Should MMOG 'Play' Be Confined? 62
Arti writes "Eve Online is famous for hosting the world's first virtual IPO, and also for its Byzantine 'meta game', in which players create fake characters and accounts to infiltrate each other's organisations for intelligence, theft or sabotage. More recently the game has seen the rise of Kugutsumen an intel blog whose creator has been accused of using real-world hacks to obtain secret information from other player forums and private messages. Some players are up in arms at the use of such out-of-game tactics. On the other hand, Kugutsumen claims these techniques have uncovered evidence of corruption. Quite aside from the legal ramifications of attacking other people's web forums, should game companies tolerate forms of 'play' that involve out of game illegality? Should they attempt to monitor and punish these kinds of activity using sanctions in-game, where the company writes the rules? This ties right back in to the discussion of Real Money Transfer we've been having over the past week. Where does the line between 'play' and 'cheating' lie?"
In related news... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:You're missing the whole story... (Score:2, Informative)
____
I no longer play Eve Online but I think some of you may find this interesting. In response to the BoB+Dev drama on the forums: I have been telling people there are high-up Polaris members, probably GMs, and possible Devs in the leadership of BoB for several years.
"Well yeah," you say, "so have tons of other people. What makes you so special?"
I was a forum moderator. Yep. I probably shouldn't say which one but I was. I also have many megabytes of IRC chatlogs from the private Polaris channels and thousands of emails sent to the moderator alias. Why am I mentioning this? There's something really really specific I want to address:
_______
quote:
Posted by: Eponine Astarte
Industrial Holdings Unlimited
I'm not bothered by there being devs in BoB. There should be devs involved in 0.0 politics, just as there should be devs who are high sec mission runners, low-sec pirates, and Jita industrialsits.
But here is what REALLY bothers me:
How did Dianbolic know that the person who petitioned Inos was an alt? The person who petitioned Inos did so anonymously because he feared that BoB would find out the identity of his main. The fact that a BoB director was able to identify who the alt was is pretty disturbing.
That, more than the mere existence of a BoB GM, shows how they are abusing their positions within CCP and using their jobs to gain an in-game advantage. Dianbolic should never have had any clue whatsoever as to who the petitioner was, yet lo and behold he did.
---------
I'll tell you exactly how he did this, because I did it once.
Petitions are tied to your account name. Normal forum moderators (like I was) can see your account name when we give you a warning on the forums. We cannot see what other characters are tied to that account name, but obviously it's pretty easy to identify an alt if you check the warning history on two different characters: not only will the warnings all be there (even though the names are blanked out for different characters) but their account name will be there if you try to send them an email.
There was once someone we suspected strongly as a traitor in an allied corporation. The enemy we'd been fighting was pretty well-informed as to our movements, and there was a certain character that always seemed to show up at the right time. So what did I do?
I looked up both characters on the forum. They were on a different account, sure, but the person behind them hadn't been real smart: one of the accounts simply had a "1" appended to the end of it. Nailed him.
We ended up luring his main character out and podding him in Yulai before booting him from the corp.
What I did was certainly an abuse of power, but trust me, it happens ALL the time. I had a friend in Aurora (the events program) who would feed me intel about where events would be and what they'd be like. I could just show up at the right time in the correct type of ship, participate, and snag the reward. I got a +4 implant that way before level 4 agents existed, much less loyalty points and rewards.
Everyone did this, and they've been doing it since the game came out. About 6 months into the game we were told not to use our Polaris character's
In my IRC chat logs there is a good amount of circumstancial evidence of high-up Polaris members (people with more authority and rights than me) were in BoB (and others. I don't remember perfectly but I believe one of the ma