[Discussion] Community Safety in EVE Online

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434

Thank you, Sir. For your consideration:

To: CCP_Swift
To: Community of New Eden

Dear Sir and Capsuleers:

You request ideas on how to improve “Community Safety” in New Eden. I have a few arrogant suggestions I wish to present for your consideration.

This cannot be simply handled by CCP. It doesn’t have enough web-angels floating in space with a flaming sword to destroy all evil-doers. It requires capsuleers to observe and report what happened to a specific terminal in order to curb the suppressive action.

First, establish within the corporations (both NPC and player-established) an “Ethics Officer” and/or “Chaplain” post. This post is assigned to the CEO who must find a suitable capsuleer for the same. (For NPC corps, I suggest recruiting corp players willing to handle it. This cannot be handled by an AI.)

The EO or Chaplain receives “Knowledge Reports” from the capsuleers regarding “out-ethics” behavior. These reports are to be addressed to “EO”, “Chaplain”, AND the specific capluseer.

The format of the KR shall give the Time-Place-Form and Event. It needs to be this way to ensure proper handling. No name-calling is allowed; only the precise data of when the incident happened, where it happened, who was present, and what happened. If there are words exchanged, perhaps a copy of that portion of the capsuleer’s logs should be added.

The EO or Chaplain shall determine from the presented KR what action to take. The report is filed under the capsuleer’s name; the number of individual reports determine whether the capsuleer is only role-playing or truly being a danger to the community.

I can suggest a gradient of justice actions to take which would give the “offending” capsuleer recourse to appeal.

Since this is a sandbox, there will be corporations and alliances who might receive the reports and use them as laughable material.

Well, by their actions you may know them.

At CCP’s Chief EO’s discretion, these corporations and/or alliances could be declared “persona non grata”, establish sizeable bounties on them and their structures, and go to war with them. They would fulfill their most cherished desire as “content” for all other alliances, corporations, and capsuleers.

However, this may not happen. It’ll be mostly individual capsuleers (or corporations) who get a large number of KRs. As previously mentioned, if they were role-playing and kept the cursing relatively mild (come on, guys, give a guy a break), the EO can determine no action need happen unless it becomes too abusive.

I can probably flesh this out better yet it’s not something that would take ten minutes to write. If there’s any further interest please let me know.

Thank you for your attention.

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435

Okay, ban me now. :grin:

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You need to learn to read. I said they TRIED, not that they gave me one. And what business is it of yours if I play a game or not?

437

Not to get too political here or anything and it was just a joke anyway but worth noting that one jerk on its own would never been able to do anything on the scale that specific one was able to due to the popular support he had. People have to carry out the orders of such a person to have such an influence on the world, this is the important lesson history teaches those who are willing to learn.

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439

The Beautiful Princess called me “Four Eyes” and “Loser”. I want her banned!

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440

yikes
that sounds so totalitarian, i mean phrase detection?
@CCP_Swift
doesnt the EULA clearly state that other player interaction is not rated and may be inappropriate for some?

so players can hunt other players down relentlessly blowing them up, scam them for everything they have and/or pod them and basically keep them docked until they quit the game and that is “safe” but calling someone a “degenerate blah blah” is considered “not safe”?!?
Something is seriously wrong with that whole thought process.

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right…

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It probably would never happen, to monitor all that info would be a huge load on the server and eve’s speed is extremely important with a single shard universe.

And I only meant extreme phrases where its literally death threats.

But even that wouldn’t work as people can use metaphor’s and be just as freaky and avoid any such system.

443

To that end, we’re opening the floor for civil discussion - open to ideas big or small - as to how our EVE Online should be protected going forward.

@CCP_Swift

Thank you for asking.

I believe strongly that we all (both long-term players and developers) first need to understand and acknowledge what the real scandal here is. The real scandal is not that some players are bad eggs and have gone out of the game and out of their way to hurt people for real for the sake of the game, and even committed illegal acts. That is not a scandal. We more or less all knew this is a thing that happens, maybe apart from a number of newfriends or solo players who don’t ever talk to anyone else. I knew, and I am absolutely sure that you did, too, Swift.

The real scandal is that so many of us (100% certainly including people at CCP and almost certainly including people in key positions at CCP) have been aware of this for a long time and looked away. We might not all have known all the details, but we absolutely did know about the issue in general. And even about the details, very little of what has “come to light” now has actually come to light for the first time. When we did not know that was not because it was a secret; we did not know because we didn’t pay attention.

I have spoken to you and others about CCP’s communication issues before. This is again a case where those discussions are relevant. “We at CCP are committed to maintaining a friendly and inclusive community” is marketing speech; it does not unfortunately seem to match observable reality. EVE Online has a long-standing culture where concerted and coordinated being shitty towards in-game enemies and rivals in order to cut their motivation to log on has been a normal, accepted and even glorified strategy.

