Now CCP’s Team Security is trying to make good on that promise. A new dev blog out today claims that CCP banned over 1800 accounts in January for botting – mostly mining bots, followed by ratting bots. A third of those were repeat offenders receiving permanent bans, while the rest were merely temp-banned. In March, the botting policy will be updated to inflict a mandatory 3-day temporary ban on the first offense, with permabans on the second.
The team has requested help from the playerbase and outlines the steps for reporting botters (start in the character info window). CCP further warns that RMT and account hacking is on the rise since the lucrative skill trading patch that made accounts themselves much more valuable (since they can steal your skill points, not just your stuff).
“At this point, most of the ISK and other stuff sold on the shady RMT sites out there comes straight from other players’ hijacked accounts,” CCP laments. And yes, there are recommendations for how to keep your account safe too.
““At this point, most of the ISK and other stuff sold on the shady RMT sites out there comes straight from other players’ hijacked accounts,” CCP laments. ”
Errr… that would make sense if there was a steady influx of people, thus a steady influx of victims. The game’s population shows a downwards trend, and it was just halted a bit by the influx of the “F2P” clones/accounts. And those generally have very few assets worth stealing.
The majority of illicit ISK is coming from people farming anomalies 23/7 in deep null with dozens of accounts, with carriers and such. You know they’re making bank when they can just shrug off the occasional loss of a supercarrier to a roaming fleet (there was a recent incident where the bot bugged out and kept farming with hostiles in local). The mining bots (that they say is the majority of those that got banned) can hardly catch up to the real RMT machines, the people running those are in most cases legit players with 2-3 accounts trying to PLEX and get some funds to blow shit up.
This is just CCP saying that “eveything’s blown out of proportion guys, we don’t have a bot problem”.
as always, they ban useless bots … Just go after the ones operating them, i am sure they know who they are just by following the “gold”
I dont get why they should be a 1st,2nd ban, cheats should be just outright banned for life.
It’s always possible to get a false positive with things like bot detection and cheating. Often they rely on player reporting to identify cheats and that can be dubious at the best of times.
What is the ship in the screenshot?
I believe it’s one of the concord hulls they gave out for fanfest last year.
So no chance I can login and snag one…got it thanks… :-D
You can buy them, the frigate and cruisers hull were vastly oversupplied due to a CCP screw-up, so they are all over the market. (The one in the picture is the cruiser.) They are still priced as a rare ship however.
The battleship on the otherhand is worth several king’s ransoms, and not worth getting till they are cheaper.
I may need to reinstall and check prices
Seems like we are about at the point where we can basically have weekly roundup articles on all the botting, cheating, and toxicity banning games are boasting/damage controlling about all the time these days.
Its a great thing assuming these companies are accurately banning people within an acceptable margin of error, but on the other hand most of these numbers are being made public because players are angry at the amount of unpunished players still abusing the games and ToS/EULA abiding players.
LOL CCP banning anyone is just to funny.
And they lowered the penalties for botting as well, This is just a half-assed attempt to pretend they are doing anything about botting.
Really? Hmm. Seems counterintuitive at the very least.
This doesn’t appear accurate – from what I could find, the old penalty was a 2-week temp ban on a first offense, one month temp ban on a second, and perma ban on a third. Today’s post clearly says the first offense will now be the one-month ban, with a perma ban on the second. That’s a much harsher penalty.
In March 2013, CCP changed their ban schedule from the 3-strike system you described to a two-strike system, with the first offense receiving a 30-day ban and the second offence resulting in a permanent ban. The change in the bans announced today changes the penalty for the first time a player is caught botting from 30 days to 3 days.
Also, from the dev blog itself:
“Macro use/modified client
“1st offense – 3-day temporary ban.
“2nd offense – Permanent ban
“The change is for the 1st offense which currently is a 30-day temporary ban. This is done to streamline the process and to make it all more user friendly. Players caught botting will get a painless chance to mend their wicked ways, and if they don’t then they simply get removed from the game pronto and we can all move on.”
I must be going crazy because both times I looked for this piece yesterday, I read 30-day, not 3-day, but it does indeed say 3. Thanks for the correction.
I’d assume they’re going with the 3-day to cut down on the impact of false positives.
That’s my guess. And in the meantime, the people can’t transfer the characters to different accounts. Hopefully, CCP institutes a policy of not allowing people who were banned from being able to extract skills and create skill injectors for sale or trade. That would have an impact on both botting and illicit RMT.
Would putting 2FA on in-game actions like skill extraction actually be feasible? If that’s the new thing, seems like the thing to make too annoying/difficult for thieves.
CCP lied about that to sites like this one and PC gamer to save face. (These sites never really follow up on company quotes/lies.)
It’s been a 2 strike system for half a decade already. All that changed was going from (30 day ban for 1st offense, and permanent for 2nd offense) to (3 day ban for 1st offense, and permanent ban for 2nd offense.)
So yes, they WEAKENED the ban penalties recently. Anything you hear out of CCP’s mouth is just lies to try and fight back against the ocean sized current of negative press as of late. (All of which they deserve and more.)