FFXI's been available on the XBox360 for quite some time now. In fact, it was mentioned on Slashdot, although the article concentrated more on how PlayOnline clashed with XBox Live than on the game itself. (In short you have to sign onto the game three times: first through XBox Live, then through PlayOnline, and then finally you need to sign into FFXI itself. The same BS is done on the PS2 and PC minus the XBox Live part.)
However, the XBox360 port was apparently essentially the PC port of the game, recompiled for the XBox360. (More effort than a simple recompile, of course, but apparently it was close enough that porting wasn't terribly difficult.) It was easy for them to create since they already had the PC port, and since the newer PS2s can't play FFXI at all, it was sort of their way of keeping it available in the console market. I can't imagine it's done very well on the XBox360, though.
I think you overestimate Mistwalker's chances. Earlier today Slashdot ran a story about Next-Gen's top 20 games at the Tokyo Game Show. If you read through their article, they list the two Mistwalker games as co-winners of the #1 slot. (I'll try linking to the last page but I have a hunch it won't work without paging through the rest of the article first.)
These are severely muscular names; any fan of Final Fantasy would do well to check these games out. In fact, most of them would spare no expense to buy an Xbox 360 simply to have these games -- that is, once they know the games exist.
At the show on two public days -- Saturday and Sunday -- only the hardcore gamers who had read Famitsu and knew Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey were something not to miss were lined up around the booth.
Apparently there isn't a lot of buzz about those games. Now I know that Japan isn't like America, but I'll bet they aren't immune to marketing either.
Final Fantasy VII was a giant hit in the US, but it was also the only Final Fantasy I can remember being heavily advertised. I don't think it would have been anywhere near as big without the giant advertising campaign in the US.
Unless Mistwalker does some serious advertising, no one is likely to notice them, if only because they're releasing for the XBox360. The XBox360 has done horrible in Japan. Without knowing to look for it, I expect most Japanese gamers will ignore the XBox section of the stores and skip straight to the Nintendo or Sony sections.
The Mistwalker games could do really well - but only if people know about them, and know to look for them as XBox360 games.
(Although the XBox360 is considerably smaller than the PS3, and Japanese are notorious for liking smaller electronics, so Sony may not be as much of a sure thing in Japan as they think...)
I foolishly registered my slim-line PS2, so I now receive the Official US PlayStation Magazine. They ran a similar article this month.
They came to basically the same conclusion: most gamers would miss the rumble and that some would not buy the PS3 for that reason. This is the official magazine, endorsed by Sony. They're expecting gamers will miss the rumble and may not buy the PS3 because of it.
Yes, the Immersion study is probably biased, but I know that one of the many reasons I'm not getting the PS3 at launch is because they removed the rumble feature. I'm sure they'll add it back in, eventually, and I'd rather put off buying a PS3 until they do. (And HDTV comes down in price. And good games are released for it. And it costs less than $300. And...)
But, anyway, the results aren't as suspect as you'd think. The Official PlayStation Magazine agrees with them.
I wouldn't worry. Or worry that much. Either the PS3 or the XBox 360 will succeed in Japan (and Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey probably makes it the XBox 360), and all the RPGs from the losing console will be ported over to the winning console in order to make sales.
You'll probably need to get a Wii to play RPGs released for it, though, since the Wii controller can't be replicated (no matter how much Sony tries) on the other consoles, so expect Wii games to be fairly unique to the Wii.
In the end, they'll all come out for the one dominant console. It may take a couple of years, but it'll happen. One console will win the RPG crowd. And the RPGs will be ported over to it since that's where the market is.
By "a while ago" I actually mean "a couple of years." I think it was in 2001 or 2002, but I'm not positive.
I think it may have been before Slashdot started keeping comments moderated to -1 after the story became archived, so I may not actually be able to find the original post. Unfortunately I don't remember what the story was, and I haven't found it in a Google search. If I ever find it again, I'll be sure to post it.
A while ago, someone posted a link to a webpage that, when clicked, caused their post to be moderated up. Their post was at +5 for quite a while until enough replies got moderated up pointing out that the link wasn't what it claimed to be.
So, in a sense, Slashdot has already been hit by a cross-site scripting vulnerability. The fix for XSS vulnerabilities like that involves requiring a secret token to be sent to take user actions, to prevent people from creating forms off-site and submitting them as the user. I suppose checking the referrer may work too, but I wouldn't count on it.
