Excessive exposure to magic and chainmail bikinis along the way led to a fascination with unusual topics that cloning technology just couldn’t cure. The Nosy Gamer an obligatory read for every serious Eve Online aficionado.
“Great, kid. Don’t get cocky.”
- Han Solo
Last Saturday’s CSM Town Hall meeting touched on many subjects important to the Eve community. Unfortunately, in my opinion, security in general and the war on bots and the illicit ISK trade in particular was not one of them. I can think of a lot of reasons that the CSM didn’t discuss security issues. Perhaps CCP Sreegs is about to come out with a security blog giving everyone an update on events since the Spring Summit. Maybe, unlike real world politicians, the CSM actually cares and understands about operational security and doesn’t want to give the bad guys any actionable intelligence. Or perhaps the CSM looks at Team Security’s success so far and believes the War on Bots is essentially over and CCP won.
Browsing the botting forums I get the sense that the shock and awe of CCP Sreegs’ spring offensive has worn off as botters have figured out the behavioral parameters of Team Security’s detection algorithm. Or maybe not. Here are some recent forum posts.
5 August 12
LoPhatMelk (Eve Miner) – “Well that didn’t take long… I’ve used this bot maybe a week to two weeks and already both accounts are banned. Pretty conservative use with safe boting practices, good thing I only paid for 1 month trial of this bot…”
markbt (Eve Miner) – “Also received today a ban, a new character, just two weeks. The bot worked 8 hours a day with three breaks … Assets confiscated when a ban for macros? I had assets more than 15kkk (“
LoPhatMelk (Eve Miner) – “Yea I’m negative 220kk between my 2 accounts… which is BS because I know I didn’t make that much when botting…”
10 August 12
Armadillo11 (Questor) – “Been banned on my 3 accounts for 14 days, only 1 was used for botting though. Ran it for 12-23h (shouldn’t have, i know..).”
15 August 12
Sollo (Eve Trader) – “This is about the 3rd time I’ve been banned. My first char was banned twice for macro use even though I use custom timers and delays. Custom log off times that i change daily with more than 10-12 hours of bot downtime. And I don’t trade high volume items. Maybe items that sell 3 or 4 a day at the most on average. After the first char had been banned twice I created a new account new VM machine the works with even slower bot speed using all custom delays and timers and changing them daily. Lasted about a week before it received a ban.”
Also, remember all the talk about how the mining ship changes that came out in Inferno 1.2 on 8 August were a boon to bots? The changes caught at least one botter by surprise…
18-19 August 12
justaminer (Eve Miner) – “Wait, what? Did something happen that made Hulks worse than retrievers? I still mine using several clients in a fleet (all hulks, not using jetcans) and all hulks.”
ComalDave (Eve Miner) – “Retrievers now have a large ore hold that takes 30 minutes to fill. Hulks have a small ore hold that takes 7 minutes to fill. The Retriever spends more time mining and less time travelling back and forth from the station. Mining vessels are no longer made out of tissue paper and tin foil so it is much safer to mine now.”
justaminer (Eve Miner) – “How long has this been true for?”
meloncholy (Eve Miner) – “Almost 2 weeks ago.”
I wonder how much money I would make if I could write a bot to read Eve patch notes for botters? But the mining barge changes seem to be a big hit with the botting community. Well, those that know about the changes anyway.
But while bot users are stumbling around making me laugh, bot developers are getting their acts together and fighting back. With the use of VMWare flagging botters for attention, a new application, Red Guard, is becoming popular with some botters looking to protect their main account when CCP catches botting activity on other accounts. Perhaps more importantly the bot devs have managed to obtain some of the code CCP is using to detect python injection. One bot dev posted the code and suggested countermeasures on the Public Demands forums. The post on the Public Demands led to this amusing exchange on the Questor forums:
9 August 12
Da_Teach (Questor dev) – “So far its only half-assed checks, but I’m sure that’ll change.”br />
aziz001 – “so for now better stop using Q or not? i know we are always in danger, but seems now we are more in danger than early?”
Da_Teach (Questor dev) – “Yes, you are all going to get banned, once your banned, CCP will call up your internet provider and get you disconnected and CCP will claim your first born baby.”
“Or, if your scared about getting banned, you shouldn’t be botting in the first place…”
I wasn’t aware that CCP Sreegs had changed the penalties for botting, but I often see the sentiment among botters that if you bot you will eventually get caught. The other important piece of information from this exchange is that Team Security is now making efforts to go after bots using python injection and that one prominent bot developer expects that effort to become more sophisticated over time.
I think Team Security has finished picking the low-hanging fruit in the War on Bots™ and are now going after harder stuff. The current efforts have generally suppressed bot use from 23 hours a day down to 8-10 with built-in breaks during that time. Now CCP Sreegs’ strategy appears to have moved onto detecting injection bots, a long time irritant to CCP. Of course, that is harder to do and Team Security will suffer setbacks because bot developers will not just sit back and let CCP take their income stream from them. But at least now we know the battle has commenced.
- NoizyGamer
Sollo (Eve Trader) – “This is about the 3rd time I’ve been banned. My first char was banned twice for macro use even though I use custom timers and delays. Custom log off times that i change daily with more than 10-12 hours of bot downtime. And I don’t trade high volume items. Maybe items that sell 3 or 4 a day at the most on average. After the first char had been banned twice I created a new account new VM machine the works with even slower bot speed using all custom delays and timers and changing them daily. Lasted about a week before it received a ban.”
