Final Thoughts On Eve Uni Botted Isk Scandal

I originally intended to close out my coveragethought about making today's post a summary of all of CCP Sreegs' comments in the locked thread on the Eve Online forums concerning the seizure of the botted ISK from Eve University.  I decided not to because of all of the other issues that arose from the security chief's posting.  I will probably include some of those points in my writings sometime closer to the start of the CSM 8 election campaign as I think the candidates need to address some of the issues.  Instead I'll just give some final thoughts on the whole sordid episode.

First, what I see as the biggest story out of the whole mess was the slowness with which the ISK was seized.  I wrote it at the time in a tweet to Kelduum...

@kelduum That's not procedure. CCP takes any ISK that can be traced to the activity. If CCP failed to do this, THAT'S the story.
— Noizy (@noizygamer) February 11, 2013

I thought that CCP Sreegs' original post on the subject was extremely interesting.  I've bolded the parts I think others have overlooked...

"2) We committed an error in not removing the isk before it got to EVE-U. However we did rectify this problem and our logs show that it was discussed and approved prior to either them receiving the isk or petitioning. We apologized to EVE-U however the petition was escalated as high as it could be and the decision remained. We cannot typically share this information with them as it's really none of their business.

"3) The only authority higher than the Director of Security for these complaints is the Executive Producer and then the CEO. This is a higher level of escalation than the Customer Service arm and IA automatically looks at our work. I'm not sure why we feel we should be able to escalate higher than the highest reasonable authority but the fact is that this team operates with significant oversight. We believe the issue here to be more that this particular CSM feels he isn't in the loop, something which is quite frankly the only proper way to do business in a unit that handles secrets."

Now to do some of that speculating that CCP Sreegs' tends not to like.  Is this an indication that CCP Arkanon, the head of Internal Affairs, had looked into the events if not when they happened then as soon as Kelduum petitioned?  Of course, following Kelduum's argument to its logical conclusion we shouldn't trust either CCP Sreegs or CCP Arkanon but I'll disagree with my former CEO and state I believe that CCP Arkanon is totally trustworthy.  As Arkanon wrote in his dev blog when accepting the position...

"First and foremost, I still consider myself a GM, here to serve the game, the players and CCP, in no particular order. As before, my job is to understand and enforce our rules, to take action when needed and raise the alarm when something is wrong. Only my jurisdiction has changed. Perhaps my new position will not always be the most pleasant of jobs, but I accept it and I'm glad that my personal intolerance for cheating can be utilized in this manner and potentially benefit so many."

Hopefully CCP Arkanon didn't need to hire too many witch doctors to deal with this case, but I wonder if one looked into the possibility that the ISK was not removed because the player in question was a member of Eve University and the person handling the ban was playing favorites.  Because given Eve University's high profile as one of the good guys in New Eden someone might think that.  In effect, IA probably investigated the possibility that the beneficiary of a new T20 type event was Eve University.

I am beginning to wonder if a year into the latest push against botters CCP still doesn't have some bottlenecks in their procedures.  I refer to CCP as a whole because I do not know if the banning process involves Team Security doing the detecting and then customer service processing the paperwork and issuing the actual bans to people.  First we have the three weeks needed to resolve the situation that occurred when Psyco Groupie had all of his accounts incorrectly banned.  Now we have resolving this issue by taking the botted ISK taking three weeks.  I know that CCP Sreegs' plan is a slow steady burn but is the technical side, as slow as some people complain about, still moving faster than the rest of the people involved in the process can move?  For all of those complaining about the three strikes rule for botters at least not handing out permanent bans immediately gives CCP time to correct mistakes.

Finally, one final word about Kelduum.  In real life he works on Sony Online Entertainment's Planetside 2.  That game is quickly building a reputation for being a home for cheaters using aimbots, scripts that allow for the 100% accurate targeting of other players and SOE President John Smedley is doing everything in his power to combat the threat to the game.  Kelduum works in the industry and should know how damaging things like speed hacks, aimbots, resource gathering bots and other forms of in-game cheating are to MMORPGs.  Yet he pulls this crap of attempting to make CCP's team fighting cheaters look bad.  I bet he wouldn't be so understanding if "John" had done this type of activity in Planetside 2.