right i dont believe this shit for a minute.. and i noted recently most anything on evenew24 thats anti – NC … well count on your comments being deleted. I call Bullshit !
If we cant beat you in a war, we will try and have CCP dismantle you from within. Go Manny ! BTW where the hell did oyu get the numbers for the graphs?
fuck russian federation we should make eve version of nato and fuck em up
Tired of losing?
Pick an easier game to play! (I hear STO has a difficulty slider.)
Am I the only one who caught the fact that it’s December, not November?
Why does the graphic on the main page say “Nov 3, Nov 4, Nov 5″
I told you, camp their macro farms already! >:(
I dougbt that Author’s competency in RMT is deep enough to write the article like that.
Only the half of the above information concerned RMT mechanics and the information provided is very limited to very known and not effective mechanics.
Another half of the article is more belongs to “reveal and expose” Nync, Lordex, PsixoZZ and even almost retired Mactep.
By the way, the information provided with no “proof of concept”. I believe the Author “has heard something somewhere”, but he does not know what happens behind the scene. Means he is simply “guessing” while trying to write the article.
He even miss-concept the known “got nynced” thing
“Got nynced”, as all EVE knows, means you’ve got your JF successfully dropped on a bridge or cyno. Or you’ve got you capital fleet dropped and destroyed while jumping to kill
“defenceless” POS. Exuse me, if the Author has no idea about that simple thing, how I can trust he knows anything real about RMT?
Well, let’s see another angle. Does author said anything real about RMT? Couple “dead” links to known external “dead” programs and couple examples of the methods to defraud the noobs in Jita.
According the author all the “RMT makers” are Serbians and Russians (BTW, where are my favorite Chinese and North Koreans??).
Oh, sure, the RMT never happens in AAA (never been before), in Nothern, Eastern or Western alliances.
The only valid statement of this article is that CCP has limited valued capability to geal against RMT.
I did not expect that very low quality information to be published on evenews24. Is evenews24 moving to tabloid type yellow press way?
Im sensing a nice damage control
At least he posted some arguments. And your facts on kugu were pretty arguable.
In the kugu thread you’ve pretty much been shown to be full of shit. No proof, inconsistencies in argumentation, with wrong, misconstrued, or completely fabricated “facts”.
Anyone interested can read here: www.kugutsumen.com/showthread.php?7212-The-summer-of-10-an-expose-on-RMT
Trying to cover something up, Manny? Trying too hard, I must say.
Well writin Lord Aron…. you just showed me there is at least one person in eve that has an IQ. And your comment was a brief wind of excellance not often seen here in evenews24.
Beyond reading the profane and the BS on here. Kudos to you!
Submit more, well writin and thought out material like this.
Where I can download a macrobot? Link plz! I need some money for school lunches!
Anyone notice in the title “300 billions isk”? Its 300 billion isk, not billions.
Yay, more Kugu content that I read ages ago. I might as well cancel my Eve24 subscription and go hang out over there.
you do realize almost all of evenews has always been kugu in a more attractive website (but not necessarily better written… maybe even worse). i just come here because it looks nicer, and i like to push the thumbs up or thumbs down buttons. mostly the buttons.
For Captain Obvious you sure missed the point. Seeing that this is a 3 part article. It was relevant to post the first part as to give context to the overall story. But please continue with your astute observations.
Seems to me most guys commenting here are rmtraders themselves, damagecontrolling their ownstuff now.
Long ago, when I was settled in scalding pass, the stories of ally roamers chasing bots in the dronelands never got old. Sometimes they were contacted by a whiney bot owner stating “please please dont kill my stuff, I need this to do to feed my family, I have three hungry kids!” and so on.
So no single 0.0- pilot can state things like “I never became aware of botting or rmt in any form” without making a complete assclown of himself.
Even in highsec two or three jumps from Jita is bot mining a daily and normal business that is not prosecuted in any form. Just look for the occasionally belt-trapped hulk, that stucks helpless between two rocks and cant get back to the station to unload the ore.
So you see or hear about this stuff at any corner inside of eve on a daily base. this leads to a question: Why do these obvious botters and rmt’rs not get banned by CCP? It’s because every single one of them is for CCP a paying subscriber. So CCP is doing the obvious in business terms and let them do.
I think we are on a turning point now. We are (with help of this website here and a few others) on the beginning of eve getting a reputation as “rmt- heavy game” in the public perception. This WILL kill sbscriber numbers in the future. Until now, every new subber started with “I can get that rich too” approach in mind. But the future will bring the “uh they all get rich botting, it doesn’t make any sense to start playing this game” attitude.
I told you, CCP.
I hope there will be another article xplaining the recent bans of some pl chars. I heard they also were involved.
Free XXXXXX!
bot farms isk > pays plex > ccp gets rlm
nooby buys isk > ccp caught him > nooby gets negative balance > nooby need to buy plex > ccp gets rlm
There are 2 ways for ccp to earn on this not one
ccp must change the rules, and kill RMT
We burn isk just as much as we burn ships. We’re also the cool russians, not like those scrubs farming & mega hoarding mineral alloys in drone space.
p.s Catch will burn. Again.
You’re trash. Always has been, always will be. IRL.
Jupp its a hobby and not to make RMT. And thats not realy a matter if you from a poor country or not. Hobby is suppost to cost money and not make you some
Eve is a serious spaceships business.
[...] of RMT. Don´t forget to check Part 1 of the series ///////////////////////////////// Part 1: Former AAA Leader explains Part 2: Introduction and examples Part 3: Interview with biggest RMTrader [...]
sounds like a lotta fucking work…like a second job. Would rather just work another job than go through that much effort for a few bucks.
[...] more information regarding the RMT issues Read this, this, and this.Tweet var addthis_config = {"data_track_clickback":true [...]
RMT is not only problem DRF. it exist in many other ally and corporation and dot associate with only russians. rmt always exist and ccp nothing can do with it.
Would have been nice if author actually compiled article from the whole kugu threead rather than just reposting the OP, large parts of which are purely speculative and not accurate. Fail.
RFMhorus is an interesting and very volatile character. EVE24 should probably talk to the CEO’s who have had to work with him over the last year (The Spire Collective, NC. For 24 hours and then the DT débâcle). He throws ISK around like water and tries to buy people out from under you. Not to be trusted ever, he is only ever motivated by self gain and the limelight. I hope he has lifted the lid on something I find distasteful, but there will be a motive behind it and it will not be as black and white as he is making out.
[...] have been reading the interesting stories on EVEnews24 and other sites (See this link that started it all). I can understand honestly people choosing to do this. I remember back when I [...]
[...] big on the minds of players this week is all this talk about Bots and RMT. Several community blogs and news outlets have picked up on the story – [...]
www.bsa.killmail.org/?a=kill_battle&kll_id=8202166&kll_times=2010-12-04%2022:00:00,2010-12-04%2022:34:00
this battle report is to the contrary,
i found this report a bit biassed to the goons, and eve news 24 seems biased twards ncdot too
[...] Part 1: Former AAA Leader explains Part 2: Introduction and examples Part 3: Interview with biggest RMTrader Part 4: CCP Devblog [...]
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