Literally - no: it's not supposed to be that impressive.
It's a set of "bonus features" you get with the PS3 as part of its "media center" thingy. Just like the original PlayStation could play CDs with colorful blobby visualization and the PS2 could play DVDs, the PS3 has a bunch of extra features related to digital media.
This is just them showing the extra features to some journalists to give them an idea of the UI and what extra features are going to be available.
So, no, they're not supposed to be incredibly impressive. It's a useless "bonus feature" that I doubt many people will ever use. The main features remain giant crabs and real-time weapon change. Or whatever they are.
Seriously, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to laugh at Sony. This isn't one of them.
I think you've hit on Sony's real problem: I don't care about any of the games being released now. Can the PS3 survive long enough for the games I actually want to play to make it out on it?
The games I'm excited about aren't going to be coming out until late 2007 at the earliest. There's no way I'm buying a PS3 at launch. I'll be waiting until the price comes down enough that I can afford it. Well, not afford, but until the price comes down to what I'm willing to pay, and what I'm willing to pay depends heavily on what games are available for it.
The Wii... well, I have high hopes for it, but I'm getting Zelda on 'Cube and waiting to see how well this wiimote thing works out.
That's essentially my plan too. The Wii is the only console I've considered buying on launch (unless buying a DS Lite on its launch day counts...), but my plan right now is to wait until January of next year and see what the reaction to it is before making any final decission.
I'll definitely want to try it out at the store once the floor models are released...
On a somewhat related topic, does anyone know if the PS3 supports DVI out? I don't have an HDTV, but I do have a nice DVI-compliant LCD monitor...
One major killer feature of the iPod are iPod accessories. If Microsoft wants to compete with the iPod, they'll need to be completely compatible with it.
I have an iPod adapter for my car radio. I hook my iPod up to it and can play directly through the radio. This isn't one of those little "FM radio car adapters" either. It puts the iPod into "control mode" or whatever they call it, and can change playlists and move through the playlist directly though the radio.
This is good, because the radio is designed to be easy to control from the driver's seat without looking at it. The most used buttons (skip song, volume) are shaped to be easy to tell by touch and are positioned to be within easy reach.
As far as I know, there is no adapter kit for my radio for any other MP3 player on the market. Only one for the iPod.
If Microsoft wants to compete with the iPod, the Zune needs to be able to support the accessory market. The iPod may not be the greatest MP3 player ever created, but it has the accessory market, and that provides a lot of value that Microsoft will be missing.
Read the complete article. Billy Berghammer fairly clearly defines what he means as a flop: third-party developer support never really materialized.
If you read through the article, it's fairly clear that he's a Nintendo fanboi. His concerns are essentially that the Wii will fail to gain developer support, and essentially float by on only Nintendo games.
With the new control scheme, there's a very real risk that third-party developer support will never materialize and the Wii will suffer the GameCube's fate of not having enough games to really push it forward. If you're looking at one new Nintendo game every couple of months, that's not the most compelling reason to buy a console.
Berghammer's concern is that developer support will fail to materialize and the Wii will be stuck with a small game library while most of the games are on one of the other consoles.
Doesn't have to. Just have them cache the image using a unique timestamp for Last-Modified (so that you should get a unique If-Modified-Since header) or using a unique ETag. Both should theoretically work to uniquely identify the user, and both can easily be embedded using an image. Combined with Cache-Control: private, this should even work through firewalls.
I expect that, amazingly enough, most people like having something tangible for their purchase. Downloads are ephemeral things. They're not real in the sense that a CD is.
I expect that most users have lost files before. Files get deleted or lost. People lose their backups or can't figure out how to transfer files from their old computer to their new computer.
When you buy a CD you have an actual thing you can hold. It's not going to suddenly disappear. Viruses can't delete it. Some random "computer repair" won't lose it. It's real in a way that a download never can be.
I doubt that people prefer freedom over convience in this case. I doubt most people even understand the freedoms they're missing when buying from the iTunes Music Store.
I expect that the reality is that people prefer buying physical things to buying something as ethereal as a downloaded file.
I don't think the judge was necessarily clueless - according to the article, it was a "default judgement." IANAL, but my understanding is that in civil cases, if the defendant doesn't bother showing up to court (as in this case) then they default on the case and the plaintiff wins automatically.
From my understanding, in that case, the judge essentially accepts all the plaintiff's arguments as true and applies a judgement based on that assumption.
