Non-Eve Player's Perspective about CQ and CCP Leaked Document

As a developer in real life, I follow a lot of techie/programming blogs in addition to the gaming blogs I read. Imagine my surprise and amusement when one of these blogs spits out an article about Eve Online!

Written completely from a non-player point of view, this post was really interesting and went into some technical details about the recent player uprisings, as well providing a link to a supposed ‘leaked’ CCP internal document --"Greed is Good" that I had never heard of before.

Though I know vaguely of some of the protests that happened after Captain’s Quarters, I didn’t realize how involved some of the ‘revolt’ was. Forrest Smith states that “Players revolted by staging mass in-game protests flooding systems and attacking popular trade hubs.”

I’m not entirely sure how they pulled off attacking popular trade hubs successfully with CONCORD sniffing around, but I’m sure he’s referring to people smartbombing, or shuttle spamming.

Smith goes on to explain some game mechanics, though some of his information is a little old. For example, he states a titan as costing 120 billion ISK, when in reality you can get the hull for much, much cheaper now. (I suppose a complete, faction fit titan might cost that much, though I believe he was just referring to hulls in that portion of the article.)

Smith’s primary conclusion was that “CCP launched the vanity store too early.” This might be true, but I think there are some other things at stake. Smith does a good job of fleshing out the problems with the pricing of these ‘vanity items.’However, I think that the main issue was that CCP is trying to be like everyone else.

A lot of the people who play the game a lot, play because the game is NOT like all the other games. It’s more complicated, with a much higher learning curve. My personal opinion is that throwing in a ‘vanity’ store somewhat cheapens the content of the game. Unlike the addition of the tech 3 ship and wormholes, which added another level of complexity to the game, adding ‘vanity’ products is simply put: dumb and useless.

But, I’m still a nice Person, Right??

If you’ve been reading any of the stuff I’ve posted lately, you’ve probably gained the impression that I’m somewhat of a cranky, cut-throat chick with a chip on her shoulder.

It’s weird too, because I always thought of myself as a somewhat diplomatic sort, easily making friends and keeping the peace. It wasn’t until I started blogging some of this stuff that I started to realize how mean I can actual be, and have been in the past.

Scammers and Bad People

Are scammers bad people? I’ve had conversations with several friends in Eve Online regarding ethics in Eve Online. Some say that they wouldn’t do anything they wouldn’t do in real life, such as stealing, lying, scamming, etc. Other say it’s just a game, so why not?

A corp I was in a number of years ago had several scammers in it, including the CEO. I didn’t find out about it until later. They weren’t your typical Jita scammers, but the kind that pretend to be 3^rd party dealers, or ‘alts’ of 3^rd party dealers and scam people out of the ISK for their motherships and titans. It would often take months to set things up, and the final ‘grab’ would be worth billions.

They offered to train me in the finer points of scamming, but I never really had the stomach for it. Especially after they told me that some of their ‘customers’ would sell some of their toons in order to be able to afford the ship they were buying.

So, maybe it wasn’t because I couldn’t stand thinking of the thought of scamming someone out of billions of their hard earned iskies. (Maybe there was a little of that.) It sounded like so much work, and being a trader, I preferred a passive income that didn’t deal with…well…people in general. I’d rather look at entries on a spreadsheet or lines in my wallet.

I never could reach the point of thinking that these ‘scammers’ and thieves were evil. So long, of course, as they operated within CCP’s rules. Granted, it felt like cheating. But I didn’t necessarily think they were bad people.

There are many other aspects of ethics that have come up in the 4+ years I’ve played EVE. For instance supposed ‘space honor’ and the like. Honoring 1 vs 1s is a big one. It’s almost a crime in many pvp corporations to not honor this unspoken rule. You are considered to be somewhat noob if you disregard it.

For me personally, I struggle to find where I draw the line between in-game ethics and game play. I’m a pvper, so blowing people up on the one hand makes it difficult for me to judge other people doing other things within the scope of game-play. If this were real life, of course I wouldn’t steal or scam people out of billions. But I also wouldn’t kill people.

So, where do you draw the line? When does it cross the realm of game play and become something unethical?