GM_Stinger

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 a...

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.

Well there are some ideas, they are constantly rotating back and forth but nothing solid for now.

I really liked how EVE Echos tackled their own RMT problem, with issuing an asset freeze when those are transferred and depending on the value the asset freeze gets longer.

But this is something above the Team Security, those changes need to go through our Dev Teams for them to be implemented, they need to go through a normal process of development. Those ideas is something that Team Security can push for, but in the end its not in our hands to implement them.

Right now there is a lot of work happening not just by our team, but other teams are also involved but we are not able to provide any information about this at this point. Hopefully we can provide more information and an update Soon™

Ah right, the total numbers of the bans issued.
Well need to brake those numbers down per category of botting and RMT and hacking and CCFraud and just simply the account that are created via automation.

But again as mentioned before, there is data that we see that is just simply is not available to the public.

For example, as I mentioned in the Team Security Panel on Fanfest 2022, regarding botting, there are organizations that are creating accounts every day, in batches. We are able to identify the pattern and remove them from the game at the point where the accounts have been created, even before they are able to login into those accounts and create characters. So when you are dealing on daily basis with the bad guys, you see the patterns and you can say for sure that those accounts were created just for one purpose specifically and that is either for botting or to be used for credit card fraud. Soo in other words, those are accounts but those are not characters...

Ehm, not sure where did this number of 70k accounts come from, it was not from us. Because that numbers is way to high. Please read the Dev Blog again to see the proper numbers.

Somebody here posted that numbers and I am not sure where it came from.

Unfortunately, we will be not disclosing any information about which Corp or Alliance is botting and shame them publicly. This goes against our 3rd party policy.

However, I can name a few corporations that are actively botting in the game and those are:

School of Applied Knowledge
Science and Trade Institute
State War Academy
Federal Navy Academy
Hedion University
Center for Advanced Studies
University of Caille

You Sir, are a troll. And we don’t feed the trolls.

You want a discussion about your case or Roughneck Joe his case reviewed again, submit a support ticket. We won’t be going into details of personal matters here publicly.

Its not an easy answer as it touches on multiple things that are set in place so RMT is very much possible in EVE and if very profitable compare to some countries and their economies.

For starters, you can trade everything and anything in EVE, so it makes it possible to transfer not only ISK but items to any other player in New Eden.

Second, a loss matters in EVE. Some players are not willing to spend the time in the game to replace or even get their new shiny ship that they just finished the skills for but rather pay with real money.

While it is possible to get some ISK via PLEX officially, many many first time ISK buyers are actually new players or the ones that recently started playing. Many of those first time buyers did actually not know that it is against the Rules. And that they are doing more harm by purchasing ISK from the black markets.
Some of them we catch, some of them report them-self’s to us but the problem is, that those new players actually...

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.

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.

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.