EVE Online unleashes Unholy Rage on in-game currency traders - Ars Technica

CCP, the developer behind the popular online title EVE Online, hates players who hope to profit in real money from its game. Those who buy and sell ISK, the game's currency, are not only exploiting the game, but unbalancing play. That's why the company decided to go drastic: a program they called "Unholy Rage," whereby 6,200 paying accounts were banned at once. The results from the mass-banning of all those real-money traders were more dramatic than anyone expected.

Einar Hreiðarsson, one of EVE's lead GM's, was gracious enough to take time out of his schedule at Gamescom this week in Germany to explain exactly why CCP finds real-money trading so distasteful.

"RMT operators take up a lot of server power. They use macros to run missions, rat (grind PvE) and mine 23/7. This adversely affects other players’ chances of making a simulated living as all sweet-spots for this sort of activity are totally overrun with RMT-type users," he explained to Ars. Prices for mission-related items are adversely affected as well, which hurts regular players. Then there's the criminal element.

"Practically all credit card fraud we suffer stems from the RMT element which uses stolen credit cards to register expendable accounts that they know we will ban as soon as they start using them, e.g. accounts used to spam ISK sale adverts and such." Further, almost all hacking problems involve accounts being cleaned out by ISK sellers. The game suffers, credit card fraud becomes an issue, and accounts are hi-jacked. Something had to be done, and "Unholy Rage" was what they named CCP's response.

"We must address this in the manner of the FDIC, not the SWAT"

For weeks they studied the behavior and effects these real-money traders had on the game, and then they struck. During scheduled maintenance, over 6,000 accounts were banned. Hreiðarsson assures us that the methods were sound, and the bannings went off with surgical precision. "We are quite confident that false positives are practically non-existent, but we examine all requests for review," he explained. "So far less than a dozen have been found to be false positives." The project is ongoing, and so far CCP has banned approximately 9,000 accounts.

What they found was these real-money traders were not only soaking up in-game, virtual assets as well as hacking accounts, but also taking way more than their fair share of server cycles. The result was dramatic.

"Now, that is a beautiful graph if I ever saw one," CCP wrote on its official blog. "While the number of accounts banned in the opening phase of the operation constituted around 2 percent of the total active registered accounts, the CPU per user usage was cut by a good 30 percent." This is great news for legitimate players. "That is a whole lot of CPU for the rest of you to play with, people."

Areas that used to be heavily traveled by bot-controlled players are now easier for real players to visit. Systems that used to be controlled by the RMT players are now open for business. "Another great improvement is that space is now suddenly full of belts of oversized asteroids that were previously sucked up by hoards of macro miners of the RMT persuasion," CCP wrote. "Regular players are now starting to see mining as a viable means of making some ISK and they are moving in to take over the business." Now that the mafia has been kicked out, legitimate players and corporations can turn an honest profit in once-overrun systems.

The dust is settling, and they'll be back

Where there's money to be made, real money, in trading in-game currency, there will always be crafty people trying to profit. Fortunately for CCP, they've hired the talent and the brain-power to continually fight the good fight.

"They keep trying to sneak back, but in the end it’s all about the money and we simply follow that to find our guys," Hreiðarsson said to Ars. "Not only do we have a Doctor of Economics and a crack team of data gurus to analyze the problem, as well as able and willing developers to cater to our every need, we also have dedicated enforcers of published policy on this matter."

EVE Online is a game of high drama and intricate economies, and for at least a short while the skies are going to be a little safer for players to legitimately fight and mine and swindle each other and defend what's theirs. "Unholy Rage" was a success, with more server power for the real players and rich veins of ore now available for anyone who wants to make a career out of mining.

Back in Iceland, the men and women at CCP are busy crunching numbers, keeping an eye on trading, and getting ready for the next attack on those who seek to illegally profit from their game. "We try to stay out of the players’ way as much as we can. As long as they adhere to local law and our EULA/TOS, we really don’t find cause to meddle in their affairs," Hreiðarsson stressed.

"However, real-money trading and most of the activity involved with it is against our published policy, and even international law in the case of credit card fraud," he warned. "That is really where we draw the line—keep it in-game." CCP keeps proving that the only thing more tenacious than real-money traders are the people keeping the game clean.

via arstechnica.com

I haven't played EVE Online for a few months now, but reading this article made me smile. Glad to see CCP taking a stand and laying the smack down. I hope they can keep it up =)

Posted via web from tvstravis's posterous

Serenity - Battle of One HQ

via youtube.com

A great Serenity video mashup done by my friend Joe. Definitely give it a watch

Posted via web from tvstravis's posterous

The weather is beginning to turn for the better, and this time I believe it is for good. That being said, it didn't help much yesterday when I drove 250 miles to Detroit for a Tigers game. It was just a comedy of errors yesterday.

First, I woke up late. I wanted to be on the road by 8am, well, I woke up at 8:12. So, once I fueled up, got a Mt. Dew for the road, it was 8:40ish by the time I actually got on the road. At first everything was smooth, until about Saginaw, when the rain started to come down. That was when my windshield wipers decided that once I turned them on for mist, they were just going to stay on. For the rest of the trip, whether it was raining or not.

I made really good time getting down state, and Picked up my friend Patti just after noon, and off to the park we went. When we found parking, I tried putting my iPod in the glove box of my car. Well, that wasn't going to happen, because the glove box opened, but then wouldn't close. So fine, I just decided to take the thing with me. Ok, can't have anything else happen right?

