Cybercrooks turn Eve Online into botnet battlefield Crooks using online games to farm virtual currencies that they can sell for real money have turned internet spaceship game Eve Online into a battlefield for botnets. Eve Online is home to various rival groups who generate in-game currency for gamers who want to join in without spending their time acquiring experience and …
You're reprinting crap from EveNews24? Really? EveNews24 is the FOX News of EVE and is well known to be written by and supports groups directly opposed to the Russian and Eastern European groups mentioned.
I'm not saying RMT and bots do not exist in EVE (because they clearly do) but in the 6 years I've played the game they have rarely impacted me and I don't think they are any worse now than they were in the past. In fact I see less Chinese isk farmers in 0.0 now than I did 3 years ago.
How long has Reg reader Patrick played the game, 6 months? Forum hacks, DDOS of forums and voice comms servers, etc have been happening in EVE for years. They aren't used to prop up some RMT cartel, they are used by many space holding alliances in the game to beat their opponents. Propaganda and disinformation campaigns are also rife in EVE warfare, sounds to me like Patrick has fallen for the lines fed to him by his alliance leaders.
Not only is EN24 a massive pile of the proverbial but nothing at all is mentioned about the things that CCP has done against RMT and such (Google: EVE Unholy Rage - for more info).
"News" like this isn't news at all, it's propaganda through and through. Something which you seem to have misinterpreted and reported.
The game's supposed to be about this kind of futuristic distopic financial battles between organized crime syndicates. EVE's probably best known for an extremely well-planned robbery anyhow [e.g., http://www.computerandvideogames.com/180867/features/murder-incorporated/?site=pcg ]. So I don't see why this cannot be worked into the storyline.
I definitely like Dave Murray's comment above, "it hasn't happened to me so it clearly doesn't exist". File under: miscellaneous (cancer, house fires, rape, lottery-winning, and deep sea diving -- all figments of feverish imaginations, probably from underemployed hacks).
I agree with Dave. This isn't news. Even the eve devblog you link to is 3 years old.
I haven't played Eve for over a year, but this wasn't even news then. The battle between the RMT crowd and the game devs has been pretty much constant for many years and as My Murray pointed out Unholy Rage [http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=687] which happened a year after the your dev blog link, Reduced the farmers by a vast amount.
I regularly read the forums and haven't noticed any new recent spike in problems (or devblogs) regarding the matter?
Slow news day?
Some time ago I got very lucky in Eve with the BPO lottery and ended up with one of the most wanted BPOs in the game, the Cap Recharger II. I made an absolute mint out of it and in the end when prices dropped significantly after invention, I sold it for just under one hundered billion ISK. With that ISK I bought the minerals and compressed them, shipped them to 0.0 and my Corp built me a Titan. The whole procedure for doing this from buying the raw minerals to having the completed ship took around six months. I had it for three weeks and then sold the character and all his assets for around $2000.
The person who bought it got a very well trained charcter with the biggest and best ship in the game, I got a pocket of cash and I've never touched Eve again. If it's as bad as it's reported here then I'm pleased I quit when I did.
What I don't understand is why people buy their in-game cash from these outfits. I gave up on Eve a while ago because I didn't have the time to play it (oh, and I realised that it was basically a dice-rolling game, and I could spend hours with a D12 and a bottle of Laphroaig and have at least as much fun). Prior to that, though, I had the skills, but not enough cash to buy the toys. So I did what lots of people do - bought a Game Time Card (with cash, from an approved web site), and sold it in-game for a pile of ISK.
It's safe, it's approved by CCP, and the exchange rate isn't horrible. It'll cost you a little more than going to the Russians (or whomever), but it won't get you banned if you're nicked.
Oh, and a word to anyone thinking of starting Eve: Sell bullets. You buy a gun once - you buy bullets every time you fire it. And I had (still have, I guess) some pretty big guns :D
The bot nets aren't in the game - yes there are a few macro-ratters and macro-miners - there was a suggestion from one alliance that another one put a DDOS attack on it's forum.
It's old news, and the idea that people who aren't using those forums are getting caught in the crossfire is crap
Of course there is meta-gaming, but it's nothing to do with opening space for botters - they'd never be able to hold it.
...social networks, Carigslist, etc.
Automated spambots, and manually or script-driven bulk abuse reporting and DOS against competition in drug and prostitution chatrooms/fora. For example Nevada:1 in Yahoo Chat.
This is a huge marketplace, and domination translates into real Dollars.
... but not very accurate.
The macro-miners got hit with the banstick in April. Macro ratters are getting the same hits this month. CCP finally hired a malware team and now network comms are analysed heuristically, as are a load of other in-game stats. Suffice it to say that the whining from banned accounts is epic :)
Oh and Eve has always had metagaming - for example a popular tactic was to spam the opposing FC's (fleet commander) mobile phone during a fight.
Out of game forums and voice comms are routinely compromised and the more careful (paranoiac?) corps will maintain lists of IP addresses that their members use (and for dynamic IPs they WILL go find out the ranges etc). Teamspeak3 is the comms of choice of corps simply because the TS3 account can be linked to the forum account and hence IP address/range can be verified.
This is probably a good summary of how totally demented Eve can be :
http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/65476
The title is "Bad Crazy in Internet Space" :D
The tl;dr of playing Eve is simply the risk factor, no other MMO comes anywhere near. Even with CCPs attempts to turn it into Second Life In Space :P
Looks like a very old repost from at least a few years ago
http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/65476 is an interesting read and one reason why never stayed long in 0.0,
friends tried playing with the russians, none of whom seem to have a RL job and so for them EVE is more important than RL work to pay for stuff like food and drink.
Recall an xmas raid on some alliance where a huge bunch of kids had to do without their dad on xmas day as some leader decided on an all out assault on some alliance
Guess the OP needs to have a current account to be able to comment :)
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