A simple YES or NO would be nice.

1. Ero engineers a game with complex rules that is designed to be hard but not impossible to win

2. Person qualifies for a bonus round (higher stakes, harder version of game) for any of a number of reasons including 100th client
3. Ero plays the game with the client in some cases for six hours after he has all their assets, thus debunking any possibility it is a scam
4. Ero is completely unsurprised when a majority can't complete the deliberately complex game, and uses their losses to pay out the small number of winners as well as making a profit, the majority of which is donated to the New Order
5. Blogger throws a losing client under his publicity bus to wage a hilariously melodramatic and over-reached vendetta against gameplay he personally considers distasteful, alongside the many other gameplay elements he considers distasteful.

Quite right, you have no idea of these things in an MMO. They are a capsuleer name, an alliance ticker, a shiptype. They are a mark, a target. The person you undercut with your market trade may have been on their last ISK and suffering manic depression. Who knows what your callous undercut could trigger? You argue that people are responsible for the jilted lover screaming "if you don't take me back I'll kill myself". People are not responsible for the reactions of others.

TS isn't a private phone line.

Firstly consent was given as far as I can tell, secondly you're blindly ignoring that in real life there are 3rd parties who can, and often do record private phone calls without either parties consent; you may even have heard of these 3rd parties, or voted for them, they're called U.S. government.

Then perhaps you should not have that private conversation on an app that has a built in record function SPECIFICALLY so that those conversations can be recorded and shared.

Obtuse arguments like this only seve to invalidate any point you folks are trying to make.

I just want to summarize a bit for my own sake and maybe others. There really are a lot of posts about this now! Please indicate where I may have gone wrong...

1. E1 baits gullible and / or vulnerable people in EvE with a scam.
2. Once a potential victim is found and has shown sufficient vulnerability, they are invited to continue out of game on TS (the bonus room).
3. The scam continues for a few minutes on TS until the victim has been scammed out of all in-game assets.
4. E1 then ransoms the victim's assets through a series of humiliating & escalating non-game related actions & tasks, picking up on any possible weaknesses the victim may have (speech impediment for example).
5. E1 continues this process for as long as it takes for the victim to display alarming levels of psychological torment & distress and snap into outrage.
6. The whole process is recorded and sometimes made public.

What I gather from reading many (but not all) comments is that the player base in general are OK with 1 & 2 as it's all a part of the game we play. Most are still OK with 3 but some don't like taking it out of game (mainly due to subsequent steps I think, might be wrong here though).

4 is beginning to push certain limits that people have, mainly based around extending an EvE scam into real world actions. 5 is seen as thoroughly reprehensible. 6 isn't mentioned too much - some see it as pawn for E1's pleasure, some as further psychological torment of the victim.

That's my rough summary of the most common views from the players.

A minority try to validate E1's actions with things like "the victim should be banned for making threats", "HTFU, it's EvE", "he deserved it", "It's not illegal or in contravention of the EULA" (that's possibly the most common one) and possibly the most outstandingly appalling one is "E1 only did it to this extent once, other times weren't as bad so it's an outlier and is therefore OK".

For what it's worth, I'd say the majority of the EvE player base are morally sound people. The poor reputation that EvE's player base has is undeserved and is based on a very small minority. Reading this thread is evidence of this.

In real life, people choose to go to casinos, even though it is well established that mathematically, the house always wins. It is a loosing game, but greed or other motivations lead them to choose to play.

So too here. Every step of the way, the "victim" had a choice.
He chose to get his isk doubled, though he suspected a scam.
He chose to enter the bonus room.
He chose to read the articles provided to him.
He chose to sing.
He chose to leave.
He chose to return.
He chose to threaten.
He chose to leave again.
He chose to return again.

You can disagree with his choices, but they were his to make every step of the way. At every step he could stop. And he did, not once, not twice, but thrice.

You can say that E1 manipulated him into staying and returning, but that disenfranchises the victim in our analysis. It removes his agency as an actor. You turn him from being a human being to being merely cattle, and I do not believe that is the case here. My opinion of the victim is not so low.

Cite the precise rule E1 broke and reread my last, bolded paragraph regarding coercion and manipulation. Please. I didn't ignore it, I attacked it head on. You chose not to read it.