CCP's War On Bots: Another One Bites The Dust

Yesterday one of the major gold selling sites that I identified Monday as experiencing supply problems, Koala Credits, took Eve Online off of the list of games in which it sells virtual currency.

Eve Online No Longer Listed

The virtual currency seller apparently began to experience issues obtaining ISK at the end of October.  Many companies began raising prices around this time as CCP's Team Security began a crackdown on illicit RMT operations in New Eden.  But of the ISK selling sites listed on MMOBUX Koala Credits raised prices the most, a whopping 27.9% 38.7% over the course of three weeks.

At the end, Koala Credits was selling ISK at the same price a player could get by purchasing two PLEX from CCP and selling the PLEX in Jita.  If a company cannot provide a significant discount to compensate for the risk involved in a player purchasing game currency from a third party site, the site will eventually lose money.  Koala Credits apparently cut its losses and will concentrate on the 33 games in which it still conducts business.

Koala Credits is a rather new virtual currency company based out of Hong Kong that is the #1 rated web site on MMOBUX for customer satisfaction.  Koala Credits is also the second major virtual currency company to stop selling ISK this month.  Sometime between 4 November and 11 November the Canadian website InGameDelivery also got out of the ISK selling business.  InGameDelivery is currently the #2 ranked web site on MMOBUX based on customer satisfaction.  Both sites are still in business, just not selling ISK.

Added 7 December 2012 -  With the launch of the Retribution expansion Koala Credits returned to the ISK selling business.  They began listing ISK sometime between 3-6 December.

CCP's War On Bots: Upon Further Review

Late word coming out of Against ALL Authorities is that Psyco Groupie, a director of The Maverick Navy, was the pilot referred to in the leaked Eve mail on Eve Skunk stating that a call to arms was cancelled due to the banning of 20 logistics accounts.  More importantly, CCP has cleared Psyco Groupie of all wrong-doing and reinstated all of his accounts.  I received word last night that all 20 accounts in question belong to Psyco Groupie.

According to Psyco Groupie he purchased two accounts on the official Eve Online forums.  These accounts transferred assets to the owner's main accounts and then the owner RMT'd the ISK before leaving the game.  Upon review the GMs determined that the illicit RMT activity all occurred before Psyco Groupie took control of the pilots.  As is CCP's custom when mistakenly banning a player, Psycho Groupie received a "generous amount" of game time for his accounts.

I still have questions.  Just how many accounts did CCP ban for RMT in order to see the price increases for illicit ISK like we have over the past three weeks?  How many alliances will eventually get hit?  Have any POS exploded yet?  And what happened this past weekend to make the prices at Avatar Bank and Koala Credits jump so much?

I should add one warning.  Be very careful about buying characters, even on the Eve Online forums. Perhaps I've spent too much time on botting forums but I would never purchase a character.  Too much risk of what happened to Psyco Groupie happening to you.

The Digital Dozen: 20 November 2012

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 18 November 2012.  For more details about the methodology, click here.  Historical data can be found here.

Rank	Prev Week	Game	Score	Hours Played	+/- %
1	1	World of Warcraft	37.5	34,645	-9.0
2	2	Guild Wars 2	28.7	26,550	+32.5
3	3	Star Wars: The Old Republic	12.9	11,925	+123.9
4	4	Aion	3.5	3,223	-6.8
5	6	Eve Online	3.4	3,120	-2.0
T6	8	Metin 2	2.8	2,584	+2.6
T6	7	Lord of the Rings Online	2.8	2,584	-6.3
8	5	The War Z (Alpha)	2.5	2,289	-32.7
9	9	APB: Reloaded	1.6	1,517	-23.2
10	--	Maple Story	1.4	1,319	+74.5
11	--	Rift	1.4	1,318	+52.7
12	--	Star Trek Online	1.4	1,302	N/A

  Total MMORPG hours played Sunday: 114,719  

In one of the wildest weeks in the short history of The Digital Dozen the members of the Xfire community increased the amount of time spent playing MMORPGs by 7.6%.  The games gaining the most playtime in percentage terms were Star Wars: The Old Republic (123.9%), Maple Story (74.5%), Rift (52.7%) and Guild Wars 2 (32.5%).  The games seeing big declines in playtime were The War Z (-32.7%) and APB Reloaded (-23.2%).

