Actually, I'm going to retract my bit about alts. Claiming to be somebody else's alt should not be allowed. Imagine somebody going around claiming to be you and saying "Did I ever tell you guys how much I beat my wife?" or something along those lines.

The issue with this is when you feel that verification is unnecessary -- after all, if Chrlbba is advertising his services in Amarr local, indistinguishable from "that guy you heard about who does third party trades", you're not going to necessarily go through any additional verification steps-- he looks and sounds exactly like what he's selling himself to be. Obviously, if you're looking for a supercapital broker, you won't find Chrlbba, or he won't be much of a threat, but in the case where *he* approaches *you*? While Chribba's reputation isn't the GM's to manage, this kind of scam takes advantage of quirks of the game client itself, and thus is an appropriate area for intervention IMO.

yeah, this gets into how GMs enforce things. AFAIK, GMs don't seek out rule violators, they only act in response to petitions. So, as long as you're *not* using name proximity for impersonation scams, you'll be totally fine.

All of those other scams require people to skim and not read, they don't rely on client tricks themselves. That's my distinction, basically. I agree with your last, but would insert "reasonable" in there-- some "reasonable" option available to them etc.

That makes me think any character name impersonations with malicious intent should be a no-no (as opposed to creating corps/alliances following the previous paragraph, since those can be freely created and closed with legal in-game means.)

Luckily, this is all fairly irrelevant to the matter at hand. Impersonation does not need to concern itself with randomfool654 who unwittingly gave away his super. The victim is the character being impersonated via slander and stealing the isk they would have legitimately made off the deal. Note further that if I create a Chribba impersonation and carry out the deal, keeping his usual fee I am still impersonating him to his detriment and in violation of ToS/Naming policy. In both cases, it should also be the person getting impersonated (the real victim of said impersonation) who has the rights to petition the Naming/ToS breach - not the person who got their stuff taken away. The mark should only be petitioning falsely claimed CCP affiliation, if any.

Character impersonation should be against the rules, full stop, because of what making them "ok" implies.

If it's ok if they're not too close, that means I make a character treading the line and ride it as long as it works. Once the character is burned, biomass it and create a new one to continue making business deals people regret. This smells too much like sec status recycling of gank alts and I feel goes too far to be allowable.

It's the making corporations with similar names that I feel should not be restricted beyond font abuse, since the corp can be dissolved and reformed under a new name. It also provides a shady employment history for the mark to investigate.

Bah! I wrote an incredibly eloquent and harrumphingly impassioned response to this, but the 'preview' button wiped it!

Here's a crappy rewrite:

'I' looks like 'l' because of the dodgy font in the game. I think peeps should be able to tell toons apart without having to paste and copy names, so some kind of intervention may be in order. Perhaps also with 'O' and '0'.

'4' doesn't look like 'A' unless you went to dafty school. It isn't a problem with the game. It doesn't need fixing. People who can't tell the difference need fixing. If we take those people's complaints at face value and decide that Chribba (or whichever 3rd party) has turned scam artist, that's our fault. Our (lack of) evaluation of others needs fixing. After all, they could be lying to deliberatley trash someone's reputation.

It's not the scammer's fault that the mark is guillible. It's not the 3rd party's fault if we're gullible enough to take the guillible mark's word at face value! It's our responsibility to judge the characters we meet and evaluate our interactions with them appropriately.

If scamming is a serious problem for noob retention, I do like the idea of putting it into the tutorial. Get them to RP a few common scams, then let Aurora scam them! Surely they can't stay mad at Aurora!?

I totally agree.



We definitely do need the rules to be as clear cut as possible. But I really think we need to minimise the 'sadness' bit. If only 'l' and 'I' were acted upon, there'd be a bit of sadness. If we started going into anything like 'A' and '4', 'E' and '3', 'T' and '7' etc. it would be horrendous and unnecessary.

other forums have rich text editors so it's easy to understand what you're writing

I stopped paying attention for a second. Have they actually changed anything back, or did they just lock us into a corner so our dissatisfaction wouldn't be noticed until the next time they nerf my friends and peers?

Hello everyone,

I just want to clear up one little misunderstanding here once and for all.

You cannot impersonate yourself.

Telling others that youGÇÖre an alt of a character you own or telling them what other characters you own is not a EULA/TOS violation and will not get you banned.

We're paid shills who support CCP 100%; why are you asking us about this?

"coming months"

...ok, so just change the ToS back until this "coming months" discussion