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This is a story from EVE for your consumption and discussion.
Before I get into the events, let me put a little basic information out there. EVE allows players to scam, backstab, nonconsensually pvp, and otherwise harm each other - in game - in ways most MMOs will warn, suspend, or ban a player for. They do have rules, though, for exploiting bugs and other problems of the game client, and more rules about dragging gameplay out into the real world. The game is a sandBOX. I capitalize the last part because that's what this story is about - where the box is.
EVE has 5 major trade hubs - Jita, Amarr, Dodixie, Rens, and Hek. there are numerous smaller hubs, but those are the biggest, and Jita is easily the king of trade hubs. It is so busy that people often have to wait at stargates to enter, and the system is on its own node, pretty much all the time.
If you go into these trade hubs you will find that local chat (the chat channel for your star system) has quite a few people offering all manner of goods and services for sale, not unlike the Commonlands tunnel used to be in EQ. In Rens or Hek its not that much, in Dodixie its prevalent, in Amarr it's overwhelming and in Jita it's a wonder any of them ever get a response because they spam each other off the screen so fast.
Now, EVE has automated markets by region (large cluster of around a hundred star systems apiece) where you can purchase or sell your wares to other players, just like the auction house in WoW. The big difference is that you have to then move your own merchandise from there, or hire someone to do it via contract.. it doesn't just appear in a mailbox like WoW. You can also buy individual items or packages of items off of public contracts from other players. For example, someone might put up contracts of fully-fit ships.
This makes one wonder - why all the chat spam in local then, if you can list your wares for sale and be done with it? Well, they are almost all scams.
There are all kinds of scams, some involving manipulation of the automated market, some involving contracts, and others than don't involve selling or buying anything at all. They are varied, and it's the last one I'm going to talk about - the ISK-doubling scam, and The Bonus Room (or Bonus Round)
ISK is the currency of EVE. In these trade hubs, you will find a fair number of "ISK doublers" who promise to send back double an amount you send them (or more; triple, quadruple, etc.) if you "follow the rules" in sending it. They put the rules for their personal scam in their character bio, and you have to read it carefully. It might demand putting certain characters in the subject line of the donation. It might require ISK sent be of specific amounts. If you have already played with a particular doubler once, they might require that a new play have double or triple the amount you sentthe first time, or the amount you received back. There's all kinds of variations.
Some ISK doublers just blatantly keep your money. Some will send it back if you "followed the rules". Others are inconsistent, perhaps sending back smaller amounts, but keeping large ones. In all cases, they specify that this game is funded by "donations that don't follow the rules". If this sounds like a bad idea it is - once you send them ISK, it's pretty much gone if they don't double it for you.
Until a few months ago, the most prominent ISK doubler was known as Erotica 1. Erotica 1 offered up to 3 rounds of play, with the requirement that ISK sent for doubling tripling, or whatever must be within specified ranges AND if it were the 2nd or 3rd round, that it must be at least double what was just received back.
This meant that 2rd round players were often sending very large sums; several billion ISK at a minimum. This is where The Bonus Room comes in.
Players (ostensibly only “lucky” players who were the every 100th or something, but in all probability actually just any player Erotica thought was susceptible) selected for the bonus room were, of course told participation was “mandatory” or they would not receive back the amount they sent for their play.
In order to participate in the bonus room, the player had to send a full-access API key, allowing Erotica 1 and his cronies to view pretty much all information about the character, including ISK balance, assets, and so forth, for that account. If the player had more than one account, they were required to do so for EVERY account. (Obviously hiding other accounts is easier since they are not linked to each other by API).
Once Erotica had this, they would then demand that the player show “complete faith” or “complete trust.” In other words, the player had to transfer ALL assets and ISK on that account to Erotica 1 (or some “escrow agent” that was either an alt or in cahoots with Erotica), with the promise that if they completed the bonus room, they would receive back something like quintuple the value.
Now, understand that once the player has done this, they have nothing left of value for Erotica 1 to scam out of them. The scam is essentially already completed – they have turned over everything they own and there is nothing further in-game Erotica can gain from them. Not only does this mean Erotica 1 has absolutely no incentive to give their stuff back (other than possibly to lure future players into the bonus room, but getting alts or cronies to attest to “successful” bonus rooms suffices for that) but at this point they are already against the edge of the sandbox.
One aspect of EVE’s rules is that you can’t just antagonize people to antagonize them. For example, you can bump a mining ship away from its asteroid repeatedly and demand a ransom to stop, but you can’t follow him around doing it just to troll him.
That’s the first problematic aspect of The Bonus Room. The second should become clear below.
The victim is invited into a private mumble or teamspeak or whatever and told they have to complete every action asked of them without question in order to win The Bonus Room. The victim is NOT told when it will be over, or what all the actions will be in advance; they are not aware of the win condition.
This is because there isn’t one. What happens in The Bonus Room is that the player is simply kept online indefinitely until they get too tired, too frustrated, or are late for work, or their spouse gets mad at them, or whatever, and they snap, quit, or whatever and “fail”.
They are kept on completing various tasks such as singing songs, reciting from Wikipedia or the dictionary, or more questionable activities. At one point, Erotica would demand they undock in their pod repeatedly and get in blown up. Since they had no money to upgrade their clone, this meant repeatedly losing skill points, which are trained in real time. CCP put the kibosh on that a while back, so other things appeard.. such as demanding the victim get on skype and pour mayonnaise all over themselves. In the last bonus room done by Erotica, a player with a speech impediment was asked to recite and sing. He eventually got frusterated, his wife intervened, and the miscreants running the bonus room started making fun of her as well. This ended in a profanity-laden rant by Sokar (the victim) and the inevitable “failure”.
The final aspect of this is that Erotica was recording these bonus rooms and uploading them to SoundCloud., exposing the victim to general internet consumption. You can, if you really want to, google EVE sokar bonus room and the SoundCloud should be the first search result… it’s lengthy though.
Now, there had been rumblings about this before; the podding thing, and Erotica had been kicked from Goonswarm (or at least an affiliate corp) after the Goons, despite their unsavory reputation, decided that this sort of thing really was not funny.
However, things came to a head on the last one because a CSM member (the elected player representatives to CCP) got wind of this. Ripard Teg, also called Jester, blogged about it, as he happened to be in the middle of a blog series about EVE players behaving badly, and apparently he had made his dislike of Erotica 1 clear to CCP before that. The blog post can be read at Jester’s Trek under a post called The Bonus Round. I feel that he’s fundamentally correct in that post, but overstates it a little bit with excessive language, like calling it “torture”.
There was an ensuing uproar on the forums between the community that felt this sort of thing was hilarious, and vital sandbox game play, and those that agreed with Ripard Teg that this was harassment, and unacceptable, and brings EVE into disrepute.
CCP, after this went on for several days, apparently banned Erotica 1. CCP does not talk about disciplinary action publicly, but Erotica claims to have been banned and has not been seen in-game since.
Personally, I agree with the ban. I don’t see that an internet spaceship sandbox needs people luring others into real-life humiliations, posting soundclouds of it, or getting people to cover themselves in mayo (what the ****?!?) I think it’s a wise decision by CCP to not associate their business with this sort of thing.
As non-EVE playing people, what do you all think about this story?
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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."
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