 

A Deluge of Content -  Apart from Maple Story the games with the biggest gains all released new content.  On 14 November Trion released Rift's first expansion, Storm Legion.  The next day Bioware released patch 1.5 for SW:TOR, turning the game free-to-play.  And on Friday Guild Wars 2 saw the launch of a major live event and a new dungeon, The Lost Shores.  I expect to see GW2 resume a slide downwards but how will SW:TOR and Rift do in the coming weeks?

The Trifecta - For the first time since 15 April Xfire players spent more than 10,000 hours playing three different MMORPGs: World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2 and Star Wars: The Old Republic.  Back in April the three games were WoW, SW:TOR and Aion.

 

Updated Data - After a month's delay I have updated the Google document with all of the Xfire data collected.  Most of the data goes back to shortly before the games made their first appearance on the list, but some games like WoW, SW:TOR and Eve Online have data back to the beginning of the year.

CCP's War On Bots: Winter Is Here

When word leaked out from Eve Skunk that Against ALL Authorities fleet commander Lee Chanka cancelled a call to arms due to CCP banning 20 -A- logistics accounts one couldn't help but wonder if the Eve mail was just a troll.  A look at the price on illicit ISK in Eve Online since that email on 31 October strongly suggests that has taken action against at least one major RMT operation in New Eden and perhaps more.

At first glance the price appears to have not increased very much.  Using the list of companies listed on MMOBUX as a guide, the median price of 1 billion ISK only rose from $22.00 to $22.50, an increase easily attributable to increased demand as the winter expansion Retribution approaches. The 2.2% increase in the cost of illicit ISK corresponded with a 2% decrease in the real-world decrease in the cost of ISK when buying PLEX through CCP and then converting the PLEX to ISK in the Jita market.  But a closer look shows that some companies are having difficulty acquiring new product.

Fully 1 in 5 websites listed on MMOBUX were selling ISK at a higher price that someone could purchase the same amount by just purchasing 2 PLEX from CCP and selling the PLEX in Jita.  Three weeks ago that number was 1 in 8.  One of the big selling points of purchasing virtual currency via a third party site is obtaining a cost savings.  How can an RMT company stay in business if they charge more than the game company?  That could explain why two of the four websites selling ISK at above market rates on 28 October are no longer online.

Looking at the 26 websites listed on MMOBUX on 28 October that are still listed today, nine of the companies raised their prices an average of 15.7%.  Two of the larger companies in the virtual gold selling industry, Avatar Bank and Koala Credits, were hit especially hard.  Koala Credits raised its prices 7.8% in the days following the leak of Lee Chanka's Eve mail.  Avatar Bank apparently was hit a few days later with a major disruption in supply as the company had raised its rates by 18.5% by 11 November.  Apparently another suppy disruption occurred within the last few days because both websites raised their rates to over $29 per 1 billion ISK yesterday.  Over the last three weeks Koala Credits have raised prices 27.9% and Avatar Bank by 21.1%.

One of CCP Sreegs' stated objectives is to make operating in Eve financially unattractive to botters and ISK sellers.  This latest offensive against illicit RMT operations succeeded in that regard as one web site, InGameDelivery, no longer sells ISK.  That move came sometime between 4 November and 11 November.  One of the interesting facts I discovered while investigating this story is that InGameDelivery is associated with Avatar Bank.  Apparently when Avatar Bank found ISK in short supply the decision was made to cut off InGameDelivery.

During my time playing Eve Online I have often heard the phrase "winter is coming" when discussing when war would begin in null sec.  For those whom CCP Stillman and CCP Sreegs warned about turning their alliances into RMT operations, winter is apparently here.

