EVE Online Dev Tracker

@Wesley_Baird @Grildar_Sloan @NeoDark

We were made aware of an issue preventing initiating of an extraction for moon mining. A fix is currently in testing and we expect it to be deployed on 14 June July (derp!)

e: Fix is live as of 14 July

Well this is the problem. You have hit the nail exactly on its head with this statement here:

And, not for nothing, but I wasn’t too thrilled with your response to Ancantes. Yes, you did set him straight on the difference between input broadcasting and botting, but you also confirmed that he had found a cheater, in spite of his evidence being extremely lacking. And so now you’re in a situation where if you don’t ban the guy, it won’t matter if he’s actually a cheater or not -Ancantes will believe that he is, and that CCP is unable/unwilling to do anything about him.

I agree, the situation could be explained by a normal game play mechanic, that not every player who is running 8-12-16 accounts, is violating the rules and policies by using 3rd party tools, but just simply has the setup and skill to do so. However, we still investigate those reports. And we do take actions if we spot a violation of our rules and policies. But because of ...

Thank you for the ticket ID, we will investigate this situation and take appropriate actions if needed.

I actually can provide a bit of inside with the bot reports, as I’ve been working on them for a while now. Super important to remember - none of the bans are issued just because of a certain number of reports that were accumulated for one person. I know that this is a common misconception in community, and I understand why, but the bot hunting process is much more complex than that.
People tend to overuse this feature in all the circumstances, I have mentioned it in my previous reply:

Hmmm, really hard to say. To be honest, I have no idea how it works internally and how it might be compatible with our own tools, so I don’t want to make assumptions or false promises.

You are not obliged to read/listen to anything that we are saying. All that we offer is a little insight into our every-day job and some of our experience to share with those who might be interested. I personally find all Team Sec’s topics quite interesting, but again, this is not a mandatory conversation.
And as I mentioned before, we are definitely not going to discuss the certain cases, bans of some players and rumours that surround it.

Unfortunately I can’t tell you all the details for obvious reasons (that would just compromise our methods), but please trust me on this - we can tell the difference and RMT is extremely blatant 90% of the time if not more. If you are a legit player, you have nothing to worry about. As for my personal experience, I did not have any false-positive RMT bans in a very long while.

Oof, I wish it was that easy. For transparency reasons - I don’t think there is a technical way to do exactly what you suggest, for now at least. It might change in the future, but for now I can already imagine at least a dozen of serious obstacles that would make it impossible. And we actually have pretty nice tools, they do show a lot, I promise. But yeah, this certain implementation is a bit… utopian, although I personally love the idea. If it was that easy, we would have done it, I assure you

Regarding the scans: we do collect some information of the hardware, as you can see in our ...

Ok, here is a lot to unpack.
There is sometimes really not much we can say in a ticket. Just simply that we have reviewed the situation and our decision stands. We can not provide detailed information on what exactly etc. etc. etc. This has nothing to do with transparency, but not providing the information to the heavy bot users or even bot developers.
I can assure you, the bans that we issue are not because of some hardware keyboard that has the macro feature. Our investigations are much deeper than that.
It kinda sounds that every player we ban is a false positive. And that is not true. The bans we issue are solid, meaning that there was something there and that is why we issued a ban. Sometimes it can happen that we get into a gray area and a ban is false positive. But those cases are very very very small amount compared to the ban numbers that our team is issuing.
There is just no way around it, it can happen. But we are doing our best to avoid it completely ...

There is no need to post the ticket replies as those were sent by either me personally or one of our team members. Again, I can not say exactly what happened to those players as I lack information like ticket ID’s or character names. But here is not the place to post that information.
The best way would be, to create a support ticket for us to review the situation again.
We are taking this matter very seriously and are reviewing each and every ticket.

I personally think that this is just the way we humans react to something bad and something that do not belong. Bad experience is always easier to remember, it stays with the player for a while, and if a certain action from our part does not come as soon as we would have hoped (since we are only humans as well) - there you go, that’s how the negative perception is made.

We also did some changes on how we handle tickets. Streamlining the processes and making it more efficient and trying to get to our players as fast as possible.
Just to give an example here, if we issue a lot of bans that will contain a lot of false positives, that will cause a huge spike of tickets and those would need to be addressed and that requires time. So by causing massive false positives, the amount of time that the players will need to wait for their ticket to be reviewed will go up and up. So we are keeping our ticket queue as low as possible and are trying to avoid huge spikes, doing the work before we issue the ban.

If you have somebody who is falsely banned, the best way is actually to create a support ticket for us to review and to deal with that.

As I mentioned above, we try to avoid false positives and if it happens, we try to make the affected players as happy as possible. Now I can not post the details on your case here, because I would be violating our 3rd party policies.
But in your case all I can say, that the suspension was issued when we were working on our procedures, adjusting the methods and because the method of detection was “new” that caused your false positive.
And I am very sorry about that.
But as far as I can see (or better say) your issue was addressed in timely manner and we have provided a compensation that our rules and policies allow.

This is a constant battle that we are fighting. We spot a pattern of a popular Bots or RMT method, we start swinging the ban hammer left, right and center and in just short amount of time those bad guys adjust and it takes us a while to see that the pattern has changed, do some changes on our end to uncover a new method and start issuing bans again. So the effort of the Team is constant. We are also supported by the PX Tools programmers who are making changes to our current tools and are working on the new ones, all that will make our effort easier and more efficient.
The bad guys just come back and it is really a constant battle that we are fighting right now. And that actually shows that we do make a dent as we force the bad guys to change which means that we are disturbing the ISK supply to the black market. But this is not something that can be done in a week or even a month, this is a long battle of attrition.

What about them? It’s Jita man!

But on serious note, those chat bots that you might have in mind, this is something we are not looking at right now as there are other bots out there that need all of our attention.

But if you see somebody obvious, or a player who is really spamming, like if you see a behavior in the game, not just in Jita local, please report it to us via a Support Ticket so our GM’s and us can take a look at it, investigate and take appropriate actions.

Thanks! We would love to have more opportunities to have this sort of… dialogue with all of our players. I think it’s super important to let everyone know that we are also humans behind those decisions (which are sometimes very tough) and we genuinely want to make the game safer and more enjoyable for everyone.

We do try to eliminate false-positives. It’s a massive work and it requires many small adjustments that we have to do on the go. Also, it’s important to remember that the bans can be treated case by case. If a player think that their account was banned falsely - we always encourage those people to send a ticket to Team Sec and one of us will have a look.
But some actions that we see can not be performed by human, is it simply impossible and we see that with the help of our tools. Personally I wouldn’t recommend using any features of the equipment/any software if you are not sure that it will not trigger the investigation eventually.

Actions are definitely being taken, it’s just sometimes they are not as visible as you guys might hope, but there are good reasons for that. We do have to keep this balance between sharing the results of our work and making sure that our methods are kept reasonably hidden. That’s what makes it difficult sometimes.

Thanks for doing this post, all. Transparency is difficult when it comes to what Team Security does, but I still think it is necessary so that folks know that their reports and complaints about cheating in the game are being acted upon.

Hi Iceacid!
I assure you that selling and buying ISK is always always visible, the patterns are very clear for Team Sec members and those are never really a grey area. If her Majesty Saviourette of Highsec Queen Aiko are not involved in any of this nastiness - there is nothing to worry about, that I can tell for sure.