If you don’t like it or are unable to protect yourself and your corp against it, go and play something else. The game is clearly not for you.

Seriously, would distilling that massive comment into the space of a couple paragraphs have hurt?

No that’s statistics.

Personally I’ve always felt that regulation of player morality cheapens interactions, since it means that the person dealing fairly with you didn’t really have a choice to do otherwise.

Alex :

Vetarnias :
Plus the ideology of that game is repulsive, but that’s beside the point.

Oh no, do go on. What exactly is this repulsive ideology and how is it represented in EVE?

Ah, I knew I wouldn’t get away with it, even by posting a week after the initial entry. Well, it’s this general idea that it’s seemingly okay to indulge in protection rackets and fraud in a virtual environment. In a post-Enron world and even more so at the beginning of an economic downturn created by little more than Wall Street greed, this is particularly unpalatable to me. The icing on the cake was that massive infiltration of a rival guild which was reported a few years back and which arguably made EvE enter the mainstream media, if only briefly.

There was, for instance, a case I have heard of involving one scammer who pulled one stunt after another, turning it into a specialty, and who continued to do so unopposed by the developers because it was perceived as part of the game. Just as to confirm what CCP seems to think is permissible in its game, one person was banned in one said scamming incident — a victim being cheated of one large amount of money, for making real-life death threats against the scammer (who, as far as I know, never got punished by CCP for his actions).

But even without death threats, I don’t care if it’s virtual money, if I get cheated by someone, I’m expecting GM’s to take care of the matter — even if that’s just to say they can’t do anything about it — instead of dismissing it as part of their intended gameplay. The ultimate lessons of EvE are that there are no rules, that rules are futile because they are meant to be broken, and that those who don’t break them are weak. Tell me something is noble but futile, don’t tell me something is futile because the first thing you are going to do is work towards its destruction.

Surely we’ve seen “play to crush” gameplay before, and every game raises its own ethical concerns. I remember that conversation surrounding Richard Bartle’s discussion of one WoW mission that has players using torture on prisoners. (I could add that there is more material in there that is ethically or morally questionable. Hell, I feel queasy when I have to attack mobs which don’t attack me first, even though it’s just a bunch of pixels — I’m weird like that.) But EvE goes beyond that, beginning with CCP’s name — Crowd Control Productions. Either this is very tongue-in-cheek, or it’s in itself an ideological statement — as in delusion of the masses, presumably to be content with what they have and never seek more.

Furthermore, because EvE is set in a sci-fi environment, it might give the impression, intentionally or not, that this is the natural evolution of the world, not as a repulsive dystopia that happened because the powers that be did nothing to stop it, but as something both *good* and inevitable, or more accurately, good because inevitable (strangely enough, I’m also thinking of Tom Friedman on globalization here).

In comparison, a fantasy setting is clearly set in the past from our perspective, as the world is nearly always some sort of medieval period set in an alternate reality, and there’s always the idea of progress kicking in — that we’ve progressed past this point. In other words, where the player can say: “Those days were brutal, but we’ve *evolved* beyond that”. (It’s the only way in which I explain the fascination for war games, even those set in historical events as recent as WWII. And why, may I ask, especially WWII? Beyond the technical progress, could it be because it’s an ideal war as far as the contrast between good and evil is concerned? In other words: World War II, the Noble War. Why are there no games set in WWI — or Vietnam?) I’m not naive enough to believe in constant progress. Regression may happen, it might even be inevitable, but I don’t want cheerleaders pointing the way.

(If I may add, that’s why I was particularly blown away by that old one-person RPG “Arcanum”, because it brought a fantasy world smack into an industrial revolution, much closer to our time period, and peppering the world with serious hints that this was, in many respects, no progress at all but at best stagnation and at worst a subtle regression to which the inhabitants of the world were oblivious for lack of a perspective but which the player himself immediately noticed.)

And this is where the ambiguity of EvE kicks in. By making no stand against such activities as cartels, infiltration, or fraud in its game, could CCP be making a political or economic statement as to the desirability of such activities?

In a nutshell, this is why I find EvE ideologically repulsive. Besides this, the other reason why I won’t play it is because it’s a five-year-old game. Not because of graphic reasons, but because the balance of power within the game seems to have cemented to such a point that I see no reason to start playing. (At least they got one thing right: a vast universe with plenty of space between belligerents.) I was tempted to try it out, but I passed, and will continue to pass as long as I see no possibility of toppling the major guilds there.

Vetarnias :
Plus the ideology of that game is repulsive, but that’s beside the point.

Oh no, do go on. What exactly is this repulsive ideology and how is it represented in EVE?

1. The exploit was introduced in 2004
2. It was petitioned and promptly ignored
3. PROFIT
4. 5 days before this exploit was discovered by CCP someone petitioned “Hey, this broken”
5. CCP, 4 years, 2 petitions and $3 trillion later, concludes that 5 days is too long to wait for a petition to be answered and vows to do better.
6. Having vowed to do better they read the petition and, upon investigating, determine that every major player in the game is fully aware of this exploit and is exploiting the heck out of it.
7. CCP, realizing they’d kill their game by banning everyone, issues token bans for those who owned exploitation facilities, knocks down a few starbases, and issues stern warnings to “never do that again, ok?”

That about it?