Nope. Wrong again. But you're used to that now. Nobody believes this player was a botter, myself included. However, as Sreegs clearly put it, the actions of this player and others like him "falls within the same philosophical context we place botting within." It's not hard to understand.

Poor game design attracts poor use. CCP should be permabanned for this.

Do you feel that removing the ban and the strike against these detected players is unfair then? Were their pleas ignored? It doesn't seem so.

Wrong. CCP admits that it is not a bot there. They admit they misidentified a non-botter as a botter: they then refuse to correct that mistake. It is the last part that is at issue here. Nobody, besides you and the algorithm, believes this player was an actual botter.

I am gratified you've now come to understand the basic fact this player was not botting.

Now that we've nailed down the facts of the case, we are discussing the interpretation and actions placed on those facts - the thin pretext by which these actions are being justified as being caught by the botting system and handled by Team Security as bots instead of properly handled by the GM team. In this case since I am arguing Sreegs was wrong, it is pointless to simply repeat his statements I disagree with.

Hey Sreegs, answer me this

How much money is "too much money"?

Give me a concrete answer, not just "a lot." Bullshit rules are vague. Good ones are not.

Hey Sreegs, answer me this

How much money is "too much money"?

Give me a concrete answer, not just "a lot." I want to make sure I limit my botting to be under than mark

but CCP GMs/Devs/whoever (it's irrelevant who handles it) .

Let me rephrase that in a way that will explain why he won't tell you:

It is not; and it is your failure to understand this that causes our disagreement. I have, unfortunately, already explained this part at length so I won't bore people by repeating it.

They did correct the mistake. They've erased the ban on these people.

The mistake wasn't identifying them - it was banning them before letting everyone know this is also a bad thing to do. They've now unbanned them, and let everyone know this is a bad thing to do.

This!

I know the exact complexes that CCP Sreegs is talking about. COMSMOS missions. I've run them, and spent half an hour to an hour in them, constantly shuttling back and forth to the various cans where the loot spawns, so that I can find the ONE piece of loot I need to move forward. Once, I never found it and gave up, and gave up on the mission. But I saw the potential to just sit in there and shoot things.

A suggestion, remove the bounties from the rats in those COSMOS missions, and instead give an appropriately larger bonus for completing the mission they are intended for, and a large time bonus as well. Problem solved, forever.

Constant reference to AFK mining is really, really dumb. You have to empty your cargohold, without a bot program, you are NOT doing that while AFK. That includes ice mining. the new Mack you can mine in for about 40 minutes while AFK, come back, and OMG, Interact with the GAME!!!. This exploit required no interaction from dropping the drones and turning on the remote reppers to the point where you collect the drones and log off. No bounties would equal no one wanting to try this exploit.

As sreegs said, being AFK for a reasonable period of time (if that's to put in a load of laundry, grab some food, hit the can, kiss the wife goodbye, is perfectly fine. Being AFK for up to 23 hours, no interaction, Not OK.

Actually, the previous rule was abundantly clear and easily applied: "any use of a bot or macro makes it botting". Now, if legitimate gameplay is botting if it exceeds certain isk thresholds, suddenly we don't have an abundantly clear and easily applied rule.

And none of them fall within this category. Feel free to alert the CSM.

It's me

I broke EvE

Here's the deal:
There's a COSMOS complex in the Aphi system called "The Labyrinth". It is a maze of 9 rooms. In each room, there are four gates, and a special battleship and cruiser that spawn over and over relatively rapidly.

You can sit there and manually farm them, but this ISK is pretty bad. Works out to about 5 mil ISK/hour for each room. At first glance, the rooms do not seem AFK farm-able via sentry drones, for two reasons:

#1, the battleships do enough DPS to kill the sentry drones, even with a large remote repairer aimed at each drone.

#2, sentry drones can't track the cruisers, even with multiple drone tracking mods.

These problems combined to create a situation where after a few spawns, the sentry drones would invariably get caught firing at a cruiser, while the battleship would move out of range.
However, if these problems could be solved, I realized that farming the rooms 23/7 with a fleet of AFK dominixes could yield about 24 billion ISK per month, without breaking the EULA. (24 billion AFTER paying to PLEX the necessary accounts).

~5 mil ISK/hour * 9 rooms * 23 hours * 28 days = ~29 bil/month

I decided this was something I wanted to try. I quickly solved the problems I mentioned earlier via trial-and-error.

#1, I came up with a domi fit that was basically 5 large RRs, all omnidirectional tracking links, cap power relays and 1 local rep. Paper-thin tank, but just enough to keep the domi alive vs. the spawn DPS.

#2, I used a fleet booster to increase the amount of reps the RRs put out, solving the problem of the spawn killing sentry drones.

