Staying with EVE Online a moment:

Gaming Nexus: All About The ISK (Via Vrigin Worlds)

Don't worry...more harrowing Planetside war stories soon, but this whole EVE Investment Bank scam had managed to pique even my interest, so it's interesting to get a round up of what CCP, (the folks who made and run EVE) think of it all. Mostly these thoughts seem to be in the 'Oooh...interesting, but you guys can do what you like,' school of thought, and I guess they're right. The whole thing was essentially players convicing other players to give them their money, and then logging out while laughing like bastards, taking the cash with them, and indeed, nothing to do with CCP at all. I'm glad they're keen on doing what they can to prevent this 80Bn ISK from being converted into the USD equvalent of about four years salary in an average mid-to-low-end desk-job, but from the look of those points, it seems CCPs options for doing so are rather limited, and probably not terribly difficult to outwit.

See this is my main problem with EVE; sure, it's a game about territorial conquest, mercantile success and starship combat, but much of it has always seemed out of context to me - it seems less about fictional stellar empires struggling for supremacy in any way possible, and more about the guy sat at the PC controlling 'CptKirkx0r187' out to steal as many small kid's lunch moneys as possible, while still causing the most crying they can, and big high-profile news items like this, (and numerous previous ones) where indidivual players get to point at the rest of us and do the Simpsons 'Nelson Laugh', do little to help the papable air of almost universal paranoia and self-reliance I've always found in there. If anything, it celebrates the skill of that player to screw over everyone else, and if this is the only really newsworthy thing you see come out of EVE, aside from population milestones, the casual observer tends to form the opinion that this is the goal and purpose of EVE - how you 'win'... 'EVE Online - we told u we were hardcore'

Simply put, another player is either a threat, or someone to be ignored, depending on system Security Status. Pick-up grouping is practically unknown - either simply a ruse to get your target's spatial coordinates to warp to, or if in the 'safer' space, an admission of weakness and invitation to local-chat ridicule and smacktalk - you should be able to do all the missions solo, or you're some kind of failure. I sometimes imagine what the place would be like if they just set all systems to 0.0 one night on a whim...always makes me chuckle. In any event, most activites are generally more efficient when two people do two of them, rather than two people work together at one of them.

Possibly I exaggerate, but they have an acronym which always seemed to sum the game up rather well for me - 'NBSI' - Not Blue, Shoot It - referring to the colour-coding system that Alliance and Coropration leaders can set for the ships of chosen allys on the HUD, and indeed, until you're well-entrenched in the bowels of one of the larger alliance corps, you can't really start to think about group-work. And even then, stories of corp-members suddenly dissappearing with all the corp's blueprints and assests are so common nowadays that they don't even warrant reporting or bitching about.

I'm sure it's just my own paranoia running rampant again, and that many thousands of people enjoy EVE and still manage to have non-corp friends they often do stuff with, but CCP are right - if you play EVE, you are pretty much the only person you can trust not to screw you over at some point. CCP won't, and shouldn't, be there to babysit you.

Despite my own fascination with the game's raw mechanics and look-and-feel, and it's slow but steady increase in subscribers and concurrent online players, I'd still have to say I prefer being shot in the face with a tripple-barrelled shotgun 20-30 times an hour, than fly about for four or more hours in a universe that always seems to be eyeing me up, and doesn't kill me purely because it's fear of police execution only just outweighs it's desire to see me lose my stuff. Planetside is harsher, certainly, but feels....cleaner somehow.

Still, as you can tell from the general tone of this rather bleak emo post, I do somewhat get off on paranoia, so I'm sure I'll be back in there in time for Kali!