There has been a massive hulk bot fleet in our system for over a month. There is NO doubt he’s a bot, he has around 10 hulks all turning their lasers on at the same time, no way for a single person to control that many hulks without some method which is clearly illegal. He has been reported over and over and over again by not only my corp but ALL corps who mine in that area and still not a single action has been taken to resolve this.
I feel like CCP prefer the money they get from him 10-15 accounts and cares nothing about the little guys with 1 or 2…
CCP does apparently nothing with bot reports. I won’t say actually nothing because I do not know of course, but bots that have been regularly reported with clear evidence of macroing and yet still seen carrying on for months or years after that information being sent to CCP. They do often address these things in waves so perhaps at some point you will see some effect, but the general sense is that bot enforcement has fallen off the priority list in recent years and Team Security’s limited resources are being focused on RMTers (and botters that RMT) rather than your run-of-the-mill mining or missioning bot.
The good news though is that if they are a Hulk fleet you can economically gank them, and gank them repeatedly until the botter moves. It is the botting Skiff fleets that you have no power against as they are economically immune to ganking, although you can bump them, but depending on the botting software the cheater is using, that probably isn’t worth your time.
We tried that, and bumping, he just comes back with mackinaws and waits till the coast is clear to bring back the hulks. He even has an alt to warp in in a velator to get concord in the belt which is ALSO clearly illegal as they prohibit manipulating concord fleets… Just think how much damage all that cheap ice is doing to the economy. They NEED to start caring.
Purposely spawning CONCORD isn’t an exploit nor is moving it, or at least it wasn’t when this post was made. You can move CONCORD yourself from the belt by just shooting a POCO or station with an alt before you gank.
But I take your point, it’s frustrating to have to play with someone who is clearly breaking the rules. You can also send evidence of the botting directly to security@ccpgames.com and see what happens. I have never had luck with that, but who knows, it might work. Otherwise, I think you best bet is to make as much noise as you can on the forums and reddit and try to get someone’s attention at CCP to remind them that even if the dude macro mining isn’t a big-time RMTer, it still degrades the experience of the other players to have such blatant cheating go unpunished.
CCP does take bot reports seriously, and they do investigate and take action on them. but they rarely do so immediately, it is generally only done in large waves a couple times per year. and for very good reason.
players can optimize their actions to a terrifying degree, to the point where in many cases it can be hard to tell a legitimate, highly skilled at what they are doing player from a bot. (just watch a video of a starcraft tournament for an example of the insane amount of micro that is possible)
But a botting program will always have identifying tells, it can take some time for those tells to be identified though, and each time a particular program gets banned, a new one gets designed that has fewer and fewer obvious tells. so rather than banning them the second they get found out, they will wait and do mass bannings, making it harder for the bot developer to know exactly what part of their program was giving them away.
its kinda like antibiotic resistances. it grows over time making them harder and harder to fight, and so you only swing the banhammer when you can have the maximum effect.
Good explanation, but it would still be in CCP’s best interest to another Development blog on this subject. I cannot remember the last purge of botters from EVE and from first hand experience,local chatter, and anecdotal reports in the forums lends me to believe that the problem is growing far worse than before, especially with the introduction of choreographed Rorquel fleets. I know that CCP has stretched it’s resources to the breaking point and that some areas are being orphaned by the lack of monitoring/maintenance, but if CCP only cares about server population and not how many non TOS accounts are feeding the company coffers, then why should each of us obey the botting restrictions?
A new Dev blog or statement would be most appreciated.
CCP is under no obligation to publish their enforcement actions. I suspect the Active ISK delta in the MER is a fairly good measure since, with Alpha state, ISK no longer leaves the game simply because someone’s subscription lapses. Faucets exceed sinks by a substantial margin so the only way for the amount of ISK in the game to drop is if CCP is confiscating it.
Running a multibox fleet is not too difficult with a tool like EVE-O and quite legal as long as you don’t broadcast instructions to multiple clients at the same time. I have no doubt it takes team security some time to make sure they are dealing with a bot or a broadcast tool like isboxer before swinging the ban hammer.
What is the system? This is a problem that can be felt with.
Ah yes! CODE. to the rescue! Locals need to decide which is worse - the disease or the cure.
I’m not CODE. I work independently, mostly.
Apologies. It’s hard to tell these days. Affiliation and signatures are things I miss from the old forums.
No. Not at all. How the negative ISK delta was calculated was changed when Alpha clones were released. I am not sure it is completely clear, or at least I can’t remember the details, but the decrease represents accounts that haven’t logged in for 30 or 90 days or whatever.
No, almost all of that represent ISK on accounts that are going dormant as people leave the game is my guess. Even during the supposed big Ghost Training bans, you barely saw a blip in that number.
I’d love CCP to release stats to prove me wrong, but all evidence points to very few botters being nabbed. They used to love to crow about that at Fanfest, but there has been nary a peep about fighting botters in recent years which leads me to believe they have all but given up on enforcing their rules on casual botting.
Times are tough I guess, and there are bigger RMT fish to fry than some guy botting in an ice belt.
Ala system, not worried about ganking, everyone here flies a skiff except for the botter who has 13(!) hulks.
Good hunting
I will look into this.
i go to check that too
I got about another week until my accounts need resubscribing, don’t think I will. Any game where rampant cheating is ignored for this long is not worth playing honestly. Real shame such a good game ruined by cheaters (like so many others before) I know there are other things to do in this game and many may think this post is stupid, but it’s a matter of principle.
Anyway if anyone does want to have a go at the guy here’s a list of his known toons:
Biff Barnstormer Caroll Peletier Kyoshi Ao Lokar Sun Zane Charen-Teng La’Bell Pepper JJavier Arthie Vi’Veri’Veniversum’Vivus Duality Hernan Cortez Stalker Madullier Kane Kowalczyk Sgt Abraham Ford Keith Nash
Happy Hunting and Fly safe o7
I was there, with my pilot , you send me the same names. The one of hispoanci name was the unique i see connected, but none of the others. Was in station. I still interested in makke justice, but my visits to that place dont see the hulk fleet… YET !
He showed up a minute after you left, tried to PM you but you were already offline.
This shouldn’t be our job anyway, this frustrates me that I have to spend this much time policing their game…
Bro’s, I guess we sometimes have to adapt our game-style. About two weeks ago I send a complaint to CCP because I used to do low-sec-mining, but recently most of these systems are totally stripped empty by the NPC mining fleet corps. System after system empty. So first week I freaked out, then threatened to stop my multiple paid accounts. But then cooled down, and realised EVE is just like real life, you have to adapt and change. So I left my asteroids belts in Losec, and looking into ratting, Factional Warfare and industry. And now I am actually really happy I did. So much new and interesting action.
I even joined a Corps after almost 1 year of solo-play.
Or maybe it is time you move your ass into 0-sec and learn some other stuff?
Greetz and please continue to enjoy here!