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EVE Devs Admit To Misconduct
RidinThoraxes writes "The Escapist has published a complete investigation of what they're calling Jumpgate. The ongoing scandal of dev-backed cheating in the game world is fully explored, complete with a confession from the offending developer, emails from their community managers, and an interview with the enterprising player who uncovered it all."
The Escapist has published a complete investigation of what they're calling Jumpgate.
With a name like that, it's got to be good.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I knew a couple MMOGS that would have gold being sold from every single server in masses no individual could achieve in month 2 of launch, lets say about 500 listings. Then I a lowly single server player tries to sell just a little bit of gold, but at a cheaper rate. Within 1 hour my listing is banned. How can mysterious Ebayer X sell nearly infinate money on both Anarchy Online AND Dark Age of Camelot, while anyone else who tries to sell even a small amount gets immediately banned. This was back in the day, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who saw it.
God spoke to me.
They already made a game out of it!
All I could think reading this article is I wish people devoted this kind of energy, passion, and dedication to their "Real Lives" (TM). The world would be a much better place...
I mean, these guys quote nuances in the rules (law), expect the developers (gov.) to abide by the law, and strive to make people accountable for their actions. The guy who did it actually took responsibility for what he did!
I am billdar, and I approve this message.
Sounds like they did what a lot of people thought might happen, and didn't really do anything.
Me and my alliance (SMASH) Alliance were in a war just before Kali came out. Kali would expand some of the world. We were holding the enterance to this area and while we were fighting this war we found out BoB (Band of Borhters) were funding our enimies...Man that just pisses me off knowing they have been getting help.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
That's cryptic as hell. Is he really saying that the Band of Brothers corporation has a position whose job description expressly called for the person to break Eve's rules? If that's the case, it would seem that the BoB corporation is due for some massive bans for intentional violation of the rules.
Either way, what is the relevance to a general discussion of developer misbehavior? I assume "account information" means username and passwords so the person can log in and confirm information. While against the rules, it's something anyone, developer or not, could do. Perhaps he means "by directly accessing Eve's databases," which suggests that BoB is deeply in bed with CCP.
I hope you will speak with your wallet if you actually care about these issues. Otherwise you're just another whiner.
this is what happens when the "community" for a game lives mostly on boards managed by the owners of that game, you end up with censorship and unfair bannings.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
This whole fiasco would have never happened if their method of introducing "epic" level equipment wasn't so horribly broken.
I'll give a basic summary:
Most weapons/equipment/ships in Eve are known as Tech 1 equipment. Tech 1 equipment require the material and Blueprints (sort of like recipes) to make them. Pretty much anyone can get into manufacturing Tech 1 equipment really easily. NPC's sell the blueprints at various stations, for relatively cheap prices.
The elite/uber items in the game are known as Tech 2 items. These ships/equipment are significantly more powerful than their Tech 1 counter parts. A cruiser with T1 equipment can't even be compared to a T2 cruiser with T2 equipment. Now since CCP wanted to keep the prices of these items really high, they decided to implement a lottery system. They made you go through some really complicated process of doing "research missions" (I still don't really know the specifics because people don't want to give away the secrets and lose chances of winning the lottery). Once you've done enough research missions you can put in your bid in for a very small chance of winning a T2 blueprint. Since very few people have these blueprints, you basically have a monopoly over the epic items if you win the blueprint, allowing you to charge friggin' rediculous prices when you sell the items on the market.
Now, all in all this isn't a horrible situation except when you get a powerful Alliance like BoB who have tons of manufactuers/industrialists and the money to back them up. They got in to the T2 market early and was able to by other T2 blueprints from non BOB players because they could offer healthy sums of cash without blinking and eye. Now add the fact that THERE ARE DEVELOPERS playing for BoB who were giving them T2 blueprints for free, the market became fubar'd, and one alliance dominates every fucking aspect of the game. Not cool.
CCP tried to fix things with invention, where you could upgrade T1 blueprints to T2. But it was an even more difficult process and the results was a temporary blue print that would go away after a few uses. It's nothing that could break up the monopoly.
Blizzard really got it right when they introduced "bind on equip" and "bind on pick-up" equipment. It prevented the hardcore players of hording all the "good" items and then selling them for unfair prices. If CCP introduced something similar with blueprints, I think the T2 market wouldn't have been so broken.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
Nobody got fired over some in-game hookups? I'm SHOCKED.
Honestly, unless you were in the top 1% of EVE players dealing with the Capitol Ships and such, this probably won't affect you.
While undoubtedly devs cheat in all sorts of MMOs, I'd initially hesitate in comparing EVE to any of those MMOs. EVE isn't a PvE game it's a PvP game, and that makes a huge difference in the significance of cheating. Since WoW is the popular game here at Slashdot, I'll use the following analogy to set up this difference:
The EVE universe is Azeroth, and the high-end zones and their dungeons are what would be 0.0(no security) space in EVE. One can't own a high-end zone in WoW under normal PvE rules, all land is open to all players. This is not the case in EVE, 0.0 is designed to be owned and consequently limited to certain parties; in effect you can have your own high-end zone with your own dungeons that no one else can run.
