EVE General Discussion

... in Eve the worst thing that can happen is still to be encouraged to jump off a tall building by a drunk man in a taller wizard hat.

Certainly Mittani's comments were, frankly, rather stupid. And he was right to apologise. What, if anything, should happen there now I don't know and isn't really what I wanted to address.

The point is that I feel some people are ignoring the wider gaming context when talking about Eve, or even the 'dangers' of the dramatic open world we have here. After Julien Barreaux was knifed in the opening round of a Counter Strike game - a round that lasted under a minute - he spent the next six months of his life plotting revenge.

After he finally found his opponent's home address, he rang the doorbell and promptly plunged a real knife into his opponent's chest (and, I might add, rather unsportingly not waiting for his rival to grab a piece of kitchen cutlery for an even duel).

Luckily Barreaux's victim lived and made a full recovery. However, others have not been so lucky. In Novosibirsk in Russia one player recently murdered another in a LAN Cafe. In the Philippines even victory wasn't enough for one player and he followed home the loser, Eric Cristobal, and stabbed him to death anyway.

It's not limited to Counter Strike, either - there have been all manner of killings in Lineage, where as in the case of Alexander "Sverkh" Blyoskin, merely turning up to a 30 man meeting of game fans can get you kicked to death, and all sorts of violence in Warcraft, and so on.

Compared to these games, the Eve community remains, despite all the flaming and the high stakes, rather civil. People generally do not assault each other at Fanfest after a supercapital gets bumped out of a POS.

Why? In such a cut-throat virtual environment, perhaps people would expect the repercussions in real life to be even more serious than in Counter Strike or Lineage. An article alluded to that notion in this present fuss over the Alliance Panel.

However, I take the opposite view - I think that Eve's 'reality' is what insulates it against stupid acts. Eve is so thorough an experience that it encompasses all aspects of combat: warfare, politics, political relations, 'hearts and minds', and so on. Knifing a rival player in the chest is a deeply stupid act. But Counter Strike is over when the round is over. In Eve, people don't want to be associated with deeply stupid acts because they are invested in their characters and their communities, and deeply stupid acts hurt pride and cohesion.

The game never quite ends - and you don't want to be known as that alliance whose guy punched someone at Fanfest. That would be losing. Better to smile through gritted teeth.

I'm not here to defend Mittens. My relationship to Goons is simply to shoot them sometimes and I enjoy the battles. I'd only like to defend the game, before we go too far into talk of scandal and cyber-bullying as a whole.

Eve is a hard game and filled with people who want to upset you. However, compare its scandals to those of other, simple and confined games. Freedom in a virtual world does not necessarily mean we're about to go 'Barreaux' on our enemies and ring their doorbells, brandishing knives. On the contrary, it provides such a fully fledged experience that even the most unstable individual would feel foolish to do so. And there are a zillion ways to get revenge with the (virtual) tools provided to us.

The title of the thread pulled me in here, but once I saw it was just ANOTHER thread about friggin Mittani...I stopped reading.

Please do not create multiple threads about the same topic, thank you.

Thread locked.