The Deadly Dollar of Eve Online

The Escapist this week talks griefing and griefers. One of their features delves into the down and dirty economic wars in Eve Online. From the article: "Having transferred the money and placed their trust in these virtual business proposals, the investors realized that they had been duped, but could do nothing to rescue their lost capital. The scam tolled 480 million ISK (EVE's currency), which is almost $1,000 in meatspace money."

Comments

Retribution

[vertinox]

The problems with scams is that they leave the victims with no course of retribution.

I personally believe sams have their place in PvP, but not so much PvE games.

In Ultima Online (back when everything was "unconsensual" as the article states Lord British saying) if someone scammed you and you knew who they were you had a chance of taking revenge on them at least by killing them.

I knew a guy that scammed my coworker back in 2000 (or was it 1999) and he took it personally. My coworker had a house and somehow this guy actually hacked his account with a trojan that he sent him on ICQ since he was supposedly a friend online and cleaned out his house and since it was obvious that it was the file that he had sent him he knew what the other names he played with.

We spent many a night just showing up and following him around. Out of the blue when he stepped out of the town we would kill him. We turned him in for macroing several times and even had someone make a character just to join his guild that he was in to mess with him.

When he was in town we'd have throw away death robe theives to steal from him and even run up to him naked with DP (deadly posion) daggers and hit him to make him die in town (even though the guards would halberd us at the same time)

After a while, we might have made it over excessive given the retaliation harrasment we gave him, but with player justice we took things into our own hands rather than letting the GMs handle it.

In a PvE environment this is really impossible since players do not have any other ways of retribution other than reporting the offending player.

However, the down side of player justice is that if you weren't in a guild or were just a poor player compared to the rest you don't have much chance of retribution. Secondly, I think often times player justice would often kill the wrong player or people that were supsect of scamming or being pks.

In a simulated world scams are just an extension of the theiving and player killing and perhaps is a legitimate strategy (although I would disdain anyone who would scam anyone in a game). However, you still have to balance that out with what the player base will tolerate in the terms of 'greifing'.