Yea "The Grinch who Stole Christmas", that mean bastard who just can't let all the good children have their Christmas gifts.
Sure thing, how's that related to Project ION?
Well, as you know we have competitions here, and for X-Mas we have a special competition. People wanted it to be more fair and have more prizes for more people so the devs found a balance by putting out 5 prizes instead of the usual 3.
So far so good. As expected with total loot events the hardcore grinders with big guns have an advantage. Fair enough. If all the prizes went to 1st day newcomers, that wouldn't be fair either.
Anyway, where's the Crinch in all that?
See, once you have secured the 1st place with your main avatar, why stop there? If you have an alt, you can then take both 1st and 2nd place. There's no TOU, no rules that say you can't use alt accounts. It has been discussed many times but as devs correctly stated, it's no use to have rules if you can't enforce the anyway. And they are right, there's no way anyone can prove that this other account you're running on your 2nd PC is not used by you. Therefore, nobody can prove abc and RAJ are the same player althou every old player knows that. So much so that several people have left that soc for exactly that reason. Actually, my soc (Alpha) wouldn't even exist if that wasn't the case...
So here we are. There's no rules, so no rules are broken. The Crinch can take all the gifts to himself and then ask "What's wrong, why are you children not happy?"
Well, yes there's a grain of truth in this. There's many alt accounts in this game. For example, lot of oil is collected using alt accounts that are created specifically for camping the oil rig. So what's the difference? In principle it's all the same thing.
It's just that stealing gifts from under the Christmas tree takes it to a whole new level.
I hope the Crinch won't succeed in taking both 1st and 2nd place this event. There wouldn't be anything legally wrong in that, but peoples sense of fairness would get a serious hit. My best friend almost left the game once because of the shit like this. This time I might really lose him.
All things considered, wouldn't it be better to have at least a declarative TOU that you can't enforce?
Then at least the Crinch would stay on the oil rig and won't go stealing the X-mas from the good children? I hope?
Or maybe not? What you think?