Should MMOG 'Play' Be Confined?

Arti writes "Eve Online is famous for hosting the world's first virtual IPO, and also for its Byzantine 'meta game', in which players create fake characters and accounts to infiltrate each other's organisations for intelligence, theft or sabotage. More recently the game has seen the rise of Kugutsumen an intel blog whose creator has been accused of using real-world hacks to obtain secret information from other player forums and private messages. Some players are up in arms at the use of such out-of-game tactics. On the other hand, Kugutsumen claims these techniques have uncovered evidence of corruption. Quite aside from the legal ramifications of attacking other people's web forums, should game companies tolerate forms of 'play' that involve out of game illegality? Should they attempt to monitor and punish these kinds of activity using sanctions in-game, where the company writes the rules? This ties right back in to the discussion of Real Money Transfer we've been having over the past week. Where does the line between 'play' and 'cheating' lie?"

Comments

Our corporation's greatest enemy

[popo]

My Eve Corporation's greatest enemy is a player named "Achomemnon".

Currently he's in the trunk of my car.

What? Its all just part of the game people!

i don't see the dilemma

[User 956]

Quite aside from the legal ramifications of attacking other people's web forums, should game companies tolerate forms of 'play' that involve out of game illegality?

Is it not so simple as just saying that violation of state or federal law is also a violation of the TOS?

Of course

[haddieman]

...should game companies tolerate forms of 'play' that involve out of game illegality?

Of course they should. The entire point of games is to have fun, not break the law. Games should, IMHO, allow you to do things that you can't do in real life, not reward you for doing them in real life. If someone can't seperate a game from reality they shouldn't be allowed to play it. To put it another way, if you are so involved in a game that you are willing to break the law to gain an advantage then you are not responsible enough to be allowed to play that game.

Impossible

[RichPowers]

Devs will never, ever win against such spies. There's simply no way they can monitor all out-of-game communications.

An MMO is left with three options: promote this sort of activity because it further "involves" players in the game's happenings (this option is probably best for hardcore MMOs); take a neutral stance on the issue; design the game in such a way that out-of-game spying and intel-sharing is ineffective at changing the course of the game. This last option is the most difficult, of course, but it's the only way I can see of combating spies and saboteurs. Examples might include instanced gameplay elements that are impossible to predict or, in the case of a military game, an emphasis on small battles so that spies could never uncover a single masterstroke battle plan and spoil the fun.

One of the reasons that a warfare MMO/FPS/strategy game would be difficult to implement is because there's no way to secure all forms of communication. The game would not be fun if the enemy knew operational details because of a mole in command. This might very well be realistic, but try explaining that to all the players who just got owned upon launching their attack.

In PlanetSide, players would IM commanders in the opposing Empires and give them a heads up before we launched a huge raid. Even so, we would still have an advantage because it takes several minutes - if not an hour - for the other team to trickle to the battle.

In related news...

[PFI_Optix]

A player of the popular on-line game "EVE Online" was recently convicted of hacking several servers for information on his opponents. He was sentenced to 30 in jail and finded $50,000. Oh, and his EVE Online account was deleted, too.

What dumb questions

[brkello]

Seriously, how does a game company monitor sites external to themsleves? They can't, they won't, they don't. If people are getting their sites hacked, then you bring in law enforcement. Ultimately, it is just a game (and it is a pretty boring one...I know, I play it). Should Blizzard take my Epics if I am caught shoplifting the expansion pack?

The story may be interesting...but the questions being asked are not the right ones.

You're missing the whole story...

[Swift Kick]

I've been a regular EvE player for over a year now, and I've been following these discussions in the EvE-Online forums with some interest.
The character Kugutsumen is the head of an in-game intelligence-gathering organization that has been doing these types of things for some time now, involving multiple corporations and alliances, usually under contract from their enemies, other times for his own personal gain.
His methods (which include bribing, forum infiltration, TS/Vent spying, etc) have been used in the past by some of the largest alliances, specifically the (arguably) most powerful one in game, named Band of Brothers (BoB), yet no one has made as big a deal out of these events in the past as now, because of one major issue: developer involvement to tip the scales in the favor of specific in-game alliances.
To sum it up, Kugutsumen has posted a number of logs obtained from 'private' BoB forums which point to one or more developers being members of BoB, and providing intel regarding future game event locations, war target information, and most of all, giving Tech2 blueprints to corporations in BoB.

