Such an amazing adition to the core game.
Now, I have been playing on and off since 2007. There were good times, there were bad times, but thats EVE.
I would play the game ofr a year or two, get bored, take a break and come back. Rinse and repeat.
Then Somer Blink came along. And boy oh boy did my game olay change. Instead of flying ships and killing stuff I was busy clicking on promos and gambling ISK away like candy. There was no other choice but to quit the game because I got adicted to gambling and that is not why I play EVE.
Then came along IronBank era. Yes I was here, but managed to contain that gamblers itch for a while. Smaller scale gambling, to get the edge off, like a crack adict would take just a bit of crack. Yeah had to leave the game again.
All of those were banned and it really was for the best.
Came back to game, played for over a year, got my main into a capital, alt into a super, got some 5 alts for varios stuff to do in EVE. Good times. But it was geting tedious so I took another leave.
But wait, drums, drums in distance .... War drums, war is coming to EVE. Glorious mayhem ! Ho the joy ! Quicly I resub and explore what is new. It was not imnediately that I discovered Hypernet relay, took me a day or two. Lo and behold CCP sanctioned gambling.
It took me 48-ish hours to loose all my liquid ISK, liquidate a bunch of ships and when that ran dry suck 50+ mil SP from my super alt ( she didnt have a super anymore, so skills were not needed ).
Now I am free. No more assets of real value ( mostly junk, aprox 50mil ISK across alts and a depleted character that literaly can not fly a shuttle anymore. The only reason I didnt drain main char is because I dont have ISK for skill extractor.
CCP gave Paske a sock. Paske is free elf now. No more resubing every time there is a conflict. No more 3 accounts on MasterCard and 2 on PLEX ( because too much ISK to PLEX 5 accounts ). I got fuck all and that is a good thing. Because when I play EVE I dont play it for hour or two, hell no, I play it as much as humanly possible ( family permitig ). Because you cant login, do a dungeon and log out, you get a fleet, do 30 jumps one way to kill stuff then ( if you survive ) 30 jumps back.
P.S. I dont gamble IRL. Dont go to casinos or stuff like that. Once a year will do small stakes poker with mates, take 10$ with me to loose and thats it. Literaly not a cent more in pocket. Because I am aware of my condition and do my best to avoid geting in contact with trigers.
Farewell EVE, I will watch this sub from a safe distance and cheer for Test. may Progod clense the galaxy in fire of - We are bored gamers, what else will we do - of purifucation

