A little slap on the wrist is what many see in a 7-day long ban recently handed out to a well known streamer. The temporary ban hit Loru for giving away an alliance tournament ship and other assets such as PLEX and SKINs to some of his “top donors”. With the two highest sums amounting to 3350 USD and 2500 USD, among many smaller donations.
People gave Loru money in exchange for the promise of receiving in-game assets, which they did. As per the End User License Agreement for EVE Online, this is an offence described as Real Money Trading (RMT):
More specifically, there is a dedicated Terms of Use section for content creators with a very clear part on giveaways:
These rules are the reason why most streamers do giveaways with very low barriers of entry. A common method is to have people type a keyword like !join or !raffle so a bot can add the user to a list. That list is then used in a randomized method, with an equal chance for each participant, to determine a winner. The only thing you need to participate is a free account to chat with.
But giving away in-game assets to the person who “donates” the most money could be very easily confused with an auction. Like on eBay.
Now why is buying PLEX, Skill Ponts, or SKINs from Fenris Creations not considered RMT? They effectively give you in-game assets for real money too. Well, that’s because they write the rules – and are the business keeping the lights on. The argument, that this is often bad for a games economy is a whole other debate.
Fact is: Rules were very publicly and undeniably broken by a streamer.
As you would expect, r/Eve lost no time to pick up the torches and sharpen the pitchforks. Reportedly, creaters currently part of the EVE Online Partner Programm asked for a statement on the matter from Fenris as well. After all, this case is rather relevant to their work.
What the broader community got was a statement made by FC Swift, see below:
The link mentioned in FC Swift’s reply leads to this post on reddit from the previous day:
The standard procedure when RMT was detected in the past, was to ban the account(s) found guilty of selling the assets permanently.
However, past figures accused of RMT were rarely such public ones. Naturally, people feel now like some must be more equal than others, getting a temporary ban instead of the expected permanent one.
Additionally, the assets acquired through RMT would be removed from the buyers account. As we can read from FC Swifts statement, this has happened here as well. Leaving the „top donors“ effectively empty handed.
Some quotes from the community:
In a way it’s the exact thing that every MMORPG company ever has stated as one of the reasons they forbid RMT: it puts players at risk of being the victim of a renegged/faulty/scam transaction that the gaming company has no means of assisting with, they can’t get you your money back.
u/Ohh_Yeah
7 days
u/RushlockTwitch
But hear me out. What if the 1 week ban is contrived?
Reddit feels like they accomplished something
Loru gets a week off to let the heat die down due to attention spans.
FCCP gets to maintain doing nothing about obvious RMT.
Everybody “wins”
Making a mistake is okay, that’s how we learn in EVE and life.
u/Spanky_Ikkala
Knowingly breaking the rules (when there’s very few of them to learn) multiple times when you have a position of ‘social responsibility’ where knowing the rules is an expected part of that responsibility, is not.
A Double-Edged Blade
Lets take a setp back and try to look at this whole drama from a Fenris Creations perspective.
I think you end up with a double-edged blade:
- One side is a, by pure numbers, rather successful content creator that potentially brings in new players to the game.
- The other is a content creator that alienates a significant part of the existing playerbase with drama and putting himself and the company developing the game into a (repeatedly) unfavourable position by association.
As I see it, Fenries has to answer the question if the caused reputational damage is worth the new blood that is coming in through Loru or not. They will have more data and insight on that matter than the community does.
Personally, I find the seeming inability of Loru to admit a mistake rather concerning. Instead of an apology, he is trying to frame it like Fenris “have shifted the goalposts” on him. Trying to paint oneself as a vicitm, not the offender who broke the rules, is one of the oldest tricks in a populists playbook.
The EULA and ToS for EVE Online are neither overly long nor complicated documents. If one intends to build a livelihood on the game which these rules regulate, one can be expected to have red and understood them.
On August 11th, Loru announced to take a break from making content „for a while“.
Bro got 5 stars and now he’s hiding from the heat.
u/Enodoro
I wonder how many times Fenris will tolerate Loru to produce more bad reputation among existing and potential future players. At least they seem to be aware of it, as they have opted to remove him from their Partner Programm a while ago. The reason being an incident, involving the questionalbe handling of rainbow-flag-reactions on Lorus discord server. While a no-politics approach is rather understandable, maybe it would be smarter to simply enforce it on the discord, and not constantly bring it up live on stream, and making it a big deal.
At what point is a drama-sturring content creator turning into a liability for a business? An intersting question.
the greybill 