Regarding penalties for botting – I’d recommend bringing forward an old precedent started by CCP Sreegs many years ago. Back then, getting your first strike for botting meant that your entire account was locked to character transfers, permanently. I’d suggest extending that permanent account-wide ban to the use of skill extractors, as well.
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Yep, we still do character transfer locks for bot bans, and I’m currently looking at extending that to SP extraction as well.
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Thanks, appreciate it! One of our obvious failures in 2017 was our lack of communication. We need to be more visible. Bots and other “baddies” are banned on a daily basis, but this isn’t overly transparent to the players.
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You could always start transferring their characters to a bot graveyard corp that’s distinct from doomheim. Would love to see how quickly that one fills up.
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that would depend on the user, some users know how to reroute their connectivity so it shows up with them living in another country. I’m not sure if the security team even has something to detect that currently as from what i’ve seen the only place currently that has that is netflix, which forces its users to connect via their true location.
Wasnt that the thing that everyone had to do anyway and not optional. I logged in once and it made me come to the Eve site to do a second authentication before it’d let me in to the client. Was annoying tbh.
“1st offense – 3-day temporary ban”
That is basically an invitation to try it as the punishment is laughable.
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I’ve read about what you’ve worked on with respect to botting, but at some levels it really isn’t working despite your efforts. In the last 10 years of playing, I’ve reported market bots all over the place. Not in major trade hubs where it’d be a pain to detect them, but in way smaller markets where it’s easy to trick the bot software into doing dumb things. I have only once seen one of them disappear. After a decade. You’re doing a good job with the resources you have but that’s bloody awful.
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Does this include chat bots? I’m not against scamming in jita and hubs but the amount of chat bots disrupting chat with scams and adverts is awful. I’m afraid to report 20 of them cause I don’t want action taken against me if one guys copy pasting or something.
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Appreciate your response to the player base. But it seems it’s still all situational and manual work, causing a lot of effort for the team. What do you say about all the ideas posted by players here and on Reddit to tackle the problem in a systematic way? Is there any punishment planned for corps hosting bot chars, e.g. confiscate all ISK coming from those chars in taxes, goods and fees?
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Is there a specific reasoning behind not banning a player but banning accounts?
The best form of communication you could ever do with EVE players would to actually cause a visable decrease in the huge amount of bots we see on a daily basis. By doing this, you communicate loudly and clearly to both the EULA following camp and the botters Until there is a noticeable drop in both the reported botting and the observed botting, many of us will continue to suspect that CCP is uneven in enforcement and perhaps complacent in certain groups using them. Blogs are great, but we’ll know you are serious when everyone notices a significant drop in the botting fleets.
not every player has a static ip address so ip address banning does not work… Mac address banning will not work either because its possible to change mac addresses now so their only option is to ban by accounts.
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However it is easy to link accounts, even if a different email is used for each of them, to one player by collecting and comparing login data, ingame isk and asset movement etc.
So I dont see a reason why the rest of a botters accounts should not be banned aswell.
This would be a more appropriate punishment in my opinion. Ofc. it is difficult to prevent a new account, but having more assets gone than just that one botting account is what really hurts.
One of my forwarded email accounts came up as “PWNED”.
The address doesn’t have a real box or account, it just gets forwarded to my real account.
Not sure what action to take, there is no password to change and I only use the account for games.
BTW GJ, love bans, 1800!! Oh yes give me more baby 
That’s 100% right. This is reflected in our internal goals for the subject of botting, which is to address how this impacts our players, and addressing “player sentiment”, instead of measuring number of bans as a success metric.
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Not just possible, but trivial.
Have you used that email address on any services? If so, that’s where it’ll be coming from.
My email shows up a number of times, but as I use different passwords on each site (yay, password managers), it’s not the email account, just an account which used that email address.
While I’m pleased to see your security team taking their job seriously, this can’t just be their job. All they can do is ban bots. They can’t prevent them, nor can they de-incentivize them.
First and foremost, make it harder to register new accounts. Add complex captchas to account creation. Then add them to pilot creation.
Next, require MFA on all new accounts. As someone pointed out in a different thread not everyone has a smartphone… make email options available. No this won’t stop botters, but it will increase the complexity requirements for them.
Finally, make the in-game content exceedingly difficult for botters. How?
- Nullsec ratting needs to have improved AIs. Smarter rats. You’ve been building a better AI, use it.
- In Nullsec sites, throw a pair or trio of burner frigates in the mix, and add NPC carriers with actual fighters when the site has a carrier in it. A player carrier would ■■■■ their pants if a hostile carrier landed and launched SS fighters on theirs. (edit: you could also just have the NPCs spawn SS fighters the same way regular rats spawn, if carriers are present in the site).
- As the mining index rises, so too does the strength of the rats attacking the miners.
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I have to ask… when you say password manager is it stored on your pc / lappy? also are they encrypted with at least 128bit encoding?