There are still numerous issues with the game that I have not seen addressed so I spent some time and put them all down in words in the hopes that the CM's can see and use as feedback. If there is anything that I have missed that is glaringly obvious please add to it in the comments.
1) War Matchmaking – This is still something that is probably the biggest turn off from playing this game. Out of the last 9 wars we have had one was with level collection powers and the other 8 we were punching up. Now given the amount of alliances that we face that are higher than us it stands to reason that there are alliances that get to punch down but from checking our history which we keep collated on discord we have not faced an enemy a million or more lower than us in the last 22 wars and we are at a TCP of around 70 million. The Matchmaking needs to be addressed as from talking to a lot of people that play this game war is the biggest thing that makes them want to quit the game because it is clearly unfair.
2) Red Stars – As we know by now the complete random nature of these make the game virtually like a casino where you require good luck in order to advance your roster which is something that should never occur in a game. Out of this weeks 10 red stars from the login calendar and then from the blitz on Monday as well I received 9 dupes and a 1 star Hela. This gave me enough to open an elite 4 orb which gave me a duplicate of a 4 star minion and gave me 750 elite 5 credits so my red stars this week did not allow me to advance my roster at all. Given the sheer nature of red stars and the ridiculously high amount of dupes that we get we should be getting 20 red star orbs per week at least if not more given how many of them are 1 or 2 star duplicates.
3) Blitz – This one is something that I can only talk a part about as there are apparently changes coming in the form of the reward rankings so we will have to see how they affect us and how they are implemented but from what people have stated on here it could work or it could be a complete failure again which is something that a lot of people have seen blitz as for a long time. The main part I do want to focus on is the milestones only going up to 750,000 points which is ridiculous, I made 1 million points in my first rotation this morning on the second Hela blitz and now I will only do 2 more battles on either day for my dailies and I won’t go in to blitz any more than that for the rest of the weekend as Mega Orb Fragments are just not worth it, so if the intent was to get us to play this mode more then you failed.
4) Blitz Matchmaking – This is one that I thought was being addressed but it currently hasn’t so I will add it to this list the top tier of 8.3 seems to have a ridiculous punch up and even high synergy teams struggle just due to the power gap, for example these are the battles I currently have picked for me:
Power Armor at 200,661 and I can fight Meta Teams ranging from 333,166 to 333,765 X-Men at 189,487 and I can fight Meta Teams ranging from 325,250 to 328,572 BKT with Ultron at 292,582 and I can fight Meta Teams ranging from 441,978 to 448,465
As you can see the punch ups are ridiculous this high up and when my Power Armor has a choice between BKT, X-Men and BH over 100k higher it makes it stupidly difficult.
5) People Leaving the Game – It has become noticeable recently that the people that are leaving our alliance (a top 100 raid and top 200 war alliance) are not leaving to go to another alliance but instead are leaving the game completely and we have found it pretty difficult to recruit new members in. From speaking outside of our alliance this is not something that is happening to just us but something that is game wide, this appears mainly to be due to the fact that there is not any new content such as new campaign nodes etc. and also the fact that one you have Ultron at 7 stars the whole Darkness modes are completely obsolete. You have good game modes that are sitting there that could be utilised in better ways to ensure that we do not find ourselves bored by the game which appears to be a general feeling going throughout the player base at the moment.
6) Character Farming – The one thing that Coulson has made a lot of people very aware of is the non-farmable characters such as Psylocke and Colossus that have been out for a long time but there is no way to farm them. The reason that this has been thrown in to such light these days is the fact that our Shields with Coulson are generally much stronger than our X-men which means that in most wars it becomes a struggle against shield and Coulson as our X-Men teams have members that are stuck on 2 or 3 gold stars whereas the Shields/Coulson are generally a minimum of 4 or 5 gold stars. Along with the fact that the other main team that are supposed to be good against them are Fantastic 4 this means that we are generally always trying to punch up against Coulson teams which has made war even worse in the last few weeks.
7) Non-Confirmation on Purchases – This is one that we have been crying out for change in for months, too many areas in the game lets us spend our power cores etc. without having a warning which is not something that should be allowed. There are warnings in other parts of the game so they should be available in all areas to stop the accidental purchases. I have seen this idea being talked about on this forum for month’s maybe even a full year but the only response I can ever remember is one that happened within the past few days so we will have to see what comes of it.
8) Customer Support – This I believe is one of the main areas that annoys your player base and coming from someone that works in a customer oriented profession yours may just be the worst customer support I have ever seen. Looking back we have numerous threads and forums that discuss this at length with responses ranging from Copy and Paste that say nothing, to messages that state that you cannot help and also ones that have got messages back regarding something that there ticket did not even mention. I guess that you have tried to automate this as much as possible but it is clearly not working and I think that a better customer support team would decrease a lot of the hostility that comes your way.
I think that I have rambled on enough now but I just wanted to get my thoughts out on this and hopefully as there is no cussing or anything like that Cerebro and Zeeks can use this and see where we the community are coming from on these issues.
I love Marvel and that along with my alliance mates are the only reason that I am still playing this game but I have friends of mine that have said they are only playing until the new Game of Thrones game comes out which is within the next few weeks and I know that there are a lot of other games out there that are now following this sort of model and I would hate to see more and more people leave this game for the reasons above.

TL;DR :–
· Me and why I was banned
· IWISK
· EVE CASINO
· CCP Security
· Tinfoil
· Shit Spelling

Dear Fellow Space Nerds,

For months I have been debating if I should write this piece and I warn you now it is long, I have written this and discarded it several times on the basis that it will just come across as a bitch or a whine. But as you may now tell I have left it long enough for many to not care, so this story will just be that, a story of bad spelling, bad punctuation and the worst grammar you have ever seen. But it is my story and I have decided to just tell it as the question “I thought you was banned” needed a point of reference I could send people to. Now I get you will be suspicious but I am telling it as I see it, and if you read all of this then bravo indeed! :)

Before we begin let me just say that the whole banning of gambling mechanisms from a video game I do support and that is my stance on it. It may just be for fun but does it hold a place in a sandbox from an external point of view, the answer is no and should be every time. However it can be incredibly innocent for the 99% that participate, it is however the 1% who may have been personally affected by the ability to gamble using IRL money via the forms of plex codes. My issue which you will read here, is how it was handled and how I was treated rather than the morals of gambling.

This story begins at the start of 2016. Between the dates of the 6th and 9th of January, approx 14 Bankers in IWISK was banned for suspected RMT. This was only several days after CCP Peligro (who will be referenced allot in this piece) had announced on Twitter that he was back to work. CCP Peligro has been a subject much recently on reddit and other channels (discord / IRC etc) and I figured I would give my experience with him and CCP as a whole. Now some devs from CCP are reading this and those who I have linked this too will agree with much that is written here.

