EVE General Discussion

Man speaks truth.

If they're saying these have in fact been the rules, is that completely admitting they let CFC get away with it on purpose?

Did all the devs switch from BOB to Goons just before the collapse?

Bottom line: that's an ugly can of worms to open.



Perfect. ^

History has been written, built even, through unsaid law as to alts and gameplay. Stupidity has been farmed within the nature of this game, even amongst the ranks of CCP. Much of this is a selling point for EVE in the first place, kids grow up when they're put behind the controls of a starship.

Want a easy fix? Remove that entire statement from the ToS, leaving only the bit about impersonating CCP (which has been ENTIRELY fair and upheld by the community of EVE).

The rest? Let the players settle that. If you're smart, CCP, like with the video EVE:Casualty, you can actually build off it, including within an extended tutorial of the reality of scamming/alts/etc.

Rather than trying to change the nature of your playerbase into something that it's not.

I had to log in and come to General Discussion to post in this, so, GM Karidor, you should already feel bad.

Now that I'm here, I have a few questions which I would like clarified:

If I claim that a character I own is NOT my alt ("No, Gallente Citizen 123456 is not owned by the same person who owns Levarr Burton"), could I now be considered to be impersonating a non-existent third party, and therefore be open to punitive measures for impersonating that party which does not exist?

Furthermore, if the intent of the policy is to protect the character being impersonated, why is it not that character's responsibility to initiate the petition process? Why should a 1-day old Science and Trade Institute character be able to open a petition claiming that Gallente Citizen 123456 is impersonating Levarr Burton, which would potentially lead to Levarr Burton or one of his alts being banned? That doesn't protect Levarr Burton at all, and, in terms of other petition policies is akin to allowing Chribba to file a petition and be reimbursed when Levarr Burton loses a carrier due to a server error by claiming without evidence that I had borrowed it from him. The policy, in that case, would be allowing a third party who may or may not have been harmed by the event in question to profit (whether through reimbursement or revenge-by-bans, or enjoying-malicious-chaos-by-bans), while simultaneously providing no benefit or safety to the actual Levarr Burton in question. Levarr Burton should be the only person who gets to claim someone is impersonating Levarr Burton (And if the real LeVar Burton is reading this, I'm sorry, please don't sue); just like Levarr Burton is the only character who may petition when Levarr Burton logs in and has 0 skill points all of a sudden.

The fact of the matter is that there is not only a technical, but also a real practical difference between a person claiming to be them self, and a person claiming to be someone they are not. The fact that you (GM Karidor) are either unable or unwilling to recognize that such a distinction exists is concerning to say the least. It suggests that you and/or the GM Team as a whole lack or refuse to possess the ability to distinguish and act appropriately upon even the more obvious nuances involved in enforcing a policy with any sort of vagaries. This shortfall raises into question the competency of the GM team to properly enforce the rules and policies in place and also has the (apparently realized) potential to turn an otherwise effectively harmless wording clarification into a draconian policy which upends and puts at risk many established gameplay mechanics, conveniences and necessities related to operating alternate characters.

Without further public guidance towards the GM team from CCP, I feel it would be appropriate and fair to the player base to remove all vagaries and nuance from the TOS and EULA, so that the GM team is purely in an enforcement position with no responsibility or privilege of interpretation. If they cannot or will not discern the difference between representing oneself honestly (whether for good or for ill intentions), and oneself being falsely represented by another, then I don't see how they can or should be trusted to make more nuanced decisions.

"They told me they were themselves, and were therefore impersonating the person which they happen to be" should not be grounds for punitive measures, simply because it makes absolutely no sense.

Does the TOS say that you can't impersonate non-existent 3rd parties? Does it mention impersonation of non-existent 3rd parties anywhere? No. No it does not.

So why would you come in here and try to confuse things more by asking such a bizarre question?

Hello GM's

You have basicly just told everybody in EvE that they can only have 1 account with 1 character on if they want to play.

Say I have 3 accounts, in alliance Im knows as Technic, I then join fleet with my alt "SOMENAME".
I am then asked to scout ahead and I say yeh I can do it on coms, identify myself as Technic, I get asked by FC I don't see you in fleet. "Ahh Im SOMENAME"

If somebody want to they can then report me for impersonating Technic and I get banned.

You inforcing this rule just made you lose 60% of your income due to alot of people have more than one account and you can not be more than one person when in an alliance you have a MAIN and the rest are alts.

So basicly I can now go and say that the leader of some random alliance now is impersonating himself with this "thisalt" and that gets banned.

The GMs have already stated that some kind of malicious intent would have to be determined in order for them to take action against the petition. So no, you won't be banned for that.

It would be a ridiculous ban even for malicious intent, verifying someone has some claimed authority or that they're a claimed alt is easy as a quick evemail. It says a hell of a lot that CCP claim the rules have always been this way but we just never noticed because victims of such a scam often don't think to petition.

Adding extremely broad rules then saying "hey trust us to apply this sensibly" will absolutely have a chilling effect on the whole metagame because no one is going to risk their whole account often with the best part of a decade's accumulated SP on the whims of a random GM and the sustained whininess of an unfortunate victim be it an individual or a whole alliance avalanching petitions.

I can give a POA to someone scam on my behalf. can't see a reason it's forbidden.

I don't have access to all the historical versions of the TOS and naming policy so I have no way of knowing for exactly how long the rules have been this way. CCP has provided (for me, satisfactory) evidence that they were this way prior to this last TOS change.

I am much more concerned with the new language that prohibits representing groups. This is a problem for a lot of eve institutions like the good old recruitment scam. It also causes problem for groups like ... I dunno ... goons who are setting up alt corps and such to run their new rental empire.

Agreed with the above two. The issues for me are:

1) the ban against "maliciously" impersonating other characters brings up a lot of weird edge cases while seeking to solve a non-problem;

2) the ban against claiming to represent NPC organizations shuts off some immersive, roleplayed opportunities for deception.

I understand that there are still avenues available for spies, scammers, and other ebil, ebil people, but I do not consider it intuitively obvious that those avenues are different or better than the ones that are getting closed off, and I suspect that you'll be getting a lot of petitions against newbies who aren't yet crafty enough about being crafty, and those petitions will come from more veteran players who have had the time and the experience to understand the policy in depth.

EDIT: Also, I'm going to second the request for clarification on what a "group of players" is. it doesn't have to be an exhaustive or definitive list, but, for example, is the gigantic CFC "a group of players?" Are highly distributed, subcontracted and decentralized organizations like New Order and the various Frogs "groups of players?" Is a fleet of otherwise unaffiliated players in e.g. an Incursion "a group of players," or a pick-up group like RvB Ganked?

Also, seeing as CCP has a policy of not disclosing alt characters (treating every character as an independent entity, in terms of petitions, killrights, etc) to 3rd parties, I fail to see how any entity other than the entity being actively impersonated should be able to claim that a particular entity is being impersonated.

If I claim to be a Goonswarm recruiter, it would make sense for a Goonswarm director (who would be able to check against their database of API keys whether I had a character in Goonswarm) to petition for impersonation as I would have been sullying their good name. The 3rd party, in this case the scam victim, has no way of verifying that I am not, in fact, associated in any way with Goonswarm, and therefore it should be recognized that there is reasonable doubt (and in fact only hear-say evidence) as to whether any impersonation is taking place.