FC prioritizing FW input broadcasters over paying customers is driving players away. Players are quitting EVE and cancelling their subscriptions because they feel their feedback—and their efforts to report bots—are being ignored. This problem is in other areas of space as well!
And banning only small group of them once year wont fix the issue.
EVE is a social game. When friends start quitting, others often follow. Why continue playing when the people you play with are no longer there?
FC should be more heavy-handed and ban/ dissolve entire alliances if need be. Make the players hold up the standard at kick members from corp/alliances anyone doing input broadcasters or something similar. Name and shame them publicly, if there doing it consistently.
I know this will probably fall on deaf ears, but someone has to voice these concerns until FC addresses them.
Please stop calling EVE a social game. It is not required to socialize at all. There are many people just playing EVE like a single player game.
And even if your social group is lost, you could try to find a new group. All things change over time and nothing will stay set in stone. So it is a “you problem” to cope with it as it is sure to happen sooner or later in the long run.
I have played EVE for 23 years now with several transitions from group to single play and back again. Your own life changes as well, so you have to adapt your EVE playing to it…obvious. I can’t roam with my friends as i used to do 20 years ago, because either they don’t play anymore or they have family now or they do different activities in EVE now or very limited time.
And there it is—the excuse to make sure the status quo deliberately continues. Just bait and milk the new players until they end up in the same situation and leave.
Maybe you didn’t understand my post? I did not write anything about verified input broadcasting, i only wrote about your perceived social aspect of the game. A problem you will have with all online multiplayer games if you can only make sense of them if played with your friends.
Input broadcasting however should be considered a bannable offence as well in my opinion. But not all multiboxing is input broadcasting.
And maybe my original post wasn’t worded perfectly. To be clear, I’m not against multiboxing. I’m against input broadcasting and anything that effectively replicates it.
The problem is that when players repeatedly report the same behaviour from same group and see no visible improvement, they simply stop participating. People avoid the content, stop logging in, or eventually stop playing
At that point, it starts to look like FC’s priorities are somewhere else entirely.
This is indeed the case sometimes. For example, Kusion live-streamed himself ganking on 20+ accounts with a clear external view of his screen, keyboard and everything.
Say you report soneone for being a bot on june 22. June 23 they arent gonna be removed. It might be july 23 before they are, if FC even has facts that they are bots. Same with ppl doing input broadcasting, it takes a while to gather proof.
Not to mention they been posting (not May yet) past several months of banning input broadcasters
I understand investigations take time, but some of these groups have been reported repeatedly for months. There are quite a few of them active in Guristas Faction Warfare, with ties to both the Guristas and Caldari sides, which is why players are becoming frustrated by the lack of visible action.
To FC’s credit, they at least put a stop to much of the awoxing that used to happen. However, the current behavior still raises questions. From the outside looking in, some of these groups appear more focused on farming ISK as efficiently as possible than actually engaging with the game or contributing to the content around them.
Do I have definitive proof of anything beyond that? No. But when the same patterns persist for years, it’s understandable that players become suspicious and start wondering what’s really going on.
Yeah sometimes it’s hard to tell what is legit and what isn’t. Take me, for example. I like to drag mine in a fleet, and when I send a warp fleet command my entire operation instantly warps out with a single click, no third party input broadcasting required because it’s built-in to the game.
Fleet warps are a built-in game mechanic, so I have no issue with that.
What I’m talking about is when an entire fleet seems to lock and react at the exact same time repeatedly. That’s the kind of behavior that makes people suspect input broadcasting rather than ordinary multiboxing.
Part of me things maybe its good, let them and other bots in game contribute into isk inflation unhindered and simply avoid that part of the game. Let them destroy the game. All we can do is move to another game.
I can only say i usually don’t chat with unimportant random people in local.
So i used to do this for fun also. It is very easy with a small fleet. Don’t react to stupid local chatters and bumpers, have everything on auto approach and be fast to make everything appear like input broadcasting.
Then just ignore them. It just makes them furious and explode on the inside as they can’t wrap their head around it and in their mind you are obliged to answer if they chat you. And then they will start to report you as bot with no effect.
I wonder if any of them got banned instead. As far as i remember FC says there are consequences on your account for false reporting afterall. I think they never gave statistics on that. But i might have not noticed.
If Fenris takes no action (bear in mind that it can take them months to do it!), then it probably wasn’t input broadcasting, or it’s not possible to definitively prove it.
Yes, there is such a warning. Which is why I only report those I am 90-99% certain are bots. Which means only the ones that are obvious from 3rd person observation.
I think that warning is there because some guys abuse it against a targeted group/players (which sounds like what the original poster is doing).
I would say EVE has some of the most antisocial, mentally-disturbed and potentially psychotic personalities all clustered together. And those are on the tamer side…
i would recommend you to watch the video of the FC devs in charge of banning people for RMT and for input-broadcasting at fanfest
As you will see they actually care about it, but as others answered here
what you think is input-broadcasting may not be input-broadcasting or there are not enough evidences
when they ban people it does not occur immediately, sometimes they do a massive ban and they also track where the money goes etc
So saying that FC is “prioritizing FW input broadcasters over paying customers” seems wrong