So it's not so much that the judge was clueless as that Spamhaus is totally ignoring US law, which sort of makes sense for a UK group.
Re:A Big Thank You To All The "A 600 Dollar System
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PS3 Problems Parried
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· Score: 1
They already have caved. SCEA's Kaz Hirai has said that "I don't think consumers expect software pricing to suddenly double.... So, if it becomes a bit higher than $59, don't ding me, but, again, I don't expect it to be $100."
So, yeah, we're looking at $70-$100 games for the PS3.
Re:A Big Thank You To All The "A 600 Dollar System
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PS3 Problems Parried
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· Score: 3, Informative
Sony couldn't pay for better marketing than they are getting for the thousands of Dreamcast/Xbox fanboys screaming all over the net about how the PS3 is 'a 600 dollar system' for the past few months.
You obviously missed it, but with 80% of produced PS3s being the $600 version, most people buying a PS3 will be spending at least $600, simply because the vast majority of PS3s available will cost $600. So, yes, saying the PS3 costs $600 is basically true.
Everything except HDMI is upgradeable on the 499 PS3 - WiFi, card readers, and you can upgrade the harddrive with drives you buy in any store.
Yep, for an extra $100, you can upgrade your $500 PS3 into a $600 PS3 minus the HDMI port! What a bargin!
No, really. Assume that a wireless adapter costs $20 and that most USB wireless adapters will work with the PS3. (As TiVo Series 2 owners know, fat chance on that happening.) Assume you get a card reader that costs $20. That leaves us with $60 for the hard drive, which is about the cheapest you can expect to spend.
The only reason to stick with the $500 version is if you don't need wireless, don't need the card reader, and don't need the HDMI port. Don't forget that if you want to grab your save games and head over to a friend's house, you'll need a card reader. Upgrading individual components is barely worth the money saved, epecially with PS3 games expected to cost $60-$100.
I remember that in previous PS3 threads whenever someone would say the PS3 cost $600, someone would always post and say "nuh-uh, most gamers will only need the $500 version!"
Well, it looks like most gamers will be stuck with the $600 version, need it or not!
Although it's probably actually a good move for launch. They can't possibly meet demand with only 500,000 PS3s at launch, so charging as much as possible makes sense.
They make this huge bulky thing, when Japanese like their tiny electronics for their tiny apartments
It'll be interesting to see the Japanese response when the PS3 comes out (assuming it does) given that it's quite a bit larger than the XBox360. And thanks to its curved top, even less stackable than the XBox360.
I purposely went over with the Wii price to try and head off any complaints about how the PS3 doesn't "really" cost $600 and instead costs $500. Think of it as a game and an extra controller or something. Likewise with the PS3, there may be an extra $100 thrown in there for a game, or whatever.
So, yeah, the price for the Wii is artificially inflated in my post to put Sony in the best possible light. And it still looks ridiculously expensive even with an over-priced Wii.
The only reason they're using Blu-ray in the PS3 is to try and take over the HD media market. So, yes, this is their fault. If the stuck with DVD which is more than adequate for next-gen gaming, they wouldn't be having this problem and the PS3 might have already launched.
But their insistance on trying to abuse a monopoly they don't actually have is causing them to become more and more of a joke and less and less likely to be even relevant this generation. If it winds up being a choice between a $300 Wii now and a $600 PS3 months from now the choice of which to buy becomes even easier than it was before.
WoW has a policy not to delete inactive characters. If you want to resume paying them money, they want to make it as easy as possible.
Final Fantasy XI deletes inactive characters after 3 months. It's the only MMORPG I know of that doesn't want to try and regain customers who left, but it's an MMORPG and it deletes inactive characters. But it's an exception.
Re:Why do Australians hate the US so?
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Steve Irwin Dead
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· Score: 2, Informative
I find them to be loud at times, but generally friendly people who are easy to get along with, if one is willing to put up some eccentricies.
Which, amusingly enough, sounds very similar to how most Americans view Australians.:)
Does it violate the rules of the game? After all, no one gets upset about the mass murder and genocide that occurs routinely on PvP servers in WoW. It's part of the game.
Assuming there are no rules within the game environment to prevent this, how would you go about punishing someone in the real world for something they did in an artificial one?
There's a difference, though. There are rules in the real world saying that something is illegal. There are no rules about it in the game world. Piracy is illegal in the real world. (I'm talking about the "arr matey!" kind, not the "RIAA" kind.) But it's permitted in the game world of EVE. Should the pirates be brought to criminal court of piracy in the spaces of EVE?
