[2022] Team Security: Rules and Policy Clarifications

Hello everyone,

We hope you enjoyed reading this last update from Team Security on your account safety in EVE Online. If you missed it then the blog can be found here.

As was mentioned in the blog, if you have any questions about account security or our you want a clarification on some of the rules then that would be the most appropriate question to put forth.They will do their best to give you an answer if they can.

Please note in some cases we are simply unable to provide answers on certain matters, notably if they regard individuals or our methods.

Hi Lucas,

See, that’s the problem We can not confirm or white-list any program, the reason for that is because we have zero control of their development. Let’s say that today it provides one service and we in Team Sec say “sure, yeah, it’s totally allowed”. But then tomorrow the creators decide to add other features that either tamper with in-game files or simplify some in-game process. We have zero control over this, so that’s why we can’t whitelist anything. I hope it makes sense.

I am sorry, but it will be the same stance all over Any third-party program is being used on the user’s own risk. We simply can not sanction it for the reasons mentioned above, and I don’t want to give any hasty promises or reassurances, as much as I wanted to.

Hmmm, did you use a support ticket or an actual email? Do you remember if it was answered by a GM?

I totally agree, this is a very important question, legitimately thank you for asking it.
How about this - as long as you are able to fly many ships manually but using a hot-key to switch the clients and still issue a command manually - that is fine. The gameplay must be manual, that I can tell you for sure.

TS might have a looked at this program at some point, but it probably was before my time in this team, so I don’t know. Personally I have not looked at it, and it was not something that was actively discussed.

Hmmm, where is the first quote from? It’s not from the blog itself, correct?

Ah, it’s not a secret at all - those limitations include inability to transfer the chararcter and SP extraction. And since the account is considered to be involved in EULA violations, further violations (even of different nature) might include more severe penalties.

I think that because it was a bug report it might have been treated differently? But if it was an RMT/bot report, you’d probably would have been asked to submit a ticket

Ah, did not realize that! Super valid point, actually. Looks like the wording might be a bit weird, but this ToS was written a while ago, to be fair. Let me bring this up with the team. If there are any updates, I’ll let you know

No bans are done just for this, EVE-O-Preview has nothing to do with it. The ban happens when the certain threshold is hit, simply put. Let’s say - you have a 100 reports on you, our internal tools picked you up, our certain checks returned positive result. In this case yes, there is definitely something to worry about. But even throughout these cases we had false positives. This is why the edge cases are being investigated by a couple of people. There have been some instances when I made a mistake of misjudging, simply because the user landed up on a very grey area, but my colleagues have provided the second opinion and the justice was restored. So yeah, it’s never easy.

Funny thing, this email does not even belong to Team Security You should use it if you want to report some vulnerabilities within the website, client, any breaches, something like this.

I’d give you a 100% on this, but there is always a chance that a certain ticket will be lost or something happens to it. So instead of promises I can say that ALL tickets that are related to TS are transferred to us, Team Sec specialists. Bought ISK, sold ISK, got banned, want to report someone - everything goes there. And then we pick it up, slowly but surely.

Got it! Will be discussed very closely

No no, you did not miss it, no worries It was not mentioned in the blog itself, but I can definitely talk about it.
Most likely it is, yep. Some limitations can be lifted later, but same with bans, it’s always case-by-case.

Ah, this is one of those cases where I can not provide any info because it’s about another player. Sadly, “can neither confirm nor deny”.

Earlier I replied to the similar question, I think it was from teddy Gbyc. Basically report by itself only causes us to LOOK at it, but bans do not happen automatically based on just this.

In most cases RMT is extremely clear. As long as you don’t engage into it, it should be fine. But once again, mistakes happen and we are not perfect, human factor still remains. If the case is somewhat questionable, if there is a doubt in the decision, we’ll always re-investigate it.

Sadly, asking before banning is not an option, because for 1 false case there will be 50 nefarious cases, where we simply must stop the ISK/PLEX/injectors flow at once.

It’s monitored, but by different people, not Team Sec.
Send us a support ticket and we’ll have a look, your efforts will not be in vain.

It might have been forwarded to Team Sec before, but if it was a couple of years ago, then it was before my time and I can’t answer this, sadly.

Hi,

A lot to unwrap, but the bottom line is “do not bot”. As most of the user agreements, EULA needs to cover as much as possible in a short amount of words and in the comprehensive manner (more or less). Hence the choice of words.
I personally think that this quote is rather self-explanatory, and accelerated rate means, well, the automation. Simple example: it might take a human to win a game of chess in 2 minutes, for bot it will be half a minute. Same here.
You are absolutely correct in your observation, automation exceeds the human input tremendously. And it is very much visible. There are many things that are considered EULA violation and botting is one of them.

