[EVE] The Great Heist

[BiG D]

Most of you have seen this, more than likely, but for the sake of interest scans of the print article or the web friendly version.

 

[VibroAxe]

This is absolutly insane, and exactly what I love about eve. It's far better than anything like second life which is trying to give people a "second real life". These are too close to reality, however eve is similar and yet totally different. As PCG said what other game can you have a "Valentine Operative" as a viable profession.
As for the legality of this, I think people have missed the point. Eve is a MERC game, concord only police Hi-Sec and the corp's are expected to police themselves. Maybe people will now try and strike out against the GHSC, maybe they will be too scared to. Either way, thats how the game works, and that is why I love eve and plan to continue playing!

 

[BiG D]

Along the same lines, here's an incredible writeup of the EIB scam. I hope you like reading. Like, lots of reading.

 

[Angelic]

Time after time I read about this GHSC heist and I can't help wonder - where did all the malice and evilness come from? This is supposed to be a game, thing played for fun... In WoW you see ganking, you even see griefing, but this is a whole different magnitude AND it causes loss of cash/time invested, which ganking does not. I disapprove of their approach and it saddens me that the whole event drew so much attention towards them and the game itself. This is just not right and shouldn't stand.

 

[BiG D]

This is no different than anything people do in WoW, except that WoW is designed in such a way that no one ever loses anything and everyone lives happily ever after. There's something to be said for a game where things you do can actually make an impact.

And yes, it is just a game. Why is playing it like a game so offensive to you?

 

[waterproofbob]

When I first came to eve I thought things like this were terrible and how awful that they take away from someone like this.
My opinion eve though I'm still currently a carebear has completely shifted it is the mechanic within eve that allows things like this to happen that makes the game amazing.
The sabotage and sovereignty battles, the fact the one man can make or break a massive system. Some of the stories that come out of these events are amazing better than anything fictional that could be written about the game.

 

[thatbloke]

I just read this writeup myself - its an awesome writeup!

And if that guy is in fact who he claims to be at the at the end, then even more awesome

The idea that this is "a bad thing" is unfortunately the whole thing with EVE. The very first thing you should ever learn in EVE is NEVER TRUST ANYONE. EVER. Even your RL friends could suddenly realise that they have massive access to your assets and just... vanish with them.

EVE is basically a massive capitalist economy much like the World's economy... except that there are no laws to prevent fraud like this.

It's the age old issue of Greed. If you put X amount of cash here, then after 1 month you get x+y amount of cash back! Can you trust that it is not a scam? It is this issue of trust that underlines the whole mentatlity in the game of EVE and what makes EVE, EVE.

 

[Ronin Storm]

The idea that this is "a bad thing" is unfortunately the whole thing with EVE. The very first thing you should ever learn in EVE is NEVER TRUST ANYONE. EVER. Even your RL friends could suddenly realise that they have massive access to your assets and just... vanish with them.

I think, in particular, that trust should only be given where earned. So rather than trust no one, just trust those who you'd actually trust face-to-face.

Personally, I would take permanent offence if a real life friend stole all my EVE stuff because it would be a breach of our real life trust; sure, it's a game, but it's a game we play together and so stealing, say, all my ISK and ships would be roughly akin to stealing all my computer games and thus result in the same loss of trust.

However, if I screwed up and lost my stuff to some random guy then while I'd be exceedingly annoyed I'd recognise that as being part of the game. Then, of course, I could evaluate whether I still wanted to play... no idea what I'd decide 'cause I've not had to make the call yet.

 

[VibroAxe]

Note to self: don't steal ronin's ISK

 

[Angelic]

Why is playing it like a game so offensive to me? Because being deliberately mean to people is offensive to me. Call me a carebear, call me an idealist, but I don't like hurting people, stealing from them, destroying months and years of their hard work. In the same idea I _WILL_ trust people, on the premise of everyone being innocent until proved guilty. A world where you can trust noone and seek personal gain to the expense of others is a world where I have no business and do not want to live. And yes, I do believe this real world we happen to inhabit is not such a place.

 

[BiG D]

Right, but what is wrong with people roleplaying in a roleplaying game?

 

[Ki!ler-Mk1]

These things may be wrong, they may be despicable, and that it is in a game does not make it less unacceptable, but it does mean that one can role play a characteristic they wouldnt dream of doing in real life.
I think that it is hard to judge the people, but the actions of their characters a very easy to judge, though on the otherhand what they did was quite an achievement.

Im sure the people that gank and corpse camp in wow and other simpler mmos(simpler, not inferior) would behave in this way also if they could, and maybe without any RP.

 

[Ki!ler-Mk1]

Wow, like you're so good at simple. D.

 

[Angelic]

D, what you're saying basically boils down to "it's just a game", defending their actions as acceptable from the point of view of their in-game avatars. But who is controlling the avatars if not the real people behind the computers? Who chose such a role for these avatars if not the real people behind the computers?

The avatars, "roles that are played", if you will, are mere proxies to the real people who control them, and because the damage on the other avatars again affects the real personae we can pretty much simplify the whole thing into one person robbing the other of a lot of his time and effort based on his own free will and choice.

