EVE New Citizens Q&A

The number of people actually scammed in Eve is tiny. In the many years I've been playing, I've never been scammed.
Common sense applies in Eve as it does in real life. No one worth joining will ask for anything more than an API. Whether it's a scam or not- there are far too many corps in Eve to have to spend isk to join any.

The vast majority of scams are aimed at greedy or lazy players. This is why I have no sympathy for so called victims of a scam, or those that embarrass themselves in 'bonus rooms'. They are not victims in any meaningful sense, but rather are trying to cheat at Eve Online.
Trying to double one's isk (a very common scam target) is cheating. It is even worse than botting or AFK'ing. At least botters undock a ship to get their isk, but people that end up in bonus rooms refuse to even do that- to the point where they don't even have to log into Eve (just something like TeamSpeak) to get their free money.
No one forces them to attempt to cheat, no one forces them into a bonus room or to give up isk...they do that voluntarily because they want free isk while the rest of us actually play this game. I have absolutely ZERO sympathy for those people and applaud people like Erotica1 for shaming them and (hopefully) sending them packing out of Eve Online.

As for the rest of the various scams....fake contracts also target greedy players who hope to essentially get something for nothing. Reading a contract is 100% protection from that type of scam- more importantly, not being greedy will keep you from even looking at contracts being spammed in trade hubs.

As for the OP, just use common sense. Your activities in game profit a corp/alliance (usually thru taxation), so you are already giving them money by being a member and doing PvE content, or helping take/defend resources. When was the last time you applied for a real life job by giving the company a year's worth of the salary they should be paying you?!

Sorry for your loss, but not only is that pretty obviously a scam- but 20 seconds of google searching would also reveal it's a well known scam.
BTW, Goonswarm doesn't run this scam as an institution, it is the individual players that choose to. Goons just allow their members to run such a scam using the Goonswarm name.

I have decided to respond to this thread once again by trying to explain myself better.

I started online gaming about 20 years ago, with the first every MMO's out there. Namely MUD's (Multi User Dungeons). For those who dont know what it was, it was basically a text based online game. Now the MUD that I always played, and returned to was a MUD called WoTMUD.

We didnt have a huge playerbase. At most we had 200 people online at the same time, but this mud persisted through the years for a very simple reason. There was always risk. There was no absolutely safe place. If you die, you lost all the gear and loot you had. Hell, you even lost some experience (comparable to EVE skillpoints). Imagine dying and not losing your gear, but with a character that is weaker than it was before... Yet we all loved it. We came back for more.

The thing that the OP, and many new players dont get is that EVE is a game where you are never safe unless you sit in a station all the time. And thats how many players like it. That is why this game is so popular. Calling the playerbase Sociopath's is just a way to soothe your own EGO: "Ah well, the guy must be a sociopath" when it almost never is the case.

I am not a Sociopath (I am not Insane, my mother had me tested), and I have never scammed (in about my 2 month playtime), nor do I intend to. However this game is exactly what I, and a very large part of the playerbase is looking for: An environment where we are not safe 100% of time.

Honestly, this is not the type of game you are looking for, then it isnt the game for you. But instead of baseless accusations (of insanity) just move on quietly and go find a game that you do actually enjoy.

P.S. Go look at the link I posted. The bit he posts about meeting new people is particularly appropriate to this game :D

I'm not even a pirate and his name makes me want to pod him to see what he's got...

Why would I spend 10 seconds typing "eve goonswarm recruitment" to google and see the word "Scam" in the first hits multiple times when that time could be spent right-clicking the name of a total stranger and giving them 500mil?

I'd go for laziness, perhaps stupidity. It might even be both!

OP. For a moderate fee of 499 mil I can introduce you into a corp I used to be in.

I'm actually amased that not a single person is getting what i'm saying, literally everyone is on the automatic defensive and resorting to ridicule, mild or otherwise, with the odd actual response here and there.

Two points to address, the age of my character is irrelevant, I had been absent from the game for most of the time and only recently played properly (1 or two months total play time). As for my not conducting a google search, I trusted my already existing notions of an MMORPG that the 'official' in game channels, such as the corp search that I used, and did not consider that those official game elements would be directly associated with scamming. Yes it is quite possible to play the game and not realise that scamming is an integral part of it, if all you've done is solo missioning in that time.

