The eve online security team is increasing their fight against botters, read on to see the new set of rules and remember don’t do the bot time if you can’t serve the ban time. Sooner or later the botting police is gonna get ya!
Greetings law-abiding citizens of New Eden!
Today I bring you graphs and news that I hope you all will enjoy. Specifically, I want to discuss the current progress being made on the botting/RMT front, and some changes that are currently ongoing here in CCP land.
The war on bots in 2012
The last few weeks have been a busy time on the anti-botting/RMT front. We’ve been hard at work catching ~bad guys~ and applying the Ban Hammer™ to those unscrupulous individuals who decide to violate our End-User License Agreement and Terms of Service. This has been a slightly different push than what we’ve been doing in the past, but has yielded a lot of interesting results.
Unfortunately it’s still too early to talk about that at this time. I do however want to go back a bit and revisit one of the initiatives that originally was trialed with the EVE Security Taskforce in 2011, and was reinstated in full force by Team Security in February 2012. That is what we colloquially still refer to as “ESTF Bans”, or in layman terms, our multi-faceted banning system which stops bad guys in their tracks.
The system ties greatly into the policy that we put in place at the same time back in 2011, which had the goal of making our overall stance towards this malicious behavior more clear and reflect that in the punishment which was handed out. Specifically, we spoke in terms of the “Three Strike System”, and the goal was to curb behavior and forcibly motivate people to play fairly, while allowing people who thought engaging in this behavior was OK due to our previous lax policy on this to become law-abiding citizens once again. The soon-to-be-obsolete-“Three Strike System” is as following:
- 1st strike for botting is a 14 day ban
- 2nd strike for botting is a 30 day ban
- 3rd strike for botting is a permanent ban
- Any client modification is a permanent ban on first offense
- Any involvement in RMT is a permanent ban on first offense
While we heard from a lot of you initially that this policy is too kind on the bad people, our goal at the time was to induce a gradual change and engage in a “slow burn”, that is to say tackle the issue as a long-term problem rather than trying to solve the issue all at once, which isn’t viable. We’ve always been open to iterating on our process and policy when appropriate. We always use data to guide our decisions, and this is no different. Here’s a graph showing you the “ESTF Bans” for 2012 Q3 and Q4:
As you can see from this graph, the there’s a few interesting trends to observe:
- 1st strikes have been trending downwards(-2.1155x + 127.76, with a x being a week)
- 2nd strikes trended down in Q3, but was stable throughout Q4
- 3rd strikes have become rare since the end of Q3, and even then it was sporadic
Moving to a 2 strike policy
From the analysis and discussion we’ve had on this subject based on this and more data, we feel like this is now a good time to tighten this system up. As such, effective today, this is our new policy 2 strike policy:
- 1st strike for botting is a 30 day ban
- 2nd strike for botting is a permanent ban
- Any client modification is a permanent ban on first offense
- Any involvement in RMT is a permanent ban on first offense
This reflects our increased efforts towards stopping people from engaging in behavior that is damaging to New Eden and all of you who play by the rules. It’s another change we’re happy to make with the goal of making life harder for those that do not want to follow the rules. We hope you appreciate these changes. A lot of you have been asking for this change for a while now, and we feel the time is right. Of course, we’re always looking and weighing options as to increase the pressure and make these people’s life harder from more angles. Any ideas you may have as to how to achieve this is something we greatly appreciate. We will also be doing our year-in-review session at Fanfest for the third year in a row now. There we’ll be sharing a lot more data and pretty graphs with you about the war on bots. We look forward to seeing as many of you there as possible!
Organizational changes
We’re currently going through some organizational changes in regards to the team that handles matters like these. Due to CCP Sreegs leaving CCP to pursue other opportunities, Team Security will be taking a new shape under different management and with a new team member.
The team will now consist of:
- CCP Peligro, The enforcer of the law™
- Lead GM Grimmi, Policy and supervision
- CCP Doppel, Bot Killer Deluxe
- CCP Stillman, Engineering and backend work
This team will be overseen by the VP of Customer Relations Management, and this will not impact the work being done by the team.
That is all for now. We hope to see you all at Fanfest!
+1
I didn't see a lot of ban in pandemic legion, famous botting alliance
pah that coming from Puppetmaster, AKA Horus123 possibly the EVE equivalent of a political Teletubby with an uncontrollable and irrational hatred of PL.
