EVE General Discussion

A specific restriction may be used, and as read prohibited, broadly in the context of gameplay. Across the various scamming methods available misrepresentation is commonly used and thus making a "very specific" statement apply in an "overly-broad" fashion.

For one:

'No we don't ban people listing all their alt characters in their bios if they actually own those accounts.'

Thats pretty specific, easy to understand and reassuring people that they actually haven't gone completely bonkers.
If they start rambling about some arcane case where people impersonate themselves and devote a paragraph to it in their clarification, then pretty please give rough examples between which 'the line' can be found.


Other parts are more complicated such as what exactly enables people to do a recruitment scam now.

Even a non exhaustive list of common situations would help to understand what they intend to do.
Why should we open a ticket everytime we could possibly interpret something to be in violation of some rule when they can provide some common examples ?

Already been addressed by another capsuleer. But let me explain it as well.

In the terms of the TOS, it's a very specific prohibition.

In terms of existing and established game play, it's overly-broad in that it prohibits a wide swath of behavior with no definable allowance. There's not even a grey area. There's no black and white.....it's just all black.

At this point, you'd be a complete moron to misrepresent anything in the game which would prompt someone to report you. You can't know if you will be banned or not, regardless of CCP's assurances to the contrary.

This is what's so unnerving. The TOS says it's bannable, CCP is saying, no no we won't ban you. It'd be like your local municipality enacting a droit du seigneur ordinance and then going to great lengths to assure you it'd never happen. The question would then be, "Then why enact such an ordinance?" and the answer is always "because they intend to use it".

EVE Online is pretty harsh eh

This is their excuse thread.

They close all the other threads, because the posts go here.

They then ignore these posts.


Or some CSM person comes in and makes things worse vov

meh

The disconnect between the GMs and the players is that bringing (supposedly) pre-existing rules to the forefront officially and loudly invalidates various types of gameplay because we can not hold the GMs accountable to a set of precedents. The fact that CCP felt the need to change the ToS signals that they do have some intent to (at some point) increase punishment for what was condoned gameplay before this wording change. It does come down to a trust issue at the end of the day because of the GMs refusal to supply hypothetical example guidelines that need not to be specific cases that have occured.

I am all for preventing/punishing people doing name based impersonation, but in all honestly, anything beyond that is a lack of a player's due diligence in verifying through in game and out of game means whether the person is legit or not. In the case with the eve-wiki, if it's something that CCP wants players to respect as a trusted source for information, not publishing edits before verifying the information provided would have prevented the issue which has likely sparked this change.

Also, I still really do not understand why same-person alts had to be mentioned earlier, as all that did was add extra confusion. This game functions on people having multiple characters, there are existing ways both in/out of game to verify that they are the same person, whether it be mailing the main or other people that both characters have associated with etc. Eve Voice is also an under-utilised tool for this kind of work. If need be, I don't think requesting a specific api set for the account(s) in question and running it through evemon etc is that much of a stretch.


Example:
- Awoxer joins corp, says he is Person A's alt. It should fall onto the corp leadership to message Person A to verify if he's an alt. If that's not done, then they're at fault for not doing their homework on the character applying.
- Someone makes a character named CHR|BBA, character should be renamed to keep in line with naming conventions.
- I identify myself as an alt of another character I own, the person I am talking to, if they feel the need should message my main or contact friends of mine to verify that it's my alt, much like the corp example, if I lack a list of alts in my bio.

^That's all the GMs had to do, was give some examples and this wouldn't have exploded nearly as much.

tl;dr - Please don't destroy eve by opening up the option to punish gameplay mechanics now or in the future that have been long held in the belief as legal actions, and condoned by CCP. This game has in-game consequences to not understanding mechanics which are easy to discover and risking the character of eve on eula/tos terminology just sounds pathetic.

Of unaccountability, and shifting blame? Very much so.

That post took about 20 minutes of arguing with people who saw nothing wrong with the change to formulate into something that blends what I can only guess would be the intended reason for rewording the ToS with what a good deal of the players in this thread (including myself) are concerned about.

This whole scenario is bizarre. The initial obfuscating "clarification" from CCP, and their subsequent silence. The hand-waving about the lack of consultation with the CSM. The subsequent silence from the CSM. The handing of the issue to a GM who is apparently making new, broad interpretations of the TOS without context or apparently any internal guidance. The seeming disregard of EVE's decade-long ethos. I could go on.

Most perplexingly: if players had been behaving in a certain way, and then you introduced a rule that you had never communicated before, why would you be surprised when players felt that they were being expected to behave differently? While CCP can change their TOS whenever they want, that doesn't absolve them from baseline reasonable communication.

(Of course, we're not even touching on the "impersonating yourself" ludicracy, which is already the butt of several landfills' worth of joke and snark, and - most sadly - bittervet lack of surprise in the non-EVE-O regions of the community.)

And in other news, the GM team is run by a banana.