Now the claims that the banning of IWISK bankers was due to SMA etc informing CCP Security of the 1 Dollar to 1 Billion isk that IWISK was selling, these were called Batts or batteries.. I know what you are thinking, why would CCP believe such an incredible story that 1 Billion equated to 1 USD... Now CCP Peligro was off on Christmas break when these emails were sent to [email protected] mailbox.

Well the simple truth is that they actually did! Team Security took this as an opportunity to jump on the IWISK RMT train which they failed to execute back in mid 2015 with the whole iwisk URL blacklisting from the in game browser. Now why would Team security hate IWISK? The answer is really simple and can be summed in a few bullet points :

• Several complaints over IWISK RMT which on reddit we saw around 20 threads claiming to have damning evidence but was never shared with anyone...
• Bankers actually had been caught prior to the ban wave (I think 2 but we shal say 3 for the sake of argument)
• IWISK is a blind spot for Security

So the complaints speak for themselves however the bankers who had actually been caught prior to this are simply the reaction of an individual acting alone. Some CCP Security caught and some we had emailed CCP Security of suspicious activity who had later been perma banned.

And lastly the blind spot... This for any organisation regardless of being a gaming company, this is just an almost impossible scenario to police and should never have been allowed to operate. But the fact is that it was and as such this was their own creation of a black zone. This black zone had existed for almost 7 years+ with 3rd partying websites. The actual Blackzone has technically always existed since the API was allowed for public use.

Now keep in mind this is not just IWISK related as ANY other gambling or website that allowed transactions to take place "legitimately" through a 3rd party site is a risk. The reason IWISK was such a risk was because literally hundreds of trillions flowed through it. IWISK could easily transact up to or approx 50 to an incredible 100 Trillion a month just by the master wallet alone! (may have been less but at its peak it really hit these numbers)

So IWISK was a massive risk to Security from an RMT perspective, and anyone could claim RMT, and to be fair to those who did, we could not prove that it was not happening. And I will explain why this is the case…

IWISK had a quick deposit method that allowed bankers to process isk by copying the transaction from the wallet into a field on the bankers backend. This allowed said banker to give the customer their virtual isk on the site within 8 seconds of sending the isk to IWISK Corp. This made us very popular as there was very limited wait times to gamble with your iskies.

However this system could be abused right? I simply could just copy a transaction from the wallet and wallah, I have given myself 1 bajjilion isk right... Yes this indeed is the scenario... IWISK or EEP mitigated this risk by adding a collateral to the bankers account. So if a bankers collateral was 10 billion, he could only quick deposit for players up to 10 billion isk. When the API ran after 30 minutes, these would be matched against the players transaction from the master wallet and the banker would be given his collateral back on the site.

So what the hell does that all mean.. well it means that a banker could amass profits as a banker and they could use those profits to RMT with. So If the banker had 20 Billion in his collateral wallet, the banker could sell 10 Billion to a player by just tweaking the transaction to their name, thus creating a fake wallet deposit in the database. The API runs and it will not match the in game wallet, and thus the banker is now down 10 Billion but you have "gifted" a player 10 billion isk to do what they want with.

So yes there was a loop hole in IWISK that allowed people to do this, but it was policed when discovered and this was one of the ways we caught people who thought they were smarter than the admins running IWISK or CCP security. I genuinely believed these bankers thought we could not catch them and that we would not shop them to CCP --- They were wrong.. --- I would often receive emails from players stating they just bought isk from xyz site and they got a iwisk email saying they had funds. So my response which can be verified by Security was always to inform CCP and if I catch who it was I would do the same.

So this is where it got a bit hard to navigate, I would often look at the person delivering the isk and be like "really this fucking guy is RMT'ing....". So when probed the banker denied it and I could not help but believe him. However I now had the issue of trying to work out who and how.. So this is really how the above loophole was discovered and the watching began to see who and how.. I never said or told people that we were watching them, simply just mailed everyone saying, if you are RMT’ing and using IWISK as a front we can identify you and you will be caught. Again this can be verified by CCP or a banker who kept these mails… We caught several bankers and details were sent to CCP and policing of that was now a task.

So back on track to the banning of the Bankers Jan 2016. After a month or so CCP un-banned all those involved. Except for one person “R00gle” who was in MC at the time. Now R00gle to this day denies any involvement in RMT and even went to FanFest to hang out with his buddies from MC. CCP Spoke to him and said they would look back into it, but they never did get in touch with him. Having now known R00gle for many years, If asked the question did he? I would say no every time and he was a scape goat for CCP Security to claim they got "their" guy from the ban wave in Jan.

Remember that CCP Security only answers to very few people in CCP and that would be Hilmar, and maybe Andie or Ned? IDK exactly who but this would be a reasonable assumption and really just speculation from other posts and channels I have poked around in. So on that basis, any communication directed at CCP Security is never going to give you a response, because CCP Security do not discuss with end client or in very rare cases they may, but not to the value add of the end user, and simply close your ticket with a no response. This you can find on Reddit hundreds of times and this is how they operate. This should come to many of you as no surprise regardless how shit the service is.

