Legal remedy and mass reports/complaints to the service providers that RMTers sell their ill-begotten commodity is an option.
But it wont prevent botting, which is the source of those ill-begotten commodities.
If Ebay closes one account, the next day, another will open.
Who’s buying this ill gotten ISK?
–Curious Gadget
You have a 100% logical question. I’m going to answer that with a seeming illogical question.
Who isn’t buying the ill gotten Isk?
To some this question will seem strange. However bare with me.
Sometimes the direct approach doesn’t always yield the desired results.
CCP has tons of data. It can and does get interpreted in many ways for what ever the purpose is at that moment.
Physics and Math often employ tools and approaches to define something by its surroundings or lack there of.
Many of the greatest theories in all the sciences arrived by this method. Later to be proven by test.
It’s a vital tool in investigation.
All of CCP’s data is exactly that,Math.
Edward Witten posed with the task would give an answer and solution in 20 minutes.
Back to your actual question. Tracking
That in itself can create a problem possibly larger than my question.
I wouldn’t know as the information isn’t available.
I could only offer generalizations that would amount to stereotyping.
Me.
–Obvious Gadget
While,I believe that to true. What you or I believe in that matter is irrelevant.
It’s what can or cannot be proven is relevant.
Anything more is speculation and why I refrain from such. What I do have as a reference can only lead to stereotypical conclusions.
I think we can agree CCP is not doing a very good job of collecting/crunching data on A) Botters B) RMT sellers C) RMT purchasers.
Their system seems to rely on player reporting, to a large extent, to which reaction seems to take many months, if ever.
Perhaps they dont have the software in place, or the computational power, or the way EVE presents data makes it difficult to comb through it,
I think they could contact Ebay and Amazon and figure something out to craxk down on RMTers on these two major international platforms. Id imagine there is a similar problem on major Chinese/Russian auction/direct sale websites.
We have two prominent recent incidents to draw conclusions from:
The detailed Mathra et al Reports, which still apparently not been acted on. Instead players tried to intervene in the botting, and apparently where told to stop.
The PIRAT CEO Nyx Fleet incident, where apparently this high profile player has botted vast amounts of isk over years, without CCP detection. Again, this was only discovered and dealt with by players.
There is a pretty obvious pattern in the above.
When CCP catches people botting/RMT they should at least mark every other account in that corporation. Subsequent marks should lead to bans if that person was doing it or not. People using large alliances to filter money to botting/RMT can easily be dealt with because no one will want to be in a large alliance that has messed up because of the risk of losing everything.
Make the large alliances self police, or just watch your game die to botters. There is the easy way to deal with the problem but CCP is probably too afraid to sever large groups of people from EvE, even if it will make drastically good differences.
I dont think its so easy, CEO even was botting. The people who would want to bot would contribute to alliance wealth in the first place, even only by paying tax. If they do not do RMT, they could bot for capitals. The alliance leaders could just leave thing to people and then say the leadership did not knew anything when a peon would be catched.
It boils down to what CCP can do with the game, how they would catch botters and how they would change game to reduce botting.
If the rule was you could get banned for other members of your alliance for botting/RMT, and a member gets caught and you get warned that this has happened. Now imagine the day after that, especially if it was the CEO who was caught doing it. Odds are that corp would be tossing its CEO and probably a few other members or they would take a massive hit on member count.
Like I said, you have to hold leadership accountable. “I Didn’t know”, doesn’t work, and shouldn’t be considered an adequate defense. Lets face it, this is a game where the corporation leadership can monitor the assets of its players, saying you “didn’t know” is just a lie.
You cant hold others responsible for the actions of another.
The responsibility for identifying/punishing botters/RMTers is entirely on CCP.
The best the rest of us can do, is report them or try to interfere in their process, but it cannot be required to do so.
If the rule was you could get banned for other members of your alliance for botting/RMT
What if they did not knew really? You can’t just hold leadership responsible for everything happening in their alliance.
