EVE General Discussion

Definetly

And while your laser pistol is giving him the carebear stare, his mate boards your faction-fit golem, undocks and warps off!

If you purposefully choose to gain the trust of someone so you can use their belief against them and take from them what they've earned, you are a bad person.

In years of playing Eve, I've never been scammed.

Virtually all of the scams I see are taking advantage of someone's greed. If the 'victim' wasn't so greedy, looking for some angle himself- then no scam would ever work. People who don't bother reading a contract, people who are thinking with their wallets and not their heads.

I think it's hilarious when people get scammed in Eve. Not my play style to sit around a hub spamming bad contracts, but it is players creating content, which I always support. I refuse to punish player creativity in favor of dumbing down Eve so people don't even have to read something before clicking on it.

If you got scammed in Eve, there is no one to blame but yourself. While it's a popular topic, the number of players that have actually ever been scammed is tiny, being smart enough not to get swindled in the first place. The simple fact is, scamming isn't a problem for the vast majority of Eve.

If you promise me that if I lend you 100m isk, and within 1 month you'll repay me 110m isk, and you choose to keep all of it and never return it, then you are a bad person for lying to me and stealing.

*edit* just for clarification, having seen you support stealing, I'll never consider you worthy of being trusted. So don't even try.

scam involving knowledge of game mechanics and smart tricks is OK
scam involving simple lying (like Ero1's and all ISK-doublers scams) is no-no.

Fair game and can be so well executed that it becomes almost poetic. I know this is technically not a scam, but an in-game scam with a style similar to that is what I'd class as a brilliant.

http://eve.klaki.net/heist/



Love it. Has all the right flavours.

i don't care about scams but i do pity the fool that falls for them for at least 2 milliseconds before laughing at them.

While this should be easy i personally find it extremely difficult to answer this question as i find my self on both sides.

As others have mentioned, this is EVE, its a sandbox, everything (almost) is allowed, and EVE is (and should be) a harsh universe that makes you thin twice and punishes you for your mistakes.

So, on that side im for scams. At least some.
Goons recruitment scam, all for it!
Market and contracts scams, sure go ahead.
Recruitment scams in general, not honoring ransoms, ISK doubling scams, whatever... I have no problem with it because its all in the game and does not hurt anyone in real life.

Quite frankly EVE would be pretty boring without the stories that occur because of scams and similar..indecent behavior.

Of course im sure some will say that it does hurt them in real life, that being scammed morally wrecked them and greatly affected their mental state, but if these people are actually honest i would say that EVE might not be for them.

However, some scams goes to far.

Scams that move "out" of game and attacks the person, or persons, in real life.

The best example i have of this is a group who used to find it really entertaining to find RIP threads, claim to be a relative of said person and say something like "***** greatest wish was to get a titan. In honor of his memory we will buy one and dedicate it to him. ISK can be sent to *****".
This particular one abuses peoples grief, and also the people who just wish to show respect for a deceased EVE player, thus in my mind it crosses the line between real life and EVE.
Luckily this one died out pretty fast, but it still left me with a foul taste in my mouth and made me wonder how low some people are willing to go in order to scam people.

For the next one, it will generally be a female thing, even if im sure there are men that does the same, or at least pretend to be females to archive the same result.
Find a guy, make said guy "fall in love" with you, have them give you ISK and various other stuff and then cut contact.
I really wish i wouldent have to list this one here since it sort of builds on a stereotype, but sadly it does happen, while not that often (i hope).
Again i react because this messes with a persons feelings in real life, and abuses their mental state, thus moves "out of game".

Then there is one that i cant really...decide how i feel about.

Obtaining pictures, voice recordings and similar of people, making it public just to get as many people as possible to laugh at the person who got scammed.
Sure the fact that the person fell for it in the first place is amusing, but again it crosses the line. When you take real life information about someone in order to "push them down in the mud" because the person wasent humiliated enough by getting scammed in the first place is (in my opinion) going to far.

But at the same time, these people must realize that going on a random voice chat and sing with a voice that makes a cats howling sound good, or sharing real life picture of them self (dressed or not) in order to "win" ISK is a bad idea!
I mean, even if this was not EVE, where scamming is legal, i cant see why anyone would be willing to do this.
After all, all they had to do was set their foot down, say no and close the convo.
But who knows, i have never known anyone who has fallen for a scam like this (well ok, i will admit i have talked to one person who did something along these lines and in that case it was a smooth talking voice and a weak sport for charming men that caused it ) so maybe im just missing something.

So, while this scam enters "real life", it does not toy with your emotions or leave you without a choice. Instead you base it all on a 5 minute conversation with a complete stranger, and, quite frankly, when you choose to give all your assets to a person after that little time im leaning towards saying that this is that own persons fault.

But well.
Personally i dont scam people.
I know people who do, i know people who have been scammed, and i know people who has never fallen for one, and they are all good people.

TLDR;
Please let the players keep having the freedom to keep execute scams.
Like it or not, it creates history.

Grr Scammers. All they do is hurt legitimate business ventures.

It is quite upsetting.

From the point of view of game mechanics, scams are just another part of the game that bring diversity to EVE. Removing scams from the game would make EVE more generic and boring.

However, if you compare other aggressive parts of the game (pirating, ganking, ....) to scams, you can see why many are annoyed about scams - it's spam. Pure, uncreative, repetitive spam. I like when a new kind of scam hits the game. It adds to the gameplay for the whole community. What I don't like are repetitive scams that are in the game for multiple years and the worst part is, many of them are not even that creative. I'll list a few:
- trade window scam where you name regular ship as its faction version. Seriously, be more creative;
- plex scam where a 0 or two is missing;
- plex scam where you pay ISK and plex to get plex;
- ISK doubling... that one is the most annoying one. Every time I see one I feel like my IQ dropped a couple of points.
- BPC instead of BPO scam. I don't know why this one is still around. They've fixed icons years ago and added text descriptions for each BP;

One universal reason why I don't like previously listed scams is that almost all of them target new players or players that are not familiar with the UI, game mechanics or the community.

There are, however, some of the old ones that I still like to see:
- Carbon/Charon Proteins/Proteus scam. I like it because you can fall for it even if you are an experienced player who doesn't pay attention;
- Fitted ship on contract with ship missing from the list of items. Same reason as the one above.
- Margin trading scam because face it, it is creative.
- Banks, stock markets and gambling sites because players who run them invest effort other than pure spam that later pays off. Spam part that is present with these types of scams is, however, annoying.

Personally, I don't like being involved in scams and I can recognize one when I see it very quickly.

I have only once profited from a margin trading scam when I noticed it being setup for a rarely used T2 item that I happened to have T1 blueprint for. I just quickly invented T2 blueprint, grabbed a bunch of materials that I already had, manufactured those items and listed them on Sell orders just below scammer's items. I later figured it's too time consuming to hunt down other plausible ventures like that since you never know which item is used in the scam and when.