The “griefers” in this case are genuine players, playing to the spirit and rules of the game, a game that would likely be all the poorer without the extra dimension that pirates offer. A game like Elite, which is basically a space trading game, would be totally boring if their wasn’t a risk of being attacked by pirates when transporting goods from one planet to another, and would be nothing but an exercise in spreadsheet shuffling. The “griefers”, which are the guys whom he finds annoying, are a part of eve, even having their own officially recognised corporation. The nerf which made it easier for the “griefers” was actually a balance change, implemented in order to ensure that the pirates and traders, who were both legitimate parts of the game, had a reasonable chance of success. This guy was annoyed because his easy virtually risk-free trading had come to an end, and the pirates, who had previously not been able to ever catch him, now had a chance of doing so. In response to that he went outside of the game mechanics to rip-off people who didn’t even have anything to do with what had annoyed him in the first place. If true, the scam was kind of clever and audacious, but not much more than the actions of a small time crook.
Hey, suck my balls.
Pirates in Eve aren’t griefers. They are players. Griefing is when you fuck with people just for the gain of fucking with them. Pirates pirate to gain in game stuff, they aren’t just trying to ruin people’s days.
This jackass was. The story wasn’t entertaining, it was pathetic. All the times he talked about having to restrain himself from being an asshole? Oh man, he sure is a cool guy.
All the insults he poured on that guy who called him in real life? Yeah, what a loser that fellow was. But the hero got up at 6:30 every day to run trading routes! He can’t ever call anyone else a loser! He’s a catassing dipshit whose sole means of profitting from the game was exploiting real world server issues.
It sounded like he was trying to gain a battleship to me, but that’s only because he kept talking about wanting a battleship.
I have trouble with the “real world” money issue Tim. What about those pirates stealing money fully with-in game? The ones who extorted 500,000 ISK? Isn’t that real life theft too because it has value? You sound like you think that’s acceptable behavior, and I agree.
I can not distinguish between what this guy did (by using IRC, ICQ, Forums, all tools used by most every MMO player out there - good or evil) to steal millions of ISK and the what the extortion happy pirates do in game.
To me IRC, ICQ, and Forums all just become peripheral game mechanics. I’d be pissed if he had hardhead actually wire him 200$. To me that defines real world fraud. All of this real world action was him still just playing a game IMO. No real world harm actually came from it. He didn’t eat Hard heads babies, and he didn’t assault anyone, and he didn’t steal anyones hard earned cash. Well, real life cash that is.
Rywill - you argue a good point. I guess my only real justification is “Hey, it’s part of what the developers intended for the game, so him being creative with how he wants to play is fine by me.”
It’s like the KKK writing their own MMORPG where’s there are 2 races and one half walks around saying “Fuck you, Nigger!” and the other half picks cotton seeds and mumbles “Fuck you, Cracker!” I won’t have fun with it, that’s for sure. But if two players both from the same game decide to call each other up and continue the game by continueing the fun over the phone so be it. There’s no victim because each willingly entered into that game system. If stealing, fraud, racism, and other things offend you - even in a fantasy environment - then just don’t play games that offer them as a part of their intended system.
This guy didn’t walk up to a random guy on the street and steal his ISK/$$$. He did it with other players in the game, through avenues that those other players employ to enhance that game.
I don’t really understand how his actually keeping the money and spending it justifies the action, or makes him any less evil, either. Ellaborate on that for me?
That being said, I’m probably only on the second rung of Kohlberg’s Morale ladder so maybe I am just a coldhearted dick, too.
The only practical difference I see between organized bands of pirates, and the scammer, is that the scammer communicated with his victims using outside communication tools, at the request of the victims, who made the totally false assumption that outside communication tools would somehow render someone more trustworthy.
Yeah, fine, the designers intended piracy. Given the description of how the corporations and blueprints worked in the scam, it’s obvious to me that the developers intended scamming to be possible as well - or else they would not have put in such elaborate structures as to allow it so easily. So the only difference I see is that scammers might have to talk to their victims on the phone, whereby pirates can simply hide their identities in-game. Are we going to treat scamming as somehow less legitimate in the game than piracy because pirates don’t actually have to gain the trust of their victims?
