So the general Idea is to put serial numbers Capital/Titans and their BPO’s. Think of a VIN number for a car
These do not need to be seen or searchable by players but can be added in the background so dev’s can trace them through repackaging and transfers in space etc.
This can be expanded to every item in the game if needed and data doesn’t become burdensome.
The way it works:
BPO’s have a serial number XYZ
Every copy or ship made from it gets serial number XYZ-123. This formula can be applied to locations and stations of manufacture as well
Now every ship can be traced to manufacturer. Now possession of ship can be logged and traced just like everything else in the game, but totally in the background by only the DEV’s. So now they can’t eject form a ship in space and not get caught.
Can this be applied to PLEX or injectors?
Now how does a RMT’er/Botter move product when every character involved can be traced and linked?
Is this a perfect system? no way.
But it can be a potent weapon against what nearly everyone agrees is a scourge in EVE and every online game for that matter.
I dont know the code…I dont know how much it would take to do it. maybe it can be added gong forward, idk. We know they can rewrite items and ships into others…think fax roll-out…can bpo’s be rolled out to have that feature? can citadels?
The problem is packaging. When a ship is repackaged, its now a fresh object copied from X ship class with no unique identifiers. You would have to create an entirely separate system to keep track of these objects.
If repackaging wasn’t a thing then it would be pretty easy, it would be treated like killmarks are, but you could then just erase its origins with a simple repackage
Pretty sure it can tell the devs who owns the ship, who built that ship, who supplied the components, and every single person that mined whatever it was that it took to make those components.
and a new field can’t be added going forward that persists on the dev side of things…to us the users nothing seems to change they appear as new items…but if for some reason ccp need to track something they can
I think CCP can already track when certain ships change hands. Not by marking the ship itself, but by looking at the transactions. If someone gains an Erebus by just hopping into it in space, then someone else must have left it there before. Not rocket science, and probably doable, if they aren’t doing that already. However, this is obviously not something they can do for everything that changes hands ingame, and is - if at all - most likely only done when there’s a reason for suspicion.
“Marking” individual ships, however is likely not something that can easily be done, from what I understand about how the database works: Things that can stack (such as packaged ship hulls or PLEX) are stored in the database as just a number of that item. So, 500PLEX in the hangar are basically stored as “500 PLEX” - merely two values. (it’s probably more complex, with a field containing a unique id for the stack, a field with an ID that means “PLEX”, a field for the number, a field to say where it’s stored and so on, but it’s fair to say that it’s not a whole lot of data). To give each of the PLEX a unique ID, those 2 values would turn into 1000 values: 500 times the “PLEX” descriptor plus the unique id. And that would probably put a lot more strain on the database.
This could probably be done with Titans, simply by making them non-repackageable (are they even repackageable?) as there are not all that many, but for PLEX? No way!
RMT stands for Real Money Transfer. As long as CCP cannot look into people’s real bank accounts can they never know what goes on, but they will always have to guess.
The way it works is to watch botting activity, and then to follow the trail of ISKs. When a character is known for violating the EULA does CCP look at the transactions of what went were and act upon it.
If I however were to give you 1b ISKs and you’d pay me in real life money then CCP could not detect it. I could just claim that you’re a friend and that I’m sponsoring you. It just isn’t possible to distinguish transfers between friends and between strangers. CCP has to be careful before they start making accusations.
People always complain about CCP not doing enough, but I guarantee you, the moment they would pursue these activities much harder will also more innocent players get hit and we’d end up living in fear of a cruel and unforgiving police administration. Be careful what you wish for …
I’m not convinced of that actually. At least not in the sense of tracking ship ID’s. Transactional id’s and flags, sure. But a unique fingerprint of a ship? I sincerely doubt this.
Why? Well, a while ago I assisted a friend who had a bunch of legacy ships in his possession. He wanted to sell several of those, and as they were incredibly old they had stories attached and origins. So after piecing things together he wanted to get some verification from CCP, so that the tales would have supporting references.
Well, that turned out to be a surprise. Through customer support it turned out that only one of those ships was identifiable, because of extremely old legacy records resulting from traces created by systems in place back in those days. Incidentally, this was one of the first titans built. Everything else was unidentifiable, no id traces, no origin traces. The same for some rather unique items.
That could either mean that such id’s are transient and only stored for some time, or that tech and expansion evolution breaks the logs. Or that flags are placed when there is suspicious activity. Or that could mean that such id’s are simply not present.
There is also the argument of resource allocation and time constraints. Restoring a hacked account, time consuming, it may very well be much more expedient to apply methods such as removing a snapshot of what was removed from A turning up at B, and recreating the snapshot at A. As opposed to tracing and tracking down individual entries and moving them in each case.
I can guarantee you there is no “magic list” to see all this stuff.
There are thousands, even millions or billions of logs, which is why it takes forever for CCP to figure out anything.
Basically you find the character you wanna look at, go through the logs, to find what you wanna find, then follow that item/isk/whatever, to another character, go through those logs, etc. It goes on and on and on like that, until you have followed all breadcrums to the desired destination and unraveled the spider web. Thats exactly why it takes months for some people, to get a hacked account back.
Since there isnt a overall system to track each specific item/isk/character, you need to do the manual work or write a bot that can parse logs for you. Dunno what CCP is doing, most likely a combo of both.
A “tracing system” like the proposed one, could perhaps work. It consist of some simple meta data being added to the database entry.
But it would certaintly require a ton of work to implement, because of the shear amount of items in eve, if its even possible with the current architecture they are using.
Unfortunately, the EvE nullsec endgame has become “Capitals Online” at the expense of other more balanced game mechanics. The jump fatigue changes were welcome and long overdue but ended up being too much of a nerf. This outcome is typically a sign of neglect. No action is taken until the problem becomes critical and then a heavy hand approach is the only response. Players have been drawing attention to the OP nature of ratting with capitals for over a year now but CCP hasn’t devoted the necessary resources to address the problem. It’s therefore unsurprising that botters have used them to their advantage.
So… As I said in the other thread this shouldn’t be a forum topic because any and all ideas you post will invariably be seen by said people you are trying to work against and will result in them being even harder to find.
