Apparently after the alliance panel... the following video was recorded ..
In it he clearly admits to the following:
Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger
now he's dead
Mama... life had just begun,
But now I've gone and thrown it all away
It goes on from there..
The audio appears distorted, we have reason to believe that some of the following is Hilmar and DNS Black:
Mittani: I'm just a poor boy, nobody loves me
DNS Black:He's just a poor boy from a poor family,
DNS Black:Spare him his life from this monstrosity!
Mittani: Easy come, easy go, will you let me go
Hilmar: Bismilah! No, we will not let you go
DNS Black: (Let him go!)
Hilmar: Bismilah! We will not let you go
DNS Black: (Let him go!)
Hilmar: Bismilah! We will not let you go
Mittani: (Let me go)
Hilmar: Will not let you go
Mittani: (Let me go)
Hilmar: (Never) Never let you go
Hilmar: Never let you go
Mittani: (Let me go)
Hilmar: Ah No, no, no, no, no, no, no
Mittani: Oh mama mia, mama mia, mama mia, let me go
Mittani: Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me, for me,
Mittani: for meeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Personally my respect for him is much higher then before the entire incident started. He clearly has done exactly the right thing in response to his actions once he had read the transcript. CCP did exactly the right thing by banning him for 30 days and removing him from the CSM. I understand there are those who called for him to stay on, but it appears he made his decision and I actually applaud him for it. It was really the only action that was possible. His resignation from the chairmanship and removal from CSM 7 should end this story and put an end to the distraction it has caused from an incredible fan-fest and launch of DUST514.
He will be able to run in a future CSM and for once, I can say without reservation, that we will likely have my vote.
Edit: Just listened to the 'State of the Goonion' .... I take it all back. "We will test the waters by destroying Jita" ??? "Understand that I have been fucked" ??? What a self-important twit.
Edit2: WTF is all this crap about this being CCPs fault for not vetting the presentations ahead of time. Do people really want all player driven communication to be censored first! Let's face it, next years alliance panel will be lame. CCP gave us players a little bit of rope and we (or at least our alliance leaders) hung ourselves. It what world can we, the players, blame CCP.
Edit 3: Mittani seems to have calmed down and understands what is happening. Voices of the Void Interview. CCP had no choice. Tough but that is just the way that it is. And I agree with him that the media stories were so innacurate, however that is usually the story. Anytime you hear a story in the news and you know more about it then the reporter, the mistakes just make you cringe. Deal with it.
So the big take-away from fanfest has suddenly turned overnight from Dust514, ship re-balancing, cruicible, and now everything seems to be focused on a poor choice of words from the Leader of the Goonswarm Alliance/part-time CCP spokesperson/CSM Chairman for life/The Mittani/Mittens. I was there in the audience and in the context of the venue, the context of the discussion and the panel itself it didn't sound so bad. However, taken on it's own this is a huge PR disaster. This is what he said...
This is really bad. It is in clear violation of the CCP Terms of Service, and, much more importantly, in violation of the Laws of the United States if not Iceland. Encouraging a mob to get someone to kill themselves over a social network type situation (and that is what eve is) is not something that CCP or Sony wants to be associated with.
What are the implications?
Firstly for the Mittani who, once sober and reading the above quote realized his mistake it is pretty much the end of his EVE career. He has already gracefully apologized and given his ISK to the victim. He has declared that he will step down from the CSM after talking to them. No Rush Limbaugh here. I suspect there will be a permaban placed on his accounts from CCP in an effort to quell the PR disaster. I don't think that he will face prosecution in the US for his statements nor will he be disbarred, although both are certainly possibilities. It is possible his taking full responsibility and apologizing will reduce the impact but far from certain.
For CCP this is about the worst clusterfuck imaginable. When trying to launch a new product that will be free to download onto the PlayStation network, to suddenly be associated with a case of apparent cyber-bullying is not good. Sony may very well pull out. It depends on the amount of press this receives. Video games have a history of tension between role-playing violence and those who would like to prevent kids from playing violent games. As a result there is a surprising amount of resilience to gaming companies to controversy.
If Sony pulls CCP's chain then EVE has a problem. I would not be surprised if there was a patch preventing suicide ganking in the very near future. There will certainly be clear modifications to the Terms Of Service and EULA coming.
As a reference... here is the first 4 sections of the EVE Terms of Service:
From the terms of service:
1 You may not abuse, harass or threaten another player or authorized representative of CCP, including customer service personnel and volunteers. This includes, but is not limited to: petitioning with false information in an attempt to gain from it or have someone else suffer from it; sending excessive e-mails, EVE-mails or petitions; obstructing CCP Employees from doing their jobs; refusal to follow the instructions of a CCP Employee; or implying favoritism by a CCP Employee.
2 You may not use any abusive, defamatory, ethnically or racially offensive, harassing, harmful, hateful, obscene, offensive, sexually explicit, threatening or vulgar language. (Alternate spelling or partial masking of such words will be reprimanded in the same manner as the actual use of such words.)
