The sad news is designers are far more likely to “punish” players for wrong-doings than to own up and admit to the faulty design that caused the situation. It’s just more proof that there are exceedingly few good game designers out there. I’m convinced none of them work at the major studios that rule the industry.

*boggles*

Kill trading between alts is fine. The problem came when the goons got a hold of the formula that dictated the LP payouts in faction war, which included the value of the cargo in the equation. The more valuable the ship, equipment, and cargo was, the more LP you’d get for blowing it up. The other thing the Goons managed to figure out was how CCP determined the value of an item. A rolling 90 day interval check on contracts and orders. So the goons bought a bunch of useless items that no one would pay for, and traded them within the alliance at massively inflated values to skew the value the CCP perceived them to have, without actually losing any significant amount of isk. Then they loaded up freighters with millions of these useless items that CCP now thinks is worth thousands of isk each, and they have an alt fly them into a faction war zone, where their mains frag them for absurd amounts of LP, which they convert into thousands of faction battleships and +5 implants that they could sell for hundreds of millions each.

Essentially, they committed complicated in game insurance fraud.

No, I think I am agreeing with you that the way we make decisions in games is more about game rules than it is about ethics and morality. I maybe didn’t make this clear but this is why I was puzzled by Jim’s argument in his video that the reason murder was OK in games but rape was not was because there might be ethical reasons to murder someone but not to rape. ie. I was puzzled because I don’t think ethical reasons are why we do things in games on the whole.

Like kiantremayne says below though, how you treat other players might have an ethical aspect (is griefing immoral?). Also some players do project an ethical framework onto games, you see people talk about honorable fights sometimes.

And if devs not only fix a bug but also do a selective rollback that implies that they felt players have been getting resources they were not intended to have, it’s the sort of thing that happens after people exploit duping bugs. We can argue about whether or not it was a cheat but if devs thought it was fine they would have let the players keep the credits. The line between exploits and emergent player behaviour can be fine and tends to be tested only on boundary conditions (ie. players keep pushing the bounds and devs push back when they’ve gone too far). But I can still call a cheap tactic.

My experience of player run police/legal systems in sandbox type games mostly comes from MUDs/MU* which are a much smaller scale than EVE but a) I think the principles still hold and b) I was a staffer so I know a lot more of the details about how we worked with players on that. ie. I’ve staffed and played on games that had functional player police factions.

Text games can have some pretty advanced sandbox systems on the social side of things. Because they’re smaller and staff tend to work much more closely with players, it’s also easier to allow players to make sweeping changes to the game world. (eg. if you murder someone in game, you can ask staff to change the description of the area to include corpse/ bloodstains etc until it is discovered.)

How you treat other players though… that CAN be immoral, and to link back to your last post, quite frequently player behaviour in PuGs, especially, does fall short of a high moral standard. I think what I find depressing isn’t that a lot of players don’t just act like dicks and treat others badly (which I would deem immoral behaviour) if there’s something in it for them… they’ll do it for nothing more than shits and giggles if they can get away with it.