EVE Online FanFest panel encourages player to commit suicide

This is what happens when people think the Greater Internet Dickwad Theory will work when they know who you are.

edited 26th Mar '12 8:50:51 AM by JAF1970

Wow.... That's just... Wow.

I'd like to say I was surprised that people did that, but...

edited 26th Mar '12 8:31:53 AM by pyr0h1tman8

Not entirely unsurprising, given that this game is a fertile breeding ground for that kind of mindset.

And they think that kind of behavior is acceptable as in the virtual space? Wow...I mean, in MMO games like this the line is more blurred, but...

What is it exactly about EVE that encourages so many sociopaths to follow it? I know a lot of other games have their fare share of jackasses in the fanbase, but EVE is really starting to stick out as the King of them all!

It's fine if you have a Jerkass populace, but the people you hire better be professional. Kid commits suicide, it's proven that admins encouraged him and mocked him, and bye bye EVE Online thanks to a massive lawsuit.

Keep in mind, it was the PLAYER committee who expressed outrage at CCP *EMPLOYEES*.

It's by design, really. The game is entirely PVP-focused with barely any limits on open warfare. In fact, this is probably the only MMO where scamming is considered a valid strategy, and anyone with standards higher than that is gonna get slaughtered by space pirates.

Oh and a few goons in the EVE forums actually support this behavior...

Well in the end, it's likely that CCP will just fire the admins who posted that stuff, so in the end it'll probably all work out. And even if the guy did end up committing suicide and they try to pinpoint it on CCP, all they'll need to do is claim that it was the fault of a few employees with poor judgement skills and does not represent the company as a whole.

So it's basically the "Stop Having Fun" Guys ruining another otherwise excellent game, yeah?

It's EVE. The second I saw the name in the title I knew what was coming. I admire EVE for creating a no-holds barred world where lying, cheating, and stealing from other players is a perfectly valid game mechanic and leaving it that way. It's a game where you can start up your own bank, take billions in deposits over the course of a couple years, then walk off with it all, buy a battleship, and tell everyone who's got a problem with it they are welcome to come try and take it out of your battleship's ass. So in a game that encourages this kind of cut throat competition it's not shocking someone takes it too far off-line.

Again, that's fine for the players. You can't have that in from your employees who are supposed to help.

There is no "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" when it comes to suicide - and these idiots have to realize that.

^ Just see the EVE forums...there's people who are arguing that it's fake...but really the anonimity of internet makes it hard to distinguish between the real and the fake case...

Some guys think that in any case, the world wins...if it's fake, he sucks, if it's true, then he removed himself from the gene pool...

Better safe than sorry though...

edited 26th Mar '12 9:42:40 AM by onyhow

Doesn't matter if it's fake.

Morton's Fork much?

^ Don't ask me, ask the guy who post that...

Argh, I remember reading this on Massively earlier. Sigh this is what happens if one combine's very cutthroat gameplay without providing a fine line between the game and RL. CCP's best bet is to fire him and the other offending parties and set out a public apology. Though, that guy and his corp are known to be total jerkasses.

Good grief, man. This is just outright shameful.

edited 26th Mar '12 12:33:05 PM by MarkVonLewis

The problem is that you do represent the company you work for when you're on the clock and acting in your capacity as an employee. If the admin had done this off hours it would be a different story. An argument could be made in court that CCP is responsible for the behaviour of its employee. (which they are)

Personally, I think this shows that a lot of internet addicted people have a hard time realizing that their actions in real life have consequences. When you spend so much time online trolling and harassing people and whatnot, it must be easy to get a feeling that your actions carry no consequences. (admittedly I don't know anything about this particular admin, but based on this, they do come across like your typical self-absorbed internet troll) I think criminal prosecution for this kind of stuff is exactly the kind of wakeup call idiots like this need.

The law would disagree with you.

...

*resulting headdesk causes a 10.3 earthquake in Sweden*

There are no words I can use to describe how shameful this is.

That's it, I give up. I'm gonna get my own asteroid to live in. Can't tolerate living in the same planet as these sort of shitwads.

For a second I thought this was going to be about the high-security space suicide bombings that some of the PVP corps do for extra isk. . .

An then I read the article. I can see this happening with some standard players, but game staff should be doing this crap.

It is. Although the fact you think they do it for profit betrays a fundamental misconception.

This incident is born of the Gallente Ice Interdiction. To tell the story fully, there are belts of ice that people mine. Ice products fuel the jump drives and station towers of the corresponding race. Goonswarm, being Goonswarm, and also determined to remind the masses that EVE is Not A Themepark MMO, staged a two-month suicide-gank interdiction of highsec Gallente ice fields. Nobody would use them. At all.

Mining ice is the most boring activity in New Eden. I do not exaggerate in the slightest, I've done it. You sit there, for hours on end, shooting blue beams at a chunk of ice which does not move, and unlike regular asteroids doesn't even run out. Like all mining done in EVE, it's also rampant with bots. (In truth the entire EVE economy is driven by botted minerals rather than legitimate human mining, and most people are actually okay with that.) It's not even a good way to make money, honestly.

Into this mass of bots and spreadsheet-wielding fools with 27 accounts who had duped themselves into believing they couldn't make more running L4s comes the Swarm, armed with smartbomb battleships and Gallente blasterships. Though many clueless or mechanical denizens of New Eden will be slaughtered, the true goal is the first attempt to screw with the game economy itself. (It worked, btw.)

Enter the face of the oppressed, The Wis, a Mackinaw pilot who does nothing in EVE but use a keystroke replication program to operate twenty-three mining barges so he can shoot a single blue beam each at a chunk of ice for hours on end. Documented killmails and timestamped conversations with him indicate he did this at least eight hours a day.

Now because the GSF are dedicated to reminding everyone that you live in a cold and uncaring universe, and trusting anyone outside your group is folly, they also ran a protection racket: 500mil ISK to the pilot who killed you and we'll go away. Only it's just 500mil straight into the dude's pocket and he's not going away because that would defeat the greater strategic goal of fucking with the economy of EVE.

During the course of various conversations which were posted to Ice Interdiction threads on several forums, The Wis claimed that he was divorced, that he cut himself, that he had various mental instabilities. He also threatened suicide three different times. And he paid out the 500mil no less than three as well. (To the same person, proving if nothing else that he did suffer from a serious case of stupidity.)

Despite his threats, The Wis and his Mackinaw army went back to the belts as soon as the interdiction was over, where they can still be found today. The threats were lies, intended to try and garner sympathy, and the mocking he has received is no more than his due for attempting to use so serious a subject to guilt trip someone online and preserve his ability to make space money by so doing.

edited 26th Mar '12 7:52:07 PM by Night

Any threat of suicide should be taken seriously, and not mocked by the people who run the game.