If you or CCP get a proof that they knew, but have done nothing about that, that CEO did not investigated and did not report botter for investigation for CCP, then its just CEO that is just ignoring some signals. Ignoring botting is not the same thing as botting. So CCP can do nothing as there is nothing about that in their rules. A lot of people dont care about botting or RMT and CCP can do nothing about that…
And what if the system is not really designed to catch bots?
Null is so empty that you can bot in empty system for hours. And bots can dock up automatically when someone jumps in. There are ways of catching bots, observing their behavior in space, but it calls for available time to do research, and in null people are more about catching members of other alliances or neutrals. Their own members are not targets by definition. They would only secure their own turf. There is bigger probability that botters will be catched by hunting parties, so there should be more of them for that stuff.
If there would be more hunters, botters would have it a lot harder.
This isn’t 10 years ago, a round of plex, which is the typical smallest transaction is over 1.5 billion.
A corporation watching its players assets, and they are probably ALREADY watching their assets, should easily see large amounts disappearing to players they don’t know. It wouldn’t be a leap to just report all these transactions to CCP for review, just add a button in the corporate control area.
It would be much more beneficial for CCP to push some of the work onto its players of catcing botters/RMTers so they can focus their people on the ones that solo play.
I also disagree with ignoring botters is not the same as botting. You are just as much as fault at them, you could of done something, and you didn’t, you should also be punished.
Removing RMT/Botters is more than removing people, its removing a mentality its ok.
It cannot, and does not work that way.
You are not responsible for the actions of another person, even if you know about it.
In IRL law, a court can investigate complicity past a burden of proof, but this is impractical in EVE and for CCP.
There is not, nor can be, a requirement for players to report other players in EVE.
They are separate clients, and not responsible for the actions of others, or for not reporting it if they know of it.
CCP could make it in a lot better way than just making people watch some numbers or assets and investigating every transaction that took place. I think also that not everything is so easy to spot or deduct. Even if you could watch someones wallet, some guy could just say he bought PLEX and sold it in Jita on alt and then send a lot of isk into his main’s wallet.
There is better way of making players report bots. PvP players, experienced bot hunters, those who know players and bot reactions, enemies of alliances that are there to hunt cariers or VNI’s. They would know how to spot it and they could report them. We need more of them, we need more dangerous null.
But it is different. One is a bannable thing, the other you sometimes dont even know you are commiting and thats why its not bannable. In the end, its up to CCP to decide who to ban, and they should ban only those who deserve it for their EVE crimes.
Do you always report a guy if someone else says, “this guy must bot, he have so much stuff in null”? Maybe he does, and that would make you ignore a botter. Does it make you facilitate botting, or does it make you friend of botting? No. Its only you not wanting to investigate further, because is it your duty? Your work? You paid for a game, not for a bot hunting simulator.
CCP have to evade a witch hunt. CCP cant just ban people left and right for even slightest mention of bot facilitating.
So… if the botter in in an NPC corp, what then?
–Curious Gadget
treat it as a single player corp since there is no active leadership
Having things does not make you a botter/RMTer, and if you are in a major Null corp, I assume they know all your alts. So you sending stuff to someone you don’t want them to know about is slightly a major offence. Again we are talking major transactions over 1.5 bil not every transaction someone does. If you have a member who keeps sending off assets and isk to a alt that the corp cant see is just a clear sign to forward to CCP for suspicion.
Saying you legally are not responsible for other peoples actions is not true. If you clearly saw a crime and who did it and intentionally did not report it, then you could be charged for that, which is a crime.
Null needs to be more dangerous, capital ships needs their hp bringed down more, local should be removed or at least delayed, citadels should drop loot and be easier to destroy by replicating POS scheme of defence, ISK bounties should be removed and replaced with tags that must be hauled to high sec. Logistic lines must be more complicated and aggresive behavior rewarded. EVE null is PvP, it should not be some safe space for null bears and botters.
These would be EVE crimes. And CCP is here to make a law. They dont want to ban everyone, just those who deserve it by breaking that law. How would you see enforcing of that law you propose and how would people react to that law?