It does not matter what exactly Ishtar does. It can engage in PVP, it can go search for drifters, it can dock and undock just for the sake of it. But if automation is used in any of those actions - that is considered botting. The gameplay as a whole is important, not the action itself.

We don’t really differentiate. No, actually that’s not right… We do differentiate the bot types, but again, the botting itself needs to be confirmed within our inner tools. When it does - we certainly take action.

I know what you mean!
That’s probably for the other teams to be discussed, but I’ll certainly bring it up and see if something can be done

That’s not exactly how botting works in EVE, but who knows, maybe one day it might. Personally I have never seen the bot doing all of this together. Bots, or rather the human behind them (who is creating them) usually have very clear goals and rather simple means to achieve them.
But the phrasing of accelerated rate is absolutely correct, you are right.

Good questions, thank you!

1. This happens, of course. This is no secret and I see no point in making this topic taboo of some sort. There are very different scenarios for this situation. Some of them are covered in the blog, it’s the part about ISK selling and possible consequences for individuals. Ironically, in this case the seller is more in danger from other capsuleers than from us. ISK selling is such a slippery slope, the initial success leads to eventual mistakes and, well, consequences.
   Besides, those people who are determined to get rid of anything, might have change of heart later on. But the assets are gone and, well… the account is kind of damaged already.

2. Easy answer - nope, it does not. It brings some level of frustration to the team because we investigate the big amount of reports, and if there is nothing to act upon… well, what was the point of those? But again, reports on its own do not do harm, if the ratters did not use any modifications, they have nothing to worry about.

We definitely try! Always fishing for those big sharks out there…

The emails sent to [email protected] were forwarded to Team Security.
But we decided to slowly transition away of reporting any violations in the game to that specific email, as it was setup for something different, like InfoSec.

So now the best way to reach Team Security regarding botters, fraudsters, RMTers and hackers is via a support Ticket. This for sure will end up in our queue and get attention it deserves.

That is a good question and for that we will need to pull out the graphs of accounts banned from this years Fanfest 2022

To be honest with you, I see no correlation between the amount of accounts banned for Botting or other violations and the sometimes lower amount of players online. I think it has more to do with the real world situation, as pandemic is slowly going away and people are spending more time on different activities rather than video games.

Especially, the numbers of the suspended accounts are kinda huge, but when we brake it down to what we have said at Fanfest, the bigger portion of those numbers where actually not players, they were those sophisticated bot farms that were in the game just for one purpose, generating ISK to be sold on the back market. The same goes for fraudsters, they create accounts not to play the game but to move the stolen goods to the buyers and etc.
So while the suspended numbers are kinda huge, the amount of suspended actual players (and here I am speaking of those players who are / were active members of the EVE Online community) are relatively low and do not explain the sometimes lower amount of players online.

Thank you SO much for these words, it means the world to me, no jokes. One of the team goals for this quarter was to try and be more transparent and engage in more dialogues with you guys, and if we manage to do it… Well, that’s just a reward on itself, for real. Thank you again!

Thank you! We try our best.

This question sort falls into the “personal” category, even if it’s not about the player, but about the alliance. I’ll try to explain though. From my experience and point of view I can tell you that neither alliances, nor the origin of its members matter to us. In fact, for the most part we don’t always know and we don’t always see these details until we pull up statistics and everything.
Lots of players (or rather botters) are a series of numbers for team Sec. I mean it in a literal, not figurative sense Not in a… “nothing but a number” meaning, but as an actual part of bot hunting. We learn names, corps and alliances later on, if the case requires us to dig deeper. But I promise you that it has never ever ever been like “oh, this guy is from THAT corp/alliance, must be botting”. It’s just not efficient.

Thank you for these words!
We do care, our devs care as well, I know it for a fact.

No, I don’t think so, to be honest. This is way too internal stuff even for NDA. Our tools are pretty specific, it takes a while to learn them, and the results are barely the same whenever we do our checks. It took me half a year at least to sort of distinguish those cases, learn to see grey areas and clear cases of botting. And mind you, I still have doubts even now.
So yeah, as much as exciting it sounds, I don’t think it’s possible, sorry!

Exactly, we are sort of uninterested party. We gain nothing from this game-wise, we have zero interference with in-game politics or something. And yep, sometimes we don’t even see alliances of players.

Hard to say, to be honest… I think it’s kind of one of those very specific questions regarding a very specific matter, that takes some time to answer.
I can tell you that much - we never really talked about those kind of setups, I am pretty sure it falls to the “modification” side, but not botting per se. Unless he is using hundreds of accounts to mine all belts clean
But yeah, I am afraid that I just can’t give the definitive answer to that. Not because I want to hide something from you or your friend, but mostly because it just seems like a very specific case.

