This is a meta-type post, to gather thoughts and advice before accidentally reporting something that might actually be legit.
Lanngisi, an SoE L4 mission hub, seems to have increased in ganking activity since I last played a couple of years ago. No problem, that’s Eve. I get it.
But I saw something that feels a bit… too difficult to achieve without violating some portion of the EULA.
15-16 characters (toons? alts? Whatever you call an entry that takes up one entry in local.) were involved in a gank. The characters are all same-name-but-one-letter, and most of the character portraits are intentionally, nearly identical.
I believe it is improper to mention names here, so I will not do so. if interested, hit up Dotlan or zkillboard over the last 24 hours and you’ll find what I’m talking about.
Here’s the thing. SIXTEEN manually controlled clients - no macros, no multi-plexing? 15-16 windows? 15-16 alt-tabs, 15-16 manually issued sets of commands? Look, I could see nine, ten, mayve eleven. But the actual number involved seems just a bit too high to be believable.
I will gladly shut up if most folks here declare ‘probably legit’. I’m not complaining - I just want to do my part to help keep the Eve experience fair for all players.
whats multi plexing, you admit 10 ir 11 is easy but 16 is not ? , its just a few more windows to cycle through so no problem. The main issue with that many accounts is the target dying before you get to the last gank alts though thats probably a good thing
Pleas read a bit more carefully. I did not say ‘easy’, I said ‘I could see…’; these are not synonymous. I’m legally blind, so more than one client is impossible for me to think of as ‘easy’. But based on historical anecdotes I’ve heard of over the last 15 years I’ve been playing on and off, other folks have heard of legit cases of nine, ten, eleven clients. I have heard no anecdotes yet of legit 15-16 client controls. Maybe this is one of them.
Let me ask you directly: Yes or no - do you believe the activity described in my post sounds like 100% legitimate activity according to the EULA?
So, he’ll have the accounts all set up the same, make use of fleet warp and hotkeys, and have the windows stacked in such a way that limits mouse movement. This results in the inputs required to execute a gank per account taking only a fraction of a second. And since it can take up to 25 seconds to show up, that provides more than enough time to execute a gank on 16 accounts.
Meh, I wish I could find a better quality video, but hopefully this one will still help illustrate what I’m talking about.
Also, not for nothing, but every time I hear someone assert that a multiboxer must be cheating because it’s impossible to do what he does, I assume that they need to improve their execution. So, learn your hotkeys, organize the items next to your capacitor donut in a sensible way, arrange your hud in a way that minimizes mouse AND eye movement, and practice, practice, practice.
16 isn’t even that many for a single person who knows what they are doing. Beyond that it’s not uncommon for 2-3 or even entire groups of people to name and make their toons identical for various reasons often as simple as for the meme. So it could be several people operating 3-6 of these accounts.
Yes. There is nothing inherently wrong with what he’s doing. So, as long as he’s not using macros or bots, he’s good. And no, you can not assume that he’s using macro’s or bots simply because "it’s impossible to control that many accounts. To the contrary, it is humanly humanly possible.
Oh, and unless the dude just started, I guarantee you that the he has already been reported and investigated -if that makes you feel any better.
Now, all of that being said, CCP does not ban players on reports alone. So, if you truly suspect someone of cheating, report them, and let CCP investigate. Of course, you have not provided sufficient evidence in my eyes, but I wanted to make it clear that you can and should report suspected cheaters. Moreover, I think it’s great that you came here to get some feedback before you tied up CCP resources on a report.
It shouldn’t… the amount of times I have reported clear bots in both fw and null and never seen action taken against any of them is a bit ridiculous.
And I don’t mean maybe they are bots but 100% to the point that you can predict and exploit their behavior to catch them every time. My favorite are the ones that only try to warp once or once every 30 seconds so you can point them they stop moving drop point and they just sit there. If you see them start moving just point again and repeat. Even video of this behavior is not enough for ccp.
Yup, I knew I had no real evidence, and hence exactly why I wanted to get thoughts here first: “This kinda’ feels weird, but maybe it isn’t.” I know the havoc that raising false alarms (in any situation) can cause, so you are correct: That is why I checked here first - to not tie up resources from the folks who would end up investigating; instead I wanted to get instinctive calls from players more familiar with this phenomena than I am.
All in all I’d like to think I did the right thing here. Thanks for the thoughts.
I haven’t seen many overly complex ones. But in theory yes.
Most complex I have seen is in FW where they will randomly warp to gates and randomly take those gates or they will warp to another site or plex. You can get a chain of several gate warps or jumps and that’s annoying. But once they warp to a plex they can be easily caught on a gate before they warp inside.
If you suspect any bot action at all, report it to CCP and let them determine if it’s legit. The people posting here don’t know if it’s legit or not… Also the ones telling you it’s legit are gankers anyway, so there’s that to consider as well. Hell, they probably don’t want CCP to start looking into it…
I’LL HAVE YOU KNOW THAT I AM NOT A “GANKER” AS YOU HAVE BESMIRCHED MY FINE CHARACTER BY SO BLITHELY ACCUSING ME!!!
I am rather evidently a “bottom-feeding psychopath with obviously untreated psychosis who is a coward with a mother who is an inexpensive prostitute and who enjoys inappropriate relations with animals”.
Nope, not Kusion. This was a series of… Avian-related names, with the variants identified using phonetic pronunciations of consonants of the English alphabet.