Inferno: A Look At The Numbers

With CCP ramping up the excitement for Retribution with a spate of dev blogs the time has come to look at how Inferno did at drawing people into actually logging in and playing Eve Online.  Taking the weekly averages from Eve-Offline.net led to a graph that looks a bit unusual.

One item that sticks out is that despite the controversy over the Unified Inventory that the average number of players on Tranquility rose by 1,500 - 2,000 per hour until the middle of September except for a dip in the middle of June.  The big spike over 30,000 users per hour occurred right before the release of the Inferno 1.2 patch.  But then following the release of Inferno 1.2 the number of users declined by 11.5% until the ramp-up to Retribution began.

Did the traditional summer/autumn decline cause the player activity observed?  I took the seasonal data from 2007-2011 I gathered earlier this year and compared the data to this year's results.

The numbers for May stand out because Eve saw almost 10% less players on Tranquility in May compared to April when May is usually a very stable month.  Was that the outrage over the Unified Inventory?  No.  Diablo III came out on 15 May and the run-up to the launch of the Blizzard game led to a loss of players in all games.  I believe that the rises in both July and August were caused by players returning to the game from playing Diablo III.

However, I do believe that part of the rise in players at the beginning of August was due to the deployment of Inferno 1.2 and the ship changes.  But that did not last very long as logins steadily declined until the middle of October.

The last mystery is why the decline in September and October.  The 2.7% decline in September is close to the 3% average decline experienced from 2007-2011.  But what about October?  While pointing to DUST 514 as the cause is tempting, Eve-Offline shows that the concurrency numbers on Singularity did not top 200 over the past few months.  A more likely explanation is the price of PLEX.  On 1 September the price of a PLEX in The Forge averaged 498,999,998 ISK.  By 10 October the price of PLEX had risen 29.7% up to an average of 647,101,002 ISK.  While that price is good for the fight against the illicit ISK trade, I believe a lot of players who funded their subscriptions using Eve's in-game currency found themselves unable to pay for subscriptions to some if not all of their accounts.  With the prices Tuesday down 9% from the all time high we may see the concurrency numbers rise, but possibly not back to the August numbers before the launch of Retribution.

So was Inferno a strong expansion?  One could argue that in the face of the Diablo III juggernaut that Eve saw growth once Inferno launched.  But Eve saw a decline as inflation in the PLEX market took its toll on players paying for their accounts in ISK.  I think history will show Inferno as a middle-of-the-road expansion, at least in terms of player interest as the concurrency numbers likely will be higher at the launch of Retribution than they were at the launch of the spring 2012 expansion.

Scattered Thoughts

Last night was my longest gaming session in any game all week.  I logged into my Prowler, traveled two jumps, bought 3 skills books, injected them into my skills queue and logged off.  Needless to say I don't have any good stories to tell but I have collected a few thoughts over the past few days.

The first is the latest kerfuffle occurring concerning the Eve Blog Pack and other ways of disseminating blogging posts.  I don't want to go into the fight because then I have to discuss Eve politics and I don't have time.  But having followed the Tobold/Syncaine feud I can say the Eve blogosphere hasn't reached the boiling point yet.  I do feel the need to remind all the Eve bloggers about one of the biggest rules in video game blogger fight club: only start a feud on Fridays.

The next thought came from reading a post by Sugar Kyle commenting on the colors not only in Eve but on Eve-related web sites and blogs.  That reminded me of the book I'm currently reading, Neal Stephenson's Reamde.  I'm about a third of the way through the book and colors, more specifically the brightness of colors, plays a part in driving the plot.  I think I'm at the part of the book where, if Mr Stephenson was writing about Eve, my Prowler is about to be fitted with a Doomsday device.

Finally I've been scanning the major news sites (TheMittani.com and Eve News 24) and since the one email leaked by Eve Skunk stating that some Against ALL Alliance pilots were banned for illict ISK selling I haven't heard anything since on the subject.  Is nothing going on?  Or do people just don't care?

