Devblog: Security Update - Q1 2019

Well as someone who paid for a sub for nearly 10 years I feel somewhat cucked when I hear of alphas doing level 4s in a mach.
Browser game indeed.

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I’m assuming the team is looking at putting Omega checks on both the agent & acceleration gate for these L4/L5 sites. Otherwise wouldn’t multiple alphas in fleet be able to complete the objective for the single Omega that accepts the mission?

On the flip-side, this prevents alpha gankers / ninja looters from entering sites as well. That’s a mixed bag.

It seems like a more ideal path is ‘alpha clone’ status either prevents bounty payouts from certain class ships or hardcaps it (that extra alpha’s share could be automatically routed to some roaming ESS structure that alphas cannot access). That’d cover null ratting as well.

I don’t see why. The point of this is just to prevent botters from exploiting the high income potential of the missions with free accounts. Just preventing the agent from issuing a mission does that.

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Omega (sub funded by bot money) accepts the mission. Uses blob of alpha bots in fleet to blitz rooms beyond acceleration gate.

That isn’t efficient at all. LP isn’t being generated for the extra accounts. They’d be better of botting L3s or ratting. And even if they did you still have forced the cheater to pay for one account raising the bar which is the point of this.

There are still dozens of things alpha accounts can do to make ISK and play the game. This just limits the damage by removing the most lucrative, easily scriptable content.

And I guess as a side bonus it removes the practice of using alphas as mission pullers, a creative use of the mechanics but one certainly not intended by the alpha clone system.

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They do increase the efficiency to earn it on a single account by withholding shared rewards.

You are correct, shared automatically.

I would like to remind everyone here that the stated goal of putting L4 missions behind Omega is as a measure to discourage / stop botters. Let’s stay focused on that. I am noticing a bit of drift as people try to rationalize this decision.

The goal is not to nerf legit player alpha access because they make too much free ISK. That is a whole different rabbit hole, and not an argument to be lumped in to the discussion of stopping botters.

Since a single legit player cannot run multiple alphas, it would only be botters who don’t care about the EULA exploiting the game in the way you suggested. But, if that’s true, then these botters need to be stopped from breaking the EULA on login from multiple alpha characters, and not after they have all logged in, organized a bot fleet, and are accepting missions. That’s way too little too late, to stop them. They need to have stronger, stricter enforcement and detection of such log ins, and stop them at the gate. Honestly, if that’s what this has come to, nerfing in game content to make it less appealing to botters because they can’t stop the botters from getting in, that’s really sad. This is as if CCP is in jail, and they keep dropping the soap. They can’t stop the other prison inmates (botters) from dominating them, so instead they soil themselves to try to make themselves less appealing. Is that what this basically is? Because that’s what this feels like.

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They are shared.

It is less efficient to help with a mission than to run one yourself. It’s also probably much harder to code a bot to do so. Or maybe not, I don’t know, but definitely each client running its own mission is way more profitable.

It seems like just turning off issuing L4 missions to alphas works well to stop these botters so I’m thinking CCP will keep it simple, but you’ll have to wait for you them to comment or the changes to appear to be sure.

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As someone who almost exclusively ran missions for 7 years of my EVE career, here’s my 2c.

Usually I would be mad at this change, since it’s banning me from coming back to my old toys for free as I did back in 2017 or 2018. But that’s not the case. I understand that CCP is in deep sh*t and all in all returning mission runners aren’t exactly a priority.

Yet, looking at it, if I ever wanted to do that again, I wouldn’t be paying 30 whole days for it. So my suggestions is to add, eventually, smaller time packages for a premium. Like 25 PLEX for one day, 40 PLEX for 2 days, 150 for a week and 275 for two weeks. That’s what F2P games do with their premium status and I sometimes wonder why EVE doesn’t.

As said, just my 2c.

