I recently saw a Reddit post accusing me of trying to “scam” another player. Unsurprisingly, as is often the case when it comes to Carlos, a significant amount of the player base have just accepted this ugly claim without a single hint or proof, or critical thinking. After all, everyone knows that Carlos is bad. I dare to defy the blue donut. I dare to suggest that nullsec should be more accessible to smaller, independent alliances. I have consistently been a voice of support for the little guy, speaking against the stranglehold the big blocs have on nullsec. For this, they hate me. And that means accepting any claim made, no matter how obviously absurd or ridiculous the claim may be.

I write this blog for anyone who may be interested in hearing the facts. Perhaps your leadership has told you not to listen, or ignore me, but it cannot do you any harm to simply listen to a different point of view. And I offer only a respectful, fact-based explanation of events:

Yesterday, 31st January, I had agreed to sell another player a copy of the Horde forum archives and we agreed a price of 1b ISK to be paid. I scraped the forum in December, when it was clear that Horde would be disbanding and I didn’t want years of history to be lost. I had hoped to get a lot more than 1b initially. My original idea was to host it on a server and have it behind some kind of subscription based system where you would pay ISK for each page viewed. But that would involve a lot of technical set up and is a bit over my head, so I decided instead to just offer the complete archive for sale for a flat fee. There wasn’t as much demand as I had expected. This is probably because, as some people had already pointed out, Horde was always a completely open alliance, anyone could join, and so a lot of people may have their own archives, or simply had no interest. Eventually I heard that someone was wanting a copy because they had written some guides on the forum years ago, and wanted to see them again. I agreed to sell them a copy of the archive and we agreed upon a price of 1b. It was agreed they would pay before receiving the archive. But when it came time to pay, they sent 250m instead which is just 1/4 of the agreed upon amount. This by itself is not a problem. We have all typed in the wrong numbers when sending isk before, so I was expected another 750m would follow. But it did not. Instead, they demanded that I send the archive. At this point, it was clear they had not just made a mistake sending 250m. It was intentional. They knew the price was 1b but had chosen instead to send only a quarter of the asking price and were still demanding the archive in return. I refused, and kept their 250m. I did this because I had spent a lot of time trying to negotiate a sale of the archive recently, this player knew and agreed upon a price only to deliberately short change me. In consideration of all this, I decided the 250m would be a sort of “time wasting tax” on the player for their attempt at cheating me out of the agreed price.

Predictably, this player has now gone to Reddit claiming they were “scammed”. This is a classical tactic, where people invert the roles in a story, accusing the other person of what they themselves were doing. This player basically tried to scam me out of 750m, so they have gone off and concocted a story where I am the one scamming them. Now EVE has always had a bit of a reputation for deception and deceit. It is after all one of the few games where things like scamming and corp thefts are allowed and even encouraged. But it always amuses me just how casually people will distort the facts of a situation for their own agenda. In future, before blindly accepting outrageous claims about Carlos, or anyone else in TSOTH, perhaps listen to our side first?