I just might have to hop into this. The last ARG I played was a decade ago, and few premises since then have excited me as much as this one.
Unlike a few other commenters, I'm not particularly worried about being a party to real-life crime. It's in keeping with both common sense and the watch-your-back nature of the spy game to perform a little due diligence on each mission. Plus there's a reasonable paper trail in the event of something going wrong (PayPal, HN account, captaincrunch's internal security measures?).
I'm definitely looking forward to seeing some interesting outcomes revolving around factions and the command chain. Whether trust is intentionally broken (i.e. by design of the mission coordinator) or whether mistrust arises spontaneously, there's great potential for each mission to be merely a pretense for gathering intel on your teammates or superiors... then using that knowledge to manipulate others to your ends. This may end up testing the game's operators more than the players in the end!
You're suggesting that a criminal would put valuable illegal merchandise in the hands of a stranger and trust that he'll carry out nefarious schemes for a reward valued less than a Foursquare badge? Interesting.
The paper trail doesn't help after the fact, naturally -- it's merely a passable indicator that I'm not secretly signing my life to the Mafia up front.
Well, I guess it depends on what you're transporting. Criminals would probably not use this to transport anything of value - the risk of loss is too great. But if instead of heroin, the box contained explosives wired to an alarm clock - the value of the container is now much cheaper.
Unlike a few other commenters, I'm not particularly worried about being a party to real-life crime. It's in keeping with both common sense and the watch-your-back nature of the spy game to perform a little due diligence on each mission. Plus there's a reasonable paper trail in the event of something going wrong (PayPal, HN account, captaincrunch's internal security measures?).
I'm definitely looking forward to seeing some interesting outcomes revolving around factions and the command chain. Whether trust is intentionally broken (i.e. by design of the mission coordinator) or whether mistrust arises spontaneously, there's great potential for each mission to be merely a pretense for gathering intel on your teammates or superiors... then using that knowledge to manipulate others to your ends. This may end up testing the game's operators more than the players in the end!