Out of Pod Experience

Humans...

In game.... == in game.

Once you make a point to go out of your way to get someone outside the game... or does not involve the game what so ever... You've crossed the magical meany line. This does not include spying....Because you're spying for game reasons.

Seems pretty clear. Doesn't involve the game... no longer griefing rather you being kinda a douche. Because only 16 year old girls commit "cyber bullying"... which is really harassment. And if you honestly harass someone... See the part about being a douche.

Keep in mind harassing someone mostly involves more than one incident in my mind. (blah blah of course there's exceptions.)

(NOTE: thanks to the kind moderator who pointed me to this thread where my point actually fits better than in the new one I started and got locked.)

Personally I think that the line should go between what you do in game, and how you act about it.

People have often claimed that upset victims of berating and smacktalk and flames should not be offended, because "it is just a game" and "you should not take EVE seriously". I think that's utter crap. EVE is not just a game. EVE is a game, yes, but it is a very unique game, it is the only real sandbox MMOG in existence, and it is a very cool one at that (spaceships! single shard! player alliance with thousands of members! totally player-driven space territory politics! I mean come on, folks, this **** is awesome).

Anyone who has played EVE for any longer time and especially leaders and key members of successful alliances know that to be any good at EVE at all, you have to take it seriously. You have to study ship fits, to organize your fleets well, have a presence across timezones, require that muppets either shape up or leave, take care of your alliance PR, spend time negotiating blues, be good at intel to know who you can afford to shoot at. In other words, you have to invest in the game. You have to care about being good, you have to care about winning - or you won't be, you won't win.

And the investment and caring is what makes EVE wonderful - because the losses and victories are not just pixels or multiplayer tetris or WoW in space, they are results of planning and investing and having the right people at the right places at the right times. Results of intelligence and practice. They are at least as real as victories in any "real life" sports. And the people who claim you should not cry over your pixelated spaceships - you know what? They know this too. They would not bother pointing and laughing in order to make people cry, if they did not believe the game mattered. Or they would do it maybe once for laughs and then bugger off. They would not build major alliances, play for years, and try and take over the forums.

I do not want EVE to turn into WoW in space. I do not, however, also think that any kind of behavior is acceptable. When we play EVE, because of the actual seriousness of the game, we cannot help it that sometimes people will feel really upset when we blow up their ships, take their territory, block their trade lines, flip their systems, or whatever other serious business it is we are at. That is inevitable. If we try to make it go away completely, EVE will be greatly diminished. But we can help pointing and laughing at the upset people. We can show sportsmanship by playing it hard to win - but being graceful towards those who lose. Even PR wars can be conducted without targeting individual players and resorting to inane flaming. (If you need juvenile language, mass posting to derail a thread, or personal attacks to conduct your PR or psyops - you are doing it wrong.)

TL;DR: START READING HERE.

What I want is an EVE where scamming, baiting, blobbing, ganking, trapping, and using clever tricks is still allowed, where we can have PR wars and gloat on locals about how wonderful players we are, where the only thing forbidden to do in the game is exploits (as defined by CCP, not by someone who thinks anything that feels unfair must be an exploit), and where there is no guaranteed safety or total opt-out of pvp. I also want an EVE where it is not acceptable behavior to point and laugh when someone is obviously RL upset about losing, to berate and humiliate people on the public forums or locals or CCP-sponsored live events, and where racist/sexist/homophobic slurs are grounds of immediate warnings and bans.

Those things are not contradictory.

And I do not think most of the community thinks they are, no matter what the proponents of "free speech means I must be allowed to say anything anywhere about anyone without consequences" say.

Immaturity is for the young. They are meant to be immature. It is nothing you can do about. Try to ignore them.

I thought about this a little before I answered. But I think the problem here is that we already tried that. We letf goonies alone when they brought in the culture of celebrating deliberate hurting of others and juvenile derailing of every thread not to their liking, etc. We just shrugged and ignored them and went to do our stuff somewhere else - even when they did it in our threads, on our locals, at our fanfest. We assumed that since no one (else) really wanted that, it'd blow over. But it hasn't; it's gotten worse, and it's getting to the point where people outside of EVE and newbie players believe that this is what EVE is like, that immaturity like that really is an integral part of the game. I don't think further trying to ignore it is a good option.

As to the young: yes, they are supposed to be immature. But the way they are supposed to get more mature is us adults showing them what is acceptable and what is not. Even when they do not particularly like that happening. Not that everyone in EVE who promotes the kind of culture I oppose to is young enough to use that as excuse. ;)

Yes, I think it would be time for that. CSM or someone else. It has even crossed my mind to run for CSM with some community standard agenda myself next time - not saying I will, just saying that as evidence for how much I think it was time. :P

I think it is possible to take a "hardliner" stance where doing stuff is ok, but any sort of berating and ridiculing other people (as well as purposeful derailing of threads etc) is not. Of course, there are borderline cases and any sort of serious moderation also will have cases that will depend on individual moderator judgment. We just need to trust the moderators enough to make the distinction, and the moderators need to be thick-skinned enough to say HTFU to people who try to whine and rules-lawyer them.

