EVE Online mass bans in style

CCP, the studio that runs EVE Online unleashed a mass ban, code named: Unholy Rage, to all of the accounts which they had tagged as botters and whose owners dealt in Real Money Transactions(RMT as CCP calls it), transactions which involve one player selling in-game items to another player in exchange for real world dollars, something which Blizzard and even the government of China have been addressing lately.

CCP began covertly investigating accounts which were suspected of RMT and botting. Before Unholy Rage, the company had been dealing with the offenses on a day to day basis, but now they were ready to deal with the problem systematically. They have been monitoring the activity of the accounts suspected of dealing in RMT or botting and writing down names. In one fell swoop, they banned a little over 6200 accounts during downtime maintenance. It was reported that although the accounts made up only 2% of the total number of servers, they had been using up 30% of the servers load.


Of course this is only the beginning. Even some industry's giants, Blizzard and Sony, haven't been able to completely rid their servers of these "undesirables". Some say there are even more botters and gold sellers now than before with the increased popularity and hacking of accounts. It does look like CCP is heading in the right direction though. There's a difference between having isolated incidents of bots and massive zones crawling with them.

Previously I had written that I was considering moving on to EVE Online from World of Warcraft. After almost 4 years of WoW, it doesn't suck me into the world of Azeroth like it used to; it's become a grind; a grind for exp, for loot, for reputation, for raid advancement, and so on. After reading about the new offensive they took to botters and real world sellers, I'm definitely going to give EVE Online a try next month, though I only hope that it lives up to my expectations.

Source: EVE Online - "Unholy Rage"