Jita Park Speakers Corner

Interesting that this poster has no philosophical objection to bots on the grounds that they are unfair to other players, simply that they are against the rules. Perfect example of how support for AFK mining has a tendency to lead to support for botting.


I appreciate the fact that you're at least opposed to bots on the basis that they are unfair to the rest of the player base. All you need to do now is replace 'botting' in that comment with 'AFK mining' and you've got exactly what is happening right now in Highsec - the only difference between the two is a couple of clicks.

The point here is that the idea of further nerfing non-consensual PvP in Highsec has nothing to do with 'protecting the poor newbies', it has everything to do with protecting income streams from AFK mining and bots.

Again, I'd like to make the offer to Ripard to take him ganking, show him the bot farms and ice fields of silent Retrievers and Mackinaws in Highsec, where not a word can be heard in local from day to day, and move him from being 'under-informed' to 'informed' on what providing further protection to this area would mean for the future of Eve.

OK, I have no idea why Ripard hasn't stepped in to say this himself yet, but clearly somebody needs to because this is just getting tedious now.

Go back and read the post that started off this shitstorm. At no point in that post is there a comparison between the act of **** or enslavement and the act of suicide ganking or non-consensual wardecs (which you neglect to mention, in spite of that being the main focus of said post). The comparison is between people's attitudes to the victims of ganking and the victims of ****, with a tendency to jump to the conclusion that each victim invited attack with their actions, and a comparison between PvPers' attitude that EVE is at its core a PvP game and that undocking = PvP consent, with most of the dissent coming from industrialists who are their victims and the attitudes of 18th century slaveowners who believed that slavery was itself morally justified and the way the world was intended to work, with most of the dissent coming from the slaves who were their victims.

If you want to rake Ripard over the coals for making those comparisons between attitudes, that's a different matter entirely. Personally I think the provocative hyperbole served more to distract people from the questions he was trying to raise in the post than spread discussion, as the language used itself became the story and we end up with situations like this one where people either haven't read the post itself or missed everything apart from the bad words in their rush to point fingers and scream "He said what?!". On the other hand, I've read hundreds of thousands of other words by Ripard that weren't deliberately provocative to this extent, so I'm comfortable with the knowledge that that kind of hyperbole isn't his normal method of communication and presumably isn't how he'd approach interacting with CCP as a CSM.

Well the reason botting is unfair to other players is because it's banned by CCP; one player is gaining significantly more by cheating than others can gain within the rules. Personally I do not consider bots to be inherently bad - a bot is not bad because it is a bot. It's bad because of the consequences it brings. With botting banned by CCP that consequence is unfair advantage to the person using the bot, as it allows performance that players cannot legally compete with. If botting were not banned then the consequence would be significant inflation as the amount of 23/7 bots constantly adding raw ISK and other resources to the economy would skyrocket, which would be bad for everyone not able to run 23/7 bots themselves, especially new players who would be coming into that world with nothing at a massive competitive disadvantage.



You know, I've heard that line plenty of times from New Order lackeys - comparing AFK mining to a gateway drug leading to botting or just saying as you have that supporting one (never mind that once again all Josef did was point out a fact, not actually say anything positive about AFK mining) leads to support of the other. Do you have any actual evidence of this happening? No other New Order member who's raised this accusation in my presence has been able to justify it. Even in this case, you'd be hard pressed to class that response as "support for botting"; imagine it in the context of a conversation:
"Should I use a bot to make ISK in EVE?"
"It is against the rules."
"OK, I guess not then."
Not exactly supportive, is it?



There are two very important differences between botting and AFK mining. The first, most basic one is that CCP has declared botting against the rules of the game, whereas they have not done the same for AFK mining (indeed, given the size of the new Ret and Mack ore bays it seems they approve of it). This is CCP's game and it's their call as to whether or not any activity is allowed, and that call at least thus far is that AFK mining is allowed and is a perfectly valid way of mining and making ISK. The second, more complex difference is that AFK mining only works in relatively few situations - mainly ice mining, where the asteroids are infinite in volume, to a lesser extent belt mining where there are relatively few asteroids that can last long enough to fill up an ore bay. In either case it only works at all in hisec. While those areas tend to be dominated by AFK miners (value of ice is well below any other mined material, for example), active players have the option to leverage their activeness in many other fields to be competitive with the AFK miners; mining smaller high value asteroids, mining in lowsec or nullsec, exploration, missions, anomalies, hauling, station trading. In contrast, botting works for all ISK generation and income sources; anything a human player can regularly do to make ISK a bot can also be built to do, and it even has the benefit of being able to react to external stimuli without needing interaction, safeing up when other players enter the system for example.



Considering the context here is still Ripard's CSM run, I'm not sure where you're getting that from aside from James 315's propaganda. It doesn't jibe with anything I've seen or heard Ripard saying - I believe he has said (and I paraphrase) he has no problem with ganking people AFK mining in exhumers because clearly they aren't new players, which would seem to be the opposite of what you're accusing. If there's some subtext that I'm missing out on then please show me where it is, because that would definitely be relevant to voting for Ripard. All I've seen so far though has been James 315 (deliberately?) misrepresenting Ripard's posts and position to suit his own message and New Order lackeys repeating the same distortions.

