I think that most everyone can agree that botting and RMT are bad for the game. CCP has said for years that they do investigate these reports and they ban in waves. It’s not hard to notice that the majority of the player base dislikes botting and RMT, wants to see those involved punished, but also wishes that CCP would disclose more information on how they handle these player reports.
I propose that CCP have some kind of system to provide feedback when you report players for botting and/or RMT. I am not suggesting that CCP release a full account of exactly what they do, but a simple:
“We investigated player ‘X’ for ‘Y amount of time’ and found ‘X’ to be breaking the EULA and TOS by botting and RMT”
This would empower players to be vigilant in helping CCP maintain a healthy game atmosphere and provide a better and more fair gaming experience for all. The biggest issue with our current situation right now is that players generally feel as if their reports don’t do anything as there have been MANY in-depth examples shared of obvious botters being reported and what seems like being allowed to operate even for months or years.
I think transparency is best in situations such as this, and some regular dev blogs releasing numbers of caught and banned offenders as well as some regular personal feedback when a player reports botting or RMT would go a long way to restoring customer confidence.
A simplified way to report RMT/botting via an in game button that automatically takes a screen shot. The screen shot would have the offenders name,system of offense,what was being reported, time of activity. Makes any investigation easier with all the information accurately submitted, as well as making reporting much easier.
Have CCP respond directly to the reporting player that they investigated the incident and either found guiltt or innocence. No need for the penalty to be revealed nor is any reward needs to be offered to the reporting player, just confirmation that the case was looked at and a final result was made. No longer should reporting players trying to follow the rules and reporting violators feel that all their reports are going into a black hole, never to be seen again.
CCP should publish the result of their efforts to reduce ToS/EULA violators in a form similar to their monthly economic report. Every player should be able to see what kind of effort CCP is making to combat those that fail to follow the rules for their own financial gain. Every 2-4 months would suffice, especially since CCP claims to ban in waves.
We’re not expecting CCP to be perfect in regards to stopping behavior that causes IRL financial gain, we are merely asking for some direct indication that our concern for EVE and it’s future is mirrored by CCP. If you want us to follow the rules, enforce them. Otherwise, you are merely asking us in a game that rewards “social rule breaking” in game to not take advantage of rule breaking for IRL gain and, obviously, some people are not doing that. It wouldn’t hurt to have an official blog response as well.
CCP isn’t going to give up the power their closed door enforcement policy gives them. They have rightly determined that it allows them to avoid the scrutiny of the players and basically do whatever they want while giving no ammunition for a player to contest their actions in the court of public opinion. Such murky and opaque enforcement of the rules has its own problems and costs when it comes to player retention, but it does allow them to claim whatever they want when they make a decision, or to cover up any mistakes or inconsistencies.
That said, they used to do as you said in point 3 and at least had a presentation from Team Security as part of Fanfest listing in gleeful detail how many RMT operations and botters they caught with their efforts. They don’t do that any more, and just like when CCP stopped reporting subscriber numbers, that it almost certainly a sign those numbers make them look bad. If you made me guess, security efforts were slashed to the bone in the 2014-2015 era, around the same time the development roadmap was re-written to be massively monetization and NPE heavy (injectors, alpha clones, PLEX unification, etc.) and even within Team Security resources were redirected from projects with long term payoff - like fighting bots - to more important things for the bottom line like fighting large-scale RMT.
Anecdotally, there appears to be no or little movement on bot reports anymore. That comes with all the caveats of course, but bots apparently have near free rein. Now, I cannot of course know if that impression is fair, but I can say as a fact that aside from a devblog on the legality of overlays, Team Security has not released a devblog or made a presentation to the public in coming up to three years.
So yes, I agree with you. They should definitely publish a quarterly or even yearly summary of their efforts fighting bots and RMTers. Why don’t they? Yes, I am sure they are understaffed and overworked fighting those that want to cheat and may not have the time to communicate regularly, but I am more worried that they stopped communicating because they have had to largely give up on casual botting, and now only have the resources to go after the large RMT efforts that are directly cutting into their bottom line.
I’d love to be proven wrong though with a new devblog though.
They can already do that. I mean, if it’s your bot, you sure as hell know if it was banned or not after you reported it. No need for any info from CCP to be published.
I don’t think a “name and shame” report by CCP is a good idea but at least some data once in a while, added in the MER maybe, could make people feel it’s not completely useless to report and that something is actually being done about it on the regular.
I’m glad there’s afk cloaking, and that we don’t have safe spaces connected to the game’s economy, otherwise botting and RMT would be much worse. Now if only the price of PLEX went up higher…