The so what to all that is, CCP Security hated IWISK from day one. Not just for the reasons above but also because they got told to let it go the first time around (mid 2015) and the second time around (Jan 2016). Most reading this will know about where CCP Burgtarist was open at FanFest and said he was over ruled and if he had his way everyone would have remained banned.

Now some numbers, because we all love numbers and spreadsheets! But sadly I do not have graphs... I could make one but then I would be just trying to buy the super nerds approval using graph pron!

This is the contribution of IWISK over 12 months to the RMT issue. So you can speculate that CCP Security spent hundreds of hours of no doubt, evidence gathering and data analysis which I know CCP Quant had to do. I am sure trying to map all that isk was a nightmare and the promo codes must have made it impossible to determine isk in vs isk out..

CCP released a figure stating that on average every day they ban 50 accounts for RMT or other activities etc... Now this same figure I have seen across reddit on a few occasions and I have used this number on occasion to make a point, and I believe it has comes from the 2014 FF video archive. If the figure is wrong let me know and I will recount my abbicus and update appropriately. But I think when you see the result the amount they ban per day will not change the outcome too much.

EDIT: Some facts for you... 2012 to 2013 30,202 Account banned total.

So 50 Accounts banned daily over 1 year

• 50*365= 18,250 accounts.
• IWISK accounts perma banned within 12 months = 4 people Jan 2016 to Jan 2017
• IWISK Contribution to the RMT problem

0.022%

Not suggesting that RMT is justified and belittling the issue at all, but numbers speak for themselves and the issue was tiny by comparison to what actually takes place in Eve if at all IWISK was RMT'ing. Now if you check these websites that are selling ISK and have feedback sections, you will see that they are still selling and moving the same amounts of isk. Soooo no sudden dip in ISK being RMT'd to the "black market"??? Think about that just for a minute and ponder if IWISK was such a massive RMT operation why has banning it had no effect on the 3rd party ISK Black Market? Smells like bullshit right...

So before I even get to what happened in Octoer 2016.. Several more points on RMT in Eve. It happens all the time and it is happening in alliances or inter corp constantly. Supers & Titans are being sold for RL $$'s all the time and accounts. CCP Tickets to FF / Vegas are being sold for isk along with Plane tickets / hotels and beer money.. Yes those going to Fanfest this year, there will be a few who have paid corp mates isk to fund their trip and hotel stays because they have soo much isk and some people have swag amounts of RL $$’s. I know many that have done this and even many CCP dev's know who these people are. This was discussed at a player meet on several occasions late last year. However this is not challenged or tackled because literally who gives a F, certainly the Devs attending did not give a F.

Hell I tried to buy a nice duder at FF but he refused to take my money and insisted he bought me the beer. So instead I said jokingly how about a plex as I will end up owing you? He said that is one cheap plex, but no you do not have to do that... Now some would have said hey, I buy beer and you gib plex K?... Little did he know that because he refused me spending my own money and just wanted to buy me a beer out of principle and in his own words "you have done a lot for many", when I got back to the UK @ home I sent him 20 plex's! Made me warm and fuzzy just for his reaction as he was gobsmacked. ♥ So If I am guilty here it is accepting a beer and paying 20 plex’s for the pleasure \0/ then yesh I deserve the banning. kek

So now we spin on to September 2016. Me and Eep had a few disagreements over several years and now looking back it was over trivial stuff and I decided that If I had stayed in IWISK our relationship would have devolved further. This being our friendship of 3 years was coming to an end and it genuinely made me sad and disappointed with myself. Regardless of what you may think of Eep or the way he reacts from time to time, he is a good guy and he takes way more flak than is deserved. He is down on his luck most of the time. He struggled with money and lived on very little, despite what you all thought, he was not rolling around in RL money living the dream, but sadly living month to month on most occasions and having to borrow money (which he repaid back to people). And I hope Gonz does not mind me saying that, but I just wanted to put it into context and disperse any ideas that he was rivalling yacht sizes with Mittens… If you really knew Gonz, you would know he had no money and if he had been RMT'ing then he would have been rich by comparison.

So I decided one day that enough was enough and if I stayed in IWISK one more day I would flip my sheet and my relationship with Gonz would be perma damaged. So I left to join Eve Casino who welcomed me along for their launch of a new casino that worked completely different to any of the others currently open. Now I did act badly here and I do regret my abuse of the in game mailing list IWISK had, I advertised me leaving IWISK and promoting a new Casino. As the Face of IWISK (streaming and Media) I tried to justify it as a bit of tongue and cheek on my way out, but it was a douche move. I figured Eep would take it two ways, badly or a challenge to step up IWISK 2.0 asap. Not one that I am proud of... But even after all that me and Eep have remained friends and we still talk from time to time. Some things are more important than space pixels, and I am happy to report he is doing ok and better off now than he was prior to IWISK being banned from EVE. The site is still thriving and makes more $$$$’s than it ever has.