What About Command Ships?

With CCP recommending everyone race to train up their Destroyer and Battlecruiser skills, one question I think few are considering is the effect on Command Ships.  No not the class; CCP  Ytterbium stated that after tech 1 battleships are balanced that command ships are next on the agenda.  No, I'm referring to the actual skill.

A required skill is changing

A quick glance shows that one of the requirements for Command Ships is Battlecruisers V.  With this skill about to change into racial variations of Battlecruiser, does this mean that we are about to see racial versions of Command Ships?  I don't think so and I'll explain why shortly.  But whatever the decision I don't see how CCP can make the changes to the Battlecruisers skill without changing the Command Ships skill.

Another question concerns the skills required to fly command ships.  In addition to the Command Ships skill shown above, flying a command ship requires Racial Cruiser V and either Logistics IV or Heavy Assault Ships IV.  Back in March CCP Yttrbium wrote that the changes would result in 14-20 days less time to train to fly a command ship than currently.  In the dev blog he gave some hints of the changes coming to learning to fly command ships:

"For tech 2 ships, it creates an overcomplicated nest of skill requirements, as you need both the Cruiser and Battlecruiser skills to 5 to train for a Command Ship for example..." 

"Tech 2 philosophy is all about specializing into a specific hull and role, thus, requiring players to train for Assault Ships, then Heavy Assault Ships when aiming for Field Command Ships, is quite redundant."

From the hints given so far, I expect CCP to remove Racial Cruiser V as a requirement to fly command ships and replace it with Racial Battlecruisers V.  I then think that with the elimination of Battlecruisers as a skill that Command Ships will see two new prerequisites, probably Assault Ships IV and Logistics IV since CCP is removing the field and fleet classifications.  I would have picked Heavy Assault Ships IV except for the comments in the March dev blog.

[ADDED] - Of course, if Assault Ships IV and not Heavy Assault Ships IV is required, that leaves training room for what I consider a must-have skill for flying command ships, Warfare Link Specialist.  I would think that in order to meet the goal of less training time to fly command ships that CCP would make Warfare Link Specialist IV a prerequisite for the Command Ships skill.  Also, as CCP is balancing command ships against tech 3 cruisers for gang boosting utility, requiring the skill fits in with the role CCP envisions for the class.

Making this move would make learning to fly command ships on par with all other tech 2 ships: learning the racial ship class skill to V and then learning a specialized skill like Interceptors or Recon Ships.  Instituting the change would also result in another "If you could fly the ship before, you'll be able to fly the ship after" moment as some people probably skipped either Heavy Assault IV or Logistics IV on their way to flying a command ship.  Could we see another skill point rush like we are currently witnessing with the Destroyers and Battlecruisers changes?  I don't think so until CCP announces the final changes.

The Digital Dozen: 13 November 2012

The rankings of the top twelve MMORPGs as determined by the players of the Xfire community from play on Sunday, 4 November 2012.  For more details about the methodology, click here.  Historical data can be found here.

Rank	Prev Week	Game	Score	Hours Played	+/- %
1	1	World of Warcraft	45.1	38,051	-9.8
2	2	Guild Wars 2	23.8	20,043	-10.7
3	3	Star Wars: The Old Republic	6.3	5,325	+7.8
4	5	Aion	4.1	3,457	-1.0
5	4	The War Z (Alpha)	4.0	3,400	-5.5
6	6	Eve Online	3.8	3,184	+6.1
7	8	Lord of the Rings Online	3.3	2,758	+1.3
8	7	Metin 2	3.0	2,519	-10.2
9	9	APB: Reloaded	2.3	1,974	-2.9
10	10	Planetside 2 (Beta)	1.6	1,349	-14.8
11	12	Need For Speed World	1.4	1,184	+0.4
12	--	Mabinogi	1.2	1,042	+8.9

  Total MMORPG hours played Sunday: 106,585  

Many players who use Xfire apparently took Sunday off as the number of hours spent playing MMORPGs fell by 12.1%.  The non-beta games that saw the biggest decreases were Maple Story (-46.1%), Guild Wars 2 (-10.7%) and Metin 2 (-10.2%).  Games bucking the downward trend were led by Mabinogi (+8.9%), Star Wars: The Old Republic (+7.8%) and Eve Online (+6.1%).