Dear Fawn, if you want to know what I think about botting, ask me, instead of making ill founded erroneous assumptions.

Hopefully, the more people who read your childish ranting, the less votes james whatever will get.

Do you realize that you have posted, in effect, the same post multiple time now?

Kind regards, Josef.

If you didn't want to give your opinion on bots, then perhaps you shouldn't have chimed in on a question I asked of someone else, but since you did, I took you to task for it.

In future, if you have something different to say, then I suggest you say it.

Also, what Primary Me just said. If i have to repeat myself it's because I'm not getting a straight answer to a straight question. No apologies for that.

I didn't ask for CCP's stance on bots in the post that you replied to, I asked for an opinion on them.

If you weren't answering that question then you shouldn't have quoted it.

Please, stay on topic in future.

Yes, Ripard is wrong to say that there is nobody ganking with only a few SP. On the other hand the context for what I said wasn't that quote, it was you saying

That's the part that I'd like you to provide evidence for, because pointing out that he wasn't 100% correct about ganker skill levels (and looking at the C&P thread he's started to research this shows there are plenty of gankers who do have tens of millions of SP) isn't the same thing as proving he wants to prevent AFK barge ganks which is what you accuse him of.

Also on the subject of context, the context for that quote you provided also includes (from the same Crossing Zebra's interview, the same question in fact)

Emphasis mine on the parts I think are relevant; your total SP are certainly low, but I don't think you can argue that pretty much every single one of those SP are directly applicable to ganking, thanks to training plans that have been set up by long term veterans and made availble. As for ISK, you've said yourself you had financial help from the New Order and I know for a fact that they offer compensation for gank ships; this is the same New Order that regularly receives over 8bn ISK per month in funding, again mostly from veteran players. I'd say a T2 fitted Catalyst is a pretty trivial investment against that level of ISK. Your own SP are certainly low, but there are rather a lot of SP that are propping yours up and leaving you free to do what you want to do.



When has Ripard ever supported adding further buffs to AFK mining though? I mean that's a pretty specific claim, surely you have some evidence to back it up?

That's my whole point, he hasn't really stated anything concrete, if he has some revolutionary idea that is going to simultaneously preserve ganking in Highsec and keep AFK mining safe, then he should let the community know what that idea is.

If his intention was to make some statements in the hopes of igniting some debate to get some feedback, then I'm sure he won't be complaining now that he's succeeded in that.

If you personally think that someone playing at the rate of 2 or 3 clicks an hour needs to have even more advantages than they already have to continue what they're doing without interference from other players, then that's OK, it's your opinion and you're entitled to it.

If you think that Ripard is the candidate that you can rely on to propose those kinds of changes to CCP, then vote for him.

I, for one, would simply like to find out exactly where he stands on this. I'm sure there are other voters who would like to know as well.


I agree.

Jinrai Tremaine, you're doing an admirable job of answering instead of Ripard. I was shocked to hear Ripards answer in the Crossing Zebras interview when he said no to "Are you in favour of moving towards consensual PvP in hisec?" We already knew that Ripard considers that arguments made by gankers sound like those made by white slave owners (as he said on his blog), yet he sees no reason to outlaw the behavior that the gankers argument supports.

I think it's generous in this situation to assume that Ripard is lying. If he is telling the truth than he is in favor of keeping something which appears analogous to slavery to him on some level, a crime worse than lying in my opinion.

Of course, he goes on in the interview to make the absurd justification of using incendiary comparisons like those to slavery, nazism, **** etc to get viewers to read his holy gospel. In light of that I find it hard to believe anybody could hold Ripard in a favorable light.

I don't like carebears, but I wouldn't say the damage they do the game is ANYWHERE even close to the pain felt by a holocaust victim, a raped person or a person who was subjugated to the abuses of slavery. It would be an insult to real victims of these tragedies to compare some laughable silly online game mechanics to their suffering.

You should read the actual post. Or even just this bit of it:


Ganking is not being compared to slavery. The argument "I'm ganking you for your own good" is being compared to the argument "I'm enslaving these Negroes for their own goods". He's saying that in both situations the powerful impose 'good' on the weak.

Here's the other controversial quote:


Same deal. In no way is the gank victim being compared to a **** victim. What is being compared is the argument "He should have tanked more" to the argument "She shouldn't have dressed in that fashion". Again, the point is that the powerful party (rapist, ganker) is imposing their own ideas of propriety (tanking, covering all skin) on the weak party (gank victim, **** victim). He's not equating the seriousness of each crime.

Now, if you want to ask Ripard about his carebear-sympathies, go ahead. You'd be justified; it isn't quite clear what he thinks of ganking in highsec (honestly I don't think he's quite clear about it at the moment either, hence all the questions he's been asking). Stop harping on about the **** and slavery comparisons, though, because you've completely misread and/or misunderstood them.