Fox Gaden
Immortal Guides
Learning Alliance
7
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Posted - 2015.12.07 18:11:00 -
[1] - Quote
First of all, scamming is not against the rules in the game, because CCP believes that a good game needs bad guys, and in a PVP game the best bad guys are other players. However, that does not mean that players should consider scamming OK. If it was socially acceptable, then they would not be bad guys.
As a CEO it is necessary to decide whether or not scamming is condoned within your Corporation. Some Corporations like to cultivate an outlaw image, and will allow scamming. From a CEOGÇÖs perspective this has the benefit of allowing you to respond with the middle finger whenever someone comes wining to you about one of your members scamming them. It is a lot less work than actually having to deal with the drama. However, there are downsides. Once your Corp gets an unsavoury reputation it will be a lot harder for any member of the Corp to find people willing to trade with them. It also has ramifications in PC as all the White Knights will be lining up to take out the GÇ£evilGÇ¥ Corporation.
Most CEOGÇÖs choose not to accept unsocial behaviours such as scamming by their members. Unfortunately trying to sort out a scamming accusation is a pain in the ass. Anyone who is any good as a Scam Artist is going to sound innocent as a quire boy when they deny the accusations against them. Add to this the fact that there are almost as many Greiffers as Scammers, and some of them will make false accusations just to ruin someoneGÇÖs reputation. This makes it doubly hard to sort out who is the victim. If you know and trust one of those involved you can side with that person, but in a big Corp you often donGÇÖt know either party very well.
Often you canGÇÖt take disciplinary action after a single incident because there is not enough evidence to tell if the person is guilty of scamming, or is being falsely accused because someone is getting their kicks out of getting someone in trouble. You need other witnesses, or multiple victims coming forward who have no affiliation to each other. Trying to find collaborating evidence to determine what actually happened takes time and effort. Meanwhile your CorpGÇÖs reputation is taking a hit just having a member accused of scamming, yet kicking a member based on an unsupported accusation is not good for a CorpGÇÖs reputation either, so it is important to do the ground work.
Recently I had to deal with a case that got even more muddied when a victim of a scam created an Alt account which he then used to make false scamming accusations against the scammer to either get some of his ISK back or ruin the guyGÇÖs reputation. Luckily the victim who was grieffing the scammer came clean to me with what he was doing, but then I was in the situation of trying to determine if a member of my Corp was a Scammer or just being grieffed, when I knew he was being grieffed, but being told he was being grieffed because he was a Scammer. Fortunately at that point someone completely unaffiliated contacted me about the same guy scamming someone else, which gave me enough collaborating evidence to justify kicking the member, even if I was still not 100% sure he was scamming.
So my conclusion is this. A trust based trading system based on reciprocal gifting, is just a pain in the ass for a CEO, Director, or anyone running a chat channel. Not only does it make it incredibly easy to scam people, it also makes it incredibly difficult to investigate scamming accusations. I donGÇÖt have a problem with scamming being part of the game, but it needs a counter, a way for a smart player to guard against it. As it is the only counters, such as using a trusted third party intermediate, are incredibly inconvenient, while the scamming itself is childGÇÖs play.
I would really like to see a trade interface like they have in EVE where both the item being sold and the ISK to purchase it are entered in the trade window, and both parties have to hit accept for the trade to go through. Scamming is still possible with such a system, but the scammers have to be far more creative, and attentive players who know what to watch for can avoid getting scammed. It would not eliminate scamming, but it would make it far less common so it would be something we would only have to deal with occasionally.
Some sort of transaction log, that showed more than just the ISK side of the exchange would be very helpful as well, so that victims could send CEOGÇÖs or people running trade channels screen shots of the transaction logs to support their accusations.
Hand/Eye coordination cannot be taught. For everything else there is the Learning Coalition.
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