Were you selling redeemers in ammarr faggot? cause i petitioned the fuck out of u.. haha u mad?
beep
01100111 01101111 00100000 01100110 01110101 01100011 01101011 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 01110011 01100101 01101100 01100110 00100000 01000011 01000011 01010000
translated to "go fuck yourself CCP" (Translated using home.paulschou.net/tools/xlate/)
01000111 01101111 00100000 01100110 01110101 01100011 01101011 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 01110011 01100101 01101100 01100110 00100000 01100010 01101111 01110100 01110100 01100101 01110010
translated to "Go fuck yourself botter"
I just hate bots? If eve ever dies, bot's will be to blame.
Fuck 'em, kill 'em, ban 'em and bitch slap 'em
lol. eve needs more than ever the mining bots to balance the market prices.
trade and ratting bots should be permanently get banned, they do not offer anything.
Mining has never been easier and safer, and mining yield has never been higher. There's plenty of mining going on. As ice prices crash back to reasonable levels, many ice miners will go back to shooting rocks.
"…and CCP will claim your first born baby.”
I'm not quite sure any bot user bears seed capable of producing children.
Maybe I should take up botting…my first born is ready for college, will they pick up the bill to?
You've obviously never seen the massive internet archives of robot pronz.
Someone ban the asshole thats fucked with the jump freighter prices.
what you mean with tech being cheaper because CCP made a work around?
Look at the prices
If I were macrominer I would try with… obligatory use of virtual machines, would not log with my all characters at once, and than maybee change of mining systems every two or three days, change of mining hours, would try to macromine around 12hrs, say few words in local while u are realy on pc … do some distribution misions for a change.
Since "macrocatchdivision" relies 100% on algorithms… try not to get within
And ofc, this is only if I were macroer.
Deklein must be having problems with all these botting bans
Evidence of botting? Or is this just slander? I hate Goons with a passion, but never throw around comments without evidence, you look ignorant.
Deklein is the single most PVE heavy region in the game, year round.
Also, CCP release a graph of bots at fanfest and Deklein was the #1 region for bots by far.
Story about botting by region www.evenews24.com/2012/03/28/video-eve-sec…
Deklein doesn't but please note that Insmother, Cache, Outer Passage and other dronelands have become very NPC friendly (if you know what I mean). Hell, I reported a bot-corp ratting in the evemaps.dotlan.net/map/Insmother/Z-ONUI#so… constellation.
Thank the lord for the death of market bots, common commodities used to be untradable due to all the bots. There may be profit now in trading minerals etc for real players *shock horror*.
I don't know if this is a new thing for bots, or if eve is just more fucked then usual lately, but when I leave my guys afk for a long time the sockets close, and my clients log off.
Ever since the macks got their huge ore bays I do afk mine way more (hey, you can leave em' go for 30min now, why not?), but I feel like my clients have never logged off as much before. Anyone else see this happening?
It's funny how war on bots takes place every year when I report hundreds of accounts. It happened this spring and it happened last spring. This year I've reported over 200 accounts and petitioned the behavioural patterns. Despite that, the next generation of bots with the exact same behavioural patterns is already active in the same area of EVE universe. It all happened out of revolt for nerfing Sanctums and fucking up many small entities in 0.0 that went bankrupt and lost players. They didn't lost the players to some bigger alliance, the players were disappointed and left the game. The reason for a nerf at the time was too big ISK faucet. At the same time hundreds of bots worked 23/7 in highsec mission hubs pumping a lot of ISK into the economy.
A year later I've decided to visit the same area again and saw even worse situation. I've made sure to catch every last one of them, report them and when nothing got done for months, I've wrote a petition and explained behavioural patterns. It was mainly the same patterns as the year before (the patterns were actually posted on the EVE forum 2 years ago). I've put the bots on my watchlist, all 200+ of them, and waited. After a couple of months they were all gone – every single one of them – and we had CCP Sreegs announce the big win. Don't get me wrong here, I'm happy that something was done and it is a big win.
A while ago CCP made "PLEX for snitches" program in order to reward players that contribute to the game's health outside of the regular gameplay. Unfortunately, this program so far was limited to "PLEX for Goons" where Darius Johnson rewards players from his (ex) alliance, which is really sad. The players like me, and there are a couple of them more that I know or remember doing the same thing, are left with the message from CCP that they "don't reward players for bot reports". If I had used the "report button" on a couple of obvious ones that would be fine, but having 200+ reported during a period of 2-3 weeks and having explained the patterns to observe in order to detect a bot is a bit more than just using the report button, if you'd agree.
The PLEX is not that important as a reward itself. It hurts morale a bit more when you know that no matter how much time and effort you spend in order to detect and report patterns of bot behaviour, the bots are still running the same show for over 2.5 years with occasional ban wave months after they are reported. At the same time, the same PLEX as a symbolic "Thank you" note is reserved for Goons. Don't get me wrong, the Goons that was FW exploit and took some time to explain and report the issue deserved the reward by all means. What bothers me is that no one else is seeing the same treatment for their efforts. The real question is: Is the head o bot hunting division CCP Sreegs or Darius Johnson? Only time will tell.
P.S.
I plan to report the next wave of bots using the option in-game and wait for a couple of weeks. After that, Riverini will be the first one to get the complete list and all of the gathered data. I'll let the public decide if the data is valuable material for a large scale banning operation or just simple bot reports, as CCP claims.
Sorry for the long post. Cheers.
Keep fighting the good fight!
Great job on the actually updated botting news this time around. Its probably the first time something isn't posted here that is already at least 1 year old when it comes to botting. The only exception being that RedGuard is probably a year old, so its not a new tool.
Solid article,
emist