So I am now with this new group ECAS / Eve Casino. The doors are closed for internal testing only and the website was pretty damn good I must say. I will not go too deep on ECAS as there really is not much to say, but the website was functioning but only to a point as it was only half finished, not ready for release. The planned release date was the week of Eve Vegas and much work was needed to get it finished.

So with that in mind that Eve Casino was not open to the public and not a single isk was moved through ECAS, the owner was banned along with myself Lenny and Eep. Here is the list of why's :

• Lenny – RMT.
• IronBank - Section 2.1 EULA Offence.
• Eep - EULA Offence / not sure as never saw it and cannot find reference.
• Adarics ECAS - EULA Breach of Development License.

Now Eve Casino was banned because they had used the Crest API for the login to the site as part of the "Evil Network" SSO. This included EOC TV and a few other tools that was being developed. The Crest API was not used for anything else other than the player to login and this was approved by CCP for use. Adarics had spoken with several developers who had given him the greenlight to use it as it was not being used to handle wallet information or any other part of the player. But CCP security banned him for said use. So now we have a classic situation of Part A of the org not talking to Part B. When this was produced to CCP Security they just closed the ticket and ignored him.

And yes you got it, CCP Peligro. So again even with Adarics doing everything by the book, asking for permission and clearing everything prior to deploying it or using it, CCP still screwed him over, or should I say CCP Security. Now it is my understanding that he took this information to Falcon who basically dismissed him and said it did not matter as the case was closed. Now Falcon was A) not interested or B) Cant do anything...

Now you might be thinking wait there must be more to this than what Iron is telling us... Nope that is it, and the so what to that.. Around 12 bankers who were helping test the website which had not transacted a single isk and was closed to the public had all their wallets reset to zero, and Adarics was banned for a first time infraction of a rule that had no effect on the game as the casino was closed even though he had a green light from the Developers.

To this day Adaric is still banned and all those bankers who joined ECAS never got their isk back. They had done nothing wrong, not a single isk moved around, not involved in any of the coding, and CCP just took trillions of isk from these players. Soo, abuse of Power you might say? Guess who did this >>> CCP Peligro Mr Team Security.

Next we move back to IWISK.. Lenny and EEP banned for the reasons above and the rest of the bankers had their isk stripped. So again bankers in IWISK who may have been or may not have been involved in RMT was stripped of their isk and that was that. CCP took between 25 and 30 Trillion isk from both of these orgs and claimed a victory over RMT.

Now it is not hard to fathom that a lot of isk was purchased with plex. I often was intrigued if people had been playing with Plex to fund their activities on IWISK, as to me this was fascinating. Take away the human part that people may have been spiralling out of control, this can be said not just for IWISK but for EOH EVE Bet and the "others" who probably had small amounts of traffic but nothing worth boasting :P (still getting those jabs in). I do not like to reference competition as it seems like a cheap shot, but as these are now all dead, it no longer matters to a degree… But yeah the point here is that all that isk taken which no doubt the players had purchased via EVE or Markee etc has disappeared.. Not even some sent to Plex 4 Good or used to reimburse players who had their stuff stolen in game etc.. CCP talk about an isk imbalance when they restore Items from stolen looted accounts, well they have a huge sink to use. But I guess this was taken and written off as profit rather than use what they took.

Whenever people think of RMT or gambling in Eve they will always pick the most known target. One because the most popular and two because law of averages state that yes it probably exists at some point. However this can exist across all of the casino's, but given the most popular will always be the focal point, you are always going to be under suspicion.

An example of RMT existing outside of IWISK I want to share with you is a guy we caught from Germany, who was trying to use IWISK to funnel money to another player. He was using the raffle system buying 50% tickets with player 1 and using a 2nd account on another machine connected via a VPN to mask himself from us and CCP. His 2nd account would purchase the other 50% of tickets. So he was washing his isk. Yes IWISK was taking a cut as the house would normally regardless, but unknowingly being abused by some tard or tards. I asked this guy if he used any other ways of doing this...

