EVE General Discussion

Like CCP said, nothing has changed. To prove it, they went and secretly handed some otherwise unobtainable assets to their friends Comunity Contributors, or something.

Seems they were, indeed, correct.

An Open Letter to CCP
Re: PR Disaster

Dear CCP

I think it's time for CCP to roll back all of the decisions they have made over the past 3 months or so and pretend they never happened, to include the following:

1. Change the TOS back.
2. Reverse these massively valuable gifts
3. Renounce CCP approval of in-game players and player-run entities
4. Apologize to the community.

I can pencil into my schedule a discounted initial consultation to help you effect these changes and communicate with the public. I will require roundtrip airline tickets (business class or above) from my home in the United States, complementary accomodations (nothing fancy, a dev's couch is fine), and I will throw in a 20% discount to my normal fees because I love you guys so much. If you choose to engage me on a full time basis, I will require prepaid moving assistance and a salary greater or equal to twice the median salary in Iceland at the senior executive level.

I look forward to moving forward with you on this endeavor.

Regards,

-Ero

That is good to hear as I had hoped this didn't get swept under the rug.

This accounts ends in December... The other one is already down...

You were told by the players to NOT DO THIS AT ALL... before you did it... Now its on to damage control...

You allow Somer to break the EULA, and in fact give them incentive to do so... LOTS of incentive...

How about another apology from Hellmar, then 6 months free game time as proof he is sincere.

Yep

Good stuff, it seems people do this "talk so avoid action" thing in other cases as well.

How about CCP takes its fat fingers out of the alt-spy metagame. People who extensively employ director alts and such but can't keep track of them shouldn't be protected by the terms of service. If someone gets a director alt into an alliance executor corp, and someone asks "who is this alt?" and the alt replies "I'm [insert legitimate director's name here]'s alt" then the ToS shouldn't protect that alliance if the guy who asked fails to follow up with the guy whose name was used.

If some guy's alts all have a particular naming convention, then adopting that naming convention to appear as one of his alts should not be prohibited. Note, I'm not talking about replacing L's with I's or 1's, if CCP wants to ban that, whatever.

But this logic that "we are going to make stuff we're OK with a violation anyway so that we have maximum discretion to apply punishment selectively." then that is harmful to the game. The examples of numerous in-game entities that have taken on the names of real life entities that they are clearly unaffiliated with is indeed humorous, but its also a serious example of why overly broad language is ******* terrible all around.

I'm really interested to know if the ToS change came from the legal department, or if it really is an attempt to protect the people that rely on alts extensively, ie alliance leaderships.

Clearly there's a line where metagaming crosses into criminal activity, but it was already clearly defined and none of these changes is necessary to solidify it.

Or how about addressing the massive internal failures that created and then perpetuated this hilarious disaster?

Does the GM team still distinguish between otherwise legal in-game actions based on their own interpretation of "maliciousness"?

Does the GM team still believe that it is acceptable policy to have broad, contradictory, and absurd rules that are enforced opaquely and inconsistently because we should "trust them"?

What was the connection between these rule changes and the simultaneous "special relationship" being developed with Somer?

Why were the GMs allowed to post themselves silly for days before someone competent stepped in?

Just because you ignore these critical issues does not make them go away. I guess we'll all be back for the next hilarious PR disaster that could have been avoided by making some hard decisions now (well...three months ago) instead of doing your best ostrich impressions.