Team Security: Rules and Policy Clarifications

Hi!

That’s very nice of you, thank you! :slight_smile: I’ll try to answer as detailed as I can.

  1. Extraction was introduced in 2016 and yes, it definitely was a major pain at some point, when Team Sec did not have tools to deal with it. I wouldn’t say that it’s worse now, accounts do get hacked/shared/sold, you name it, but in the past year I personally don’t see a huge spike or something like that. Just business as usual. Use the two-factor to avoid that, pretty please! :pray:

  2. I think it usually comes to case-by-case scenarios. There is alpha exploiting and botting, those are a bit different in our books. Usually exploiting multiple alphas results in a permaban, no exceptions. If they were used to personal game advantage, people tend to create a couple of Omega accounts later on and most likely they won’t appear on our radar anymore. By “industrial exploitation” you probably mean big groups, right? In this case it’s a bit more complex. If it’s alpha abuse, then it’s the same permaban, and if it’s more on the botting side, then we are forced to cut their access to the game completely.

I hope it makes sense :slight_smile:

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Hi again!

Thank you for taking the time to answer. By industrial exploitation, yes I mean by big groups or an individual using a large number of alpha accounts systematically for profit. This answers my questions, though I am going to add more if that’s alright:

  1. Have extractors become less of an issue for you (by virtue of having the tools for it now, or otherwise) or are they as persistent an issue as ever?
  2. In a related vein, is Team Security satisfied with how the situation with extractors is (and their ability to combat its exploitation), or could we see a change in skill extractors in order to combat their use for exploitation?
  3. You say you haven’t seen any spikes in extractor issues. Has there been a trend upwards or downwards in the level of it?
  4. In Final Fantasy XIV, in order to encourage the use of two-factor authentication, Square Enix gave an in-game reward of allowing teleportation to a certain place for free on your characters if you set up 2FA. What are Team Security/CCP’s thoughts of following in this idea, and offering a reward for setting up 2FA? E.g. A skin; a skill point reward; etc?
  5. When discussion in this thread has concluded, can the additional information given in response to various players’ questions be added to the Devblog? Then there is a central place for all this information, and digging through this thread in the future won’t be necessary.
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Is this considered RMT ?

A Live streamer has a loyalty point system, where the longer a viewer stays in the stream channel, more points are gained, if the viewer is subbed they get additional points.

At the end of the week, they run a ISK/Skill Injector type of giveaway to only the top 5 viewers who have the most points

Next week resets points

Money is gained via Ad Revenue, bits/tips and sub fee’s

Absolutely!
All right, lots of valid questions, let’s try to unwrap it.

  1. No, I wouldn’t say so, for TS it’s just business as usual. But I joined it later on, after the injectors were introduced so I can’t really feel the difference, I suppose. Hacked accounts are persistent, and it usually goes in waves, mostly the spikes are on holidays for obvious reasons and in summers, when people are on vacations. Other than that… I think it’s just as always.
  2. I don’t think any changes were ever discussed within TS. But honestly, it does not really matter for us if it’s PLEX or injectors. As long as there is any in-game currency, baddies will find to exploit that, and as long as players have it in their possessions - there is always a certain risk associated with it. Other departments can have other opinions, personally I am not aware of that.
  3. Ah, I think I touched this subject in the first answer :slight_smile: It comes in waves, yes, and the spikes are usually bigger for holidays since lots of people are getting scammed, there is more fraud happening, people tend to be less careful with their cards and payments. To be fair, it’s not just EVE related issue, but worldwide, lots of big companies are facing it.
  4. Super cool idea, I’ll bring it up to the table, thanks! The problem is… our team is somewhat limited in resources, human-power, and implementation of good ideas might take longer than we hope for. And some things are just impossible to implement from the technical perspective.
  5. I don’t think so, unfortunately, we can not edit the blogs. But this forum thread will stay here :slight_smile:
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Again, very helpful and insightful answer. Thank you again. Even if implementing the reward idea in #4 takes a long time, I would be happy to see it done so. I understand the limitations on your team.

I only have two more questions, then I’m done and will stop bothering you.

  1. There has been a persistent RMT spammer in Jita and the help channels. The ISDs do their best to keep it under control, but they always come back. Is there any hope for a permanent solution here?
  2. Is Team Security hiring? :grin:
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Good question! I double-checked with our community folks just in case. Yes, this is against the rules for EVE and Twitch as well. Community also mandate that every giveaway is done in such a way that everyone has equal chance to win.

Can you provide the security teams contact email so we can provide you with video evidence and the name of the player?

Thanks for asking them! I’d be happy to see the rewards too, I always wanted to see some incentive for something good.

  1. It’s definitely been discussed, but so far no permanent solution yet :frowning:
  2. Not now, but you can always apply for CCP, if you’d like! :slight_smile:
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Thank you very much, GM Aisling. :slightly_smiling_face:

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No email for now, unfortunately, but just attach video to the ticket, if possible.