This is a big problem, because normally Tech2 blueprints are used to build 'rare/epic'-type weapons/ships/equipment, and can be highly profitable and provide a distinct advantage not only to those that possess them, but also to those who use said items.

These blueprints are handed out in a lottery fashion, where everyone can have a chance at owning one, but in this case, someone from CCP (the company that created EvE), possibly a developer or GM, has apparently given multiple blueprints to BoB, which is a enourmous slap in the face to the rest of the community which is constantly asking for the Tech2 blueprint distribution system to be balanced.

Some of the other logs also seem to point to high-ranking members of BoB giving access to special areas of their space to Ebay currency sellers in exchange for a cut of the profits, character accounts being traded or sold between members, and other things which are strictly forbidden by EvE's EULA.

This is why there is such a large reaction on the forums. BoB is trying very hard to throw off the focus of the discussion to the methods in which this information was obtained, because their very existence as an alliance is being put in jeopardy by the allegations that CCP's development or GM team members have engaged in actions that benefited them. This is not the first time that CCP staff have abused their status; last summer, a 'rookie' GM spawned a rare ship completely fitted with high-end rare items, which was blown up by 'accident' by a BoB-allied corporation member and some of its items looted. The GM was fired for this, but the story was never completely explained to the general community (CCP reserves the right to control how much information is disclosed about investigations such as these).

So there you have it. The most powerful alliance in EvE is accused of cheating with the help of CCP employees, and now the rest of the player-base wants to know what is going on. Only because Kugutsumen and a number of the SomethingAwful Goons made a number of posts in the EvE-Online forums did this become such a huge issue, forcing CCP to address it publicly (http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=top ic&threadID=468189) and now we're hoping that something will be done.

Re:You're missing the whole story...

[Anonymous Coward]

Copy/pasted from http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?th readid=2280238&perpage=40&pagenumber=11#post322155 112 because it was deleted from the Eve-O forums when someone reposted it there,

____

I no longer play Eve Online but I think some of you may find this interesting. In response to the BoB+Dev drama on the forums: I have been telling people there are high-up Polaris members, probably GMs, and possible Devs in the leadership of BoB for several years.
"Well yeah," you say, "so have tons of other people. What makes you so special?"

I was a forum moderator. Yep. I probably shouldn't say which one but I was. I also have many megabytes of IRC chatlogs from the private Polaris channels and thousands of emails sent to the moderator alias. Why am I mentioning this? There's something really really specific I want to address:

_______
quote:
Posted by: Eponine Astarte
Industrial Holdings Unlimited

I'm not bothered by there being devs in BoB. There should be devs involved in 0.0 politics, just as there should be devs who are high sec mission runners, low-sec pirates, and Jita industrialsits.

But here is what REALLY bothers me:

How did Dianbolic know that the person who petitioned Inos was an alt? The person who petitioned Inos did so anonymously because he feared that BoB would find out the identity of his main. The fact that a BoB director was able to identify who the alt was is pretty disturbing.

That, more than the mere existence of a BoB GM, shows how they are abusing their positions within CCP and using their jobs to gain an in-game advantage. Dianbolic should never have had any clue whatsoever as to who the petitioner was, yet lo and behold he did.
---------

I'll tell you exactly how he did this, because I did it once.

Petitions are tied to your account name. Normal forum moderators (like I was) can see your account name when we give you a warning on the forums. We cannot see what other characters are tied to that account name, but obviously it's pretty easy to identify an alt if you check the warning history on two different characters: not only will the warnings all be there (even though the names are blanked out for different characters) but their account name will be there if you try to send them an email.

There was once someone we suspected strongly as a traitor in an allied corporation. The enemy we'd been fighting was pretty well-informed as to our movements, and there was a certain character that always seemed to show up at the right time. So what did I do?

I looked up both characters on the forum. They were on a different account, sure, but the person behind them hadn't been real smart: one of the accounts simply had a "1" appended to the end of it. Nailed him.

We ended up luring his main character out and podding him in Yulai before booting him from the corp.

What I did was certainly an abuse of power, but trust me, it happens ALL the time. I had a friend in Aurora (the events program) who would feed me intel about where events would be and what they'd be like. I could just show up at the right time in the correct type of ship, participate, and snag the reward. I got a +4 implant that way before level 4 agents existed, much less loyalty points and rewards.

Everyone did this, and they've been doing it since the game came out. About 6 months into the game we were told not to use our Polaris character's /tr commands to scout the game for good mining spots. We still did it because nobody bothered to track us (even if they could--their tools were rudimentary at best back then).