How is choosing a role and playing it along with actual real impact on other people's lives any better than being the baddie yourself?

 

[BiG D]

What differs between EvE and Call of Duty? Am I murdering people by proxy when I play multiplayer games?

You're having trouble separating games from reality, and as a result you're applying people's ingame actions directly to the person behind the keyboard.

 

[Rhivre]

I play a pirate on one of my chars in eve, I blow people up, its what I do. My other characters are fluffy and carebear. This doesnt mean my pirate is an ebil character, she is not, she is fluffy and funny too, just dont try escaping while making a ransom deal with her or she will pod you .....she might do that anyway, but its business, not personal, and I am in game friends with many people I have been at war with.

(Yup Mk1....I have an evil RP char, but, does that mean I am a bad person? I dont insult or smacktalk on her, I speak like an 18th century johnny depp wannabe, and am merely protecting asteroids from miners)

This is the thing with RP....you can tell if someone is merely roleplaying a bad character, or if they use it as an excuse....I have roleplayed both a "good" character and an extreme bitch in WoW who would screw her own imp over to get ahead, but I can spot an idiot behind a keyboard a mile away

I find it difficult to understand people who build up trust over a long time and then screw you over using trust built up in game.

But then, i have that in WoW with major domos chest...and countless other ocassions.

However, in eve, there is a whole mercenary business, and actions do have consequences, its one of the reasons I love it....I pugged my way through dungeons in WoW a few months ago for the hell of it...I soon started missing the fact that if you talk like an idiot to me in eve, I can blow you out of the sky and send you back to your clone bay.

The scheming in eve gets the headlines, but, there are an equally amazing number of fluffy people who avoid anything bad. Even some of the people who do "bad" things I am good friends with, they work for contracts, and go where the pay is....nothing personal involved.

 

[Angelic]

You're having trouble separating games from reality, and as a result you're applying people's ingame actions directly to the person behind the keyboard.

No, I don't; yes, I am. The difference between CoD and EVE is obvious - CoD can't be played in any other way and most importantly killing someone else in the game does not cause them permanent harm. In EVE it does, however, moreso when you do it on such grand scale like GHSC did.

Ingame actions ARE actions of the people behind the keyboard, can't you see it? NO ONE controls your character other than you. Anything the character does is your decision.

Rhivre, nice post, thank you for it. I can see most of your points, however I still maintain that I would never roleplay a character that would harm others if the harm caused them real damage (e.g. destroy their ingame assets they worked on for a long time). This may not be true on smaller scale, but what GHSC did certainly is not a small scale. Of course, distinguishing what is acceptable and what is not, where the line between harming too much and just playing the game is is very individual. I myself may have it set very low, you somewhere in between, the guys from GHSC sky-high.

Plus I see a distinct difference between, say, betraying people, backstabbing etc and being a fairly honest mercenary/warrior. What GHSC did was not a fair war, it was sabotage, betrayal. What you do sounds to me like a fairly straightforward usage of brute force.



Angelic

 

[waterproofbob]

For our money, the Ubiqua Seraph infiltration was an act of despicable brilliance. An operation as cruel as it is astonishing, it serves as a simultaneous testament to both the virtues and the evils of a truly open-ended massively multiplayer game. Players crying for developers CCP to step in and redress the balance miss the point - this is exactly the kind of extraordinary player politics that you can't find anywhere else. CCP been very vocal in the past about their intention to simply create a world - a galaxy, in fact - and let people do what they may within it. If you stop people from doing horrible things to each other in it, you lose the full scope of what a game can be.

In my opinion that quote from the OP sums is up better than anything I could say.

 

[Angelic]

Bob, so you're basically defending them with "let them do it, it makes the EVE world more realistic and free"...? The same line of thought would defend real life robbers because, well, they must be free to do whatever they want and it's, you know, the real world...

Look, I understand what people find so amazing about it. Yes, it is very ingenious, yes, the EVE world is very open-ended and realistic. I get this, I see where people are coming from.

That doesn't change anything about me despising them for doing it and wishing there was some sort of power in works that would in turn punish them for it, or -even better - make things right.

 

[Ronin Storm]

I feel that the point that Big D was trying to make is that the player is not the character and vice versa. This is a consideration arrived at in all fiction, be it as a role-player, actor or writer. Because you are not your character you are "permitted" to take actions as that character that do not represent your personal values. However, that only really holds when all players are role-playing. If I am representing myself in a game such as EVE, which I admit may be a mistake in itself, then I expect to apply the same basic values to the game. Thus player level trust becomes important. If I only ever representedmyself through the fiction of the game then being entirely evil is, in my opinion, entirely acceptable. It's when I claim to represent myself as a player and then, player to player, screw someone over that I find a problem. But, on a fundamentally hostile Net should I expect anything else?

Said a different way, an evil character must be allowed to be evil if the fiction is to have any impact. An evil player deserves a punch in the face. Mixing player and character is something to be avoided.