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Friday, August 10, 2012

Pondering The Penalties

I just had a thought after sleeping on what I read on the botting forums and reading the comments left by the developer of the Red Guard software that attempts to protect unscrupulous holders of Eve accounts from hardware detection.  What is the penalty for using that type of software?  Yesterday I quoted a user of the Eve Pilot bot who stated that he was going to use Red Guard and hoped it did not result in a permanent ban.

I went to the Eve Online community site and looked up the posted "Suspension and Ban Policy" page and found this:

2. HACKING
An immediate permanent ban of an account may result from attempting to or successfully:
    a. Interfering with the performance of the EVE Online servers or web site.
  • b.Defrauding another player of his account through use of misinformation or impersonating an EVE Online official. NOTE: No employee of CCP or one of its authorized representatives will ever ask for your password. Should someone claiming to be a CCP associate request your password, don’t give it. Instead, notify the support team immediately by sending an in-game petition or by using the “Ask a question” form on our support website.  Please retain all related documentation in the event it is needed during a possible investigation.
  • c. Deciphering, hacking into or interfering with any transmissions to or from the EVE Online servers or web site.
  • d. Engaging in any activity that increases the difficulty and/or expense of CCP in maintaining the EVE Online client, server, web site or other services.
  • e. Obtaining unauthorized access to another’s EVE Online account or account information
Okay, spoofing the hardware signature falls under the permanent ban category.   I also read some concern on the Questor forums about the EULA.  Especially Section 7D:
"You agree that CCP may remotely monitor your Game hardware solely for the purpose of establishing whether in playing the Game and accessing the System you are using software created or approved by CCP, or whether you are using unauthorized software created by you or a third party in contravention of Section 6."
So when Eve players log into the game, they give CCP Sreegs and Team Security free reign to search if certain programs used by botters are running.  Interesting.

I know that a lot of Eve players don't like the fact that CCP Sreegs believes in only handing out 14 day bans to first time botters.  But if those first time botters are using the wrong type of software, those bans may turn out to be permanent.

6 comments:

  1. What I really don't like is that during that 14 days ban your skill point training is going on (granted, you can't queue in more skills). So the botter don't get in any worse situation that many of the completely legitimate second-third EVE accounts are: not playing just learning skills for some capital ship.

    I have 7 accounts and only 2 are playing. The rest 5 are learning skills for future usage. OK, 2 of them for later sale, but 3 are for personal usage (Carrier, Titan, Rorqual). My point is that I could bot on these 3 accounts without ANY risk of punishment.

    I understand that CCP believes in the chance that the player may reform and stop botting if captured. However in these cases temporary bans are not proper answers. Punitive negwalleting would be it. Like putting -5B on top of reverting the botted amount.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's only true if you happened to have a long skill in when you got banned and if it had only just started training. People don't know when they're suddenly going to get banned.

      Delete
    2. lemmie get this straight. you want CCP to devote some coding team onto an issue that they're probably using for everyone else during a temp 2 week banhammer?

      which could better be used to fix FW?


      oh wait. it's CCP. nvm

      Delete
    3. Unless of course when you get banned, CCP also bans all other accounts it can link to your botting account. Which means, among other things, that you can't transfer (or sell) characters. So if one of the two accounts you are using to train characters for sales gets banned, then you can't sell your character, and that would hurt you.

      It looks like I will need to write a post explaining the old character sales ruse, won't I.

      Delete
  2. Wen an account is banned, the training stops too. I know players who got a temp ban, and the accounts go inactive. If someone managed to keep their training going during a ban, that's an exception, not the standard.

    As for "hacking"' they're talking about intercepting the communications between client and server, or directly manipulating it, to the players' advantage, Running a virtual machine is not even close to that. Some people like running virtual machines, and that software has been very handy when running apps that are not multithreaded. If VM software was a problem, CCP would ban more accounts, because the fact that VM is running on a machine, is part of the information that is collect by the Eve client and sent to the server. Because Eve can and does support multi threading, anyone running a VM on their computer immediately raises a suspicion flag, because that process is un-necessary for Eve. Even in the VM, the O/S can be identified by it's ID number, which is also collected by CCP, so it doesn't take much effort to find a match between any client or account running on the same machine, VM or not. Only the uninformed believe that running Eve in a VM is hiding anything. It isn't. I have a capture of the information that Eve sends to CCP about the computer it's running on. There are so many unique system identifiers, no one is fooling CCP. It's just a matter of time for CCP to run scripts, or monitor logs, to find the players and accounts and IPs, do some simple comparisons, and then apply the ban.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I just got banned for macroing JUST because I have a thincliet for a computer. Linux LTSP rdping a vmware windows 7. I explained the situation to my credit card company and they are filing a complaint with visa for merchant fraud.

    ReplyDelete