Comments on: Internet Spaceships Bring The Aid

By: uberVU - social comments

uberVU - social comments — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 03:54:19 +0000

Social comments and analytics for this post…

This post was mentioned on Twitter by drewwww: How wealthy EVE players can convert ISK into USD for Haiti aid, and total donations compared to a titan’s cost: http://bit.ly/bFzfGc...

By: Kári Tulinius

Kári Tulinius — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 02:54:34 +0000

Ah, thanks for digging that information up.

By: StevieTopSiders

StevieTopSiders — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:34:52 +0000

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By: drew

drew — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:46:37 +0000

I did some more digging on the previous donation drive, and it looks like it was a bit of a different situation. Based on Hilmar's description of the program at the time it sounds like they were leveraging their access to people's billing information to make it easy to donate from their account page, not using the in-game currency/PLEX route. If I remember correctly, the PLEX system was quite different then, and I'm not sure they had the technical pieces of the puzzle to do it the way they are now.

By: drew

drew — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 04:59:01 +0000

Oh, neat! Didn’t know that. I’ll update the post accordingly in the morning. I’ll have to double check the history on the secondary PLEX market – I know it hasn’t always been this way. Do you know if people could buy PLEX with ISK legally when they last did this? That’s the component that most catches my imagination, although it may well have been a thing back then too and I just missed the news.

Yeah, I realllly loved Hilmar’s “morally reprehensible” quote. You make an excellent point about the community, although I wonder sometimes if it’s just that most other companies design worlds where the stakes are low and it’s hard to cause that much trouble to other players. The WoW community can certainly grief up a storm, it just doesn’t have the tools available to steal money. I’m not convinced they wouldn’t if they could. Perhaps it says more about human nature in anonymous online situations and the lengths to which other developers go to keep it in check than about the EVE community per se. I do think, though, that the austere and anarchic fiction of EVE plays a role in both attracting a certain type of player and inculcating certain values into the community.

By: Kári Tulinius

Kári Tulinius — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 03:28:57 +0000

Great post! Three things though.

1) CCP did this back in 2005 for tsunami relief at the request of the EVE playerbase, so this is an idea that came from the industrial barons of EVE.

2) Back in 2005 they donated the money to the Icelandic Red Cross, I’m presuming they’ll do the same again.

3) Hilmar, the CEO of CCP, had to tell EVE Online players that scamming would be punished severely. I don’t think that anyone would’ve done anything, but I can’t think of any other MMO community where scamming a disaster relief donation drive would be a thinkable possibility.