You show me a bunch to toons with the same names and numbers at the end, I see just another collection of ex cloaky camper alts like Aunt Jemima’s Southern kitchen and the Alpha Beta [00…99] tools that camped entered regions for ISK.
At some point are you guys going to get sick of what is obviously cookie cutter industrialisation ( 10 alphas can run as many industry jobs as 1 omega, but alpha’s cost nothing ) and issue bans for iteratively named characters under TOS violations for deliberately impacting the performance of the server?
Well there are some ideas, they are constantly rotating back and forth but nothing solid for now.
I really liked how EVE Echos tackled their own RMT problem, with issuing an asset freeze when those are transferred and depending on the value the asset freeze gets longer.
But this is something above the Team Security, those changes need to go through our Dev Teams for them to be implemented, they need to go through a normal process of development. Those ideas is something that Team Security can push for, but in the end its not in our hands to implement them.
Right now there is a lot of work happening not just by our team, but other teams are also involved but we are not able to provide any information about this at this point. Hopefully we can provide more information and an update Soon™
I am no troll, good sir. I am tempted to say I’ve been playing this game longer than you’ve been a CCP employee, because you have no understanding of the black marks on the history of Team Security. Need I remind you of your team’s fuckup with Brisc and Pando? You guys sure did shoot first and ask questions later there, when it was, no doubt, a hell of a lot more important than a nullsec Ishtar ratter.
I asked you why you think your team deserves any trust given some of the issues I raised, and you pulled the ol’ “I can’t define obscenity but I know it when I see it” card. The issue is, that card is old and worn out, and in an age where Team Security seems to be operating without any form of oversight or proper recourse for false bans, that just doesn’t cut it anymore.
And again, in order to avoid the hard questions, you label that person a “troll” and hope he goes away. I note you didn’t actually respond to Roughneck Joe’s question directly either. I consider him a friend of mine and I was on comms with him when ■■■■ went down, so it would be appreciated if you actually answered his and my questions.
E: Stop flagging this ■■■■ as spam, Mister GMs. You can’t escape responsibility that easily.
So you are saying you don’t even look at all the potential evidence that would either prove someone’s innocence or guilt and decide on someone’s guilt after only a fraction of the evidence. That is a ■■■■ way of doing things and most likely lead to many false positives due to confirmation bias.
Yeah sure, let’s just ignore people with valid concerns because it doesn’t track with the narrative that is trying to be pushed. Great look. This will surely give people confidence in the security team’s actions.
That’s not a reason why you could not do it.
I hunted extensively… like proper madly extensively for bots. On a best day usual 5 hours gameplay session i managed to properly find, identify, document and report close to a 50 of them across 4 regions of space and i hunt 99% in null sec. For my own purposes i screenshot and note every report i do so in a month time if that account magically ends up in npc corp never to log in again, that’s a ban in my books as i check the player to avoid double reports on him.
OF course you can create pie chart for cheaters and botters. Even including separate section and naming it (banned in npc corporations, never to join a player made corp). You already have the raw data, made slick graphs from it so did it already for presentation purposes.
Choosing the safest option to save face rather than point a finger and state “out of 70k accounts banned this and this percentage belonged to accounts affiliated with xyz alliance”
Well it is easier to monitor the region for same activities from same alliances without them being forced to move out and set up shop elsewhere , that’s true. But for players who not without proof suspect a massive cheating apparatus that some alliances allow, endorse and viciously protects, that’s just hush hushing the problem after posting raw numbers.
That is absolutely not what I said. We look at all the evidence that is required by the investigation. If the case lands up on the grey area - we unleash the full investigation. If it’s straightforward - then there is not much we can do, unfortunately.
That’s literally what you said. You have some amount of tools that provide evidence of guilt and you admit that you don’t look at all of them. That’s literally the definition of not looking at all the evidence.
Thank you guys for your questions and for your engagement with us, some questions were super tough, but I am very glad to see them being asked. I like to think that we managed to clear out some things, and I hope that we’ll be able to do more so in the future.
If you think that some of the issues you are curious about were not addressed or you would like to ask more questions, you can join our Q&A in EVE official discord. 19 July at 15:00 UTC. Submit your questions in the #ask-ccp channel. Deadline for question submission is 18 July.
I must mention once again that we will not be able to comment on the individual bans and individual cases, this is something that can be discussed solely with player involved and Team Sec. This is simply a part of the Privacy Policy that we have in place and not something that we can change.
Yes, exactly, it all depends on the case. Sometimes the RMT behaviour is extremely blatant and it does not require further checks.
Let me give an example to make it a bit more clear: person A has just created an account, used the stolen credit card to pay for PLEX and then distributed those items to buyers in various ways. Person A has some other aliases, that have already been banned for the same behaviour back in… let’s say 2020. This is the blatant RMT and it does not require checking forum history.
How does the incident rate for RMT compare per capita in EVE Echo’s vs (the one true EVE) EVE Online?
Perhaps replace outright bans with “Thought shall be locked in a new star system (call it Australis) and made to mine lavite in a rookie ship for the next 1,000 hours before release back into the greater new eden” so those that feel wrongly targeted can prove their innocence or guilt by trial of ordeal, since there is some contention around the process employed by CCP and there is no way in hell EVE will work with judgements decided by a jury of their peers.