Sure, there are EULAs and policies against racism, misogynist attitudes, homo/transphobia, doxxing etc, but these seem to be quite erratically enforced. Moreover, the erratic enforcing happens inside the culture where being shitty and aggressive to make other people feel bad enough to quit is normalized or even glorified. It is quite normal for a particular person or a group to become a target of a torrent of ■■■■-talk designed to drive them away from the game. When one participant in that torrent gets a slap on the wrist for saying one particularly nasty word, that does not maintain a friendly and inclusive community. Quite the opposite, what it seems to do is show that CCP thought the rest of the shitstorm was just fine by them.

The ■■■■-talk “psyops” culture and the serious breaches (of racism/sexism, harassment, doxxing, RL threats, and harboring sexual predators) are not separate issues. A community that normalizes harassing and ■■■■-talk as “HTFU” will always have more people who will cross the ultimate lines than a community that stresses respectful treatment of fellow players at all times. Some of us, maybe even majority of us, can “play hard” without ever crossing a single real line, but the problem is the one out of ten or twenty who cannot. They see the glorification of ■■■■-talk as permission to be ■■■■ and for such people, each slap on the wrist is just a new lesson of how ■■■■ exactly you can be without consequence.

To be clear: one of the reasons I love EVE is because it is a harsh game. Ganking, scams, spais, theft, all those are part of the game and part of what makes EVE feel ‘real’. But it is still a game. It is possible to play hard without being unnecessarily shitty about it. It is even entirely possible to enjoy some salt without going out of your way to mine it. Name-calling, ■■■■-talk, “psyops” to try and make people quit, making channels (including local) unpleasant and unwelcoming to other players, concerted defamation campaigns etc are not necessary to build a hard game played for high enough stakes. In my opinion, people who cannot see the difference should not have a place here.

Sermon over, here are my suggestions:

  • Acknowledge that the game’s culture is in a bad place and needs work. Cut the marketing ■■■■■■■■. This is a community work issue and the community sees right through it. If you treat this as primarily a publicity problem and not a real problem, nothing will change.
  • Make reporting harassment, racism, sexism, etc ingame as easy as reporting RMT (right click from the game client or something).
  • While you cannot police what is said on 3rd party forums, I believe you in fact can exclude people from your game based on how they act towards fellow players in forums other than yours. They might keep on the problematic behavior where you cannot stop it, but who cares if they are gone from the game? This should probably not be routine, but getting rid of the categorical refusal to see problem behavior on forums where you participate would certainly help with getting rid of the impression that y’all are fine with it.
  • Give the work some visibility. I understand there are privacy issues in letting people in general know about a particular punishment, but on the other hand seeing where the lines actually are will deter more bad behavior than individual warnings, and people will report serious stuff to you more reliably if their experience is it actually helps. You manage whack-a-bot and RMT ban reports, I am sure you can think of something.
  • Be willing to not tackle only clear breaches, but also the cases where no hard line is crossed by any one individual, but multiple people together push the line exactly as far as it goes, as a concerted attack against an individual or a group. Don’t let those who like being shitty rules-lawyer you about it. They are very good at it, you will lose.
  • From now on, take serious stuff seriously. (Something-something wizard hat 30-day ban.)
  • When you see reports of actually seriously problematic things (like accusations of grooming or RL threats), take a proactive stance in figuring out what’s going on and if these people are actually safe to have around in your PEGI-13 game.
  • Consider a system of IDing players that allows you to hold people accountable across accounts (pun not intended).

Again, thanks for asking. Sorry for the wall of text.

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444

I agree with the above.

Just because EVE is supposed to be a mechanically challenging game, doesn’t mean that people who communicate like children, sometimes purposefully so to drive adults away, should be tolerated.

They can go play Call of Duty with people whose physical age matches their mental age.

445

Indeed. As people need to be reminded every time they pull the ‘it was just a few bad apples’ crap, the full saying is, ‘a few bad apples spoil the bunch.’

It’s a lot harder to build something than it is to wreck it, and EVE’s been an environment encouraging wreckage for a long time.

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446

No mention of banning players accounts who have been proven guilty of their actions? That’s highly disappointing. Banning them from events is not nearly enough for IRL cases like this.