I have never ran a forum of this size, but I have moderated for several smaller ones. After an initial adjustment period, people usually respond pretty well to "you can say anything, but you cannot be an ass about it, and yes, I know what being an ass is when I see it" type of policies. Initially some folks test you and try to argue that they used "***" to mean "cigarette" when they said "you ***" and therefore it was not an insult (yes, really), but when you keep at it they settle down. Our alliance forums for example have a policy where you cannot say "lol that's a terrible fit", but you can say "that's a terrible fit because X, Y, and Z". Newcomers sometimes have difficulties telling the difference (especially when their fits are criticized), but they learn after a couple of iterations.

One thing CCP clearly lacks on these forums is feedback to players about what is and is not acceptable. Posts get nuked, but they usually get nuked without a trace, and even the person whose post was nuked does not usually receive a notification that it was done, let alone why it was done. That means people don't really learn the rules that way; the best the mods can do is keep threads clean, but it is not easy for them to educate people to not make them dirty to begin with. Most other forums I am on have a practice where when a post is nuked, it is not just silently removed, but the moderators replace it with something like "*snip* please do not flame". Also, they have a system through which the moderators can send warnings to individual posters, and often an automatic system where enough warnings inside some defined time range puts you on an automatic temporary posting ban.

Of course a line has to be drawn. I had to on several occasions decide to change my behavior in eve and on the eve boards and on other channels because I felt I had crossed the line when someone has gotten really upset.

If I "happen" to mess with someones ventrilo server I do that for fun and if it gets too serious I keep that to myself. Having someone confess to wanting to commit suicide is not something I would play back to people nor would I reveal any personal information that could be abused by someone else.

I have no idea about what happened that the OP refer to so hard to know what you guys are talking about, I would not mind if someone could be as nice as to fill me in briefly on what has taken place.

In any case, there are many lines, heck even in-game I have drawn the line on since I started playing like to never scam a person or to betray friends not to mention if I ever challenged or were challenged to a duel to cheat in order to win.

Now that is in-game and all those things are allowed and should be allowed. It is up to each person to make that choice for themselves. But if people start using Facebook and other ways to try and ruin someones life you need to be careful. I do know where I live people have been arrested for cyber bullying and in America I think some people have even gone to jail and been sued for a lot of money over it? Heck, even CCP could face legal problems.

So I guess my point is, people should be careful about crossing the lines too much not just for the sake of their "victim" or even themselves but because it could mean trouble for CCP and EVE Online as a game. I would hate for some depressed kid killing himself, having his family sue, media reporting on it and a legal case to be made having CCP lawyers decide it is too much of a hassle and start making things we have taken for granted and are a big reason as to why we love EVE and make those forbidden.

I remember was it 5 or6 years ago when we had the biggest scam back then and CCP took all the ISK and not only returned it to their previous owners but also banned the guy doing the scam. Both me and several other people made huge protests about it on the forums, in-game and to CCP demanding the ISK to be sent back to the scammer and his account to be restored. We got our way finally and all was happy, but that scam besides making people lose their ISK was all done in-game. Imagine if similar but worse things take place out of game possibly resorting in death, well then, I doubt CCP would hold back.

So, again, I would appreciate the juice on this.


PS: To make it clear, as far as in-game goes I'd say that anything goes. It is up to the player if he wants to be an ass or not.

So, you are saying, if a bunch of thugs in RL decide to take over a park or pub, and punch in the face everyone who goes there, that is not bullying, as you can easily avoid going to the place?

Hmh. I give you that bullying over EVE is not as big a problem as bullying in meatspace.

I still think it's a crap thing to do though, and I worry about the fact that when we have a culture that celebrates people ganging up to hurt others, we end up with cases where someone takes it a step too far (into that meatspace). Also, while people can block someone, often they do not, and the situation where you have a couple of hundreds of people after you, they talk on locals, and people answer them, it can take quite some time before you have total peace.

We have already had encouraging people to harass someone to cause a suicide, and a real-life threat to someone's life. I don't think we need more of these episodes, and it seems obvious to me that the current culture in EVE does encourage them (though unintentionally, mind you, so it is not as if anyone is "guilty" of doing it). Even if in an ideal world people would not get upset for spaceships exploding and were capable of just blocking morons, we do not live in an ideal world, unfortunately, and I think as responsible people we have to take that into account.

Also, I'd rather we called morons morons instead of clapped them on when they behave like thugs and bullies.

No clarification on what has taken place disappoints me greatly, ta-da!