What's up? not like it when we used to turn down your contracts and burn down your paid for alliances. Botting and buying yourself influence with out the temperament to do anything with it is quite magical to watch. Hours of entertainment listening to you rant about perceived wrongs and shadows which don't exist. Think I may have some recordings somewhere will post them if I can find.
You are a tool, a useful tool but an in game tool all the same
you are not the real Dave! Identity theft
XFILE 666!
Learned something new!
If you send less ban warnings the graph shows a downward trend. www.thescifishow.com/wp-content/uploads/20…
Botters are the ruin. Good thing they see it now.
Interesting to see CCP Goonswarm…..eeerrrrrr Shreegs leave CCP.
I wonder if they plan on tackling the Jita bots…
Nice change to only 2 strikes , would love one strike , but this is a nice middle road.
Maybe there should be a zero strike ban policy. That could be administered by the CFC against anyone we think might bot in the future?
so cfc banning cfc then?
lol now that CCP Screegs is gone probably not?
Deklein has the most bots in Eve
cfc bots down
I'm pretty sure botting pales in comparison to the skim RMT'd from High end moons and renting.
You are wrong. Botting is by far biggest isk printer in game. Carrier will make on average 100m/h in anoms. If you run that bot only 2 h/day in a month you will make around 6b, roughly on the scale of one tech moon. Chance you will be detected as bot running carrier only 2 h a day is slim, and you can do it safely with properly set up bot and a pos, only thing that is danger for you is blue awoxser.
This is why PL is setting up all those botting alt toons in their pet alliances, profit is far better then moons. It can be done safely for them as their pets will take the fall and blame if something goes wrong by either rating carrier being awoxed or detected by CCP.
make a faction war alt and make twice as much 100mp/h is a scrubs wage
Harder to bot FW. Maybe FW missions?
mission or just afk plex pn a low sp toon kill one rat afk whore
i do it on one screen wile pvping on main
Well, to be honest, RMT:ing only from high end moons or renting isn't really doing any harm to EVE's economy. It's ISK changing hands which would have been in the game anyway. Only suffering part from that is CCP.
What makes RMT bad for players, is that it encourages people to create excess amount of isk by bots so they can get real money for themselves. The more ISK EVE's economy has, the more everything costs. Running bot effectively makes your mission/anomaly grinding less effective.
And btw, you are wrong, botting is the biggest RMT source in the game.
I dunno how people up voted this its totally wrong. One bot, typically running 8h a day, makes about 3x what a tech moon does. If you're gonna RMT what do you think is easier to do; take over the most fiercely contested space in the game, or run a few bots?
Evidence please. Stop with the empty accusations, I am pretty confident it happens, but without evidence I keep the opinion to myself.
nice job ccp
good job, 1st strike should be 30 day ban and all their isk on all their accounts confiscated. I would lol at the tears, CCP should record the calls they get from these people.
LOOK IT IS FANFEST AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
CCP Screegs will do one of his nice presentations and then – and then we do not hear from him anymore until next year while find lots of bots and ask us frustrated, why he is not doing anything.
oh noes! Screegs you must stay to protect the Deklein botters!!
Interesting to see CCP Goonswarm…..eeerrrrrr Shreegs leave CCP.
Did anyone look at the SCALE on the posted graph? Your telling me only a little over 200 people use bots?? I call bullshit!! This says to me that CCP's so called increased efforts to eliminat botting are a massive FAIL!!!! Nobody wants to admit botting cannot be eliminated…it's kinda like the War on Drugs…another massive FAIL!!!! Either CCP changes the mining mechanic to make it really unappealing to bot, removes the bot mechanic altogether , or accepts botting (like they've been doing all along without official acknowledgement)
200 bots? bu haha ha ha hah ha.
It's obvious that they don't want ban all bots because they lose to much subscriptions.
Most rentiers and pets botting. 0.0 wealth is build on botting and moon RMT
Look again. I see approximately 2725 first-strikes.
'these aren't the bots you're looking for'.
I read it afterwards. He cant do his presentation anymore. So this is worse for him. I will always remember him as the guy, who was only good at presentation and stalling tactics. In his time botting and RMT became even bigger. That is what you get, if you are a lazy cunt. But he got well paid I guess. Good for him.
We'll see, wehther the new guys are better.