With a bit of poking he finally opened up and said he had access to alliance funds and also a corp accounts in B0T. Not B0T holding itself ofc but some renter corps within B0t... This allowed him to funnel isk into these corp accounts and the use of these funds to build supers etc which he then 3rd partied to make RL money. This seemed like an obvious way to funnel isk and I asked him how he never got caught. His response was CCP are not clever enough or lack the resources to catch him... I was a little surprised by this but I wanted more info on this guy. I was trying to catch him out by getting any info I could, but all avenues lead me to around 50 iP's which bounced all over the world across 7 or 8 VPN services which are easily obtained online & his hardware ID's were changing all the time. This guy was the master or RMT and seemingly from what he was claiming (because that is what it is just a claim) and I wanted to know more, hell who would not be curious.

So I asked him if he had ever used any other websites to facilitate washing isk or doing RMT trades. He said the best one was using EOH Poker (Sorry guys). He said that all he had to do was set up a Head to Head and just lose to the person he was selling to... Or use 2 accounts of his and wash the money across 20 accounts over a 3 month or 6 month period of which none could be connected to Physical hardware or software ID tagging. He told me he would biomass on mass accounts, and some accounts he has had for years without being banned by Team Security. So he in private could wash isk very easily via playing poker in sealed rooms. Thus utilizing EOH's system to wash isk very easily with little to no risk of another player sniping raffles from him. I could see his point and he said that he would only use IWISK for certain methods of washing or selling isk, but he would not tell me anymore, he felt spooked by a few people dropping in and out of the channel. Once really confident talking to us then suddenly not so much. So this encounter certainly opened my eyes on how these guys were abusing sites to do these trades and he was boasting of hundreds of thousands of Euros in profit from this.

This ultimately changed how I looked for patterns in the database. For example looking for players who go head to head on raffles of a value higher than x and then expanding this to a large date range to see how long this was going on for. To be honest it was hard to figure out who was who and if it was chance or just normal activity.. So I thought I knew or had the silver bullet in identifying anyone abusing the system, but reality was, I am now more confused over the data set than ever.

So that aside, that was September done and dusted and I have now moved over to EVE Casino. Hopefully I have given a decent overview of the before the final banning and demonstrated that RMT was happening everywhere, but because IWISK was the most prominent focal point of the gambling scene in EVE, it had become the centre of all RMT claims, even though every system could be manipulated regardless of reputation.

So October the 12th and the ban wave and EULA changes announced by CCP. https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/end-user-license-agreement-changes-coming-with-eve-online-ascension/

I am working night shifts and had been for a few days at this point. I woke up to hundreds of messages and tweets, skype, irc everything… I laid in bed and was like sigh this again!!! So I get out of bed, put on my slippas and go to the kitchen whilst reading all of the messages and a cluster barrage of confusion. I make a cup of tea (Earl Grey to be precise + 2 sugars dash of milk) and make my way to my PC. I was not worried as this had happened several times before and I have never been banned in 12 or 13 years. To be honest at that point I assumed it was just a IWISK the website had been blacklisted and all gambling was to cease, but to my genuine surprise, my account had been banned also.

When attempting to login I got the classic “Banned pending investigation, CCP Peligro”… I laughed out loud at first and then tried every account I owned. All 30 of them but alas to no avail. So I started checking my emails and literally as I opened my client, the email popped in.. It was from guess who, you got it – CCP Peligro

CCP Peligro (EVE Online) Oct 12, 15:22 UTC
Hi,
This mail is sent to inform you that your EVE Online accounts have permanently banned, in light of EULA violations. Specifically, you were found to be using your accounts "XYZ" and "XYZ1" for business purposes, in violation of the EULA, Section 2.A.
Your continued access to the System and license to play the Game is subject to proper conduct. Without limiting CCP's rights to control the Game environment, and the conduct of the players within that environment, CCP prohibits the following practices that CCP has determined detract from the overall user experience of the users playing the Game.
2.A "Accounts may not be used for business purposes. Access to the System and playing EVE is intended for your personal entertainment, enjoyment and recreation, and not for corporate, business, commercial or income-seeking activities. Business entities and anyone who is acting for or on behalf of a business or for business purposes may not establish an Account, access the System or play EVE. Accessing the System or using the Game for commercial, business or income-seeking purposes is strictly prohibited."

So I opened TS3 and those from IWISK was now back on my TS3 server and I started to understand what the damage was, and it was everyone, it was a swift attack from young Mr CCP Peligro.

So I noticed that a Petition had already been opened on my behalf by CCP, no doubt just for their tracking. So I responded saying “I have never RMT’d so I do not understand my ban”. Then as I sit there I read the email again, it was not for RMT as I had assumed... Because it came from CCP Peligro my assumption was that it must be ISK related as that is what he does right. But to my surprise it was no mention of RMT in my petition like Lenny’s. Now I had not spoken to Lenny at this point due to the TZ difference, but the guys on TS3 said his specifically stated RMT, yet mine was for a Section 2.A… So I jumped on IRC and started asking questions with some Devs at CCP, they said if it was not RMT then it should not have come from CCP Peligro, it should have come from another person at CCP. I cannot remember who the Dev is who handles violating of Section 2 of the EULA but we know that it is not CCP Peligro. So now I am confused as this info is coming from Devs and then a few days later I noticed that Nosy Gamer was talking about the same thing. (If anyone finds out who the Dev at CCP should have been let me know and I will update this to keep this accurate.)