It seems like there’s two groups of people here - those who are ignoring the piracy and condemning the scammer, and those who are claiming that both are okay because it’s “just a game”. Well, I can’t say much to the latter group, since, after all, I agree that the two acts are equally despicable. What I don’t understand is why developer okay suddenly makes piracy acceptable. If we’re going to treat a game as having some kind of real-world relevance, than people who play pirates in space MMOs are acting as petty muggers, just as the scammer was acting as a petty thief. If we aren’t going to treat a game as having real-world relevance, then the actions that a player takes in relation to other players must, by definition, all be in-character, and not regarded as reflecting on the player’s character.
It’s unreasonable to claim that using your in-character persona to fast-talk someone on a phone is a crime and yet using your in-character ships to blow the shit out of them for money is not. Either they’re both scummy, assholy things to do, to varying degrees, or they’re not. Either they’re both griefers, or they aren’t.* The fact that the developers allow griefing to happen, as a part of their world simulation, shouldn’t amount to a legitimization of it. There is in fact a good and bad side here, and both the idiot kid and the pirates that ganked him twice are on the bad side.
For the record, I do in fact think they’re both scum. That doesn’t mean that I would advocate throwing them out of game; it’s simply an acknowledgement that the Eve developers explicitly need scummy asshole players for their game to work.
*[size=2]A careful reading indicates that the kid was in fact in it for the money. He only threw it away when he realized he’d effectively sold six months of his life for a moment’s amusement and eight useless zeroes.[/size]
The pirates are OK, scamming is not.
Yes the pirates are following a path that closely parallels grief play in other games, but it is a path specifically allowed by the developers. If he didn’t like that, he should have quit.
The scamming was a different matter altogether and entirely undefendable. Whether he intended to sell the money on ebay is unimportant.
Incidental point: when I said he was in it for the money, I meant the in-game money. If he’d been in it for hundred-dollar bills, I don’t doubt he would have completed the sale first.
New point: I wasn’t completely sure if Eve was intended to allow scamming, indirect theft, white-collar crime, and the like, so I decided to check with the web site. Two nice quotes I found:
If the guy’s scheme isn’t part of the devs’ intended framework, then it’s extremely close. Come on. “Spying, scheming, double-dealing, and espionage”? He hits two of the four.
There’s no logical consistency in accepting the pirates and rejecting the scammer on the basis of what the devs intended, because the devs intended a free-for-all.
I’m not sure that this sort of con is what the developers intended for the game or not, but I don’t think it matters that much anyway. What matters (to me) is that Nightfreeze intentionally caused a lot of people to suffer a lot of grief. You or I might think that grief is stupid because all they lost was something in a game, but the fact remains that the grief was, at least to them, very serious. Balanced against that, I look at why he did it, and I don’t see any reason except for Nightfreeze’s own glee at having made people feel bad. Since I think that that’s a pretty lousy thing to enjoy, I conclude that Nightfreeze is pretty much a dick.
It doesn’t matter that it’s part of a game, or any of that. Whenever anyone goes out of their way to make other people feel like shit, for no reason other than that it makes them feel cool to make other people feel like shit, I think that person is a dick. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Nightfreeze bilking someone out of their “isk,” or a prosecutor throwing the book at one of my clients out of spite, or some guy I see on the street saying “Get a job, nigger!” to the homeless guy who stands outside the train station. Whatever. The point is, feeling good simply because you made someone else feel bad means you’re an asshole. Nightfreeze feels good about what he did; what he did served no purpose other than to make other people feel bad; therefore, Nightfreeze is an asshole.
I’m not saying you should never make people feel bad. Beating someone at a game will probably usually make them feel bad, but in that case you’re trying to win not because you want the other person to feel like shit, but rather because that’s the point of the game. Nightfreeze, as nearly as I can tell from reading the story, wasn’t running the con to try and win or gain useful in-game money; he just wanted to see if he could make people feel like crap because some other, unrelated people once made Nightfreeze feel like crap.