I am getting a bit frustrated that not one of you so far has actually understood what I'm saying, either that or you've not quite got the point I'm making. In saying that, no doubt you will become offended and feel like I am attacking your intelligence, there seems to me a huge undercurrent of intellectual pride which means that I get responses addressing how offensive I am, or how I am alienating the community, and very few posts are actually speaking to my actual point.

Let me be clear, my objection is very very specific, and is just relating to new player recruitment scams. Everyone that is replying about how great it is to not be 100% safe, I agree, and it's also something that attracts me to the game, if I saw a post with someone moaning that they got blown up then my responses would be very similar to you guys. Please stop thinking that I am against all in game criminal activity, you are mistaken.

Again on the sociopath thing, I used the word because the definition fit very well. The other reason that I use it is because I am seeing behavior that I would never be involved in, that is, a direct conversation with another person with the knowledge that I am being deceptive and stealing, the result of which will be a real person that is robbed of ISK that they spent time in getting, or spent money on. I can say this at the very least, I do not understand how people can do it comfortably and then just turn around and say "well the game lets me do it". Yes it's a game, but it's a game with real people.

I'm not a sociopath if I destroy pawns in a game of chess, that's a very loose analogy... both chess players know the rules of the game before they play and realise that that the very clear goal is to have a better strategy than the opponent, in EVE they don't (scammer vs. new player). In chess, my opponent didn't invest days of their life, or money, that will be lost if beaten. In chess I'm not involved in elaborate and complex schemes that engage with people that don't know they are in them.

What a chess game would need to look like to mirror EVE:

>Players sit down to play

>Player A has been sat there for a year and knows how to play very well

>Player B (and C and D and E etc....) has never played chess

>Player B decides to go play chess and learn by just starting, if 'part of the game' is the ability to check things out before done, then that also needs to be learned along the way, especially when it contradicts other games that player B has played.

>Player B, for 2 months, carves their chess pieces by hand, he couldn't play otherwise

>Player B sits down with player A

>Player A tells B how to move their pieces, so that A can win, and B reasonably assumes that player A is helping, why wouldn't he.

>Player A now owns player B's chess pieces

>Player B "oh no! What even just happened?! Did we just play the game?!"

>Player A "I'm just better than you, get over it, haha i'm going to just burn your chess pieces because its funny"

Player A is a douche.

Something bad is not really bad because there is something worse going on too? Great logic *claps*

Not really sure what you mean, "grrr predators" is part of it yes, this is a forum discussion, people are discussing, what more do you want?


To save some time though allow me to outline my original points.

a) I don't think that CCP should allow new player recruitment scams for all reasons stated previously.

b) I have expressed my interest in people's behavior in game, and how it might reflect the behavior in real life. People disagree with my use of the word sociopath, and on reflection I am willing to retract that word, some very good points have been made.


I'm now just getting an impression of the community through this post, and the attitudes towards new players, and it makes me a bit uneasy that I can read through 3 pages and not see one person just talking to me like a normal person instead of a piece of crap on their shoe, because I have some misconceptions about their beloved EVE.

EVE promotes gameplay that allows players to be heroes and villains, even both.

Though playing the villain is not my cup of tea, I fully support and encourage those that enjoy either play-style.

Both sides make the EVE universe great.

And?

In RL I'm the straight-laced one who gets annoyed when people don't completely stop at a stop street. When I'm playing Munchkin with my friend and he gets to level 9, you bet I'm going to try and stab him in the back (figuratively) to stop him from winning. In table-top RPGs (like Dungeons and Dragons) I've schemed and plotted against the other player-characters a couple of times because that's what my *character* would do.

My friend doesn't get pissed off because I managed to prevent him from winning a Munchkin game. My RPG group aren't going to refuse to play again if I manage to pull off a scheme that left the rest of the party (their characters which they had invested huge amounts of time in) at a disadvantage, at least not for long.

In fact, when someone lets in-game issues affect their out-of-game behaviour, that's more likely when we would have a problem. There would be discussions around whether that person is taking the game too seriously, or whether they're having trouble distinguishing between in-game and out-of-game events.