So I respond to my petition basically saying, sorry I misread the petition, but I do not understand how I broke this section of the EULA. Can you explain to me what I did wrong…
But the classic silence now dawned upon this petition and not a single response. Few weeks later the petition is closed and not a single response nor explanation or even guidance on why and how to avoid going forward, just simply nothing.

I spoke with Falcon and we had traded a few emails. Not to go into them too much but the bottom line was that Security had concluded their investigation and as such the matter was closed. Nobody can do anything at CCP as the decision is theirs.

So no point except to maybe appeal to Internal Affairs at CCP. I did wait a while before doing this, & Not a single response.

The one good thing about going to Player events is you can meet Devs that you know or have never met. Meet people you have never met and share experiences. Even though I was super angry about what happened, I pulled up my big boy pants and put a smile on my face. I think because of my demeanour about the whole thing being happy go lucky and care free, nearly all the devs would speak openly with me about what had happened over a few shots and a giggle. Not giving too much away, but it did give away a few things that I was trying to understand. Why had I been banned as the reason given made no sense.

So take the email from CCP stating that my accounts had been banned for the reason “income seeking or for business” – Now given I know this is not RMT related as it would just say RMT and you are perma banned from EVE. Yet I am still allowed to play subject to proper conduct right? So it is not RMT as that is clear cut and nor should it be.

The only road I can go down is “Twitch” and the “Game Show” I was pixel space famous for. So I would ask these Devs when intoxicated, was I banned for the reason because of what I was doing on Twitch? The same response, sorry I cannot tell you but a smile & a wink was enough for me to know that I was on the right path.

Why all this effort and having to read between the lines, simple really, nobody at CCP would discuss any of this with me. Because they were kept out of the loop or those involved were told specifically not to discuss this with anyone at CCP or external. Drunk CCP best CCP :)

However not all employees will toe the line, so yes some expressed their disgust to me and apologised for their company & colleagues behaviours and some of the CSM contacted me saying they were appalled by this, and no I am not referring to Bobmon but “others”. It was comforting to know that despite the public flogging CCP gave me, people were still ready to call out CCP’s BS.

So now Its November and I kinda have a better understanding of the reason I was banned for. So I stream on Twitch like many others and the assumption from CCP or more specifically is that my channel is a cash grab based on massive amounts of ISK I have amassed from IWISK. (This was a comment made to me by a member of CCP GM's)

Now if you spent like 5 minutes in my channel like most critiques have in the past. You assume that I am trying to get subs and donations for the isk being given away. This could not have been further from the truth and if you have read this far congratulations…

The channel operated like this… If you are a subscriber you got “Iron” or points for every month that you were subscribed. So if you had been subbed for 1 month you got 500 Iron, and on month 2 you got 500 + 2000 for being 2 months, 3 months 500 + 3000 etc etc…

So the longer you are subbed the more points or “Iron” you got and this is known on Twitch as a loyalty system. You also got points for being idle in channel or being in channel when I was streaming.

Now if you are not subscribed you got no points at all, simply none as points are used to play in game channel games “roulette or Bank robbing” or entering Subscriber only giveaways / requesting songs etc. These giveaways were for Plex’s or other things which you could redeem via your EVE account management page.

I purchased these codes from Markee Dragons store or Greenman Gaming (Approved ETC or PLEX code retailers) and the money to buy these codes came from the sub’s money that I got from Twitch every month.

So I have been accused of Income seeking by CCP, and the reason I find this so ludicrous is that it was no secret of how this model operated. Hell every stream I would announce these code giveaways are only for subs because the subs effectively paid for them. And at this point I think nobody at CCP involved in my banning knew this, because they simply did not do their homework. I would love to be proven wrong, but that would require someone from CCP actually talking to me.

The other giveaways that was done on the channel follow’s CCP rules that everyone must have the same chance regardless of subscription type. This I followed to the letter and back story, I even asked for this to be made as a policy for streamers. The rules also state that this is for “in game items only” and Fozzie even reinforced that on Mittani’s Twitch channel days after this policy was released. He said if it is for anything out of game then do what you want with it, which reinforced the CCP policy on Streaming.

So I followed the rules to the letter and others on Twitch were still not following these rules… But hey I did not care as everyone has their own path to follow and if CCP really gave a hoot they would step in. I am no internet police vigilantly and I do not stoop to the same levels like DBRB for example. Yes DBRB I know what you tried to do and it failed.

