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What, is Sony running Fanfest now?

Word of advice: Fanfest owned, drinking, debauchery, wormhole-penetrating phalluses and all. Don't go all limp-ducked and Blizzardish on us, bros.

CCP, will you also be censuring the moderator who allowed the supposedly EULA breaking activity to pass without comment? How about the employees who broadcast and rebroadcast the pannel without bleeping out the offending bits?

Nicely written blog, all this Mittani BS aside (plz? pretty plz?) I hope everyone realizes it was an ISOLATED incident, yea theres alot of "frat house" behaviour, but so far we've all kept ourselves in check. Alot of drunkenness but alot of fun too, sharing a beer with a dev and them sharing jokes with us means the WORLD to the players!

If CCP have to tone Fanfest down after all this utter BS I'll be devestated. Its what makes CCP so awesome!!!

Hi5, spacebro.

The Mittani made a mistake in resorting to Something Awful/Goonswarm subscriber-only style humour in a public forum. In your own cultural surrounds, his call to drive a player to suicide would be interpreted as the "up talking" it probably was: you'd have a chuckle, enjoy the schadenfreude of someone possibly committing suicide over words in an Internet spaceship game, and forget about the incident (possibly after moving to the system to entertain the fantasy of ganking the guy, then not following through because even Goons have some lines they won't cross). In the public environment, merely uttering the suggestion to harass someone who claims to be suicidal is crossing one of those lines that shouldn't have been crossed.

To be clear here: it does not matter one iota whether or not the target is actually suicidal or not. He might claim to be fine with the attention in public, while in private he's resenting it. He might have made the claim about how his life was a mess and was contemplating suicide simply to get a rise out of the gankers. You just don't know. This is why in the real world we take any hint of suicidal (or homicidal) tendencies seriously and offer help: we certainly don't make a joke about encouraging people to harass the target further, especially not in a forum attended by 3000 people who aren't present at the venue to be aware of the general atmosphere of the gathering. Some of us watching the feed would have just turned on the feed to watch the Alliance Panel during our lunch break at work, and be totally unaware of the general atmosphere of FanFest 2012 at that point in time.

On CCP's side of things, the usual way to handle unscripted "live" events is to delay the broadcast by about 7-8 seconds to allow the production crew time to hit the "OH ****" button. On a radio station, this might be a simple "BEEEP" to obscure the words being uttered, terminating the phone call, or playing the station's jingle. For FanFest this could be a few frames of "Trollface" or the serious-face Amarr guy from the promotional brochure with the words "CCP Advises that this live content is not suitable for broadcast". Or heck, why not use The Mittani, finger over his mouth ("Shh!") with the caption "Some things are better left unheard."

There are still null sec candidates and candidates sympathetic to Goonswarm (or at least to The Mittani) on CSM 7. You will not be "unrepresented", it's just that your favoured representative has disqualified himself from representing you. Goonswarm opinions will still shape the future of EVE Online and DUST 514. Vote for two candidates in the future, so you have backup when one self-destructs.

TL;DR: Your beef should be with Alex for trying to engage in a **** measuring contest in a live broadcast forum, not with CCP for taking the only action they can take for such a public violation of their TOS.

Yes. CCP is kow-towing to someone else. They just sold out their biggest asset. The magical time that is Fanfest and the drunken party at the top of the world. (no one would come to that horrible country otherwise).

Sony is going to kill another game I loved.

That isn't the big issue. The issue is, why is CCP changing Fanfest over a single incident in years of Fanfests. They are kneejerking as usual and dancing to the tune of a Sony. You do realize what Sony is going to do to EVE right?

Let me guess, wearing a tin foil hat?

You do realize that if Mittens didn't say those few sentences in a live broadcast none of this would have happened?

He apologized, fell on his sword, and resigned.

Note, this is all after a presentation where NO ONE in attendance, including all of CCP said a word. CCP obviously didn't consider this worthy of any attention until someone batphoned them.

As always PR events like this tend to take problems and themselves over seriously. Internet corps which seldom interact with the public face to face even more so. Then there the bandwagon activist types searching for vicarious personal power by suggesting things need to raised to a higher level yet.


However...

CCP may have a suicide "hotline" program for players internally but it certainly is not well advertised for players to report someone. And its 99% players who first recognize possible issue via directly interacting with those players with problems.

*** If CCP is serious about getting involved with players who may have issues that EVE is making worse --- then they need to add a chat link similar to "Report ISK spammers". Probably need to let players input 1-10 as to degree of suicide or rage-aholic behavior. (1- more depressed than seems good for a person, 2- nobody would miss me, 3 - I have thought suicide over as a solution, 5 - seriously considering it, 7 - I have set a date, 9 - later today 10 - doing it now) ***

Thus players could call for CCP hotline people to monitor a person's convo for a while. Probably send chat to log for efficiency and track multiple reports over time. Then CCP could take appropriate steps if needed: like referencing to incident to closest local community suicide prevention. Obviously clear abuse of the flagging system would be like frivolous use of ISK spamming flag.

Sure if its an online friend or corpmate, players will spend some time themselves trying to prop things up. But most of us aren't therapists. And I for one certainly don't log to hold the hands of total strangers. Plus I have seen people use "suicide talk" as another particularly distracting scam mechanism in EVE (no big surprise there).

So CCP if you really want to step up -- do so in a more substantial way than just making your PR events squeaky PC clean. LOL - there would probably be a good news story that might even cross outside the dedicated gaming community in doing so.