First, they said that anyone caught doing RMT gets zero strikes. Straight to permaband.
The 3-day ban is for those found ‘botting’ but don’t have a direct link to RMT.
These naughty players are being given a 3 day ban for two main reasons:
Faster time to get to the permanent ban should they do it again. The first time a player might plead ignorance, but no one will buy the second. A three day ban is enough to give a warning to players who honestly didn’t understand that botting is bad - or more likely to those EvE players who pushed the envelope and strayed over the line. It’ll keep the honest players honest.
For those that are gonna bot anyway, it’ll give them a false sense of security when they continue in their nefarious ways, which the team will have been watching.
Its explicitly a condition for signing the contracts.
Whether they actually have read them, is another issue, but by agreeing to the terms, they claim they have. If they havent, that itself is a violation of the contract and cause for terminating the contract.
Also, seriously:
“Oh, I didnt know botting was not allowed…?”
Pffft.
This is a concern that CCP has not publicly addressed.
If I was a botter (I am not) if I got caught, after the measly 3 day suspension, I would extract all my SP/isk/value, start a new account, contract/send/sell all of it over either directly or via “fences”, and go right back to botting.
Afaik, CCP has no rational/reasonable systems to track my transfer of SP/assets, especially if I run it through a convoluted process, nor any rational/reasonable way to identify the new account as associated with me as a caught botter.
At the previous 30 day suspension, as a botter, I would be unable to access my account for SP/assets extraction for 30 days, and would have additionally lost 500Plex/1sub.
Ergo with the previous 30 day suspension, I would be unable to resume my botting operation on a character I transferred SP/assets to, for 30 days, severly impairing my botting operation. Also, at a 30 day penalty, I would have lost 500PLEX/1 sub, ontop of that.
Dev asked us if we thought putting a SP extraction ban on the character/account would be good. We unequivocally, emphatically said yes. Havent heard back on that since.
The character transfer issue is one thing, but is only equitable if its a high SP toon. Otherwise its cheaper financially to simply stripmine the SP off it, and inject them on another character on another account.
We asked CCP to specify whether they will confiscate value earned by botting, when a botter is caught. They did not respond.
Doing a digest of replies here… time zones and all that.
"Signed’, maybe, but while they should have read it, it stands to reason that many would not have.
Just to be clear, I’m discussing actual players, not the mythical (but useful) homo economicus.
Which follows to…
I agree with the sentiment, but it’s possible that someone may have read and signed the documents…and still have a misunderstanding of what the rules mean - most people aren’t lawyers. Also, I’m using ‘botting’ to mean any automation that’s not already built into EvE. It’s possible that someone is using something they wrote themselves for some sort of disability assistance (yes, a stretch, but still possible). The three day is still a black mark (they did break the rules after all), but it does give the benefit of the doubt. CCP would likely rather rap some knuckles than lose a misguided player that can be redeemed. Remember that evidence of RMT links go straight to perma-banned.
I would suspect, that for at least the duration of the ban, they’re locked from the account.
If you were a botter, you would just do it after 30 days as well.
And AFIAK, They very well may have a system in place to track transactions/assets. I’ve seen plenty of threads where CCP has taken away ill gotten RMT stuff leaving characters at negative ISK. I’ve seen SP redeemed after research of a bug. And if they can recognize botting, then they can find out what was ‘earned’ when the process was active. Personally, I’m of the hammer method for assets - EVERYTHING is forfeit during periods where it can be found that they were potentially practicing automation, and by that I mean from the first noticed period of automation to the ban. Since any assets are CCP’s property, they can take it all away. I suspect that CCP’s actual response would be a bit less extreme.
Thank you for the update.
I had been remiss and not checked updates recently.
The itemised ban figures is a great improvement to the report and the SP extraction restriction will go a long way towards preventing them resetting up bot operations at very little cost.
Why not make all combat anomalies into sites that have to be scanned in order to be warped to? If they all have level 1 scanning difficulty and still appear as combat anomalies on the probe window, it won’t affect explorers and make it only a tad bit more difficult for hunters to catch ratters. The up side of this would be that bots wouldn’t be able to warp from anomaly to anomaly and thus there would be no more ratting bots. Thoughts, salt and criticism all welcome!
TBH, I don’t think it would work, though it’s a nice thought, and it would also increase safety as people would have time to see probes on scan.
The reason this won’t work in my view is that the botting scripts would just require a tweak.
For example, a player could initially scan down all the sigs on one character, exempt that character from fleet warp and keep it in a safe. Then every time a bot finishes a site, it could just warp back on grid with the cloaked ship, which would fleet warp it to the next site.
At this point I’m all for a gigantic ass CAPTCHA in the middle of the screen every 5 minutes. If you don’t immediately solve it, all your modules shut off. I’d put up with that for a couple months straight if it would get rid of the ratting and mining bots…
It would make bots slower and some of them would just stop working for sure but in null it would give ratters +10/20 seconds or even more, which is too much time to warp out. The point of the game is not to be harder to bot, but to be enjoyable for both the hunter and the hunted.
