For the last few weeks the community has been debating the topic of real life harassment, and its connection to the EVE Universe. The EVE Universe Community Team has been working on this issue for some time now, and has had extensive discussions about it with your elected representatives, the Council of Stellar Management.
EVE is a virtual world whose inhabitants have more freedom to play the villain and experiment with various backhanded tactics than in any other MMO. The freedom to scam and commit piracy, espionage, and extortion are all fundamental to the EVE Online experience, and CCP will never change that. However, it is important to remember that the EVE universe is a virtual world, and behavior of this nature should remain firmly within that virtual world.
While the content of online interactions between players cannot realistically be gated within our game worlds, CCP strongly disapproves of clear and extraordinary levels of real life harassment against our players in the outside world.
CCP, in collaboration with the CSM, have agreed and would like to state in the strongest possible terms and in accordance with our existing Terms of Service and End User License Agreement, that real life harassment is morally reprehensible, and verifiable examples of such behavior will be met with disciplinary action against game accounts in accordance with our Terms of Service.
Harassment poses a potential problem in any virtual world, and CCP has dealt with cases of this nature for more than a decade. We will continue to monitor and evaluate claims of harassment based on our policies and acceptable standards of behavior.
As always, CCP will not discuss specific cases of policy enforcement. However, if you have any questions regarding this statement, please feel free to pose them in this thread, and we will respond to the best of our ability.
– The EVE Universe Community Team