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/agree with all of these, but I’d add two more items:

  • Take a good, long look at your own behaviors and public statements. Yeah, Falcon’s gone. Hilmar and the ‘I want people to need medication to play EVE’ line remains. Make the game hard, sure. Make it effort, so that when you achieve, you feel the accomplishment. But people shouldn’t be getting the message of ‘be jerks to one another because this is supposed to be a horrible hellscape’. The setting can be hellish without the experience of playing the game being hellish, too.
  • Take Brisc’s suggestion of an ombudsman to heart. Absolutely be pro-active and look into accusations, but do your due diligence. In the past, you very publicly haven’t, and you’ve made public statements (like the ones when Brisc himself was wrongly banned) that amounted to ‘hey, this guy did a thing and now we might ruin his life’ (A lawyer breaking a confidentiality contract is the kind of accusation that seriously screws them, you know?). Look into things. Do it right. Be as pro-active and aggressive as you can without going full-on witch-hunt. The mob will always be howling for more. Do it right.
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448

Tangentially related but something that a conversation about would probably be a good idea that I haven’t seen brought up again. In light of recent events, the comic EVE True Stories that for lack of a better term mythologizes the in game actions of certainly players and directly ties them to the EVE brand is still very much available on the Dark Horse page. But hey, it was recently price reduced to about 3 fiddy. Good time to buy it now! /s

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The choice to make this comic was questionable to begin with given that even if the characters involved weren’t at the time (as) publicly known to be abusers they were certainly known to contribute to the toxic culture that we see coming home to roost today.

Its not the artists fault or Dark Horse that they’ve now been dragged into this so long as this is up. It’s bought and paid for media that’s been circulating for nearly a decade, I get it. You’re not going to be able to quietly pull this from shelves where the book has already been printed and sitting in inventory much less second hand. But its really hard to take statements on community safety seriously and earnestly believe claims of gearing toward a more inclusive community when media mythologizing the acts of an abuser within the EVE IP is still up for digital distribution. You can say that this isn’t what EVE is but objectively there is a history of hitching the EVE brand to these same people, and its still available to this day.

I really, really hope CCP reevaluates what they can do to address this fact.

EDIT:

Preemptively, because I can see this as a point of contention, this is not a matter of “censuring history” portraying events in a game. I have no issues with works like Empires of EVE or other media that attempted to portray the world and characters of EVE as they happened from a neutral and objective position. That’s not what this comic is or ever was, however.

It is a narrative structure, made to sell as entertainment because the story within was idealized and mythologized as part of EVEs brand. This was specifically made because it was idolized as indicative of what EVE is and what the game is known for among the public who aren’t involved in the finer details of the game. I know people that have never touched EVE but know the story of Mittani and the Band of Brothers war because his story was signalboosted from media like this that CCP had a direct hand in that only reinforced his cult of personality.

As to what extent that makes them unintentionally socially complicate (entirely different from legally complicate which I refuse speak on as I’m not qualified) I can’t say. But addressing that fact and this comic would sure go a long way towards absolving themselves and demonstrating good faith.

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449

Well said!

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This whole post is excellent, but this part is particularly key for me.

What I see in EVE is a game filled with people who do not want the culture that we see in the public spaces devoted to EVE. I see these groups dedicated to things like teaching people to mine, do exploration, pvp ect. I see little small groups of friends building things together. I see all sorts of diverse playstyles ranging from collaborative to hypercompetitive. There is a lot to love here.

If you go into many public spaces, all you see is relentless, uncompromising, and unending hostility. The collaborative aspects of EVE disappear and only the hostility remains. The only voices left have tough enough skins to survive constant attacks. Everyone else builds side communities, that are outside the views of developers and public. If they do not leave the game entirely.

There is a really good community and really good game here, but it’s hidden under a surface of gross anti-social behaivior in almost every public space you can find for the game.

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451

As aways a great wall of text from Elsebeth well done

I want eve to continue being this harsh environment, although like most i hate it when real enters.

Some people do need guidelines on how to act but i just hope ccp doesn’t just go around banning people to make a point or scapegoat for what ever new rules they make.

We can dig up all types of accusations from past events. Often people playing the harshest version of eve will meet
a player maybe an industrialist or miner who’s never taken part in any of eve’s harsh activities , it shocks then and often ends in real abuse mainly from anger and frustration.

As my line of eve game time is involved with fighting some of the darker sides of eve play , i have never had any real abuse other than a few words in local from these people. However i have experienced some disturbing lines of text trying to help some pilots , even from a live streamer with no trousers on about to get stream sniped, All sides and every player needs protecting. .

Protecting from Intent to harm , not a handfull of, in the heat of the moment words

So, we don’t want to lose any more people , how about a clean slate with the new rules.

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Agreement to the terms of creating a pilot could be that starting point to explain what is accepted and what isn’t. I do hope it comes to that where we log in and require accepting a new agreement.

Part of it is already there with the ablilty to scam another pilot via contracts, it just needs to be clear about all the other areas.

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I actually missed this part, but yea, could not agree more.

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Speaking of “fostering” bad behavior. would this kind of talk be policable under a crackdown on bad actors or not? :thinking:

Or what about