EVE General Discussion

In the Mittani threads, the claim constantly comes up that people who were appalled by the alliance panel being mostly a bunch of drunken people berating and publicly humiliating their rival players and the whole thing culminating in a person of authority and trust calling for everyone to harass a specific player to suicide are somehow wanting to turn EVE into "WoW in space". The claim has also come up that such berating is the community standard and that no one really cares, because "worse is being said on the forums and Jita local every day", as one poster put it.

After reading the forums for a couple of days, it seems unfortunately true that if not worse then at least as bad things are being said all the time, and that the disgrace of not just Mittani but others on the alliance panel too is the de facto public community standard. This is a change that has happened sometime during the last five-six(?) years - it was not always like this. But certain player groups have promoted the idea that since EVE is a sandbox game, that means that we have to also tolerate anything being said, and we have let it slip. CCP has let it slip, but also we the players have let it slip, by giving the forums over to people who think that is true.

People have claimed that it is the point of the alliance panel to be drunk and berate others. Is that really what we want to hear from the leaders of the most successful alliances in the game? Clever and not so clever smacktalk? When they could tell us a lot about how they built their alliances, how they keep on keeping them successful, what have the major challenges been? I don't think so.

People have also claimed that the victims of the berating and smacktalk and flames - both on the fanfest, and on forums and locals - should not be offended, because "it is just a game" and "you should not take EVE seriously". I think that's utter crap. EVE is not just a game. EVE is a game, yes, but it is a very unique game, it is the only real sandbox MMOG in existence, and it is a very cool one at that (spaceships! single shard! player alliance with thousands of members! totally player-driven space territory politics! I mean come on, folks, this **** is awesome).

Anyone who has played EVE for any longer time and especially leaders and key members of big alliances know that to be any good at EVE at all, you have to take it seriously. You have to study ship fits, to organize your fleets well, have a presence across timezones, require that muppets either shape up or leave, take care of your alliance PR, spend time negotiating blues, be good at intel to know who you can afford to shoot at. In other words, you have to invest in the game. You have to care about being good, you have to care about winning - or you won't be, you won't win.

And the investment and caring is what makes EVE wonderful - because the losses and victories are not just pixels or multiplayer tetris or indeed WoW in space, they are results of planning and investing and having the right people at the right places at the right times. Results of intelligence and practice. They are at least as real as victories in any "real life" sports. And the people who claim you should not cry over your pixelated spaceships - you know what? They know this too. They would not bother pointing and laughing in order to make people cry, if they did not believe the game mattered. They would do it maybe once for laughs and then bugger off. They would not build major alliances, play for years, and take over the forums.

I do not want EVE to turn into WoW in space. I do not, however, also think that any kind of behavior is acceptable. When we play EVE, because of the actual seriousness of the game, we cannot help it that sometimes people will feel really upset when we blow up their ships, take their territory, block their trade lines, flip their systems, or whatever other serious business it is we are at. But we can help pointing and laughing when they do. We can show sportsmanship by playing it hard to win - but being graceful towards those who lose. Even PR wars can be conducted without targeting individual players and resorting to inane flaming. If you need juvenile language, mass posting to derail a thread, or personal attacks to conduct your PR or psyops - you are doing it wrong.

TL;DR: START READING HERE.

What I want is an EVE where scamming, baiting, blobbing, ganking, trapping, and using clever tricks is still allowed, where we can have PR wars and gloat on locals about how wonderful players we are, and where there is no guaranteed safety and total opt-out of pvp. I also want an EVE where it is not acceptable behavior to point and laugh when someone is obviously RL upset about losing, to use stage time in a CCP event to humiliate and berate your rivals rather than talk about what you do well, or to flame people on the public forums, and where racist/sexist/homophobic slurs are grounds of immediate warnings and bans.

Those things are not contradictory.

And I do not think most of the community thinks they are, no matter what the proponents of "free speech means I must be allowed to say anything anywhere about anyone without consequences" say.

That guy's name ^^