Just need to add a tomato firework to shoot at them and we are golden.
I am afraid that real life examples that are considered law-related do not always come handy when it comes to online multiplayer games. Otherwise it would make our job much easier It’s much more complicated than that and involves the ever-changing technologies that usually change drastically for a year or two.
Scenario
You detect that a players gameplay is automated and issue a ban for “macro” use.
This player did in fact not use any macros or any other automation tool.
Player creates a ticket asking to have the ban reversed.
You do a manual review of the logs and come to the conclusion that “macro” was used. Ban stays.
What can this player do to provide you with whatever it is you need to accept that your macro detection have produced a false positive? What programs, what data…WHAT do we have to collect? What do you accept as a counter to what your tools say?
Or to quote someone in this very situation
I have to play with fear that I might get a perma ban because I dont even know what triggered it
One of my best friends, and the person who is the main reason I still play this game got banned recently. What followed was a series of support tickets, many of which I helped him draft because he was upset and stressed and wanted more than anything to understand why he got banned. He still doesn’t, not really. He was told best to read the EULA and not break the rules.
The problem is, he doesn’t actually know why he got banned.
It’s possible something he was doing caused an internal to flag and suspends his account, and if so he has no idea what that thing was. This means if he does this unknown thing again all of his accounts likely get terminated, all of his time, his effort gone, poof. . .
The other option is someone reported him, possibly out of spite and a GM looked at the evidence and decided he did something wrong. Either way in both cases he wasn’t able to get a concrete answer as to what it was he did. So how is he meant to not break the rules again?
Now he has decided to continue playing, but is worried about getting banned again - and what if he does? He doesn’t really have any recourse… so all his commitment to the game is wiped away in a moment.
TBH if he does get yeeted out of Eve, I’m not sure I’d have a reason to play anymore, so I’ll probably kill my subs and end my ~15 years of playtime in this game, many of which I’ve volunteered my time to improve this game in one way or another. Not really a net positive.
I get that the GMs here have a very difficult job, and I also understand that to some extent there is an arms race, if you say too much you risk making your own jobs harder; however, being overly vague doesn’t help the people who get caught up in suspensions and I do feel like there should be more caution used in cases where the person may be innocent or otherwise breaking a rule they didn’t know about.
I haven’t erally played that much in the past year but having logged in a few times in the past few days it’s quite disappointing to see that there are still cloaky campers in every system in the region I live in 24/7. I thought the 15 min reloak would help stop this but it hasn’t.
I understand that you want to be doubly sure that something illicit is going on but unless there is someone that is sleep depriving themselves and playing EVE full time, they must be scripting/botting/account sharing. I don’t see how these things are not obvious? You must have tools to search for who has been cloaked the longest in the past week to show all the suspects.
The cynics will say that these kind of operations make CCP more money and everything is about the bottom line. Whereas I’m sure more is lost to those leaving because of this stifiling gameplay style that is seemingly - to me as a casual player - being brushed over.
It’s the opposite really. In most games frequent updates are the lifeblood of game but in eve the more frequent changes to the content the worse you end up since skilling to one ship of specified role takes like a month or so, and changes in industry are so volatile that settling down takes 3-4 months and guess what… another crap stirring update is comming in so no time to relax.
Botting and cheating nowdays re-lives it’s renaissance as the ratting part especially is basically repetition of same thing 100x over. You can see in last 3 years shield deadspace modules went down like nearly 30%, from abyss bots (yes those are a thing) a frigate deadspace modules went up like nearly 200%
Im guessing from average 200 bans a day this number will just increase and we will see new wave of GM’s to compliment the ones we have as a numbers of cheaters will just increase.
I listened to the Q&A. and this wasnt addressed. so im posting my thoughts, and input here.
I am aware this isnt something Team Security can handle themselves.
An easy way to reduce the amount of “false positives” would be to start supporting basic software macros, or support hardware macros.
There is already a key bind/hot key system in game. just expand that system so we can make software macros in game, similar to what Final Fantasy 14 has. Doing it this way allows CCP to control how effective a macro can be, and allows everyone access to the same system.
Or start supporting hardware macros. Change the EULA & TOS that as long as a macro doesn’t “exceed human ability” (hitting 6 keys in under half a second kind of thing) then macros are supported.
In addition to just making things more comfortable for a normal player. What about a player with a physical disability that would have to use macros so they could start to, or could continue to play the game.
I am fortunate to be in the comfort side. still.
So here is a more personal example for you to address.
I have both an Razer Orb Weaver game pad, and an Razer Naga mouse. Both of these have extra keys, and could emulate keyboard commands. (the Razer Naga has 12 keys on the side that are defaulted to the standard number row)
I would love to be able to set up my Razer so Instead of the number row, it emulated the F row. thus allowing me to use my modules, and control 99% of my ship with just my mouse hand.
Or even using my Orb Weaver so I can have my hand in a better position that it would be trying to hover over the F row.
Both of these would be a lot more comfortable to do than having to stretch my hand all over the keyboard to hit various keys.
I do neither out of fear and concern that I could get hit with a ban just for using hardware that is attached to my computer.
It’s much more complicated than that and involves the ever-changing technologies that usually change drastically for a year or two.