Shadow of Cerberus EVE Community Forum

Series canceled

Six or eight times (or maybe even ten times, I've lost count) during the run of this blog, I've chosen to take a particular topic within EVE Online, disassemble it, and look at it from a lot of different angles. When The Mittani had his wizard hat incident, I wrote eight posts about that. When CCP had their unfortunate October lay-offs two years ago, I wrote ten posts about that. When I was examining what I felt were failings in how CSM7 was operating, I wrote six posts about that.

For the lay-offs, for instance, I wrote posts on CCP financials, the probable impact on the company culture, the impact on the players, the particularly harsh impact on the Community team at that time, how future EVE Online expansions might be affected, how CCP's other games might be affected, et cetera.

So in January, I decided to run a series of blog posts about bullying and harassment in EVE Online. The eventual plan was for ten blog posts, with probably a couple of follow-on comment of the week posts as people reacted to the series. The "tent-pole" post, which I had intended to publish today, was about general bullying in EVE Online with a focus on bullying of new players.(1) The full series of posts:

1. How nasty treatment of EVE players is escalating;
2. how EVE players are like Reavers (a bit tongue in cheek);
3. what happens to CCP if they do nothing about this;
4. the intensity level of out-of-game harassment;
5. the good that EVE players do, linked to...;
6. the perception of EVE players outside of EVE;
7. the bonus round (I wonder how this post went);
8. what kinds of new players is EVE attracting, and what kinds are we driving off;
9. how do the CSM9 candidates respond to this topic; and,
10. the final post which would have been about bullying.

And as I mentioned, in the midst of this I expected to run a post or two with comments and reactions. I expected the final post to be the most contentious and I have been working on it and editing it for about seven weeks now.

Needless to say, that post is now going into the Disney Vault for a while as are the two unfinished posts that were to precede it. I have no particular desire to make the current EVE Community team workload any worse than it already is. After all, I'd like to see the Minutes someday. ;-)

CCP Falcon has announced CCP's official position on the current earthquake. In particular:

While the content of online interactions between players cannot realistically be gated within our game worlds, CCP strongly disapproves of clear and extraordinary levels of real life harassment against our players in the outside world.

CCP, in collaboration with the CSM, have agreed and would like to state in the strongest possible terms and in accordance with our existing Terms of Service and End User License Agreement, that real life harassment is morally reprehensible, and verifiable examples of such behavior will be met with disciplinary action against game accounts in accordance with our Terms of Service.

Short version? Even sandboxes have some limits, and out of game behavior should stay within limits of morality if you want to keep playing the game. If you exceed those limits, even if you try to hide yourself outside the client, CCP retains the right to take action against your use of their client. In other words, more or less what I said about this topic earlier in the week. So needless to say, I believe CCP made the right decision here. Exactly what was done to Erotica 1 hasn't been announced but I think it likely we'll hear from the man himself in the next day or two. After that, it will be time to see how his followers react.

For the moment, they're busily trying to rules lawyer the forum thread into the ground without notable success. This ruling doesn't mean your FC or alliance leader can't call you names, for instance, and anyone trying to say that it does is being deliberately obtuse and argumentative.

Finally, last night I gave what I feel like is going to be my definitive interview on this topic to Hoots, Lanctharus, and the other guys at the Cap Stable pod-cast. Most of that interview is now up... go give it a listen if you care to and thanks to the guys for having me on!

Anyway, I think that's all I have to say about this topic for now. I'm going to keep watching it and see how this evolves. Perhaps one day the bullying post will come out of the vault but for now I'm happy that EVE players and CCP have started the conversation on this topic... if not in exactly the way that I intended.

I wrap with perhaps the funniest response to today's events (edited slightly):

Looks like someone didn't make it though to the end of CCP's Bonus Round.

Indeed!


(1) For a hint of where that post was going to go, read this and this, both excellent pieces of writing.
Source: Series canceled