You may not use, transfer or assign any game assets for games of chance operated by third parties.
-From the Updated EULA for Ascension
Buh-bye EVE Online gambling and the influence of that ill-gotten ISK in New Eden.
Coming in November
The game is better for it. I already like what this expansion is bringing and it isn’t even here yet.
I am especially happy to see IWantISK getting what they deserve.
The third party service IWANTISK has been shut down in game, and all ISK and assets have been confiscated after extensive and exhaustive investigation has brought forward compelling evidence of large-scale Real Money Trading. Permanent account suspensions have been issued against those involved.
The third party service EVE Casino has been shut down in game, and all ISK and assets have been confiscated after multiple and sustained breaches of our Developer License Agreement. Permanent account suspensions have been issued against those involved.
Whenever anybody brought up the idea that IWI was deep in RMT, it was always shouted down by the “Grr Goons” crowd, who demanded proof. Well there is your proof now. Good riddance to bad garbage.
Time to study the EULA changes more, but that seemed to be the big news. Again, all available here.
Follow up posts by others who might be a little more thoughtful than my own gut reaction here:
- Overrun Thread of tears and joy on Reddit
- Imperium News (formerly TMC)
- Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah
- PC Gamer
- Rock Paper Shotgun
- Hardcore Casual
- Target Caller
- Massively OP
- EN24
- Crossing Zebras
- Just for Crits
- EVE NT
- Fuzzwork
- EVE Hermit
- EuroGamer
- The Indecisive Noob
- EVEOGANDA
- Polygon
- Greedy Goblin
- GameIndustry.biz
- The Neocom
- The Nosy Gamer *You should read this one*
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
So Eve Bet will also go down and we may see reduced activity from Eve streamers and other content creators. (Not objecting, just considering the fallout).
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@Stabs – Oh yeah, the wailing has commenced. EN24 and CZ are both loudly declaring that their sites will go dark without the support of dirty RMT money. I am waiting for The Mittani to stop smugging on Jabber and put up a post about his site, not funded by gambling, hiring writers and editors.
I expect to see all sorts of ripples go through the game because of this. What do you suppose will happen to the price of PLEX? It has been alleged that people who just wanted to gamble on these sites, as opposed to play EVE, were buying PLEX to fund their addiction. Is PLEX about to go through the roof with less on the market?
Interesting times.
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Meanwhile, at Imperium HQ:
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As someone on reddit wrote, CCP really should make in in-game casino, especially because betting on the AT was a huge draw, plus a casino would be another nice sink to the game.
Plus give me poker in-game while I rat please.
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I’d say this is move that’s not about re-balancing power in game, but keeping CCP out of a bunch of different regulatory domains associated with either appearing to facilitate a market for real money transactions outside of their game or somehow acting as a broker for the same. Having a world wide player base, there’s a lot of national equivalents of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission they’d potentially have to answer to, with different licensing and audit requirements and very different liability laws. Much easier just to be a game publisher.
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@TheGreatYak – This is absolutely about CCP covering their collective ass because they are moving most operations to London and in light of what happened with Valve and the CSGO skins gambling stuff and other potential real world regulatory issues. That it happens to change the in-game landscape is incidental.
@SynCaine – The problem is that real money to PLEX to ISK chain of events seems to cut too close, making it real world gambling. If you can buy into the gambling part without actually playing the game, it is going to be a problem somewhere. Of course, that brings up lock boxes and shit like that. We’ll see, but that is my gut, that they will err on the side of caution.
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But you can’t convert (legally) ISK to real money, so ultimately buying PLEX to gamble is still paying CCP to ‘play’ EVE. What you actually do in the game (so long as its within the game rules) shouldn’t matter.
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You know, for something so viciously derided by The Imperium, I don’t believe that I’ve ever seen a really good explanation of what makes Gambling ISK specifically bad, as opposed to Renting ISK or ratting ISK.
Anyway, I’m surprised that you’re in favour of less quality content, considering your opposition to EveNews24. Perhaps it was opposition to non-Imperium news, instead of low quality news?
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@Disgruntled – You know I used to be syndicated over at EN24, right? (Their old achieves got purged at some point, but you can find my posts at the Internet Archive.) And there is only one person who writes over there that I find universally trollish, and I occasionally troll him back. But I also link EN24 in my side bar and always link their posts in mine if they are related to the topic at hand. I make an effort not to act like the world is black and white. It doesn’t always work.
