I’ve not played the game in many years, I’ve infrequently logged in to ‘chew the fat’ since & I have always kept up to speed on Eve gaming news via Reddit, these forums & gaming news sites/blogs/tubers/discord. Even to me without logging in it is clear that CCP has made zero further efforts to target botting & illicit macroing.
The punishments for botting remain the same which are minimal time bans. If CCP was serious about tackling botting there would be one punishment, perma ban’s issued & seizing of player/corp/alliance assets without warning. They have announced no new banning punishment & I’ve yet to see a wave of posts condemnation on all platforms from banned botters. So it is clear that CCP has failed here, utterly.
The greatest tell-tale is that eve offline & dotland has yet to see a large chunk of ‘’ active player’’ drops. This is of course why CCP has allowed botting from the get go. They have always been paranoid about this quarter sales & this quarters active players to the point the game degenerated into the rotting mess it has.
They’ve had to cut real peoples lives in half with redundancies because the CEO & board can’t see 90 days ahead. There will be more real player counts to come & real job cuts at CCP because of this allowance of botting.
CCP’s new MMO titles will suffer the same CCP brand infestation from the get go too, that is clear for all gamers to see.
I kind of understand CCP’s shortsightedness over all these years. I understand why they have been corrupt, I understand why they have feared certain player entities, I understand the dangers they have faced from DDOS attacks along the years & negative reviews. They were wrong to pander to certain players over the years and they are wrong to pander to the botters now.
If they are scared about this quarters implications they can do one of 2 things as an experiment. Open a one way region of space in Eve where they openly acknowledge that they will implement the game rules fairly with transparency or open an new server to do this. Hammer down on botting in this area, hammer down on the macro’s, maybe even have a single log on allowed from each IP & see what kind of game develops under this.
The old infestation can continue & new awakening & hardcore server/region can grow with true fans of CCP & eve online. That way all parties are happy, players get a place to go with out bots & pet players while the bots & pet players can stay put where they are and continue.
New server or one way region with focus on implementing the game rules in a competitive sandbox.
A region would probably be better, if it fails players can be ‘‘swept back’’ into the rot of tranquillity. Could be implemented via a one way wormhole that only lets low sp chars through in a pod. On the other side is a region bare bones from scratch. Rookie ships mine the ore in the first week to sell to NPC station to buy blue prints. ISK does not exist & a new currency is available. t1 bpo’s are on sale that is it.
Players make everything from scratch. CCP does not allow botting, it publishes reimbursements publicly for player review & it keeps it paws out from gifting pet players intel & gifts which built the current power houses we see today. You know like a competitive, fair sandbox, the thing they keep wrongly calling eve as of current?
Yeah, that’s along the same lines as what I was saying in a different thread. They know who the key players are and which ones that are RMT’ing, they’ve just let it go on for so long now that it’s gotten out of hand and there’s not a damn thing they can do about it without shooting themselves in the foot.
With CCP, nothing seems to be a problem as long as it effects small number of people. Thus, small problems over time are allowed to balloon into significant ones.
Not to forget CCP is a rather small operation. Even someone huge like Blizzard is in trouble with bots - they killed one operation last year but the things are back again. So a dedicated anti-bot team is too expensive for a company with billions in turnover. The best they can manage is collecting evidence and banning accounts a few times a year, which is apparently perfectly fine for the botters that return with a new version next week.
If you read the CSM minutes, you’ll learn that bots are a comparatively minor problem - most of the damage is caused by compromised accounts and most accounts are compromised because the email account was hacked.
Use 2 factor authentication. Not just on your Eve account but also on your mail account - it only takes a couple of minutes to setup and makes life a lot more difficult for criminals. Give team security some time to invest in chasing bots.
Catching botters is a thankless task - these people aren’t players, they’re in it strictly for the money and will create a new account the moment you ban the old one. Hopefully the 64 bit client CCP is now talking about will have some technology builtin to discourage bots and other automation.
There hasn’t been a lock invented that cannot be compromised, humans are to adept at finding a way, it is the people who “want everything now” that feed this botting problem, and no amount of reasoning can change that person’s mind, that requires them to change their way of coming to a conclusion in their mind and humans are wired to want something in the “now” not later, which is why we see the world run by criminals.