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Thursday, May 19, 2011

CCP's War On Bots: Roid Ripper - Epilogue

Hopefully this is my final post on the subject of the mining bot for Eve Online called Roid Ripper.  The forums that the bot was advertised on are up again, but the bot is not.  The developer, DareDevil, apparently has skipped town, according to the admin for the site.

"This is being asked alot so im going to explain; After the recent events with the site being locked to maintenance and my admin access removed, Daredevil and me had an argument over the weekend until he left the conversation. He had been speaking to me like I am dirt for no reason and I am just not going to take it. I don't like to make assumptions but im pretty sure he wanted out for whatever reasons judging by the recent events. When Daredevil offered the roidripper support subscription, he was supposed to give me 25% for using publicdemands for his services. Any refunds are completely down to him. If I could offer support on roidripper I would, but that was not my part, I was supplying the means for him to advertise those services, nothing more."
The developer has disappeared and all of those who subscribed to the service are out of luck and out of money.  I know that some readers will want to see bot tears, so here are some...

"If you're reading this DD, or someone can get the message to him; if you want to quite RR fine but WHY screw over everyone who has paid for it and supported you? You made profit out of it no doubt given the number of subscribers. Server/forum isn't that expensive and anyone only has to do some minor research to see that. But nobody complained about your making profit and that's fine but I really hope you reconsider. It is completely uncalled for to punish everyone who supported you because of some spat you might have with one or two people from publicdemands.

"I subscribed because despite being piss poor I felt you deserved the support. Without Roidripper I can probably no longer afford Eve since I paid with PLEX and also bought game time. I have very little time to play otherwise. So I really hope you reconsider and work things out and come back. It isn't just you and MeSaR. Many others like me are caught in the crossfire too and paying the price through no fault of our own. You did a lot of good work for people for free so I don't believe you're just some money grabbing asshole. C'mon man show us you're a bigger man than that"

I don't think people want to admit that CCP just shut the bot down.  From watching the forums for this bot, the developer had to pull the bot due to CCP's activities and was never able to fix it so it would work.  But some people don't want to admit their bot writer perhaps wasn't that good:

I'm grateful for the work DD did in the past, but his recent actions were pretty fucked up. Vindictive even. If he wanted out, why not just say so and go, why try to fuck over people who gave him support, why lead people on with "will be released soon" messages. What a douche.
Heck, even a conspiracy theory was posted:

"guys u re being funny not to see such obvious fact.
WHY would DD do such thing, disappear close the website and delete forum...
u should answer urself simple question, who made him do that or in other way, who would benefit from PD being closed.

"how much CCP or other companied would have paid him.... if it was to consider that this whole issue with PD had been caused by some 3rd party losing money cause of PD
maybe they somehow forced him, although

"another thing is i couldnt stand all of you buttlicking and simply kissing DD's ass to urge him to finish Roid Ripper. 'ohh yes lovely DD take ur time we all love u oh oh kiss kiss'
never seen such a flame of candy pink sweet bullcrap addressed to one person who deliberately pissed on u most of the times."

But I'm going with the simplest explanation, lack of skill.  And I found a post to back me up on the conclusion.


"oh yeah well. havnt used RR since 3.5 or something as it was bugged for my in every single release with new bugs coming up by every following release. i more felt like a bughunter than a paying customer.

"some month ago i lost the intereset in this piece of code as there was no real progress whereas other bots had 'friendly' developers without napoleon complex but with a a very fast and reliable update/support. i have never seen so many users beeing banned in this forum. that was funny like 'uuh dude you are gonna burn for this comment' haha."
So the sad tale of Roid Ripper comes to an end.  Someone from the Public Demands community may come up with a new bot based on DareDevil's code, because where there is money, someone will try to get some of it.  But I'm sure CCP Sreeg would do a happy dance if that happens, since he would know how to ban those users fairly easily.

1 comment:

  1. Sreeg is nothing more than a mouth piece of cCCP. The event of detection of RoidRipper would only be because it wasn't a custom writen script. Most all publicly sold bots are known by CCP. I can easily spot botting users that are custom or non-custom. You don't need a degree in program or astro-physics to figure out who is botting and who isn't.

    cCCP only bans bots as a token action to say "here, see we are trying to do something". With the advent of 60% of the player base on games like PlanetSide2 and 80% on Dayz using some type of scripted assistance it would be a financial nightmare to ban "everyone". cCCP knows this and couldn't take a 60% (guessing the percentage here) perm ban of its player base. This would cripple the game internally and externally.

    So the war on bot is exactly like America's war on Terror... essentially smoke and glass.

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