Suicide By Team Security

I think the end game is fast approaching for what is now clearly CCP's attempts to curtail the use and abuse of the ISBoxer advanced multiboxing software within EVE Online. Of course, close is a relative term, but I think yesterday's announcement by Blizzard of the introduction of WoW Tokens into World of Warcraft in patch 6.1.2 will give many current users of ISBoxer a destination to which they can retreat. But until that day arrives, I expect to continue to see some pretty amazing things come out of the ISBoxer community.

The latest came from a user who goes by Mog2 on the Dual-Boxing.com forums and Verisimili in EVE. He published the below video on 7 February showing what he believed was a EULA-compliant set-up.


He then posted the following:

Verisimili's Challenge

Not exactly the smartest thing in the world to do. I'm not sure, but Verisimili may have even submitted a ticket pointing to this video. At this point, Team Security has to take a look. As I suspected, Verisimili would get banned. On Friday, Verisimili posted the news.

"Well, all 20 of my accounts were banned yesterday for 'Macro Use' while I still had a ticket in about multiboxing. I have not received an email explaining the situation, just a message when I tried to log in. When I do get it, I intend on posting it for everyone's edification.

"In other news, a little birdy sent me a copy of a response they got from CCP about multiboxing. I'm presently negotiating its release to the public; in short, though, I'll say that in CCP's view, anything that you do with ISBoxer or a similar program that makes controlling multiple characters faster than alt tabbing is considered a bannable offense."

If anyone wonders if Verisimili intentionally threw himself in front of Team Security so he would receive a ban, I would say that is certainly possible.  A little later on Friday, he posted the following:

"Thanks for the support guys. I knew when I resubbed in late January that there was a 50-60% chance of getting banned; I wasn't walking into it blind. I figured if I did get banned it'd make it easier to go back to WoW, and if I didn't then I could have fun getting ships blown up "

The posts of another Dual-Boxing.com forum poster, thedevilyouknow, indicated Verisimili would receive more than just a 30-day vacation from EVE:

"To clarify, I wasnt unbanned (misuse of the word apologies) The ban ran its course, and my accounts were drained of isk (apparently isboxing is in line with the policy for botting, yay...not like i spent dozens of hours theory crafting, training and practicing)

"mosg i saw that page, my response looks identical in many areas with just a bit extra"

Perhaps at this point I should review the penalties for macro/botting in EVE. Since March 2013, CCP has maintained a two-strike policy for botting, with offenders receiving a 30-day ban for the first offense and a permanent ban for the second. Also, CCP announced in April 2012 that CCP would remove all ISK gained from botting when the ban took effect. In a separate dev blog, CCP also announced that:

"...characters who receive a warning such as this will have the characters locked to the account. This means that once you've received a warning for botting your character transfer privileges have been revoked in perpetuity. This is to prevent people trying to circumvent the rules by recycling accounts."

And as per Section 5B of the EULA, CCP reserves the right to suspend or terminate all of a player's accounts, not just ones involved in an actual breach of the EULA or Terms of Service. Actually, I think cases where CCP does not suspend or terminate all accounts is rather rare. If players are receiving notices from CCP that they are receiving bans for "macro use", then I would expect that all of the player's accounts would receive the bans and the penalties for violating the same sections of the EULA as botters.

I'm not going to feel bad for Verisimili. From reading the forum thread, he sounded like he wanted to "win" EVE, but couldn't quite force himself to unsubscribe. So, much like a man who points a gun at a group of police officers, Verisimili created a video likely to have CCP ban all of his accounts. I'm judging this a case of suicide by Team Security.