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Comment by caylus | Hacker News Reader

While you're correct about the general philosophy of EVE, your example is incorrect. Evading police retribution is one of the few exploits explicitly forbidden by game rules, whether through a known or unknown exploit: https://support.eveonline.com/hc/en-us/articles/204873262-Kn...

> It is also considered an exploit to commit a criminal act and prevent ship loss to CONCORD by any means.

It's likely you're thinking of "suicide ganking", where the attacker is destroyed by police but still turns a profit due to the loot their partner can take from the victim.

You also mention ships capable of preventing warping. Those ship can only be used in "null sec" space, where there are no police ships. And even if they could be used in "high sec", preventing warping would not prevent a pirate from moving up to a target using normal engines and destroying them.

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> your example is incorrect. Evading police retribution is one of the few exploits explicitly forbidden by game rules

But his example was not about evading police retribution. It was about mechanics related to self-protection from suicide ships.

Too bad that story isn't quite right, but a few tweaks and it's still a good anecdote.

I disagree about "quite" since almost every game mechanical statement in it is incorrect. I'd suggest focusing on the lack of social rules in the game, which allow for completely unrestricted scams, corporate espionage and treachery.

It might end up illustrating the opposite point though, since players who lose everything to these scams are often surprised and driven away, which is the opposite of what social networks want. In comparison, the possibility of losing a ship to a pirate is pretty clearly advertised.

To complete the analogy, I would think social networks should try to prevent the dogpiling and cancelation effect that shock and destroy people, while allowing them to be occasionally exposed to different opinions. Unfortunately it seems the opposite is more often the case, as in EVE.

The way to handle something like this is to turn the "surprised and driven away" into "prepared and motivated to solve it," which is what the anecdote conveyed^1. You give players tools to counter-act negative outcomes, and, in the case of social media, you do your best to make tools which amplify truth, signal, and positivity.

Suicide-ganking sounds like it needed something like a cooldown timer on picking up loot in high sec.

^1 Trying to move the conversation back into the useful territory - I'll concede the anecdote is likely to be wrong, since you know more about EVE than I do.

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