EVE General Discussion

Hey everyone. It's evening here in Reykjavík, our senior staff are presumably at home with their families and it may take until tomorrow to get this all cleared up in an official manner.

I can assure you that this is intended in the best way, as clarification of policy that's been in effect for a long time so I hope we have your patience until office hours tomorrow. Nothing bad will happen in the meantime.

If it turns out that this change to the wording is actually too far reaching, goes against its intended purpose, or is somehow confusing things rather than clarifying them, that will be taken care of...trust me. If it turns out to make sense despite the worries you guys have, proper explanations will be provided.

I want to give the people responsible for drafting the policy a chance to read your posts and address the matter. Agreed?

The new wording also seems to rule out satirical/ parodies of corporation and character names, that poke fun at other individuals and organisations, without actually impersonating them.


That's fair enough, I can live with that.

Is the Amarr monument still intact?

Sounds good to me.

The problem lies not in the wording or it's intent, but in enforcing this rule. I see a dozen ways to break this rule without the victim being able to produce conclusive evidence that a breach of the rule indeed took place, which is problematic at the very least. Out-of-game communication (audio) come to mind.

Yeah, I think it's completely reasonable that people just worded something more broadly than they intended, the real trouble came when it seemed like that discussion on the issue was getting abruptly shut down. I think my concerns and whatever the GM team was trying to get at can easily both be solved.

Agreed. I have faith you guys like the sandbox as much as we do.

I hope even!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awa87mmCKpM


I would be curious as to the initiator/intended fix of this.
Would delve greatly into the intent of why this was done.

Another point I'd like to see clarification on:

There are many groups in this game that do not have official backing of the pool of people they draw from. There's warhammer 40k corps, brony corps, RL military corps, StarTrek fan corps...too many to count.

What happens when, say, crazy example, Hasbro gets into EVE and says "OK, our alliance is the official alliance for bronies. Any other alliance out there who claims to be a brony alliance is impersonating our official group. We own the IP, it belongs to us."

What will you do when (picking on Goonies again), Lowtax, the owner of SomethingAwful, decides to join up in EVE and create the "official" SomethingAwful Goon corp? The RL company is his, it's his IP again...Goonswarm would be falsely representing themselves as the Goon corp in EVE at that point.


Granted, these are pretty outlandish examples, but they are things that could happen. I'm exaggerating for effect, but it'll be something CCP will have to deal with in some way if they keep this wording for the ToS.

We believe that this was intended as a clarification to prevent the Pizza incident from reoccurring. Where people edited the Wiki to say they were ISD verified trusted 3rd parties (Then scammed using that page).

If so a new rule adding ISD and the Wiki to the "out of bounds" parties seems like the best solution.

I think pretty much all of us realise that the intent of the revised TOS isn't actually to introduce a massive shift in policy towards scamming and metagaming. But a vague and poorly-worded policy which gives that impression can easily be misapplied in ways not intended by the original writer.

As has been pointed out, the wording of this alteration could be read as making CVA's conquest of Providence in the name of the Amarr Empire a bannable offence, never mind the multitude of ways it interacts with various scams and tricks available to the more devious amongst your playerbase. All it takes is one tired GM at the end of a long nightshift to receive an angry ARGH I GOT SCAMMED IT ISN'T FAIR petition, look at the wording of the TOS you guys have just put out, and decide to reach for the banhammer. Believe me, it's better that you get this straightened out now before you have to start dealing with the fallout of players getting wrongly punished for activities that appear to break the letter of the law but which you never intended to be a breach.