In other words, playing to win because that’s the point of the game, even though you know it will make the losers feel like crap, is fine. But playing to make people feel like crap just because you enjoy making people feel like crap, that’s lame. It’s essentially griefing. Intentional team killing is arguably part of Battlefield 1942. So is purposefully driving the aircraft carrier off the battlefield, or sinking it with satchel charges, or whatever. But it’s just incredibly lame, because it’s something you do to piss other people off just for the thrill of being a dickhead. Except in Nightfreeze’s case, instead of ruining a five-minute game experience and having people just log to a different server, he ruined (apparently) months or years of progress for the people involved.
The clear difference is in the act of consent. Nailing someone’s foreskin to the floor is a terrible thing to do to someone, unless they actually are into S&M and want you to do it. In the game of Eve, piracy is a element of the game mechanics, an element that I believe would detract from such a game if it didn’t exist. I mean what thrill is there to trading if you are just moving from point A to point B with no risk factor involved? It would be like running through an FPS game without anyone shooting back at you. Everyone in the game knows that piracy exists in the game when they buy it, and it is clearly marketed and understood by the users. Scamming, however, is not. There is no official organisation recognising scam artists, and certainly not ones who operate outside of the game.
There’s no consent issue here. You’re playing a game in which corporations that you join and/or give money to, and employees that you promote, can take money from you and run like hell. The corporation FAQ explicitly states possibility. You’re consenting to the possibility of a scam artist. And I’m fairly sure there are many people for whom fraud and shady business deals add excitement to the money game in Eve, just as there are many people for whom the existence of piracy is nothing but an obstruction to having fun.
That makes a lot more sense, Rywill. I was going to go back and skim the story again but Silverlights link is giving me 404 errors now.
My opinion without re-reading the article is that he was in it for the money. Pissing off other players was just a cherry on top. Indeed, he did take a certain measure of pleasure from telling all those people to fuck off and talking down to them. More importantly for me, he also had issues giving the vaste sum of money over to his friend. That and money was his entire drive/motivating factor the entire time he played the game (whether he was being a complete dick, or just an average Joe miner).
I can see how you can read the story and come out thinking he’s either a sadist or a clever greedy kid. There’s plenty of evidence to support both viewpoints.
Players can take money off you, but like tricking people into giving you their account details so you can hack them, it is not explicitly an aspect of gameplay, like piracy, and is therefore not consenting. People may be aware that this is a risk, but it is not an accepted risk in terms of gameplay, like piracy. In any MMPORPG you can message other players, in fact it is clearly explained how to do this in the manuals and tutorials, however, you if you constantly harrass female players with lewd messages requesting cyber-sex, you are moving into the realms of criminality. If it actually states clearly in the manuals, advertising, or tutorials for Eve that people may communicate with you in real life and scam you out of your in-game earnings, like this case is clear for piracy, then you would be able to argue that point. Somehow I don’t think this is the case.
Silverlight, is there any point that this kind of action would be considered immoral by you? If the in game credits were actually bought, legitimately, by the victims of the scam through e-bay for hard earned dollars, would the fact that he basically stole $500 from them through a con act not sway you in any way? What if one of the victims was a young kid who’d bought the credits on ebay with money he’d earned sweating on a paper round all year, to invest in his dream of a battleship, only for this guy to rip him off and laugh in his face? Is the fact that a game simulates a sometimes lawless society render any act of immorality neutral in your eyes?
Eve Online sounds like an interesting game. A bit like an online version of X2 The Threat. Does anyone here play it ?
I have a free trial thingo here… I haven’t been game enough to try it yet…
(Hopefull an Online version of X2 comes soon… that game was yawno-rama singleplayer )
Er, yeah, Tim. I drew the line at (or before) piracy, about eight posts ago:
Not perfectly phrased; what I meant was that I couldn’t advocate throwing them out of the game because they were supposed to be in the game in the first place. Given that Eve is an MMO, its developers are perfectly within their rights to make an anarchistic dystopia that puts out the welcome mat for all the worst griefers that can be persuaded to play. It’s unfortunate but true that new players don’t think out the implications of this very far. (Or maybe they do, considering that SirBruce gives a popcount of 45k.)
