CCP Games has made communicating just how it’s “coming for the bots” in EVE Online a priority all year, both before and after players exposed the scale of the botting problem in a well-publicized sting operation. This week, the game’s Team Security has posted another dev blog updating players on how its war on cheaters is going. Spoiler alert, it’s not going so well – for the bots, that is.
The team says it’s banned 1469 accounts for account hacking, 3388 accounts for botting, and 4953 for (illegal) real-money trading. That amounts to nearly 10,000 accounts sent to New Eden’s version of purgatory, on top of the 20,000 banned earlier this year. “We were super happy with the level of engagement we saw when we collaborated with the Customer Support team to run the two ‘Whack-a-bot’ events during GM Week, and it was great to see capsuleers from all over the cluster come together to help purge the scourge of botting from New Eden,” says the studio. Moreover, CCP says it’s waging war on “RMT groups.”
“With the help of our legal and sales teams, along with assistance from many capsuleer reports of scumbags selling ISK and assets on the internets, we’ve successfully shut down more than 115 RMT groups that are operating on social media in the last couple of months and are planning on also looking to shut down RMT stores on eBay and other e-commerce platforms as we move forward. The war on RMT is never going to end, but so long as there’s a fight to be had, we’ll keep hitting them as hard as we can.”
Worth noting here is that EVE Online actually supports its own regulated RMT system; CCP sells PLEX for real cash, and then players can then trade those PLEX in game for currency or other goods.
It's time for another blog from Team Security covering the ongoing fight against RMT and botting.
Check out more information in this blog! 😎 🚀 🚀 #tweetfleethttps://t.co/hzjUjjffxl pic.twitter.com/IIETKmHNXR
— EVE Online (@EveOnline) August 31, 2018
