Let me ask you something: what is a billion isk to you?

To me, its a nicely fit T3 or two. Or maybe a blops. I've eaten those types of losses before. And honestly, so has much of the eve community.

When I lost that much isk, I didn't cry, or yell, bang a desk, or threaten someones mother in impotent rage. To me, someone that demonstrates these symptoms has a problem. Maybe even a hardcore addiction as you say, idk.

The point is, such a person is not well adjusted, and you can't base policy for a community of hundreds of thousands based on the response of the mentally unstable fringe. Just my 2 isk.

No citation then? Thought so.

I believe that if CCP want to keep some control over the situation, they need to be seen as responsible enough to self regulate.

If they sit on their hands they might just find some government agency headed by a liberal petty bureaucrat regulating for them. Not a good precedent. Once it's out of their hands things will go from inconvenient to downright repressive really fast.

In this instance, CCP being proactive wins over reactive 100%.

Mr Epeen

I believe that if CCP want to keep some control over the situation, they need to be seen as responsible enough to self regulate.

If they sit on their hands they might just find some government agency headed by a liberal petty bureaucrat regulating for them. Not a good precedent. Once it's out of their hands things will go from inconvenient to downright repressive really fast.

In this instance, CCP being proactive wins over reactive 100%.

Mr Epeen

That you need one to realize people have died while playing video games, is like needing a citation to 'prove' the holocaust...

Making value judgments on ISK is besides the point. The issue is that he was humiliated and I think... wasn't so much looking for his ISK back but his pride.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude

You people need to knock off the hyperbole.

That's not even an argument, that's a small, petty insinuation of a possibility of a threat of prosecution where no previous international legal precedent exists for something that isn't a crime in the first place.

You lot are just hilarious.

The fact that a billion isk can make someone loose their pride is no less a sign of mental instability or hardcore addiction.

We can take pity on the victim, we can sympathize with him, and perhaps we should but in the final analysis this problem begins and ends in the victims mind. You and I are powerless to fix it. If we could, it would be a wonderful thing, not just for the victim, or the Eve community, but for all mankind. But we can't.

Maybe CCP should put a big flashing warning sign on the character select screen that says:

WARNING THIS IS JUST A GAME. PLEASE DON'T HURT YOURSELF. WE LOVE YOU FOR WHO YOU ARE.

I don't disagree with the point you're making but just losing a billion ISK was just the beginning of his humiliation.

My point is that you can't account for mentally instabillity. The things that go on in erotica 1's bonus room are nothing compared to some of the things you hear in an Xbox live call of duty lobby. And there is NOTHING at stake in those games, no assets lost.

You could give everyone in eve unlimited free ships and assets, and you would STILL be able to provoke an episode from the mentally unstable.

You could turn eve into a care bear Utopia where the possibility of asset loss doesn't exist, and the mentally unstable will still find a reason to lash out. There is a mountain of evidence for this in the chat channels and lobbies of every online multilayer game ever made.

This isn't a problem to be fixed, it simply is.

Making value judgments on ISK is besides the point. The issue is that he was humiliated and I think... wasn't so much looking for his ISK back but his pride.

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.

getting them to gamble their stuff and then using that EvE virtual property as leverage to coerce them onto a team speak server where they are humiliated and harassed. They then post the recorded conversation on EvE forums to further humiliate that player.

The whole time you guys have been talking here, I've been mining alot of the Veldspar in low sec. I normally can't access.
I think I just beat you all at Eve the past two days!

Veldspar mining automatically results in disqualification from ever winning EvE.

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.

The thing is though that in RL (at least here) Casinos are now bound by law to stop problem gamblers and addicts from gaming when they're spotted. Same with pubs and alcohol - the establishment is ultimately responsible for how drunk they allow someone to become.

We're seeing the same thing creep in online, where the sites are ultimately being asked to take responsibility for people who cannot meter their own interactions within the game.

Hmm, more good point from you!

Is nice to have some reasonable discussion in this thread lol Seems most posters here are closer to "idiots" than anyone involved in the original bonus room issue were.

You're absolutely correct with most of your points I think (I still disagree with your assesment of these emotional gamers as being unstable though - least not all of them). People will always rage in any game, no matter the circumstance of the game. But I feel it should come down to allowing only what is reasonable. Lost ISK to a scam? Got ganked? Then raged afterward? Too bad imo, those are reasonable circumstances within the boundaries of the game.

Allow yourself to be dragged through a silly thing on TS, acting out humiliating scenarios, affecting others around you IRL? Then have the whole episode made public for further humiliation? Hmmm. I think this begins to step into unreasonable territory, despite the 'victim' being able to end it at anytime. Chicken or the egg, I guess. Should we allow people to be placed in that situation to begin with when we know there will always be people who will come out the other side hurt in RL, regardless of their mental stability?

I dunno. But I look forward to hearing CCP's take eventually.

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.