#3 (THIS IS THE IMPORTANT ONE) I dropped the drones in two groups, so one group of sentry drones could always hit a cruiser orbiting the other group. Getting the drones to stay apart was a challenge. Anyone who has used sentry drones knows that they invariably end up at 0 on your ship. That is because sentry drones actually move. They move at 1 m/s towards their current target, and 1 m/s towards you if they are not firing. By dropping three drones, then setting the dominix to "keep at range" or about 7km from one, then dropping the other set, it was possible to keep about 7km distance between the two drone sets that would not close. This spacing allowed the drones to successfully kill the cruiser rats.

With these problems solved, I started farming a few rooms with a few accounts. The ISK was great. However, after a few weeks, I got really sick of flying the ships into place every morning (I always get up around the end of downtime), even though I was making bank.

Another emergent problem was that people had noticed what I was doing and started copying me. People had started to scan my ship and copy my setup.
So I was faced with two new problems:

#1: competition

#2: lack of a desire to set up my fleet every day

I solved these problems together. I decided that rather than farm the rooms myself, I would recruit other people to farm and I would be the overlord of the operation. With a combination of suicide ganking and denial tactics, I would push out the competition. I would use these same tactics to keep my farmers from rebelling against me.

First, I recruited some people. I told them up front that I would be running what amounted to a protection racket. They would farm and pay me a percentage. If they got out of line, I promised I would park a drake AFK in their rooms, which would eventually get aggro and prevent them from AFK farming. I also told them that they would each be required to help me block others from farming if I requested their help. Each room generated about 3.2 bil/month. I would take a 33% cut.

This might seem silly, but for these people, all the incentives were in place for their cooperation. A few people tried to cut me out, and I either blocked them from AFK farming myself, or had other farmers do it. One of my mates referred to this tactic as GG#pissing in the potGG%. If anyone tried to farm without giving me a percentage, I would make sure no one got any isk. There were a few people who tried to keep farming despite my blocking tactics. I started suicide ganking these people with torp ravens and killing their AFK pods with suicide destroyers. It was easy; the farming setups had almost no tank, and Aphi is a 0.5 sec status system. (This was before the insurance change.) Getting into the Labyrinth required a rare and expensive re-usable key. I bought them up. After being ganked, many people found that they could not get back in.

Within a month, I had either driven off or recruited all the competition into my organization. I had farmers in all 9 rooms farming 23/7. Each one paid me a 33% tax rate. For the next year, I collected about 9.6 bil/month and did virtually nothing other than suicide gank a few people and settle occasional disputes between my farmers. Occasionally, haters who knew what I was up to wardecGGVd my corps, but that was easy to avoid with corp-jumping.

The best part was that this was all done within the scope of what was allowed. It was a goal of mine to not violate the EULA in any way.
Unfortunately for me, eventually a lazy GM mistook my AFK farmers for botters and banned them all. After a lengthy petition process where I was forced to explain all these details, I was able to get the bans reversed, but was informed that what I had done would no longer be allowed, and that the devs would be implementing changes to prevent it from happening in the future.

TL;DR:

I got rich and forced CCP to change their bad game design

Until that "legitimate gameplay" is ruled otherwise, as is the case here, and that "legitimate gameplay" is forced out. At this point, nobody will be banned or otherwise sanctioned who isn't in clear violation of the rules.

Actually, the previous rule was abundantly clear and easily applied: "any use of a bot or macro makes it botting". Now, if legitimate gameplay is botting if it exceeds certain isk thresholds, suddenly we don't have an abundantly clear and easily applied rule.

Time to bring sleeper A.I. into the rest of NPC spawns...

If they tell you (or anyone) what the actual ISK level over 23.5 hours is that is a flag, people will just set their bots to stop below that level. Then it's one less tool in the box to stop botting.

So I feel the need to risk a generous fellow player and repost his details here, as the backstory to this is a brilliant piece of true Eve emergent gameplay that will otherwise be covered over by CCP rather than championed.

The COSMOS sites were added years ago, its not a recent change. Disabling them would punish those players who do them legitimately. Why should those players suffer? Better to just tell those few who do the afk thing to stop until ccp gets time to change how fixed site complexes work.

So I feel the need to risk a generous fellow player and repost his details here, as the backstory to this is a brilliant piece of true Eve emergent gameplay that will otherwise be covered over by CCP rather than championed.

The perfect opportunity to plug my stance on the matter.

http://soundcloud.com/xenuria/csm8-activity-vs-inactivity

Screegs,

Don't be so lame, and effing lazy. Penalizing us for using the mechanics that were designed by the devs is a lazy. The players of Eve are smart, and we will use every little mechanic to our advantage. You should be thankful that we are so industrious. It's what separates this game from the rest (for me). Our nature should not bring us under fire. Rather, maybe you should fix the mechanics that make this 'exploit' possible. (Seems to me anyone running low sec/nul sec plexes afk is also under risk of being scanned down and popped.)

Why should the players, who pay your salary have to be penalized for CCP's lack of insight and forethought? At the very least (I believe someone already mentioned) disable the plexes that are providing us with this opportunity that has been created until said problem has been fixed--ON YOUR END.

Let us PAYING subscribers have fun, and get off our backs.