This story is just ridiculously stupid. It's a game. Only the game's rules apply. Whatever the rules set out by those who run the game are the only rules that matter.
Get conned while playing a game? Learn from it and just be glad it wasn't real.
Slashdot Mirror
FFXI's been available on the XBox360 for quite some time now. In fact, it was mentioned on Slashdot, although the article concentrated more on how PlayOnline clashed with XBox Live than on the game itself. (In short you have to sign onto the game three times: first through XBox Live, then through PlayOnline, and then finally you need to sign into FFXI itself. The same BS is done on the PS2 and PC minus the XBox Live part.)
However, the XBox360 port was apparently essentially the PC port of the game, recompiled for the XBox360. (More effort than a simple recompile, of course, but apparently it was close enough that porting wasn't terribly difficult.) It was easy for them to create since they already had the PC port, and since the newer PS2s can't play FFXI at all, it was sort of their way of keeping it available in the console market. I can't imagine it's done very well on the XBox360, though.
I think you overestimate Mistwalker's chances. Earlier today Slashdot ran a story about Next-Gen's top 20 games at the Tokyo Game Show. If you read through their article, they list the two Mistwalker games as co-winners of the #1 slot. (I'll try linking to the last page but I have a hunch it won't work without paging through the rest of the article first.)
Apparently there isn't a lot of buzz about those games. Now I know that Japan isn't like America, but I'll bet they aren't immune to marketing either.
Final Fantasy VII was a giant hit in the US, but it was also the only Final Fantasy I can remember being heavily advertised. I don't think it would have been anywhere near as big without the giant advertising campaign in the US.
Unless Mistwalker does some serious advertising, no one is likely to notice them, if only because they're releasing for the XBox360. The XBox360 has done horrible in Japan. Without knowing to look for it, I expect most Japanese gamers will ignore the XBox section of the stores and skip straight to the Nintendo or Sony sections.
The Mistwalker games could do really well - but only if people know about them, and know to look for them as XBox360 games.
(Although the XBox360 is considerably smaller than the PS3, and Japanese are notorious for liking smaller electronics, so Sony may not be as much of a sure thing in Japan as they think...)
I foolishly registered my slim-line PS2, so I now receive the Official US PlayStation Magazine. They ran a similar article this month.
They came to basically the same conclusion: most gamers would miss the rumble and that some would not buy the PS3 for that reason. This is the official magazine, endorsed by Sony. They're expecting gamers will miss the rumble and may not buy the PS3 because of it.
Yes, the Immersion study is probably biased, but I know that one of the many reasons I'm not getting the PS3 at launch is because they removed the rumble feature. I'm sure they'll add it back in, eventually, and I'd rather put off buying a PS3 until they do. (And HDTV comes down in price. And good games are released for it. And it costs less than $300. And...)
But, anyway, the results aren't as suspect as you'd think. The Official PlayStation Magazine agrees with them.
I wouldn't worry. Or worry that much. Either the PS3 or the XBox 360 will succeed in Japan (and Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey probably makes it the XBox 360), and all the RPGs from the losing console will be ported over to the winning console in order to make sales.
You'll probably need to get a Wii to play RPGs released for it, though, since the Wii controller can't be replicated (no matter how much Sony tries) on the other consoles, so expect Wii games to be fairly unique to the Wii.
In the end, they'll all come out for the one dominant console. It may take a couple of years, but it'll happen. One console will win the RPG crowd. And the RPGs will be ported over to it since that's where the market is.
By "a while ago" I actually mean "a couple of years." I think it was in 2001 or 2002, but I'm not positive.
I think it may have been before Slashdot started keeping comments moderated to -1 after the story became archived, so I may not actually be able to find the original post. Unfortunately I don't remember what the story was, and I haven't found it in a Google search. If I ever find it again, I'll be sure to post it.
A while ago, someone posted a link to a webpage that, when clicked, caused their post to be moderated up. Their post was at +5 for quite a while until enough replies got moderated up pointing out that the link wasn't what it claimed to be.
So, in a sense, Slashdot has already been hit by a cross-site scripting vulnerability. The fix for XSS vulnerabilities like that involves requiring a secret token to be sent to take user actions, to prevent people from creating forms off-site and submitting them as the user. I suppose checking the referrer may work too, but I wouldn't count on it.
