"Kelduum asked why CCP found it challenging to tell whether the one person with 5 characters and 5 accounts in his own corporation was actually just a single person. Seagull explained that right now, the focus was on tracking accounts and characters, but not necessarily humans. Identifying unique humans that are being added to the community would be essential going forward, as Seagull didn’t feel comfortable working under the illusion that increased character participation in an activity or increased subscriber count actually meant that they were gaining new customers as a business. Unifex reiterated that this was an absolutely critical problem to solve in the near future, and that their analytics team was actively researching the number of human users in particular. Seagull added that CCP needs better tools for examining cancelled accounts, for example – which could represent either players quitting the game entirely, or people still playing the game but reducing their accounts." (p. 10)From everything I knew about how Eve Online worked I knew this was the case. Is this because Kelduum isn't too bright or because I've visited botting forums way too often and read how botters operate? From what I've seen the only time CCP attempts to link multiple accounts to a single player is when Team Security is trying to ban all of a botter's or ISK seller's accounts.
So what is the impact on the War on Bots™? From this answer I assume that a team completely separate from Team Security is going to build a database linking accounts to actual people. I think that should prove an interesting exercise since many of the lurkers CCP Seagull talked about in the session are botting accounts and botters and ISK sellers already go to great lengths to hide the links between their multiple accounts. I'm assuming that Team Security will have access to the information CCP Seagull's analytics team produces, which may make investigations into bad behavior run faster as a lot of the legwork of tracking accounts will already be done.
I have one more pleasant thought. Botters like to make accounts with the same name and just add a number at the end, like Bot1, Bot2, etc. A lot of players wonder why CCP just doesn't look at names and use that to track and ban botters. The question I'd like to know is if someone makes accounts with sequential names and totally different personal information (like email addresses, home addresses, even credit cards) will that throw up red flags to the analytics team? And if they see that will they then alert CCP Sreegs of the security threat? I say security threat because not only could that indicate bot use but possible credit card fraud, with the associated charge backs coming out of CCP's corporate wallet. If that happens then Team Security just received some reinforcements in the War on Bots™.