Absolutely! We welcome questions. Well, most of them
Using alpha accounts at once is a no no and is bannable indeed. We also can see it very clearly and those cases are never a grey area, since it’s just… well, very obvious in most cases.

You’d be surprised, but it’s not always a bot posting those links. Some have very much human input. I think it might seem for many people that there is a lot of bots in chats, since Jita is being Jita.
Of course, some edge cases are investigated, our brave ISDs are actually reporting lots of them and pick them up on their watchful radar.

Those are extremely specific scenarios. To be honest, I have not seen any of those while being in Team Sec, but it also does not mean that it has never happened. It’s just wasn’t part of my experience and part of what I do, that’s all.
We try to look at problems en messe, simply because it’s more efficient. It does not mean that we don’t discuss edge cases, but they are edge cases for a reason.

As mentioned on Fanfest and in previous Team Security Dev Blog, we are working hard to take all the bots down. It is possible that we have missed some or it is possible that what players think is a bot, is actually not. We have changed our approach regarding account suspensions for botting, now we really make sure that the player is guilty and only after that we swing our ban hammer.

There are multiple tools and logs to our disposal, yes they are not perfect but we are working constantly on it to improve them, but they for sure offer more information to us rather what players see in EVE Online.

Please submit more reports via Support Ticket about any suspicious behavior and we will investigate it and take action where it is necessary.

Yes. There are some types of game play that allow the drone ships to farm AFK. Those are the Vexors, Ishtars and Gilas. They are very much liked for a nearly AFK farming.

But again, there is nothing wrong with that, apart of the fact that this is also very much favorite setup to run bots on them. We investigate each and every case and only after that we swing the ban hammer.

Yes, sometimes it causes false positive bans, but when a ticket is submitted we re-investigate the situation and yes we do lift bans and do apologize for the false positive ban. Somehow this fact does not get the attention of the player community, that we do lift bans for false positive bans and do compensate the time that the accounts were suspended.

Regarding the Jita loot bots, this situation was investigated multiple times this year by multiple eyes and it did not yield any results. The allegations that were mentioned in the said videos did not hold ground when we investigated them.

This again shows, that what players think that this must be clearly a bot, does not hold any ground when looking at the logs and the information we have available. Plus we did work closely with the accused players and have requested from them to provide us with proof of a specific situation that we saw in the logs. And they did, explained the situation and provided proof that we then cross checked with the information we have available.

The focus of Team Security for the last year was and still is, to remove botting from EVE Online, to stop account hacking, to make a dent in RMT supply chain and eliminate credit card fraud and we are working very hard on it but before we take action, we are making sure that we have the right guys, that we are banning players and suspending accounts that are in violation of our TOS and EULA.

If account was banned, then there is something in the data that we saw that forced us to take action. In nearly all cases that is justified but sometimes here and there a false positive slips through and we do listen to the accused players and we do lift bans if the explanation is provided that fits what we saw in the data.

It is not something that Team Security planned, but other teams might have discussed it, I am not sure about that.

Haha, good try with the Indonesia trolling. But it would be a shame to ban so many accounts, if you know what I mean

Its our pleasure. We are here to protect EVE and the players in it

This is a new trend that we are now pursuing, more transparency in the actions of Team Security.

Don’t need to be sorry, no one is standing behind us and forces us to be here on the forums.

Worst case, we still have the ban hammer that we can use to deal with you guys

Uff, after 10 years in CCP and multiple Fanfests and other different EVE Online events, you are the first one who picked that one up.

Yes indeed, but I never got too deep into it, I did read some novels regarding Mech Warrior but the name was forged back when internet presence was been established (can’t remember the year) but this was one of my first SciFi online games that I played in a Clan and I had to choose a Nickname and for some reason Stinger got stuck. Still remember the landings on the planets to capture them and to throw out the clan who was defending.

Good job, I actually completely gave up hope that somebody would pick it up

Haha,
Stinger vs Wasp: A battle for the ages… ok maybe not, but still an interesting fight. Who will win???

My pleasure to meet you too

Thank you for your engagement! Always feels nice to talk to you guys

Hi!

That’s very nice of you, thank you! 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!

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

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 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

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.

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
2. Not now, but you can always apply for CCP, if you’d like!

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

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.

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

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.

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

Great, thanks! I forwarded it to the Community, since Twitch things are generally their thing.
I can’t really tell a lot about the action, since it’s usually case by case, and also Privacy Policy definitely prevents me from going into details of particular cases.
I am also not the best person to ask about Twitch as I have zero idea how it works with followers and Twitch banning per se, so that would be a question for the Community