Literally - no: it's not supposed to be that impressive.
It's a set of "bonus features" you get with the PS3 as part of its "media center" thingy. Just like the original PlayStation could play CDs with colorful blobby visualization and the PS2 could play DVDs, the PS3 has a bunch of extra features related to digital media.
This is just them showing the extra features to some journalists to give them an idea of the UI and what extra features are going to be available.
So, no, they're not supposed to be incredibly impressive. It's a useless "bonus feature" that I doubt many people will ever use. The main features remain giant crabs and real-time weapon change. Or whatever they are.
Seriously, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to laugh at Sony. This isn't one of them.
I think you've hit on Sony's real problem: I don't care about any of the games being released now. Can the PS3 survive long enough for the games I actually want to play to make it out on it?
The games I'm excited about aren't going to be coming out until late 2007 at the earliest. There's no way I'm buying a PS3 at launch. I'll be waiting until the price comes down enough that I can afford it. Well, not afford, but until the price comes down to what I'm willing to pay, and what I'm willing to pay depends heavily on what games are available for it.
That's essentially my plan too. The Wii is the only console I've considered buying on launch (unless buying a DS Lite on its launch day counts...), but my plan right now is to wait until January of next year and see what the reaction to it is before making any final decission.
I'll definitely want to try it out at the store once the floor models are released...
On a somewhat related topic, does anyone know if the PS3 supports DVI out? I don't have an HDTV, but I do have a nice DVI-compliant LCD monitor...
Oh, don't worry, the first people up for survielence will be the members of the House panel. Those who voted against it, of course.
After all, if you aren't for securin' our co'ntry, you must be part of them terrists, right? (That's the best G.W. Bush impression I can do in text.)
One major killer feature of the iPod are iPod accessories. If Microsoft wants to compete with the iPod, they'll need to be completely compatible with it.
I have an iPod adapter for my car radio. I hook my iPod up to it and can play directly through the radio. This isn't one of those little "FM radio car adapters" either. It puts the iPod into "control mode" or whatever they call it, and can change playlists and move through the playlist directly though the radio.
This is good, because the radio is designed to be easy to control from the driver's seat without looking at it. The most used buttons (skip song, volume) are shaped to be easy to tell by touch and are positioned to be within easy reach.
As far as I know, there is no adapter kit for my radio for any other MP3 player on the market. Only one for the iPod.
If Microsoft wants to compete with the iPod, the Zune needs to be able to support the accessory market. The iPod may not be the greatest MP3 player ever created, but it has the accessory market, and that provides a lot of value that Microsoft will be missing.
Read the complete article. Billy Berghammer fairly clearly defines what he means as a flop: third-party developer support never really materialized.
If you read through the article, it's fairly clear that he's a Nintendo fanboi. His concerns are essentially that the Wii will fail to gain developer support, and essentially float by on only Nintendo games.
With the new control scheme, there's a very real risk that third-party developer support will never materialize and the Wii will suffer the GameCube's fate of not having enough games to really push it forward. If you're looking at one new Nintendo game every couple of months, that's not the most compelling reason to buy a console.
His concern isn't that Nintendo won't make a profit, they almost certainly will. (It's Vladimir Cole who says we shouldn't buy the Wii because Nintendo makes a profit. Seriously.)
Berghammer's concern is that developer support will fail to materialize and the Wii will be stuck with a small game library while most of the games are on one of the other consoles.
Doesn't have to. Just have them cache the image using a unique timestamp for Last-Modified (so that you should get a unique If-Modified-Since header) or using a unique ETag. Both should theoretically work to uniquely identify the user, and both can easily be embedded using an image. Combined with Cache-Control: private, this should even work through firewalls.
Doubt it.
I expect that, amazingly enough, most people like having something tangible for their purchase. Downloads are ephemeral things. They're not real in the sense that a CD is.
I expect that most users have lost files before. Files get deleted or lost. People lose their backups or can't figure out how to transfer files from their old computer to their new computer.
When you buy a CD you have an actual thing you can hold. It's not going to suddenly disappear. Viruses can't delete it. Some random "computer repair" won't lose it. It's real in a way that a download never can be.
I doubt that people prefer freedom over convience in this case. I doubt most people even understand the freedoms they're missing when buying from the iTunes Music Store.
I expect that the reality is that people prefer buying physical things to buying something as ethereal as a downloaded file.
