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| leetcheese - TEST Director |
On top of my busy work schedule, my 4-year old computer finally died last night. But what I heard through the forums (hat tip to
Rakshasa Taisab) I visit was just too good to not write about. A Test Alliance Please Ignore director was recently banned for botting. This bit of intelligence is confirmed because the pilot in question,
leetcheese,
posted the information on Kugutsumen:
"A 3 weeks ago, I received a 14 day ban on all of my accounts for allegedly botting. Like anyone else, I petitioned this ban, received a response saying 'Sorry, we say you were botting, so it still stands.' Whatever, only one more week, I thought. I found out that some guy, Anthie, a member of my alliance that I had never interacted with before, had petitioned one of my characters after he had killed and podded it. Fast forward to the end of my ban, two days ago. I excitedly log into my accounts, to update skill queues and do my other duties as TEST's military director. I was actually pretty excited to play eve.
"I logged in my main. Hovered over my wallet, expecting to see the money that I left on the character, or at the worst a zero balance. Nope. Negative 6.9 BILLION ISK. At least all my assets were there. Today, I logged into another alt that I was training towards a Leviathan. It's balance was at negative 5B isk and all of my assets were removed. I had activated that account using the 4 hour activation for unsubbed account as my subscription lapsed during the ban, expecting to plex my character with one of the PLEX I thought I had stored on that account. NOPE. All of my assets were removed. I had 3 shield mods, the drake I was in space with, and an Ibis. Now CCP had not only banned me for two weeks, but had removed between 11 and 16 billion isk from my accounts. Two of my accounts are unusable, as with a negative balance a player cannot:
Upgrade a clone.
Purchase insurance.
Create a contract.
Receive a contract.
Participate in a station trade.
"Essentially, they removed my ability to play the game. I could try manually ratting up that isk in sanctums, averaging 40 million isk an hour, but that would take me 172.5 hours, or 4.3 regular 40 hour work-weeks of nonstop ratting. Just to free one character from the shackles of a secondary punishment I received AFTER the ban."
Ouch! While I don't remember this information from CCP Sreeg's presentation at FanFest, others are pointing out that the security chief did say that the punishments could increase if the current ban plan is insufficient to deter players from botting. Treating ISK gained through botting is one way to do that. Is that the punishment going forward? Or will that punishment only occur for those who involved in very large cheats? Time will tell.
This kind of occurrences just confirm one thing about EvE Online as a game where you need to cheat in order to succeed. CCP considers botting as cheating, but there are other ways that players can cheat without any consequences. The games is awesome, cheating makes it less awesome, the need to cheat is plain sad.
ReplyDeleteCCP is on their way down. My 3 accounts just got banned for no reason, no notification, no warning, no nothing, and they won't respond to my petitions. People are leaving their game in a massive exodus after 3 failed expansions. Check out Perpetuum, it's a much cooler game.
ReplyDeleteAll three? Hate to tell you this, but just the little you wrote has botter or RMTer written all over it. CCP is really good at tracing that kind of thing down. Good to know they are still hard at work even though they lost a bunch of subs this summer.
ReplyDeleteHate to tell *you* this, but what I wrote has nothing about botting or RMT written "all over it", and you just prove what a tool you are for saying that.
ReplyDeleteGavin, you come to a site that has followed CCP's War on Bots and post a story that is typical of CCP banning someone for botting or engaging in RMT. If it is a permanent ban with no warning for a first offense, you were detected as an RMTer. If it is a two week ban, you were detected for botting. If it is neither of those two, you would have been sent an email explaining why you were banned. But no explanation usually means botting.
ReplyDeleteLike I said, your story indicates you were detected botting or engaging in RMT. If you weren't, you can petition that. I have covered enough stories to know you can, so my BS detector is up on your story.
Have fun in Perpetuum. It wasn't for me, but I hope you like it.
Gavin,
ReplyDeleteI did a little research based on the IP that SiteMeter captured for your visit. You are recorded as using a proxy. Are you using virtual machines and/or virtual networks? CCP stated at the May CSM Summit that very few people use virtual machines for legitimate purposes. Also, bot developers and experienced users recommend using virtual machines and virtual protected networks to evade CCP's detection methods. EveNews24 actually had a series of articles explaining exactly how to do this before public pressure made them take it down.
The EN24 article did explain that if you aren't very careful that CCP will catch you and ban all your accounts. I've also read that on some bot forums.
If you were just banned in the last few days, then that means that CCP has just escalated the War on Bots up another level.