Bonus Room

Communications Center General Discussion
1

Hi

This came up in the thread that got closed and I wanted to clarify something.
And ask the community- are my morals suspect? If this is what I think?

CCP did not allow the bonus room, and bullying, to continue as long as they did and ban the players only because it was made public.
They did not retroactively decide all previous bonus rooms were bullying.
Its just that originally the bonus room was a scam.

It’s only bullying and harassment if you take everything, there is nothing left to scam, and then you continue to deride and humiliate purely for harassment.

Doing it for isk, to scam, is just meta gaming, and it seems like it made a fair bit of isk, before the players got carried away and perhaps, through hubris and over confidence, scammed themselves out of their accounts.

Is it wrong that I fully support this version of the bonus room, yet at the same time find the recording of the incident that led to the ban
repulsive, is it just a flaw on my part, that I can see the difference? That I can empathise with that guy’s state of mind and most importantly totally relate to the wife having a panic attack, and that I find how the bonus room guys responded to her reaction awful and stomache churning. And that I can see the way others made political profit from it, did not really help the victim, while at the same time understand that just because he
said ‘he was ok with it’ after the event, well sometimes bullying has that effect on people.

Because when the guy went into the room he went in stating he would never be scammed and was quite vocal about people not falling for it, and he was taken in, isn’t this how scammers work, they rely on hubris and pride and greed, and the mark thinking they are somehow special ‘they wont get me’, so if as soon as they got all his stuff they had said GG, that would be ok to me?

Am I having a nuanced adult response to this or am I just a facilitator of abuse?

Community- am I a sociopath or a balanced human being,
or something in between?

2

Is it not bullying and harassment if you engage in derision and humiliation partially for harassment while there is still something left to scam ?

3

I’m not sure
however my understanding of the bonus room is that would not have provided much isk? If it had been the case?
the idea is some people do win they stay and act as as shills and may not even know its a scam as they won, others are shills and alts, when it was about isk I don’t see how derision and humiliation play a part-
until you realise you lost everything which is pretty humiliating but then losing usually is?
Scammers speak with a silver tongue, they got the guy who led to the bans into such a state by ‘playing along’,
that’s the trick isn’t it?
Is it bullying or fraud if I get taken in by one of those ‘pop up auctions’ which work on the same principle as the bonus room, you know where they work the crowd to a frenzy with ‘suprize’ boxes and have fake bidders in the audience-
I don’t think that’s harassment-
but if you spend a length of time after the final sucker has bought the final box of worthless crap, getting him to sing and dance like a performing monkey, and then laugh at his wife who is having a panic attack because your victim is raging so much, that’s not a scam that’s harassment.
Bonus room is really one of those pop up auctions- some people get a nice box- they even stay and egg on the others, because for them it WAS a good deal, that’s the bonus room.

4

You’re scamming people out of virtual money, I don’t think your morals really matter at all, it’s truly a victimless crime.

5

May I remind you that gambling ingame is forbidden as it can lead to RMT ? EULA 6.B

you may not use, transfer or assign any game assets for games of chance operated by third parties.

So if bonus room is driven by chance, it is forbidden.

Now scamming is totally allowed, but activities that can have IRL legal consequences are forbidden. EULA 6.A.5

You may not submit any content […] that […] encourages conduct that could constitute a criminal offense or give rise to civil liabilities,

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6

You don’t know if CCP acted WHEN THEY FOUND OUT, or sometime later. They’re not omniscient, people can bully and drive others to suicide on private chat servers and CCP won’t know about it unless it’s announced, somehow, on Reddit or other internet outlet. Based on how they reacted to other incidents, they seem to be taking action as soon as they find out; that seems to be ethical on their part.

As far as your response, in my opinion you can have a “nuanced adult” stance on it all you want, not my place to pass moral judgment on you, but if you take actual action to set up or support a bonus room, then yes you are a facilitator of abuse.

To give you a different perspective, you can have “nuanced adult response” to nazism, and write pages and pages of interpretative exposition about what happened in the '30’s and '40’s, but if you take any action to abuse others or set up camps, etc., then you’re a facilitator.

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7

You’re wrong. The victims exist and are very real. It’s just NOT a crime.

8

The bonus room stuff isn’t something we were acutely aware of until it really blew up, and it was being done on third party platforms, so it was very hard to verify.

This is not really something that’s up for discussion. It’s abhorrent, and it won’t be allowed to be a thing that goes on in EVE.

Just putting it out there, but if anyone decides they want to take the risk of kicking “bonus room” like harassment and scamming off again, I’ll personally make sure that they never play EVE Online again.

Ever.

Discussion over, thread closed.

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