CCP Eterne wrote:Intaki Assembly condemns "orbital strike tournament"
Intaki - The Intaki Assembly has harshly condemned the Imperfects mercenary corporation for organizing a combat tournament on Intaki Prime which featured capsuleers providing off-field support via orbital strikes. The tournament, which involved mercenary corporations from across the cluster, was characterized by the Assembly as "an illegal bloodsport which caused untold damage to the planetary biosphere."
According to information gleaned from satellite reports, survey probes, and official releases from the organizers, the tournament took place amidst military installations recently abandoned by Mordu's Legion and the Ishukone Watch after the revocation of the Blind Auction by Tibus Heth. The mercenary corporations involved battled over the objectives on the planet, while capsuleers, who had been encouraged to place bets on the matches, were allowed to assault the facilities from orbit. Over the course of the tournament, numerous orbital strikes were recorded, and satellite images show several of the facilities have been reduced to rubble.
The majority of the installations were far from habited areas, typically being placed in arid regions of the planet without much surrounding wildlife. The Intaki Assembly claims this is irrelevant. "Orbital strikes, even tactical ones on remote sites, can kick up dust and spread pollution and wreckage," the press release read. "It is unconscionable that someone thought these activities were acceptable for entertainment and profit. That doesn't even consider the fact that it was essentially killing for fun. The Intaki Assembly would have never sanctioned such an event."
Tournament organizer Kane Spero brushed off such criticism, saying, "If anything, they should be thanking us for providing free demolition of those abandoned bases. If not for us, who knows? Kids might have gotten into them. Besides, it's not like anyone was permanently injured."
Not sure that I like this. At all. Sure, I've said some not so nice things about Imperfects in the past but this is tasteless to me. Player organizations are vaguely mentioned in the lore, not directly - in fact during the Fiction Contest we were told that player organizations -COULD NOT BE MENTIONED BY NAME-. Hell, the novel even referred to "a capsuleer war" rather than the actual war's title that took place between the player entities.
It's one thing if it's a role-play element, such as the Capsuleer Captain Nell sending a probe through a wormhole to investigate the Sansha Fleets in Jovian Space shortly before Incursion expansion, but I'm not very comfortable with non-role-player entities suddenly tying into the lore in such a way as this. I mean, come on, we don't even have a valid RP subsection like Intergalactic Summit - just a bunch of random posts in General Discussions.
I dunno. Maybe I'm over-reacting but this just seems really jacked up. Out of all the player organized events that have happened in Eve Online/Dust 514, and the ones that could potentially happen, this seems like a slight degree of favoritism.
EDIT: There seems to be a misconception that this is simply because 'Imperfects' was mentioned and I admitted bias. This is not the case. If it were -any- corporation, ZionTCD, STB, Seraphim; it wouldn't have mattered. My response would have been the same. The cause for concern was that a player entity was named directly and there was no RP element to interact with it.
As can be seen below through CCP Eterne's response, and my response in kind, this is brought on by new circumstances in the way player organized events are handled.