Botting Ban and PLEX

I dont see how thats possible, except by players reporting suspected bots for CCP to investigate, or snitching on laundering operations.

The problem with the laundering, in whatever forms it takes, is determining whether the other party is complicit. Cant just confiscate their stuff cos thats where the isk/assets went.

Cant crowdsource that, because the papertrail data is confidential.

I suspect its very easy for a botter to funnel isk/assets through a series of “fences/fronts”. Probably a chain of three exchanges is more than enough for plausible deniability, especially if its not recurring down the same chain each time.

I also suspect CCP just suspends the account, confiscates isk on it plus some isk penalty perhaps, and thats that.

PS: CCP almost didnt implement a skill extraction lock/character transfer lock on accounts suspended for botting until it was brought up here on these boards pre-penalty change. (By me, btw.)

Otherwise botters would have returned after 3days, extracted all SP, transferred to new account/toon and begun botting all over again, barely missing a beat.

Especially since before you lost a month of gametime (500Plex/sub), whereas now they lose only 3 days.

Frankly, I was shocked I even had to point this eventuality out. Should have been obvious and included in the original draft for the change.

1 Like

And this is why you don’t work on the security team who handles this, because this is a woefully ineffective solution and everyone knows it, instant feedback lets them know immediately if their bot has been detected and just lets a dev sit there and iterate over his bot code quickly, at this point literally all you do is ban throwaway accounts that nobody cares about, by waiting and giving the botters a false sense of security they will invest more time and effort in to their accounts which will then, after a certain amount of time, all be banned at the same time, which method do you think causes more lasting damage to the botters? :stuck_out_tongue:

Its not always about instant gratification

I dont agree.

The sooner a botter is banned, the less they harm the game and the less chance/assets they have to setup back-up operations to restart again after a ban.

The longer a botter can operate, the more operations they can setup, and the more assets they can launder to survive a ban intact. The longer they do this, the harder it gets to uproot that weed, and the more damage they have done to the game.

You dont wait for a tumor to grow to the size of a fist, with multiple metastasized pockets elsewhere, and the patients condition deteriorating progressively before taking action to remove it.

You get rid of it immediately upon detection.

1 Like

I do think it is an expedient solution when you just don’t have that much manpower to win the arms race of program code. As you have pointed out before “two staff on the security team”…

And the less loss they feel as they had nothing majorly invested in setting up those characters, remember a bot takes no real effort to create, the time investment is in maintaining it, and banning them as soon as they create the first of their bot army just means they will switch to a different method, its an arms race and banning too early gives out too much in the way of information on what CCP is currently tracking and looking at, its a very simple concept, its the same reason the police will leave the small criminals operating in order to get the people higher up the food chain, its not hard to follow

And the more operations they lose in a single wave, again you need to consider the impact to the botter, losing one account means nothing, losing 50 in a single wave, now thats going to sting

Banning them the second you detect them serves literally no purpose other than to inform people which specific botting programs CCP is 100% aware of and that information is pretty valuable to the botters

Not even remotely the same thing, so this example is pretty pointless here

You also target the source, there is no reason removing a tiny lump in your leg if the actual thing that caused that was a piece that migrated away from the original site somewhere else in the body, you look for all of it and you take it out in a single wave, in your example you would just cut out the small roaming tumours instead of the tumour that created them

Ban botters ASAP.

The longer they operate, the more damage to EVE they do and the harder they get to root out.

They would like they very much, but they can not. Maybe they are blackmailed… :mage:

The question is what ASAP means.

First they need to verify someone is actually botting. I don’t know their methods, but they want to make sure not to create large numbers of false positives.

Then, they might need to figure out if it’s only one account or a whole web, how that is organized and so on. Reason being: this char might have botted for a year and maybe CCP would like to confiscate not only the current assets, but also everything that went to Alts during that hypothetical year.

Finally, they might investigate RMT sites at the same time and this might give them the opportunity to ban people who are the other side of the issue: ISK buyers.

I agree with ASAP, but simply kicking them without using all the might of the banhammer sounds less effective and could mean that more harm is done to the game compared to investigating deeper.

2000 suspensions a month.
2 staff.
Assumed 40hr work week.

Do the math yourself.

1 Like

We are going in circles, you won’t be able to win the fight by detecting and banning, the only sustainable way is to make botting inconvenient by changing PvE mechanics.

4 Likes

Some posts removed for Racial Discussion.

2 Likes

At the very least this shows that those 2 guys are doing a fantastic job. Kudos to them.

P.S. This also looks as if they already work at the limit and can really only ban people right away, without much ressources to investigate further. Hard to tell though, without knowing details. Suspensions might be for a whole number of reasons other than botting.

There is a whole lot of people who get angry over losses and say things that are against the EULA (and often against the law). If someone reports them, they disappear for a while. Then suspensions might be people who are actually already banned but try to come back with new accounts.

I think we shouldn’t automatically assume that each of the 2000 bans is connected to botting. Some maybe also multiple account bans when they are known.

Since when has China or the people living there become a race? You okay ISD Buldath?

Stop flagging facts.

1 Like

February 2018 has seen the following in terms of account action from Team Security. Of the 1882 bans issued in total this month:

  • 896 bans related to account hijacking.
  • 511 bans related to macro use and botting.
  • 253 bans relating to ISK selling

A little over 1800 accounts were banned for botting/automation in January. Mining bots were the largest group represented, with ratting bots coming in a close second.

About one third of the affected accounts received permanent bans as repeat offenders, while the rest was temporarily banned on first offense.

Still, I don’t have full confidence that the data of one month is representative of the whole. I hope CCP releases more data about the bans.

3 Likes

Frankly, they just don’t want to be blamed if the thread get derailed and evolve into a “region lock China” outcry in which they have to go through a dozen of threads. Better go to reddit for that.

1 Like

Because it’s also wrong. Just because people on Serenity botted, doesn’t imply that all Chinese are botters. Hell, how many people have been banned from TQ for botting before there was even a notably large gorup of Chinese bros here? People from all over the world bot and people from all over the world don’t bot.

It doesn’t help to grasp the botting issue by looking at it from the real world citizenship perspective. Not only does it accuse a lot of people wrongly, but also (maybe more importantly) it makes it look as if the others are innocent. They are not. People in the largest US alliances bot like hell. Every botter is doing harm to the game and we need to concentrate how to fix the issue not present false solutions by finding a scapegoat.

5 Likes

Internet argument is never about right and wrong, it is about what the majority of people perceives. You are not gonna change other people’s stereotypes just by very limited engagement.

Yes and no. Everyone has stereotypes, we cannot avoid them. Some people challenge themselves and their own ideas and lose some stereotypes, because they realize it’s not true. Ohter people don’t challenge themselves and there is no use talking to them directly. Still I think it is important for people to see that anti-Chinese stereotypes are only a part of the people, and racist bigots like the poster above you are a minority. Chinese bros are welcome on TQ just like everyone else. Botters, no matter where they come from are not. I’m not here to convince people against their stereotypes, but try to bring reason into discussing solutions for botting.

Actually, I very much agree with this:

And it won’t really happen because majority of PvE, the bounty grinding and mining is almost unchanged for decades.