You might noticed I don't like botters since they essentially cheat the game. They also flood the market with cheap things, supporting risk-free play (you don't care losing cheap stuff).
Today I post an idea of mine that could help CCP fighting botters and other cheaters by identifying their non-violating mains. The CCP policy is to ban the player by banning all his account, including non-violating ones. However to do so, they must be able to link accounts. In case of legitimate players it's not a big deal: same IP, same login pattern, often same e-mail or similar account name. However cheaters - for obvious reasons - try to hide their main account from the bot accounts by proxies, maybe even different computers.
The idea - as the title says - is API Coincidence detection. What is this? Several third party programs query your API key (that's why it's there). For example EVEMon asks the API using your keys to read the skill progression of your accounts to update the skill training plan. Accounting programs ask for your market API keys. The idea is that if the botter is lazy (and most people are), he doesn't have various instances of EVEMon. So when he starts EVEMon, it queries all his accounts at the same time, legitimate and botter alike. Using the API server log, CCP can calculate API coincidence: Qboth/min(QAcc1,QAcc2), where Qboth is the number of events when both accounts were queried within a time window. This number is zero for accounts that never query together and 1 for accounts that are always queried together. Of course accounts can be queried together by blind chance or by a third party site that queries lot of APIs (like killboards). However I believe that alt accounts will have a significantly higher coincidence number than random accounts, allowing detection of alts. The best thing is that this can be used on gathered old data, finding alts that were not found before, even if they stopped linking behavior long ago.
A quick answer to the post of Shadoo who is thinking about wargames to replace the "horrible" Sov grind. I was there with him on Sov grinding three regions and didn't find it horrible, because I'm one of the "few who've not actually ever ran or been in the FC side of running a large block war." The problem isn't Sov grind. The problem is that it waits for the same veterans who did it zillion times and don't want the Sov at the first place. Pandemic Legion which is leaded by Shadoo has 19 system Sov, practically staging systems in various points of space. The Sov they grind won't be theirs. They don't need it. They don't want it. Making someone grind down hundreds of multi-million HP stationary structures they don't want at the first place with no fight (besides bombers killing their fighter-bombers) is indeed horrible.
But the solution isn't simpler Sov grind. Without Sov grind, a weaker alliance would have no chance to rally troops, or find allies before losing everything. HBC would conquer all nullsec overnight just because they can. The solution is making people want to have Sov. Making them wanting to live there. A Sov war would be much more fun for PL if the new owners of the Sov would grind it in dreads, PL would only be cynoed in if someone shows up with force threatening the dreads. But why would anyone want Sov or even moons? Just buy a battleship V pilot and run lvl 4s in highsec. I'm damn sure that the man hours needed to capture and hold a even a Tech moon would be better spent missioning.
The solution is making living in nullsec profitable enough that "carebears" flow to it, grind it down and pay to PvP-ers to protect them. As long as nullsec Sov is nothing but bragging right - or even worse, to trigger a "good fight" - only a handful of bored nerds would try to get it who simply have nothing better to do.
Today I post an idea of mine that could help CCP fighting botters and other cheaters by identifying their non-violating mains. The CCP policy is to ban the player by banning all his account, including non-violating ones. However to do so, they must be able to link accounts. In case of legitimate players it's not a big deal: same IP, same login pattern, often same e-mail or similar account name. However cheaters - for obvious reasons - try to hide their main account from the bot accounts by proxies, maybe even different computers.
The idea - as the title says - is API Coincidence detection. What is this? Several third party programs query your API key (that's why it's there). For example EVEMon asks the API using your keys to read the skill progression of your accounts to update the skill training plan. Accounting programs ask for your market API keys. The idea is that if the botter is lazy (and most people are), he doesn't have various instances of EVEMon. So when he starts EVEMon, it queries all his accounts at the same time, legitimate and botter alike. Using the API server log, CCP can calculate API coincidence: Qboth/min(QAcc1,QAcc2), where Qboth is the number of events when both accounts were queried within a time window. This number is zero for accounts that never query together and 1 for accounts that are always queried together. Of course accounts can be queried together by blind chance or by a third party site that queries lot of APIs (like killboards). However I believe that alt accounts will have a significantly higher coincidence number than random accounts, allowing detection of alts. The best thing is that this can be used on gathered old data, finding alts that were not found before, even if they stopped linking behavior long ago.
A quick answer to the post of Shadoo who is thinking about wargames to replace the "horrible" Sov grind. I was there with him on Sov grinding three regions and didn't find it horrible, because I'm one of the "few who've not actually ever ran or been in the FC side of running a large block war." The problem isn't Sov grind. The problem is that it waits for the same veterans who did it zillion times and don't want the Sov at the first place. Pandemic Legion which is leaded by Shadoo has 19 system Sov, practically staging systems in various points of space. The Sov they grind won't be theirs. They don't need it. They don't want it. Making someone grind down hundreds of multi-million HP stationary structures they don't want at the first place with no fight (besides bombers killing their fighter-bombers) is indeed horrible.
But the solution isn't simpler Sov grind. Without Sov grind, a weaker alliance would have no chance to rally troops, or find allies before losing everything. HBC would conquer all nullsec overnight just because they can. The solution is making people want to have Sov. Making them wanting to live there. A Sov war would be much more fun for PL if the new owners of the Sov would grind it in dreads, PL would only be cynoed in if someone shows up with force threatening the dreads. But why would anyone want Sov or even moons? Just buy a battleship V pilot and run lvl 4s in highsec. I'm damn sure that the man hours needed to capture and hold a even a Tech moon would be better spent missioning.
The solution is making living in nullsec profitable enough that "carebears" flow to it, grind it down and pay to PvP-ers to protect them. As long as nullsec Sov is nothing but bragging right - or even worse, to trigger a "good fight" - only a handful of bored nerds would try to get it who simply have nothing better to do.
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