Wrong! We get to the gate, and I hand over the ticket. Now, I bought the tickets on Stubhub.com, and printed them out from home. Well, one of the tickets printed out just fine, and the other? No barcode or number on it. All the relevant information was on it, except the barcode. There was simply the word "barcode" printed in it's place. This meant we had to head over to the stadium box office and get it sorted out. Well, we did, and finally made our way in, and found our seats.

Now, the seats were really nice. The "Tiger's Den" is a great section, with wooden deck chairs with pads, and plenty of leg room. Plus a small table in between, and a wait staff. So yeah, we were doing good, getting ready for the tarp to come off the field, and just as Patti was saying "let's get a beer", the announcement came. The game was postponed due to rain. So great. Well, at least they will honor the tickets when they eventually reschedule the game. If I can make it down for that game. We'll have to wait and see on that one.

And so, after hanging out at Patti's for a bit, I made the 4 hour drive home. And that was that, 8 hours of driving, 0 hours of Tigers game. Oh well, I did have a good lunch in Greektown, and I'll be heading back down sometime soon.

Play Ball!; or, The Start of Baseball Season

Spring has kind of arrived here in northern Michigan. And by that I mean that you can see grass (not just snow), and the temperature is slowly climbing above the freezing mark.

That being the case, it also means we have entered my favorite time of year. That would of course be Baseball season. I am something of a rarity these days, a rabid baseball fan in a time when everyone is a football fan. Don't get me wrong, I like football, and certainly watch plenty of it during the fall, but my first love is still baseball.

I will watch most any game when it's on TV, or listen to them on the radio, but at heart, I am a Detroit Tigers fan. They've been my team since I was just a 3 year old and they won the World Series in 1984. I grew up with guys like Jack Morris, Lou Whitaker, Alan Trammel and Kirk Gibson. Then the early 90's and Cecil Fielder, Travis Fryman, Bill Gullickson, and Mickey Tettleton. Whether the team is good or not doesn't stop me from watching, and following them.

This year's team is a bit of a conundrum for me. On one hand, I'm looking forward to watching them this year. To see Miguel Cabrera with a year in the AL under his belt, Brandon Inge getting to play a full season at third base, and the hopeful bounce back of the pitching staff. Which is where the problem is. The pitching staff is a bit of a mystery. Justin Verlander needs to return to his form from 2006-07, instead of the man masquerading in his place in 2008. Will Jeremy Bonderman ever live up to his potential? And let's not even start on Dontrell Willis and his Anxiety disorder. But, I am still hopeful that they can turn it around.

The bullpen will also be an interesting thing to watch. Can Brandon Lyon be a solid piece? I have my reservations about Fernando Rodney ever getting the command of his pitches to be effective. And 2006's wunderkid Joel Zumaya needs to stay healthy and be able to utilize his 103 mph fastball, as well as fully develop something off speed.

All in all, I'm remaining positive about this years Tigers team. Especially given the wide open nature of the American League Central Division. All 5 teams have a legitimate shot at winning the division. Expect quite a few posts this summer about baseball in general, and the Tigers specifically. I'm looking forward to a good season.

Tweets Ahoy!; or, Twitter isn't really that new folks...

There has recently been a rash of stories, and segments involving Twitter all over the news. In the past couple of months, every major news channel has had at least one mention of the website during a broadcast. Or have used it to "crowd-source", and/or reach out to their viewers in a new way. Even ESPN had an article involving Twitter in the past few days, as well as nearly an entire hour on the radio program "All Night" with Jason Smith on ESPN radio.

All this exposure for twitter is a bit of a double edged sword. See, here's why I think this. I started using twitter about a year and a half ago. I thought I was one of the Johnny-come-latelys to the party, having heard about it a few months before that, but signed up on Jaiku first. In the end, I joined twitter because the community was so much better there. Sure, the site was constantly down, and holy unreliable, but yet I stuck with it because the people were there.

Skip ahead to now, and we see a massive influx of celebrities, athletes, and the like joining twitter. Everyone from Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, to Shaq, have joined and started tweeting. This is all well and good I suppose, as they way I see it, the more the merrier. But, all this attention to Twitter has some calling it a fad, and has led to the mass miss use of the service.

First, let me address the fad angle. It's entirely likely that Twitter is nothing more than a fad, and will die out in a year or so. But, keep in mind that it has been around for quite some time, and unlike some other social networking sites (myspace, facebook, etc.), Twitter opened up the service to let others build widgets and such for any site. You can add your twitter feed to your blog, facebook, myspace, or any other page you want. Meaning that no matter what social network is the next hot network, you can always take your tweets along with you. I personally tie my tweets in to my facebook status messages. That way I can update both at the same time.

As for the miss use of Twitter, well, this happens to any and all websites that get popular enough. Spam happens. Anything that gets enough traffic will eventually have to deal with spam, and spammers. Why? The almighty dollar that's why. Spammers see all that traffic, and think only of the money they could possibly make off it. Thankfully, Twitter is set up in such a way that just because someone wants to read your posts, you don't have to read theirs. There are different levels of involvement, Followers, and Friends. Followers simply see your tweets and that's it. Unless you choose to follow them as well, you don't have to even know about them. Which is nice to keep the amount of spam down.

The other thing is people starting fake Twitter accounts in the name of someone. Like a fake account of a celebrity or athlete, or prominent tech person. For the most part, this is harmless as you can usually tell right away it's a fake, as those who do it tend to either do it for fun and are just having a harmless goof, or THINK they're funny, and are in fact just plain simplistic and sad. Either way, the fake Twitter accounts are kind of silly, and in the end don't get anywhere.

So, as long as there are people on Twitter that I find interesting or are friends of mine, I'll keep tweeting. It's a nice way to communicate, or just get a thought out in the ether for others to digest.