Uncertainty
From: Kadm
Sent: 2014.11.29 15:40
To: CCP Falcon, CCP FoxFour, CCP Phantom, CCP Random,

Good day,

My name is Kadm, and I'm a mass-scale multiboxer. I have thirty four (well, had) active accounts, and maintain one-hundred and one characters in EVE. These characters are divided into three fleets plus miscellaneous supporting characters.

You could probably infer it, but the recent changes to the EULA have a significant impact on me. I look at them a bit differently than most folks have. I knew something would happen someday. I'm surprised, but not upset quite the same way other people are.

People will always search for a way to maintain what they have. I've looked at a few EULA compliant methods of maintaining what I've built for myself, and while I'm not sure how they'll work, people will always persist and try.

My uncertainty comes in how everything is going to be handled going forward. My initial reaction to the changes was to give a sigh and pack things up, tell me partner and friends that we would roll into a small corp, and just play with a few accounts again.

It's a sad thing to feel like you've sunk over eleven thousand dollars into a game, but unlike most people, I know that I've gotten my moneys worth. There's no feeling like landing on the Jita undock in 21 Oracles and vaporising people playing suspect docking games, or helping a small corp move into a wormhole, giving them a chance to grow. There are many things that I'd planned, that I don't think I'll get to do now, but the things I've done have been fun.

Many of my friends want me to stay. And part of me wants to stay. In my eight years playing EVE, this is probably the most exciting the game has ever been. While there have een times I've worried for EVE, this isn't one of them. The six week development cycle has been the best thing I've ever seen happen to the game.

But the idea of staying is filled with uncertainty. If I go through the trouble of setting myself and my fleets up in a EULA compliant manner, what will happen? People will still feel like wronged when I shoot them, even if there's a difference in how it works on my end. How many petitions will it take before it's easier for CCP to remove me, rather than explain the difference between what I'm doing now, and what I'm doing then? What thresholds are in place to differentiate key duplication from fast keystrokes? If I rebind hotkeys to put them closer together, will I be automatically detected and banned for being too fast?

And what happens if I'm banned? My partner and I reap approximately two to four billion isk an hour when we're running sites. If I'm banned, that's the end, but how would that effect the people I play the game with? When their wallets are drained of the isk made from my efforts. What about my allies? If I help them siege a tower, or kill an enemy fleet, and I get banned, what happens to them? Are they banned for taking my help?

And what do I do if I think I was wrongfully banned? Do I spend weeks escalating to try and reverse the process? How do I even prove that I'm EULA compliant, going forward?

This is my greatest concern. How will all of this effect me, and is it worth trying to be EULA compliant, if playing by the rules may still mean that my friends and I may suffer for it.

I'm not sure who should recieve this, so I'm going to blindly mail it out to anyone who has touched the keymultiplexing and ISBoxing topics the last few days.

If you tell me that my concerns are valid, I won't be upset. As I said earlier, I've had my fun. The memories I've made with my characters are priceless. There is nothing that compares with your friends saying, "Wow, that looks cool," as a dozen Tengus land and start firing missiles, or people cursing your very presence because they know their time in W-space is at an end.

It's hard to imagine going back to anything other than that, but at the end of the day, I love EVE Online, and CCP games. Even if I wouldn't have as much reason to play, there is no game company out there that deserves my money as much as I feel you do. Even if I have to forsake my exa-scale boxing, I'll likely stay.

I thank you all for your time, and I appreciate any guidance that you can give me in this.

Kadm