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Honestly just a 3day ban for botting? That is disappointing. So the botters won’t even lose their wealth gained by botting? And they can play again after 3 days? Kinda lol considering how long does it takes to security team to act.

We have ganked an obvious bot a month ago who was mining with Orca + 6 hulks. We were killing his hulks one by one every 15 minutes and the remaining fleet continue mining, activating lasers on another after they were depleted etc.

I don’t know what your internal logs tells you, that this user didn’t even received a 3day ban (judging by the fact that I didn’t receive email thanking me for reporting an user who was cheating), but the fact that he kept mining after his hulks were picked by gankers is an obvious proof that he was using an automation to mine. No human would kept mining after losing a 3bil hulk to gankers and letting them to kill 4 more within next hour.

Likewise the obvious makro usage for smartbombing in lowsec. Still not addressed. Super obvious to anyone who ever smartbombed himself, there is just no way to press it manually in correct order without error due to the way how server (don’t) accept input. I regularly fail with 3 bombs setup doing this manually, and that guy is multiboxing 4 accounts and never fails to press all 28 buttons. It can’t be more obvious really.

I appreciate the article and the communication here on forums, but from what I see, Security Team is not doing enough and macro usage or straight up botting is becoming more and more prevalent. Low penalties for doing it, now publicly revealed, won’t help this either.

People make mistakes, it’s natural. We don’t want to punish bad decisions so severely with a permanent ban. Some were tempted to try it and stopped after the short ban. Consider it as a warning - “we see it, we know what you are doing, please stop”. If the warning is not heard - then we take a more… permanent action. I think that’s fair.

Regarding the obvious bots. I understand that many in-game moments and encounters might seem like someone using a tool. We had hundreds of reports for some players throughout the years. All of those instances have been investigated thoroughly. If there is nothing, then there is nothing and we will not ban people just because they came up with some strategy and managing to do it good.

But once again, if you’d like to report someone specific, send us a ticket with chararcter names and we’ll have a look.

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I feel like a 3 day ban is fair as well. Takes into consideration some spuds who use macros for other uses outside of eve, decides to use them, in eve. Realizes their mistake during the 3 day ban and afterwards, doesnt do it again.

I know multiple people who have been banned for botting, because the “threshold” was hit, and then CCP unbanned them and admitted CCP was wrong. Have you considered the long-term effect of alienating players with false accusations? It doesn’t merely impact the individuals directly, it also affects everybody who knows about the incident, and the playerbase has that much less confidence in CCP.

Yep, exactly this. Mistakes happen, I can understand it to a certain degree. Banning rampage never did anything good.

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In my personal experience there have not been that many cases. I definitely made mistakes myself, my colleagues usually pick those cases up when I ask them for a review. But I don’t remember that much of them, to be honest.

False positives will always happen, this is just how it is when both machine check and human check are included. We decreased the amounts of false positive drastically from previous years, this is something that I see for sure.

Good thing about false positives - they happen only once per player. Simply put, if someone was falsely banned and then unbanned, if the same case is ever picked up again, we’d be extra careful in investigating it.

And yes, we are only humans, but we genuinely try to reduce the amount of those false positives and are ready for the dialogue when the case landed on a sort of grey area. Luckily, there has not been many of those.

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I hope you’re a new breed of GM. I’ve seen many complaints about this that were not resolved “in the past.”

Anyway, hearing from CCP in any way, shape, manor or form is always a good thing! :grinning:

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That’s very nice of you, thank you! I’ve been with GMs for quite a while though, haha :smiley:
Happy to hear it, hopefully we’ll be able to keep on this trend.

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Created the following support ticket ID 1950709

I have ref your name on it, its listed under “Rules & Policies > EULA & Terms of Service”

Good question! I double-checked with our community folks just in case. Yes, this is against the rules for EVE and Twitch as well. Community also mandate that every giveaway is done in such a way that everyone has equal chance to win.

Can you advise, generally if a streamer is found to have violated the giveaway policy what type of action is taken? Ban? Warning? Removal from Partner Program?

Last follow ups, on Twitch if you have Follower only mode enabled, which requires someone to follow the twitch channel in order to chat, does this violate the giveaway policy?

If the Twitch Channel has some viewers banned from the channel, so they are not able to follow or enter the giveaway, does this violate the giveaway policy?

Thanks!

at some point people need to understand that multi boxing is not botting. with all the changes to industry, it is impossible to get the materials you need without a team . sometimes that team is fellow players, sometimes that team is you with a boost ship, and a couple of miners. i pay for my accounts and simply enjoy building things. YET some people still ocmplain that CCP should eliminate multiboxing. i cant even begin to imagine the economic fallout from such an ill conceived idea both for CCP and in the game itself.
hopefully this idea finds its way to the dumpster where it belongs

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