Crime & Punishment

I'll tell you about tears. Some of the best tears in the year and some months I've been playin flowed from the emergent gameplay community in the two weeks following the bonus room debacle and subsequent ban that ensued. Warmed the cockles of my heart. Yes indeed, my cockles were burning.

I find it amusing when supposed adults erupt into rage, tantrums and insults over a computer game. I used to laugh when my uncle Joe would throw SNES controllers when he lost at Super Mario also. So yeah, it encourages me when I can derive extra amusement from something I'd be doing anyway. You could call me a tear collector, mostly because I keep a fairly large list of hatemails I have received. But I truly don't care, to be honest, I have played videogames like this since UO, and it's not really different here.

Also as Kane says, people tend to misappropriate the concept of "tears" to apply to things that it really doesn't. This has cheapened the concept, in my opinion, diluted it.

As to the podcast itself, I would suggest that you talk to your sound guy, listening to that was... weird. That or one of two of you need new mics. The podcast is also a little disorganized, I suggest that you guys set someone as a director to keep things moving along.

Oh, and an obligatory jab at Anslo. His statements were about what I'd expect of him. Someone who is thoroughly upset that other people are allowed to play the way they want to, that other people say mean things about casuals, and doing his best to puff up his supposed accomplishments.

I like watching people that are actively obnoxious for some reason melt down. If I see someone launch a racist tirade in local, I'll quietly note their name and watchlist them, then suicide gank their pod and, if it has a crystal set, contract them a low-grade crystal alpha, and EVEmail them saying "Hope this helps you get back on your feet after the big loss". Ditto for people saying things like 'scammers should be banned' or 'gankers are as bad as schoolyard bullies/child abusers/school shooters'.

I will also engage in 'tear harvesting' if sending my opponent on-tilt will advance some strategic end. This is something I learned IRL playing poker, where 'tear harvesting' when you inflicted a bad beat on someone (with a comment like "about time the best player won") often made them lose a lot of chips to you over the next hours.

I don't harvest tears from people that I respect in any way.

Got close to the end.

Wow.

Seriously crying about getting pipebombed in a stream? Good lord, get some Opsec.


[edit:
Oh, and of course they bring sexual assault into it.

If you are literally giving real time intelligence on your location and tactics that is open to the public, yes, you are going to get dunked if someone cares to do so.

It's not "blaming the victim", it's telling you that cause and effect are a thing. Jesus Christ.

I shut the stream off at that point.

Tears, it's the lifeblood of EVE. The more carebears cry, the more EvE Online grows.

I cannot stand people that trivialise sexual crimes by claiming that suffering a defeat in a competitive game is in any way similar.

Internet Spaceship Tears are serious business, guys.

That's why I collect them as a full time job.

^^^ This, except I wouldn't contract that person anything.

I don't actively attempt to harvest any tears, but if someone that gets so upset over losing a spaceship in a game based around losing spaceships that they issue death threats and such, they definitely have bigger issues than "tear collectors".

For once I agree with you. The concept of farming tears or whatever one wants to call it is so over applied in the game, that few people are actually doing it. You always see people in local claiming what "tears" they've caused when it really doesn't seem that there was that great of effect. Making tears seems now to have become a synonym for any sort of non-consentual PvP whether it actually caused any reaction on the losing party.

Personally, so far in my eve life of crime, the amount of tears I attempt to harvest depends on the reaction of my victim to the initial encounter. There was one guy me and a buddy suicide ganked, we spoke to him in local for several minutes before we blew up his illegal retriever (he said he was bored, so we changed that), then continued to talk to him in local. He was a good sport about it, and ended up creating his own gank alt and joined us on a couple gank runs so far.

Another guy was talking smack in local, so we dec'd him, got 7 kills off him during the war (4 ships 3 pods), and he kept talking smack the whole time, and continued to do so after the war. So we did what we could to make his life miserable. Haven't really seen him on much lately, but everytime we do he's complaining about us in local, so I'd say mission accomplished.

I recently awox'd a guy, he was genuinely an awesome guy, if misguided and lacking quality recruitment standards, he dealt with the awox really well, he was more disapointed that I wasn't honest rather than angry. So I was much nicer to him than I could have been. Had he started yelling or swearing, things would have turned out much more poorly for him.

tl;dr In general I'm fine with the idea of tear collecting, but personally it really depends on the victim, the more belligerent they are, the more tears I'll try to milk from them.