Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The moderators in the Broadcast4Reps channel would like to see a formalized way to notify CCP in the event of a player emergency. When a player makes a statement that infers immediate suicidal or homicidal behavior, where another reasonable person believes loss of life is imminent, there needs to be a system that gets immediate notice by a CCP employee (i.e. GM). As it stands, we've had to submit tickets under the heading "Stuck player", and then spam any CSM or CCP folks we might know until they see it and get in contact.

I've been rolling this over in my head, trying to find a solution that won't be misused or abused (intentionally or unintentionally) by players. Without knowing the workings of CCP's monitoring system, I'm not sure about the best solution.

Assuming CCP has 24/7 coverage via GM's (which, I don't know if this is accurate), the only solution that comes to mind is providing a trouble ticket for "real life emergency" that creates a red flag for GM's, with perhaps an addendum to the EULA that prohibits abusing that ticket header with threat of a ban.

Anyone else have any ideas?

CCP cannot manage this.
It is not about 'this is not CCP job' - simply to many players, situations - and all possible help that CCP could provide ends the moment player log off.
CCP cannot pass personal information to any one, and it cannot be used in this way as depending on the country player is from , we have different law regulations.

This is not the way to manage this kind of issues!

Possibly the best is a ticket section for it.
With big red letters that abuse of the feature will result in consequences.

Definitely this would not be full proof but "every little bit..."

You'll probably find the language barrier would be the biggest issue in a lot of locations.

The idea is good, the implementation will be very difficult - however it is possible that authorities already have things set up for things like this? I dunno.

I can't even express how much I hate the concept of this idea.

So here's a list of things...

1. Not CCP's job to protect people
2. Not YOUR job to protect people
3. This is a video game
4. Stop trying to control everyone and everything and make the whole world safe
5. You're aware that 10 million people per day (made up statistic) make death threats on the internet and 0.02% of them are credible?

All the people saying "The idea is good but it would be too difficult to implement".. no the idea is NOT good. We should not have our video game communities policing people's mental health and behaviors. If you don't know the person in real life, stay the **** out of their business.

1. Correct
2. Correct
3. Yup
4. I think you're seriously mistaken about what B4R does.
5. You can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forty percent of all people know that.

I think you are mistaken about what we do. We do not police, and "control" is about the last thing any of us have or do. We are not mental health professionals, nor are we counselors. We are fellow players who make ourselves available to chat in the event that someone needs to vent about real life, needs someone to talk through a problem with, or just needs to step away from the meta and just have a human conversation. However, this also exposes us to the (thankfully) rare instance where a player makes it very clear they are about to harm themselves.

Also, you should know in regards to the practice: this is already happening, has been happening for a while, and it's not EVE specific. It's a common practice with most gaming companies in the event of a seriously troubling statement made by a player (within context, of course - all of us say crazy **** in the heat of battle or in the meta). Do a quick search under Blizzard to see the kinds of volumes they handle.

Regarding your statement: "We should not have our video game communities policing people's mental health and behaviors...", that's why I'm asking for constructive feedback about helping create a way to notify CCP that won't be mishandled or abused.

All you can really do is file a support ticket. I know it's been done in the past and police paid a visit to the player to check on them.

Considering a SWAT team will deploy with far, far less information in the US (often with tragic consequences--i.e. killing the wrong person)...that conversation probably wont go like that.

P.S. SWAT always kills the dog.

P.P.S. By the way that thing about notifying SWAT...might a good reason NOT to do this. Sometimes the local police send SWAT and it can and has ended very badly. I know the intentions are good...but sometimes, the police/authorities are NOT the best people to inform. For more on this, look at that guy I just linked, Radley Balko.

How long have the police been working on the case BEFORE the swat team was sent in? days? weeks? months?


Ever been a 911 operator, or an emergency services dispatcher? because the types of questions I posted are asked frequently at least by the 911 operators I know especially if the calls are coming from or they suspect the calls are coming from a cell phone.

Do you really think that the police / fire / ambulance here in the US are going to dispatch units based on a phone call they receive from a game company in Iceland without asking a few questions first?

This whole idea is filed with so many potential problem areas that it is really not feasible, I mean really what could possibly go wrong.

You have untrained people that are doing the initial evaluation of the situation often based on nothing more than a comment made in a chat channel somewhere on the internet.

Other than your shared gaming experiences do you know anything about the person who you are concerned about, what do you know about their life as a whole.

Do you fully understand the local customs, language and dialect they are speaking, this is compounded when you consider that there is likely a large percentage of the players that are not native English speakers. And while we are on the topic of languages which language does CCP use for this system, or would they need to keep people on staff 24 / 365 that speak all languages possible based on their subscribers.

Given that words often have opposite meanings are you really hearing what you think you are, or just a local slang variant definition. As an example we went through that whole phase some time back were "bad" did not always mean bad, sometimes it meant really good

So a player in US pushes the panic button and reports a corp member that lives in Australia to a game company in Iceland.
The game company looks up information on the players address which takes a few seconds but then what do they do? How do they know the proper emergency contact phone number to call, do they have it on file with the account info?

And yet this brings us back to perhaps one of the biggest problems, does the player still live at that address, or did they move and forgot to update CCP with their new address? What happens if the player you are reporting is on a trip out of their home country using a laptop to log in how can CCP know this information, do you even know they are away from their home address?

While this idea seems good at the basic level when it comes down to working around the potential problems associated with it there is just no practical way to make it work. We as players getting to know each other, where we live, what we do for a job is the ultimate answer to this situation