Player Features and Ideas Discussion

It's funny that the reasonings for this change apply more so to the non-NPC forum alts on here.

When it comes to thread derailment, trolling, and especially breaking of the forum rules, tough-guy-regulars on here are absolutely larger culprits.

If CCP wants to improve the quality of the forums, they can start by promoting them to be popular amongst non-elitist posters. The vast, vast majority of regulars on here are elitists and it's because they have not seen consequences for their actions, causing most non-elitists to eventually stop posting here.

So no, the notion that NPC restrictions would improve forum quality is bologna. The only way to improve forum quality is to start banning members - NPC or otherwise - for breaking forum rules. This would mean a large chunk of the regulars would be banned, but it would pave the road for more reasonable posters to join up.

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=360319&find=unread

This is why this idea cannot, should not, and will not happen.

I personally have no problem with this; I myself have hired mercs to wardec posters on here before.

However from a business standpoint CCP cannot reasonably support this. It is against their better interest to create an environment where sharing one's ideas and thoughts about the game results in wardecs or in-game reactions.

1) Players will simply not share their ideas due to what has occurred in the above thread.
2) Players who want to share their ideas despite this will many times be ordered by their corp/alliance leaders not to.

As a result this will cause the industrial/non-PVP playerbase to become less involved in the forums and thus less involved in the community. Considering lack of community involvement is one of the biggest issues in the game right now, it is quite obvious this idea will never actually happen.

Quite honestly, you only have yourselves to blame for this. The regulars on here are extremely aggressive and hostile individuals. Call it EVE all you want, CCP isn't going to allow their playerbase to become victimized for simply trying to discuss ideas about the game.

I'm rather late to the party, but after reading the first two and last two pages of this thread, I am in agreement with La Nariz. Even if doing so would have a direct detriment to myself, being in my own corp. I have posted manymanytimes before in response to Forum trolls and alts.

While I personally feel that a 1 million is charge would prove too exclusionary, not just for new players, but also for those, like myself, that are vehemently cheap in game/rl, I do believe a CSPA charge for NPC characters and one-man corp characters would be a reasonable compromise.

However, I would lower the charge to an amount between 10K and 100K. Overall, I would be happy to see some improvement in the quality of posting and discussion on these forums and I look forward to seeing the evolution of the same. Better yet, if the isk accumulated could be banked by CCP and converted back into real money by them at Plex price, then reinvested by CCP for their infrastructure or as a charitable contribution, all the better.

Subscribed.

Edit: Darn, bottom of the page.

If only CCP applied their own damn rules and revoked posting privilege to repeat offenders instead of letting them come back all the damn time. If it cost people an account to keep trolling, I can bet you a lot will stop.

I've more or less refrained from commenting on this (I think - I may have commented before and just forgotten) but honestly, I didn't expect this thread to last this long.

Ah well, shows what I know.

At any rate, this idea is kind of a non-starter for two reasons:

1. It is absolutely not in CCP's best interests as a for profit entity to treat (or even give the appearance of treating) a large portion of their player base as second class citizens just for being in a certain group of characters.

2. A lot of the really inflammatory trolling doesn't come from NPC corp characters (Tom Gerard springs to mind immediately), so the proposed solution does nothing to attack the problem.

Of course, I am assuming that the OP is not, himself, trolling with this entire thread - if I'm wrong, then 100/10 OP, well played.

A couple of other points.
I do agree with the OP that trolling is a TOS/EULA violation and should be punished. CCP has rules in place for this kind of thing, and frankly, I don't think additional restrictions are necessary - they just need to actually enforce the ones they already have in a more judicious manner. Personally, I'm not against temp bans to in game accounts for serious forum violations.

I also agree that this has nothing to do with free speech. Free speech arguments fall flat from the get-go because this is not a government managed forum - it's run by a private entity and they have the right to ban people from it for absolutely no reason at all, if they so choose.

I disagree that the proposed change would, in any way, improve the quality of the forums because frankly, it's so easy to bypass. In fact, I argue it would worsen the quality of the forums due to the "*******" effect, in which people rail against arbitrary restrictions by being as obnoxious as possible in openly working to circumvent the restriction. I would expect to see a Postshield corporation (a la Dechsield) spring up almost immediately with free and open recruitment simply for people to post absolute dreck on the forums in retaliation against CCP for this change. (I would probably be one of them, because frankly, it's a bad idea.)

I also disagree that it would make people more accountable for their posts - all it would do in that case is spur the creation of more anonymous alts who would then join corporations like Postshield and continue sperging on the forums.

In summary, I cannot support this idea because it simply won't do any good. It certainly won't accomplish the lofty goal set by the OP, and it might, in all honesty, make the problem significantly worse.

1. It is in their financial interest to automate as much of the forum moderation as possible because it allows them to use their employees more efficiently and CCP has stated before the subset of forum users is considerably smaller than the population of EVE. Out of all the people playing EVE few people use the forums. That could be for a variety of reasons like poor forum quality but, since few customers are effected by the change in the first place it won't be a big deal.

2. CAOD rules are 10+ member corporations so it will get rid of plenty of that kind of garbage.

I might as well say it again its not the solution but is part of it, its not intended to be a herculean effort to qualify for posting, and NPC corporations do far more trolling than anything else. Player organizations can be handled so the Alliance of Posting alts is a non-issue.

By that reasoning, it makes even more buisness sense to not moderate at all because you don't even have to spend time building rules for it. Did EVE ever lose players because the boards were a cesspit?

No because then you get a cesspit like kugu that actively drives people away and looks horrible to the outside looking in crowd that has been so beneficial to EVE like national news agencies. EVE-O isn't there yet but, its quickly approaching that level of terrible. It makes the most sense to put in a filter like this, one that has been tested, and enact other small changes to fix the problem.

Are we looking at the same forums? Can you provide some examples of how NPC troll alts are causing the EVE-O forums to "quickly approach that level of terrible"? Am I just blind to all these posts?

You continue to repeat the same mantra about how god awful the quality is here and it is just completely baffling to me.

Edit: Also.. posting in what now appears to be a stealth Forums are Dying thread

The part were people in NPC corps that do play by the rules are shut out of the forums, that part.