I do in fact think that, from a moral perspective, it’s wrong to take an action in an MMO that you explicitly know will rob another player of their time investment in the game. I am not however prepared to argue the point; it’s a can of worms that will lead right into OOT land. Since I do believe this, however, and since the Eve developers specifically want scammers as well as pirates in their game, I don’t see a justification for drawing a moral distinction between them. Pirates really aren’t any better than scammers, they just rob more people per day of less time per person.
Based on that article by the scam-artist guy, it sounds absolutely awful. Tweaks to make it easier of PK-ers ot prey on other players? Hours spent watching little pebbles stream into your hold? Weeks and weeks of hardcore play required to reach the part of the game where you can even start to think about having fun (well, unless you scam someone into giving you a whole bunch of money)? Count me out.
You probably wouldn’t like X2 The Threat then. :wink:
ben:
Pirates in Eve aren’t griefers. They are players. Griefing is when you fuck with people just for the gain of fucking with them. Pirates pirate to gain in game stuff, they aren’t just trying to ruin people’s days.
but some of the pirates were griefers in that story.
“I’ll give you 5 million credits if you let me go. PLEASE MAN.”
He responded with a dual-volley of Phalanx Rockets. …I was dead now, and I knew it. I force-ejected from my ship, hoping that he wouldn’t destroy it if it was unoccupied. My pod hovered in space, like a small child seperated from its parent. I jammed my finger into the hyperspace key, and moments later, I blasted off into the stars. By the time I was tens of kilometers away, I saw a small speck of light in the galactic horizon. The fucker had destroyed my ship.
yeah, he didn’t check the update notes, but does anyone religiously read the update notes on their programs?
tim:
The nerf which made it easier for the “griefers” was actually a balance change, implemented in order to ensure that the pirates and traders, who were both legitimate parts of the game, had a reasonable chance of success
yeah except (just going from the guy’s story) the nerf made the trader ships not easier to catch, but basically unprofitable targets.
the pirates apparently already had noobs to chew on, but somewhat experienced guys would build up their ships to escape the pirates. which is what he did, with his micro warpy drive thingys. then the devs said, no that’s not fair to the pirates. he made his ship into the millenium falcon, but then the empire said that putting in a hyperdrive that could make a quick jump into hyperspace was illegal because pirates couldn’t catch him and so all drive units require an extra whatever to power up.
seeing him screwed over by other players, and the game makers themselves, i can see why he turned to evil (like victims of crimes becoming victimizers). regardless, screwing over the innocent “good” people was wrong.
Russell, that was his opinion, and I’m sure the people who played the pirates role, who had every player who had been trading a few days flying off into the distance with a magic escape button were just as annoyed as he was when he found he’d been nerfed.
You missed the question from that FAQ, which was “can I be a corporate spy?”, not “can I scam people off-line?”. Piracy and espionage are fine within the game, as they are expected behaviours. I would also argue that scamming and other forms of crime are expected behaviours, even if not explicitly defined, because of the somewhat lawless nature of game. The difference here is in the scale, and the means, by which he scammed the other players. He stepped outside the game’s mechanics, and used the real world to produce an air of authenticity that his scam did not deserve. Going up to a player in-game and saying that you will give them something for their credits, and then not handing it over, is a scam that would be acceptable within the context of the game, just as piracy is. When you set up an elaborate scam outside the framework of the game, you are definitely moving into the realms of criminality, just as you would if you tricked someone via email into handing over their account details, so you could access their in-game character and steal all their money.
Morality is always going to be a difficult thing to judge, and there are no right or wrong answers, but I do find it difficult to accept that pirates in a game, who are just doing what the other game players expect, are “scum” of the same level as those who go outside the game mechanics to scam and defraud people in the real world. Has anyone who believes the pirates in this game are “scum” ever even played a space trading game like Elite? Would you really want to play a game where there was no challenge and you just moved pretend goods from point A to point B for ever and ever with no risk? Are the people who destroy your beautifully created towns in RTS games also “scum”? As far as I can see, pirates are an essential game play mechanic in any game involving space trading, as long as it is balanced properly so the trader has a good chance of escape and the pirate of getting his kill, just as in any predator-prey relationship. Scamming, on the other hand, especially outside the game itself, is not.