I don't think the judge was necessarily clueless - according to the article, it was a "default judgement." IANAL, but my understanding is that in civil cases, if the defendant doesn't bother showing up to court (as in this case) then they default on the case and the plaintiff wins automatically.
From my understanding, in that case, the judge essentially accepts all the plaintiff's arguments as true and applies a judgement based on that assumption.
So it's not so much that the judge was clueless as that Spamhaus is totally ignoring US law, which sort of makes sense for a UK group.
Oh yeah, let's ignore those annoying facts where Sony announced the 80/20 split. Unless you have actual proof that Sony never announced this, of course.
You're right, that is wrong. It should be $70-$100.
They already have caved. SCEA's Kaz Hirai has said that "I don't think consumers expect software pricing to suddenly double. ... So, if it becomes a bit higher than $59, don't ding me, but, again, I don't expect it to be $100."
So, yeah, we're looking at $70-$100 games for the PS3.
You obviously missed it, but with 80% of produced PS3s being the $600 version, most people buying a PS3 will be spending at least $600, simply because the vast majority of PS3s available will cost $600. So, yes, saying the PS3 costs $600 is basically true.
Yep, for an extra $100, you can upgrade your $500 PS3 into a $600 PS3 minus the HDMI port! What a bargin!
No, really. Assume that a wireless adapter costs $20 and that most USB wireless adapters will work with the PS3. (As TiVo Series 2 owners know, fat chance on that happening.) Assume you get a card reader that costs $20. That leaves us with $60 for the hard drive, which is about the cheapest you can expect to spend.
The only reason to stick with the $500 version is if you don't need wireless, don't need the card reader, and don't need the HDMI port. Don't forget that if you want to grab your save games and head over to a friend's house, you'll need a card reader. Upgrading individual components is barely worth the money saved, epecially with PS3 games expected to cost $60-$100.
I remember that in previous PS3 threads whenever someone would say the PS3 cost $600, someone would always post and say "nuh-uh, most gamers will only need the $500 version!"
Well, it looks like most gamers will be stuck with the $600 version, need it or not!
Although it's probably actually a good move for launch. They can't possibly meet demand with only 500,000 PS3s at launch, so charging as much as possible makes sense.
It'll be interesting to see the Japanese response when the PS3 comes out (assuming it does) given that it's quite a bit larger than the XBox360. And thanks to its curved top, even less stackable than the XBox360.
I purposely went over with the Wii price to try and head off any complaints about how the PS3 doesn't "really" cost $600 and instead costs $500. Think of it as a game and an extra controller or something. Likewise with the PS3, there may be an extra $100 thrown in there for a game, or whatever.
So, yeah, the price for the Wii is artificially inflated in my post to put Sony in the best possible light. And it still looks ridiculously expensive even with an over-priced Wii.
The only reason they're using Blu-ray in the PS3 is to try and take over the HD media market. So, yes, this is their fault. If the stuck with DVD which is more than adequate for next-gen gaming, they wouldn't be having this problem and the PS3 might have already launched.
But their insistance on trying to abuse a monopoly they don't actually have is causing them to become more and more of a joke and less and less likely to be even relevant this generation. If it winds up being a choice between a $300 Wii now and a $600 PS3 months from now the choice of which to buy becomes even easier than it was before.
WoW has a policy not to delete inactive characters. If you want to resume paying them money, they want to make it as easy as possible.
Final Fantasy XI deletes inactive characters after 3 months. It's the only MMORPG I know of that doesn't want to try and regain customers who left, but it's an MMORPG and it deletes inactive characters. But it's an exception.
Which, amusingly enough, sounds very similar to how most Americans view Australians. :)
Does it violate the rules of the game? After all, no one gets upset about the mass murder and genocide that occurs routinely on PvP servers in WoW. It's part of the game.
There's a difference, though. There are rules in the real world saying that something is illegal. There are no rules about it in the game world. Piracy is illegal in the real world. (I'm talking about the "arr matey!" kind, not the "RIAA" kind.) But it's permitted in the game world of EVE. Should the pirates be brought to criminal court of piracy in the spaces of EVE?
This story is just ridiculously stupid. It's a game. Only the game's rules apply. Whatever the rules set out by those who run the game are the only rules that matter.
Get conned while playing a game? Learn from it and just be glad it wasn't real.
Wait, you have a free energy device? Link, please!
(Couldn't help myself either, sorry. :))