Technical Difficulties?  I wonder if Xfire was experiencing some technical difficulties this past weekend that lowered the numbers for some games.  For example, Star Trek Online fell from 1026 hours played on 4 November down to 11 hours Sunday.

A Week Early - I was not expecting big declines in World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2 until next weekend due to Star Wars: The Old Republic going free-to-play on 15 November.  I think a lot of players who tried SW:TOR but then left for WoW or GW2 will return to SW:TOR if only to finish up some of the stories.  I doubt that SW:TOR will surpass GW2 but stranger things have happened.

Seven Days And Counting - Another F2P game scheduled to launch next week should shake up the listings.  Planetside 2 launches on 20 November and opened its servers 24/7 last weekend.  The beta still saw 14.8% fewer hours played Sunday compared to the week before but hopefully the bugs will be worked out for the final beta weekend.

Nine Days

"As a reminder, we would like to state there are no skill changes planned for the winter expansion - your Destroyers and Battlecruisers skills are safe for now, as we are not adjusting spaceship command skill trees until we are done with the Battlecruiser class."

CCP Ytterbium, September 2012

I know that I still have a lot of time to take advantage of the training changes coming with CCP's tiericide efforts but with the latest dev blog discussing battlecruiser and battleship changes I figure I need to take care of business before I forget.

• Breaking Destroyers and Battlecruisers skills into four racial versions with an identical training multiplier (thus making it four times harder to get all races trained)
• Changing skill requirements for Racial Cruisers from Racial Frigates 4 to Racial Destroyers 4
• Changing skill requirements for Racial Battleships from Racial Cruisers 4 to Racial Battlecruisers 4
• Changing skill requirements for capital ships from Racial Battleships 5 to 4, but introducing or increasing other skills to keep the same overall training time requirements

Up until now both of my main pilots have exclusively flown Minmatar and ORE ships.  As such both have trained both Destroyers and Battlecruisers to V.  If the implementation of racial Destroyers and racial Battlecruisers occurred today, I would only receive Minmatar Destroyers V and Minmatar Battlecruisers V.  So what would I need to do to get all of the racial Destroyers and racial Battlecruisers to V?  Here is what CCP Ytterbium wrote:

"Let us repeat again: if you could fly it before, you will be able to do so after the change. Technically it means if you are able to fly an Oracle by having Amarr Cruisers 3 and Battlecruisers 3, we will remove the Battlecruisers skill from your character and give you Amarr Battlecruisers at 3. If you had Battlecruisers at 3 and Caldari Cruisers 3 instead, you would not receive Amarr Battlecruisers but the Caldari Battlecruisers skill at 3 instead. The same principle work with the Destroyers skill."

CCP Fozzie clarified further in the comments thread for the dev blog when answering a question:

Antoine Jordan:  "So if I have Battlecruisers V and Amarr Cruiser III, after the patch I'll have Amarr Battlecruiser V, right? So that I can fly them to the same effectiveness I could before the patch."

CCP Fozzie:  "This is correct."

So all I need to do is train the three racial Cruiser skills I don't have to III and I will have Battlecruisers V for all races.  As a byproduct of the requirement to train the racial Frigate skills to IV before beginning Cruiser training, I'll also have Destroyers trained to V as well.  The nicest part is how long the training takes for me.  Even with my attributes not min/max'd each of my pilots will finish in under nine days.

Nine days.  Yes, I know that I still have to learn the gunnery skills to fly the ships properly (well, except for the Caldari missile boats).  But for the eventual payoff I think I can divert nine days of training for support skills on both my pilots to have a big payoff down the line.  I can't wait for the spring expansion.