Anyway back on track.. A little bit into the world of me and why income seeking is just utter nonsense.. I work as an IT Contractor and earn good money. Or at least I think it is good money. Approx 300 GBP a day or 380 USD a day not inc bonus etc. Not going to be a billionaire in RL, but enough to not worry financially about a mortgage or nice cars holidays etc.
So here is a rough example of what I got from Twitch every month and how those funds were spent. Sometimes it was less around 500 but it varied and at one point was as high as 720… This is puny compared to the likes of Zarvox etc but he does it full time and deserves every penny!

Twitch Income:

• 250 Subs @ 2.5 USD = 625 USD

Monthly Expenditure:

· Server VPS - 105 USD · Deepbot 10 – USD · 1ronbot 5 – USD · Plex Codes and Aurumn Codes Monthly Avg - 200 - 250 USD · X-Split – 15

Total Monthly Expenditure - 380 USD

So I make give or take a massive:

245 USD a month

depending on how many subs I have, and this does not even include the cost of Electricity / Hardware failures or equipment purchases to improve the stream. If I was to break it down further into that. But as these additional's I have not included are for personal enjoyment as well and I cannot or won’t include them. as it would be wrong to do so.

Also any paypal money left over in paypal get's spent at the end of the Year on a Christmas and New Years special Stream. I buy as many codes as I can to give away (2015 Christmas I spent over 1100 USD on codes alone). So I run my channel almost non profit or at least as best I could. And yes I take money for Beer and Nachos cuz Beer and Nachoz amright?

So I was banned for making around 200 USD a month and some change because… NOPE NOPE NOPE I do not get it also. Other streamers make more $$$’s than me easy in the Eve Category, but yep you got it, it was all they could use to ban me. Literally they used a BS excuse to ban me from the game and publicly flog me.

So yes I got F’d over royally because some fuck wit child in CCP Security had a grudge to settle. That is truly how I feelz about this and it is disgusting. If any of my staff members behaved like this, they would be out immediately without warning. And I know I am not alone when it comes to complaints about Peligro and his conduct…

To add insult to injury he even followed me on Twitter about 2 weeks prior to nuking my account, I guess he wanted my tears…

http://i.imgur.com/MtAxI0Y.png

But the funny part is, as soon as I mentioned and saw this connection I emailed CCP about his behaviour and that day he un-followed me on Twitter. Bad taste indeed sir.

Now I had tried to reach out and extend my hand with Peligro, as he followed me on Twitter prior to the first ban wave in Jan 2016. I used to feed him info on suspected people or anything else that I thought may have been an issue. See image and you will notice the dates..

http://i.imgur.com/bxATAfX.png << But as you can see I was trying every avenue to get these sec people to engage.

Around June he stopped following me, so I took that as a sign that CCP Security wanted nothing to do with me or to aid in catching RMT'ers. I have also emailed and raised petitions of bankers & players who I thought were dodgy. And I also captured one of the bankers via Reddit who I know got banned. That was a good day for Reddit on the anti RMT front!

Now there is the whole unassailable wealth thing.. This made my literally laugh out loud. For a start I know more people in Eve who are station traders and combined have more isk than IWISK bankers / IWISK in general. They could have funded the war against Mittens all by themselves as a small group. Station traders in major hubs selling and buying firesales or hunting forums for cheap BPO deals and reselling them etc also have unassailable wealth. The hypocrisy that it is unfair because you cannot target these people and casino’s are generally untouchable… Well if you know station trading or have half a fucking clue about this game and enough capital, you can literally steer the market in your favour. And I do believe a trader recently and a few other have been banned and they are still banned. Guess who is investigating them… CCP Peligro

@ CCP – I am disappointed with you that you even listened to the dear complaints of the overlord Mittani, But I do expect you to Nerf Market trading so you can be killed and have your stuff taken from you, or would it be better Mittens to write a letter of complaint to Ned?
Sigh…

Lastly
I was debating and have been for the last 15 minutes whether to put this in or not but I will add these last few bits as conjecture and you make up your own mind. But all of the above is my story and I have no reason to BS. You can see it is open and honest. I have tried not to misty any part of the above except the bit with my email trades with Falcon as it contained some personal parts of my life when I was in the forces / Hospital. But I hope at the very least you can see that not everything is as it seems.

If you control the evidence that is received and you want a group or x people out of the game, you can make any evidence tell the story you want. Forget what you think about me or IWISK etc, just think about it for a while.

[Tinfoil-zone]

· Mittani is RL friends with Peligro and he is / was a Goonswarm Member… · Head of internal affairs left after this all happened. · Head of CCP Security left after this all happened.

[/Tinfoil-zone-end]