@noizygamer It was news! Looking forward to your analysis of how/what exactly happened, though :)
— Ellen McManis (@ali_of_space) November 12, 2013
Over the past few weeks I've happily sat back and watched others cover stories about real money transactions in EVE Online. Funky Bacon was ahead of me on the RMT aspects of SOMERblink's operation. I even used one of his graphics in one of my own posts on the subject. But that was on a controversial topic that had forces behind the scenes digging up dirt in a vast anti-SOMERblink conspiracy. Absent drama, I wondered if we would see that type of focus on EVE's botting and RMT underworld continue.
At least in the short term, the answer is yes. Team Security's CCP Stillman and CCP Peligro paid a visit to Jita yesterday and TheMittani.com's Ali Aras quickly had a story up on the absence of spam bots in local. Ali, who is also a member of the Council of Stellar Management, has to take care to use publicly available information on security matters to avoid running afoul of the dreaded NDA, so she left me with some things to write about. But her story gives me some things to use in my upcoming post. Perhaps more importantly, by publishing the story so quickly, she allowed me to focus on finding sources that can help in evaluating the effectiveness of whatever Team Security pulled out of its hat.
As an added bonus, I got to sit down and actually play EVE. Getting up to 70,000 loyalty points for the Sisters of EVE plus having the time to go back to Metropolis to start some manufacturing jobs was really nice. I like to write, and the research is interesting, but flying around space in an internet spaceship delivering pixels is pretty relaxing.
So for all of those out there wanting to write about the subject, jump on in, the water's fine. And I won't mind. Honest.