Back To Low Sec

I set a goal for my week of vacation to work on my scanning and finish setting up a second base in low sec.  With three days to go I'm doing pretty well and just need to bookmark the new constellation I'm moving to.  As simple as this sounds I've had a bit of an adventure over the past few days.

My first task was to acquire a set of Sisters' scanning gear.  I had already run the level 4 missions to get the loyalty points and all I needed to do was purchase them.  But purchasing the gear required having the base versions of the equipment.  No problem right?  All I have to do is go to a trade hub, buy the stuff and bing, bang, boom I'm done.  The only problem was I wanted to manufacture my own gear as much as possible.

Making the items isn't really difficult.  I just needed to go and purchase the blueprint originals from an NPC and then put the items in a factory.  I had all the minerals mined and refined that I needed already except for some strontium clathrates I needed to make the combat and deep space probes.  Easy right?  Just go out and mine some dark glitter, get about 7 or 8 cycles and I'm done.

Did I forget to mention that the Minmatar Republic only has one ice belt containing dark glitter?  But I decided to go for the challenge and mine dark glitter instead of going off to a more remote system and mine glare crust.  So I loaded up a Procurer I hadn't unpacked yet, picked up some ice mining modules and Wandering Rose headed off to Todifrauan in my Prowler accompanied by Rosewalker in his Hound.

Things went well and I mined three units of dark glitter before a German player in a Hurricane decided to try to gank Wandering Rose.  She got away easily and with Rosewalker keeping an eye on the ice belt watched the Hurricane warp off.  I saw the pilot leave local, waited a few minutes and then tried to begin mining again.  The Hurricane came back and once again I warped off.  I don't think the Hurricane pilot realized I was watching him.  I decided to take the ice I had already mined and started manufacturing a batch of combat probes.

I have to give that Hurricane pilot credit for patience.  I played cat and mouse with him for maybe an hour until a birthday fleet of about 100 ships rolled into the system.  They were having so much fun spamming "happy birthday" that while the German docked up I sped out to the ice belt and mined six additional cycles.  I guess flying a cheap ship like the Procurer made me less risk adverse than the Hurricane pilot.  So with having more ice than I needed I finished making the last of my items.  Once made I went to the nearest Sisters of Eve station and purchased my goods.

My Inventory of Sisters Scanning Equipment

Of course once I had the good gear I had to go out exploring.  I found two wormholes and decided to enter my first wormholes since leaving Eve University.  The first wormhole I entered was populated with POCOs from a Russian corporation.  That explained why I see so many Russian pilots flying around my system.  In the second wormhole I entered I broke one of the cardinal rules of wormholes: I forgot to bookmark the wormhole before warping off.

I did want to use my new gear but I didn't really want to do so trying to find my way out of a wormhole.  I scanned down two wormholes pretty quickly.  The first wormhole I found led to Gallente low sec 22 jumps away.  I reentered the wormhole and went to the second one which led back home.

Exiting To Gallente Space

The second goal is to set up a second base in low sec.  The first part I needed to accomplish is to get the standings with the Republic Fleet for the station so I can have perfect refining.  During the standings grind all the storyline missions I did were for The Leisure Group and I wound up getting my standings up to 7.3 with that corporation in addition to standings of 6.7 with the Republic Fleet.

After finishing the grind I realized that I now have perfect refining in at least one station in every .1 and .2 security system in the Minmatar Republic except for Todifrauan.  To get that the easiest way is to grind faction with the Pator Tech School.  If I want to run level 4 missions I either have to go to high sec or go to a couple of places I really try to avoid: Amamake and Molden Heath.  Do I dare venture into the pirate stronghold of Molden Heath?  I might cheat and do the faction grind in high sec so I can explore wormholes in relative safety when I get tired of running missions.  I understand that high sec spawns class 1 and class 2 wormholes which should prove easier to operate solo in.

So all I really have left to do is bookmark the constellation where I plan to set up a second home.  I may not finish the entire constellation but I should manage to get enough bookmarks made to begin operations.