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CCP Speaks on Allegations of Misconduct in Eve
Arti writes "Last week the hacker spoke, raising questions for many about how game companies should deal with 'out of game' tactics. What about the game companies themselves? The man behind Kugutsumen.com alleged that CCP employees had been involved too intimately with the game's top alliance, Band of Brothers (who, ironically, have publicly described themselves as 'omnipotence itself'). These claims were made based on posts apparently hacked from the alliance's private forums. CCP promised to look into the allegations. Now they report in a post that many players say is inadequate and does nothing to address a crisis of confidence in CCP's oversight of its employees. Developers need to understand the games they make, and deserve to enjoy them, but how far? And what should a company do when an issue like this pits it against some of its own customers?" Blues News has an excellent summary of the thread's contents, distressing though they be.
Really. All games have 'out of game' issues.
But when you have the Dev's and other employees breaking the rules and cheating by using their special priviledges, well that is a whole different story. If you're paying RL money to play in Eve, I wouldn't be surprised if this constituted as fraud (IANAL).
CCP is at fault here (Big Time) for letting their Dev's and GM's play in the game as regular players and not making sure they didn't cheat. They're more at fault for not dealing with the cheating (by firing said Dev's and GM's) when the people paying to play the game complained.
Why people are playing Eve anymore now that this has been exposed is beyond me.
That's really all gaming is (and this probably applies to sport too). You create a simpler universe with problems to solve and challenges to face. The problems are designed to be entertaining, and you can derive a sense of satisfaction from it because many familiar rules from our own universe are programmed into the games. Online multiplayer adds human conflict as another source of entertainment. That's a big part of why it's so fun.
What people do in their leisure time usually doesn't detract from what they can accomplish in "serious time". Just because they enjoy stuff like this during their time off doesn't prevent them from working towards world peace at the U.N. from 9 to 5.
Even with it's many flaws, I like Eve. I keep hoping CCP does something about this soon (and not just the namby-pamby stuff they've talked about this so far - because I have a lot of friends on Eve, and I'm just getting to the point where having my smaller frigates blown up doesn't hurt so much.
For a game that's been hanging tough while others have fallen by the wayside, this news comes at a bad time. It's already a difficult game for new players to join - I really wouldn't have made it past the newbie stage if I didn't have a lot of advice from people I knew - and now the game makers themselves are found to be conspiring against other players?
I have been playing EVE for about a year and a half. I really like it. Sure it has some problems, but EVE is a different type of game then WOW and the other fantasy based MMO's. But some earlier comments are right about it being hard to play alone. The way the combat system is put together it's geared towards fleet warfare.
But also, I think the whole point of an MMO is to play with others, so even if I could play the game alone, it's being able to play with friends that makes it more interesting.
Apparently, the guy who blew the lid off this whole scandal just had all of his EVE accounts banned.
The dev lost a character that he had worked on for 3 years.
Boo-frickin'-hoo.
The devs signed up with a player alliance whose mission has been, for most of its existence and certainly more than the past eighteen months, centered on stomping the life out of other player alliances. There are some individual players in that alliance who are good guys -- heck, the overwhelming majority may be, I've never done a statistical analysis. But their alliance makes a point out of befriending and backstabbing other players, deriding them in game and out as worthless and weak, and generally lording their mastery of the game over everyone else.
The devs involved weren't just frontline grunts in this alliance: one of the dev characters was a director in one of the principal component corporations of the alliance, and another was in charge of their capital ship fleet. They turned over hugely-valuable money-generating resources to their mates; they had inside information on game mechanics and future development which, even if not shared explicitly with other players, noentheless informed their decisions as leaders in the alliance.
Basically, you had CCP employees, who were being paid out of the subscriptions of the entire EVE player community, taking actions that benefited one group of players over all the others. That's unacceptable.