In my IRC chat logs there is a good amount of circumstancial evidence of high-up Polaris members (people with more authority and rights than me) were in BoB (and others. I don't remember perfectly but I believe one of the ma

Re:You're missing the whole story...

[Swift Kick]

Hippo, glad to see you post here.

I'd say that a Malediction BPO and a Sabre BPO (in addition to several T2 Ammo BPOs) are anything but mediocre. Also, he had (according to the information obtained by Kugutsumen) at least 8 Tech2 BPOS. You and I both know that the chances of getting 1 BPO are very slim, but one single character presumably played by a dev having 8 of them is a little ridiculous. See it for yourself here:

http://www.kugutsumen.com/showthread.php?t=68

It's nice to see you try to downplay it, though. Old habits die hard, uh?

You also forget the other allegations of improper behavior by BoB members with some or full knowledge by CCP staff brought up by Kugutsumen, such as:

a) the sharing of player accounts capable of deploying cyno fields to allow 23/7 movement of BoB's capital fleet at a moment's notice;

b) 'renting out' one or more complexes in BoB's space to a known Ebay currency seller and his crew;

c) the purchase of character accounts from other players (namely DB Preacher).

This is all in Kugutsumen's posts in the forum linked above, with forum posts and PM logs (which in all honesty can be faked, but it'd require quite a bit of work).

Note that I never said that CCP employees should not play like anyone else; quite the contrary, I think that we absolutely need devs to be as active as possible to enable CCP to fix all the existing problems with EvE.
However, this particular situation (if ultimately proven truthful) illustrates an apparent lack of ethics by some of CCP's staff, and CCP's inability to control its own employees.

This is a very poor example for the regular EvE player, that spends his time grinding away missions or doing any number of tasks to try to achieve something, when ultimately he has no chance of accomplishing his goal because a character played by a CCP employee wanted to 'get in with the cool kids'.
What's the point of playing if you're gimped from the start?

Do you understand why so many are upset at these developments and how the possibility of this being true can be a major blow to CCP's credibility?

I play Eve-online

[jaylen]

...and I've been following the thread on the Eve-online forum avidly.

I've played Eve-online for over a year now, and as stated it is indeed the most brutal, darwinistic multi player game on the net that I know of; utterly unforgiving of mistakes and weakness ... which is why I like it; only the strong survive, and the 'weaker' (ie less dedicated/less interested or no interest in unconsentual PvP combat) are quickly winnowed out, or forced to remain within 'Empire space' bascially a sandbox which while a little safer is by no means 100% safe.

In a way, I'm glad the accusations have come to light - firstly, it took repeated forum spamming by 'Goon fleet' (an alliance/guild within the Eve universe) before the Devs within CCP (owners of Eve-online) finally made a statement regarding the issues; I gather the impression that had they had not repeatedly spammed the forums, the current investigation that is being carried out would not have been initiated.

Secondly, there have indeed been several instances as of late where certain players have known of information that could only have come from CCP employees.

The biggest issue at the end of the day is that CCP employees are also allowed to actually play the game itself, and as players are expected to give their loyalty to their corp/alliance, while simultaneously remaining true to CCP's doctrine and not give out any internal information that would aid player alliances/corps.

And that in a nutshell is what started this current uproar. The players are stating that each and every time a CCP employee logs on as a player, he or she has a clear conflict of loyalties, and they are asking for clarification from CCP regarding this.

In my opinion, the vast majority of CCP employees who play the Eve online game are honest and genuine. However, it only takes on single misguided Dev to leak information, and much is ruined, which seems to be the case here.

Having read Kugutsumen's blog, I cannot of course say that it is genuine. I can however say it is believable.

Hopefully in the future CCP Developers will no longer be allowed to maintain positions within PvP alliances, and the clear conflict of interest will be avoided; as to if that will actually happen however, remains to be seen.

Re:Evidence of corruption?

[cowscows]

Dev cheating can take forms that cannot be tracked by the game, and can mostly take place outside of the game itself. Having advanced knowledge of upcoming changes (new ship abilities, upcoming nerf of an expensive item, change in significant play mechanic) can allow one group to prepare ahead of time, and purposely benefit from these changes in a way that no one else could outside of luck.

In the EVE universe, there's a whole lot of alliance politics, it's as much a part of the game as blowing up spaceships is. Knowledge is more valuable than in-game currency, and there are lots of ways for knowledge to be shared without leaving any sort of trace within the game itself. The advantages might be subtle, but in a game as cut-throat as EVE, it's a big deal.