Hello @CCP_Swift ,
The fight against cyberbullying is a challenge. Committing to it, as announced today by CCP, is not only a guarantee of seriousness on the part of your company, it is also proof of courage.
Because to achieve your goals, you will have to review a number of important things:
1- review the way you could register all EvE Online users, even if it means having to ask current customers to please update their personal information accordingly; it is both additional implementation work at the level of your commercial databases, and information at the level of the player community that you will have to reassure, particularly in terms of GDPR on the European side;
2- review how you could categorize players to prevent certain unwanted behaviors from occurring; for this, several criteria can be taken into account, and on this point, I take the liberty of insisting, but excessively PLEXed players will never have the same in-game behavior as players addicted to respecting the rules of games of strategies; the former are simple arena players fond of fast PvP games, while the latter are much more calm and patient players who can devote hours of play to perfecting the best possible strategies; another criterion may also be the language since some players allow themselves to insult all those who do not speak English or dare to communicate useful links in languages other than Shakespeare’s language; another criterion may be age in the worst case; this categorization may give rise to the establishment of several separate servers;
3- review the way in which you could educate players: a) the victims first, who must learn to let go (don’t feed the troll), to temporarily disconnect from all their accounts, to gather the evidence present on their PC among their log files, then to tell you about it, b) witnesses also who must learn not to intervene online (this is precisely what all trolls are waiting for), to report any unwanted behavior, then to support the victims, and finally c) the culprits who, in addition to the sanctions that can be taken against them, must learn what the consequences of their actions are, to recognize their wrongdoing, then if possible to publicly apologize to the victims;
4- review the way you could act internally on the CCP side, vis-à-vis the victims on the one hand, then vis-à-vis the perpetrators of unwanted behavior…
Here is the ladle, the challenge that you should tackle in my opinion.
And take my word for it, it’s no cakewalk. Cyberbullying currently poisons all strata of the digital economy, and this too often because all companies have taken far too long to take concrete action; however, it is certainly not the warnings that are lacking on the scientific level; see for example this helpful reminder:
If it were up to me (but I’m not president of Humanity 3.0), it would be mandatory digital identity for everyone, without exception, and it would be over once and for all, all pseudonyms online! Take my word for it too, it would deter more than one…
So. Try To Fly Safe Again. Or Not.
Ully Loom