3 You may not organize nor be a member of any corporation or group within EVE Online that is based on or advocates any anti-ethnic, anti-gay, anti-religious, racist, sexist or other hate-mongering philosophies
4 You may not use “role-playing” as an excuse to violate these rules. While EVE Online is a persistent world, fantasy role-playing game, the claim of role-playing is not an acceptable defense for anti-social behavior. Role-playing is encouraged, but not at the expense of other player. You may not create or participate in a corporation or group that habitually violates this policy.
TL;DR - EVE Fanfest + Mittani = Drama
Note: The target of the attack is alive and well and is still mining in space mostly oblivious to what is happening it seems.
So far it has been quite a fanfest. Most of the sessions have been quite good, or if not good, entertaining. As expected the alliance panel was a drunken fiasco. It started serious with eve university giving a powerpoint presentation, went to audio clips of people singing their national anthems for ransom, and ended as a mittani three way love-in between test, dns black and the mittani.
The dust514 keynote was a blast despite being an hour late due to technical issues. Orbital bombardment is good. They didn't show the opposite of ships on the ground returning fire but according to the round table that should be possible as well. It seems that they are going to start with making dust a factionwarfare tool to begin with and expand later to include 0.0.
Today's sessions were also good. Ship balancing and redesign is going to be huge. Basically there is no ship that is immune to the sweeping, and seemingly awesome changes. In short, ship tiers are going to be removed and replaced with a more role based outlook. Bonuses will align around what the ship is supposed to do, not arbitrary hodgepodge fits.
Other changes of interest are the apiece stuff for developers. Expect great new 3rd party tools coming soon.
Of course the big news for Agony is that the new producer, CCP unifex, is former agony, or at least a past student. Awesome!!!! Expect the future to be about spaceship explosions!!!
On a side note any inkling of pay-to-win is dead. Devs are publicly and privately tripping over themselves declaring that it is gone, gone, gone! This is good.
Just got into fanfest:). I got to say Iceland is really great. Everyone from the airport to the hotel to the restaurants to even the other tourists are very friendly. I am staying in hotel odinsve located in the center of reykjavik. About a 10minute walk down to the spectacular harpa convention center. The weather has been iffy.... Cold yesterday with a few snowflakes fluttering in the wind, however the sun did peak out on occasion which was nice. Today, the first day of fanfest, it started out raining. I, recovering from a night drinking with other agony members, staggered down to the site and got my tickets.
So what am I looking for from fanfest?
In general what I want to see is that CCP continues their push to get EVE to achieve its potential. There is a lot of talk about Dust514, and considering the number of press that have been invited, the launch is going to be a big deal. I just want to see that the flying spaceship part is not left in the dust.
View of the bay in the sunlight (mountains are about 1000m high)
Like every other aspiring EVE pvp'er I on occasion watch one of the awesome Garmon or kil2 or Kovorix or Prometheus Exenthal videos to see how it is supposed to be done. I am not bad at this game. I can fly around 0.0 or low-sec just like they do. I can warp to 0 at ease. Gate camps.... I see them all the time. Sometimes I even impress myself by cleverly landing in a belt just as the hauler warps off.
The difference is that, while I run away or die at the gate.... they seem to have a different outcome. Why is it that my armor repper seems to be completely overwhelmed by incomming damage, while they have to turn it off on occasion to fool the massive enemy fleet that they are taking on solo into thinking that he is close to going down? Why is it that I find myself webbed well out of range of a rapier, while they seem to effortlessly sling themselves right at it and land a scram?
Fortunately the answers to these questions is starting to become more apparent. While in the past most EVE videos were accelerated playbacks of good fight after good fight, we are starting to see a bunch of videos that pause the action and actually explain what the heck they were thinking and how they do it.
Let's go over some of the best....
First we have Kil2 and Kovorix's Bringing Solo back youtube channel. They have a bunch of great winning, and more usefull, loosing fights complete with commentary. Good stuff.
The other big one is the EVE is EASY site put up by AT IX winning Genos Occidere pilots Garmon, Duncan Tanner and Will Adama. Very detailed information complete with maps, a lot of pausing, and a lot of thought. I really like this site. My only complaint, if you could even call it that, is that since they pause the action so much you don't realize just how fast paced the engagements are. These pro's really can think through all the tactical scenarios faster than I can start powering back to the gate. Great stuff.
Also worth looking at, especially for beginners are the videos being put up by Agony Unleashed as supplimentals to the PVP BASIC instruction that they (and I as a member of AU) offer. The two videos so far, one on tracking and spirraling, the other on the all important directional scanner, are signs of good things to come. Great work!
So after spending a year wondering New Eden, I have returned to the only corp where I truly felt at home, Agony Unleashed. It has been an interesting year, I participated in 500 man Maelstrom fleets, asked for and received ransoms, failed at starting a noob corp (twice) and joined the carnage of Red vs Blue. But Agony is really where I belong. A null-sec corp that cares more about blowing stuff up then blowing up their ego. I seem to have joined at a good time too. Several old members are back. We live in Syndicate now, which, with Outbreak moving into our home system this past few days, should provide for much pew pew.
Just before I joined up Temprail (from Agony) completed a nice video called 'This is Syndicate'. Unlike the usual EVE video this one combines both great fights with an artistic eye. Well worth watching...
