CCP has revealed hard data on their war against RMT sellers in EVE Online and their ultimate end-game for beating sellers: To convince buyers to spend cash on PLEX instead of on currency sold by unauthorized third parties.
On May 30 to June 1, CCP met with the Council of Stellar Management, a player-elected council that represents the views and interests of the EVE Online playerbase to developers. The transcripts of that meeting tackled the progress of CCP's ongoing war against RMT, and the developer let loose a dozen or so statistics on the amount of illicit accounts it has banned and disabled, and the amount of ISK it has removed from the economy as a result:
- Total number of accounts banned: 1705
- Accounts banned under 1 year old: 1354
- Accounts banned over 500 days old: 192
- Number of buyers reversed from: 248 + 519 = 767
- Total PLEX bought: 202 + 1419 = 1621
- Number of users buying PLED: 50 + 158 = 208
- Total cancellations: 9 + 54 = 63
- Accounts disabled 41 + 150 = 191
- Accounts still in negative: 125 + 205 = 330
- Character ISK from banned accounts: 720,349,658,85.65
- Character assets from banned accounts: 3,292,457,157,769.26
- Corporation ISK from banned accounts: 383,349,849,981.61
- Corporation Assets from banned accounts 792,010,629,991.37
- Total: 5,188,167,296,594
Converting RMT Buyers
CCP Screegs, which oversees account security, said that aside from cutting off ISK supply flowing to sellers by actively shutting down RMT farms, he is also focusing on converting buyers to purchase PLEX and to shut down the profitability of businesses selling ISK currency.
CCP keeps track of their conversion campaign by seeing if players turn to the legal PLEX to fund their ISK needs instead of turning to third-party sellers.
"The security team does in fact measure if players are bringing their wallet balances back up to the positives with PLEX once being set back into the negative. These are generally players who want to keep playing, and are then considered "converted" accomplishing the goal of changing player behavior," said the meeting transcript.
Working on Authenticators, Anti-Hacking Upgrades
CCP also confirmed a batch of new measures meant to further cripple RMT sellers. This includes the release of authenticators and the development of new anti-hacking systems.
There can only so much oversight that CCP can enforce, though. CCP Sreegs admitted that there isn't any easy way to detect when a player goes to an RMT seller website to make an ISK purchase outside the game.
Monitoring RMT sales related to character selling is also at the bottom of the priority list for the developer, according to CCP Sreegs, but it is on their radar. Right now, it is only when CCP stumbles across a business that also sells characters that those characters are banned.
CCP Screegs admitted that there is no active policing measure to go after sold characters since he doesn't have the time to do everything that he wants to. "While he'd love to go after people renting systems for real money and selling characters for real money, he just doesn't have the time currently. Maybe in the future though," the transcript said.