But I will give you what I think is the correct answer to your initial question, what is wrong with accumulating ISK in one way but not another.
For the other activities, renting, ratting, moon goo, PI, or what not, you actually have to be in game and playing the game with assets at risk. Right, I mean the whole Imperium got kicked out of its space, lost all its moons up there and so on and so forth. It clearly can happen.
The gambling sites, on the other hand, have no in-game risk whatsoever. You cannot invade their casino and take it from them. They get to influence the game, the market, whatever, without actually playing the game. That, to me, seems wrong.
And there is more nuance to all of this than my post allows. This was my gut reaction post, wherein a foe who financed a war against us got their comeuppance. Hard to not smug about that a bit. I did link out to others whose opinion did not line up with my own gut reaction, and I suspect I will have more to say on the subject once I think upon it.
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The gambling sites, on the other hand, have no in-game risk whatsoever. You cannot invade their casino and take it from them. They get to influence the game, the market, whatever, without actually playing the game. That, to me, seems wrong.
This is a dangerous precident. I can take pretty much what you have said here to directly apply to the donation streams that CODE receives. Does that also seem wrong to you? Do you that CCP should also intervene in any playstyle that receives “untouchable” benefit or assistance. Now we going into the “mercencary profession” of Eve.
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@Easy Esky – I am not familiar with how CODE is funded. Do they get ISK from an unassailable, out of game source? If so, then I would find that problematic as well. If they get their ISK from another entity with New Eden which you could attack, then I do not see a problem. I am not suggesting you cannot hire mercenaries.
And yes, I can see that PLEX immediately becomes a sticking point, since real world cash can be translated into a revenue source as well, but that is funding the game and isn’t going away. Plus there is a line somewhere between one person buying PLEX to get ISK and running a site where you manage to get other people to buy PLEX and slowly handing you the ISK.
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@syncaine
Valve doesn’t have a legal method for converting skins into RL cash either. The law doesn’t just forbid you from running gambling yourself it also requires that you take actions to prevent 3rd parties from doing the same using your servers as a middle man. Without that clause anyone could set up a legal service (of any kind, not just games) with the functionality for 3rd parties to set up illegal gambling cash outs and circumvent the law.
You’ll find that allowing your house for illegal card games gets you arrested just as quickly as running the game itself.
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@dsj: Isn’t the CS thing a bit different since the skin gambling had money directly involved? Or can you earn the ‘stuff’ to then go and gamble for the CS skins, with zero need to buy anything?
That to me is the key difference. In EVE, you could play at IWI without spending a single dime of real money. Going down the path of ‘no gambling of any kind, real money or not’ is a dangerous one, because if you go far enough, any game with a crit % chance might suddenly qualify as ‘gambling’. Is FF7 suddenly going to be banned because it also has a casino? Should FFXIV tomorrow delete their casino? I’m sure someone playing FFXIV has won money at that casino or some other gambling activity around the game and turned that into RMT.
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I’d have no problem with gambling run by CCP to fund ingame charities as long as they keep it casual. Putting all this power in the hands of players always end up badly, and I’m talking about RMT here. Somer Blink was doing it, IWI too, everyone knew it and CCP waited several months before doing anything.
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@Syncaine Any service that puts itself in a position as an intermediary to gambling is subject to regulation and jurisdiction from the authorities regardless of intent or design. As with most law enforcement efforts no one is going to spend significant amounts of time and money prosecuting every computer service provider that gets their game invaded by real money traders and occasionally gets linked to gambling. It actually doesn’t matter how many layers of intermediaries you go through either (online currency, real world tokens, or accounting entries). The legal requirements mean that when the state commission issues cease and desist you are going to either do it or fight the state Attorney General and all that goes along with that.
In the CSGO case we are talking about $7.4 Billion in bets each year. This kind of unregulated gambling is going to get the kind of attention that pulls in those running the actual gambling sites and those who are “merely” facilitating. Eve adds the international aspect to it and additionally they want to operate out of London at a time the UK is increasing their scrutiny (because of FIFA gambling). Now that the authorities see the amounts involved you can expect to see enforcement actions increase several times over.
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