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That’s sort of what Alpha Injectors are:

They describe in that article the challenges of offering shorter Omega game time than a month. However, maybe they could link the ability to get a L4 mission to the Alpha Skill Injector? Like when you consume it you get a 24h timer where the mission restriction is waived? You could also maybe include other restricted things like cloaks and MJDs.

It’s probably too complicated and niche enough not to ever see devtime, but only CCP knows for sure whether it is worth trying or even possible.

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One day super/cyno alts. That is why…

This is not ok.
No mission should be restricted by gameplay statuss.
This seems to be reverting back to before the Alpha Clone era, preventing anyone access to content based on account status is reverting back to pay-to-play and is not ok.
There are better ways to combat those who exploit the game that does not require the punishment of those who don’t.
It just seems like a lazy way of approaching the matter.
(note I am Omega)

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I’m omega too and would agree (although I do have some 5 mill SP ‘maxed’ alphas too).

Allowing alphas to skill into battleships and other L4 capable ships like a PVE alpha Gila and then stopping them from doing L4’s because they might be botting seams to be the wrong way to deal with it.

Detect botters and ban them, preventing them from doing L4 missions does nothing to get rid of bots and botters it just diminishes their return or gets them to do other things.

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I have a question about this.

If an Omega player pulls the level 4 mission can Alpha players still assist with running the mission? I am asking about this because I am trying to power level my corp members and friends. If nothing else we can still run level 3s to help power level them.

This should still work as far as i can tell.

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They should lock Alphas out of Gilas, too.
That’d get rid of another batch of farmers who contribute nothing.

Too bad that CCP employees, (Dev’s, GM’s, and so on) are so much a part of the same corps and alliances that are harboring the bot’s and rmt’s or that commit such action themselves, so everyone knows that nothing will be done to those corps and alliances. You will never see the biggest 5 corps/alliances get disbanded and get banned from Eve. Seen it too many times in online games.

It’s always the smaller people that action gets taken against.

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I’m looking at you and I thinking: would I buy a used car from this one ???

So much discussion about Alphas. When we talk about botting and RMT, that will not change anything if alphas can do that or can do this.

Where comes all the RMT isk from and will restricting alpha accounts change anything about RMT?

I am sure the big money comes from ratting in 0.0, not from running missions or mining in high sec.

So for example if they are ratting in a VNI 12 hours a day making 50 m/h, that would be 600m a day or 18 B a month. As you can have higher skills for the VNI and drones and have more dps they are running Omegas by plexing the account. Ok, thats 16 B a month after plexing.

Next example ratting in a super making 300 m/h, that what be 108 B a month. Plexing is a must, so thats only 106 B a month.

So yes, restricting alphas show the community that something is done against botting. Also something is done about maybe 1-10% of the isk generated for RMT. Restricting alphas doesn’t solve the RMT problem.

And I am sure the 0.0 renters don’t care, as they also earn a lot ISK, whether the botter gets banned or not. Look at some renter agreements, if you want to place a citadel where carriers can dock you have to pay 15 B to anchor that structure. So if the botter gets banned, the renter alliance gets an extra bonus of 15 B. If you want to place a super carrier docking citadel, these structures are usually owned by the renting alliance, so if the botter gets banned they get a free Keepstar.

The big RMT isk is made in 0.0 with Omegas and even now the alliances who rent out space make good money, regardless if the botters get banned or not. Even regardless if they aware that their renters are botters.

To shut down RMT you have to hurt the big alliances as well, so that they know that it hurts their wallet when a renting corp is botting and being banned. Currently they just get extra ISK and/or structures. I am not sure if this is going to happen.

At last you have to automatically detect bots like Blizzard did with Wow and warden. It’s the first step in the right direction, but there are many steps to still be made.

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Not happy about this change as an alpha player, hopefully they don’t continue to add even more restrictions. Honestly its an impressive feat that EVE Online still has a subscription given the fact that many mmos including other sandboxes have a b2p or just have a cosmetic store and do just fine. But nevertheless seems like an overreaction and I hope will be reconsidered. Punish bad actors but don’t make blanket decisions like this.

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