GM_Aisling

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.

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 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.

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.

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...

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.

This is definitely something we would like to work on - raising awareness regarding those cases and removing this aura of unnecessary secrecy that surrounds Team Sec. This is not something that is done in one day though, but hopefully we’ll be able to change that.

Everything that you said is legitimately very important to say many times in a row and hopefully new and old players will hear that.

As we mentioned in our panel on fanfest - buying from the third party websites is not supporting the small player business. Those are organized groups, they do lots of credit card fraud, they hack accounts, and who knows, maybe some day an ISK buyer will end up buying injectors that were taken from his friends SP.

The choice of buying or not buying ISK aside seems easy now, so we would like not only to stress the inevitability of consequences, but also share the origins and sources of those funds.

In the end of the day, everything aside, EVE is a game that people play for their pleasure.

I personally don’t think that it’s fair to shame alliances/corporations/regions with certain prevailing population just because some of those who share a space with the might have made a bad choice once. For some the corporations are like family, close ties are made there, friends and relationships. Shaming and nullifying all of this only because someone landed on a slippery slope does not seem right to me.

Crude example: imagine person A living on an island and is friends with everybody. He loves it there, he is proud of his island, he travels everywhere and tells people how awesome his island is. Which is technically true, the island IS awesome. Later there is a news article in… let’s say BBC News that this island is populated with the filthy robbers who stole this much from the treasury. But person A has never stolen anything from the treasury. He knows that his friends, pers...

We check everything that is required by the certain case.

Imagine that we have… let’s say ten tools. Sometimes we check two, sometimes five, sometimes all ten. Depending on the case.

hi! All right, lots to unpack, but I’ll try to answer to that. I also encourage you to come to the Discord and ask us there, we’ll have Q&A session next week

Important to remember - now we are talking about false positives in the RMT bans, not botting. Easy to confuse those two. I am also talking about my personal experience and all the investigations that I have been dealing with personally (provided second opinion, did researches, spent some nights over an overly complicated cases - pls don’t judge, those were rough lockdown times).

Yes, the decision in those are definitive. I wish I could provide our reasonings for it, it would be very easy for players to see how we actually operate, but due to the security reasons I obviously can not disclose our methods, otherwise we’ll have to develop them from scratch. Some c...

Hi! In this reply I was talking about RMT bans, not bot bans specifically. Those are very different kind of bans and very different kind of investigations that need different kind of proof. Let me know which one you’d like to ask questions about, otherwise it can be easy to confuse those two.

hi! of course, my pleasure
I am afraid we can only provide answers regarding to bots and RMT stuff, as we don’t really deal with chats, threats and such… Sometimes we do, but it’s more of an exception, and those issues are usually processed within the standard means.
But I can tell you how it works in general, if you are interested? Nothing specific though, as we can’t discuss cases.

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 ...

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.

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.