As for why this makes a difference in cheating, cheating in WoW would mean someone gets rich and gets some unbelievably good gear; it knocks you further down the list of cool people and makes the stuff you have worth less, but that's about it. The devs cheating in EVE however can result in one faction controlling more and more pieces of 0.0 space, and the losers from this get kicked out. Unlike the WoW player who can still continue going to high-end zones and running dungeons, the EVE player has lost actual game content, they can't go to the 0.0 space they once held, and the finite amount of 0.0 space in the game means it's unlikely they'll be able to take anyone else's either. Meanwhile the faction that just kicked them out is now even richer, and will go on to take over yet another piece of 0.0 space using their combination of legal and ill-gotten resources.
Cheating sucks for everyone(except the cheater) without a doubt. But this is to my knowledge the first example of significant cheating in an actual massive PvP MMO. It will set a precedent for everyone else, and the results of it will have put the EVE players through a lot more suckage than cheating in most other MMOs would.
Too bad for BoB - any honor they might have had, is gone now. Real BoB players (if there are any), should bail and join a real Corp/Alliance instead of the CCP Dev circle-jerk that is BoB.
(Sorry for the AC comment but I don't want my opinion to reflect on my former employer)
I have to say that I firmly believe that any dev caught tampering with their own game, no matter how small the indiscretion - as long as it is willful and intentional - should be immediately terminated. It's something every dev is tempted to do, but I think it's deeply wrong and hurts the credibility of the whole industry.
With the increasing monetization of MMOs, as well as the real life impact they have for many people, I think the MMO industry should self-regulate with as firm a hand as the gambling industry is supposedly known for. A developer handing out money or favors to his own accounts or friends is not very different from a blackjack dealer helping friends cheat at his table.
I'm sorry if I sound pitiless, but it really seems important to regard these things as important, if we want our customers to have any faith in the credibility of the game.
Read what the EVE players have to say about the cheating dev remaining an employee of CCP:
t20 and Hellmar speak on recent events
I forgot in my earlier comment/posting to explain why 6-12 months ago was a critical point in time.
- BoB, as mentioned, was two and a half areas in 0.0 space down in the south-west(the top , Querious - see the eve political map) was somewhat contested.
- The new big patch that was a year in the making came out. And it allowed two major changes.
1: Big ships. Before this, the biggest ship you could have was a Battleship. Big, nasty, but not really effective by itself because so many people had them. PvP was pretty well balanced. But they introduced Dreadnaughts and Freighters. These cost 10-20 times the cost of a battleship but allowed you to move cargo around in massive amounts and lay siege to stations.
2: They introduced player controlled and owned stations. Before this, there were often only 2-3 NPC stations in an entire area and that was it. Now, with player-owned stations, you effectively could claim an area for real - as if you really owned it. Of course, the dreadnaughts had the big weapons needed to take on these player built installations.
The jump BoB recieved was huge - it put them always a step or two ahead of everyone else. I really wish I had a map of the game a year ago - there were 5-6 groups in the areas BoB is currently expanding into down south. They had been fighting over the areas for two years, more or less. BoB comes in and in 5-6 months flattens everything. This clearly wasn't possible without DeV help, and we all knew it, but there wasn't any proof at the time.
- Then they released another patch this last fall - 5 months ago. This broke it entirely.
1:They intoduced motherships and carriers. These ships have the ability to do way more damage than anything before them in the right hands AND they can jump from any system to another, bypassing enemy lines. Want to get from the east of the map to the south? Done. What was risky and took time - now you can jump in an entire fleet behind enemy lines with little risk.
BoB, yet again, got a jump on the rest of us by a month or two and it went from 5-6 smaller groups fighting down south to... *BoB*. This combo of patches, knowing exactly what skills to train and have before the patch, plus early access to the ships - they steamrolled over a large section of EvE before we could really react.
In short, being beat to the punch tme after time because a group of players are in bed with the developers takes all the fun out of it - especially when you are *paying* for the privelege of getting beat so badly.
And CCP deletes posts like this routinely. They also delete in-game petitions routinely under the claim that they server got too full - so try submitting again(after the third time in a row - this gets very old)
My take on CCPs response is that they are flat out lying and will run the game like they want - Developers cheating and all. There's nothing illegal about what they are doing, afterall.
For all the insight and knowledge expressed in this discussion you'd think that the game devs were using taxpayer dollars to give themselves artificial game advantages.
Yes. I am saying that this is exactly what happens with taxpayer dollars in the Federal Government, the SEC, the stock market, the Federal Reserve, the state governments... And yet we can plainly see how those discussions go.
How can people be so thick-headed?
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
We do, but the Devs^H^H^H^H Supreme Court decided to give BoB^H^H^H Bush T2 BPOs^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H the election, and so we're in the situation we're in now, despite our best efforts. You'd be surprised how many protests aren't being televised, even in liberal places like San Francisco and Berkeley.
At least with Eve we can easily decide not to give them our money. Or our lives, for that matter.
Here's mine :-)
O DQ4NjE2/
http://ineve.net/skills/character.php?charID=NDA1
Note that I can check anyone in my Corp who also updates and that this is auto updated from EVEMon...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
There was one political party in one European country back in the 1930s that accused Jewish businessmen of being too cozy with God. "Chosen people" anyone? Do you not see where this will lead if left unchecked?
I read through most of that article, then suddenly realized I a) don't play EVE, b) don't know anyone who does, and c) don't really care too much. Why was I reading it? I don't know.
I am a WoW player (shocking...I know). But I tried EVE one summer with all my friends and started to kinda get into it. Well eventually just simply mining bored me and I went back to WoW, but my friends stayed. They CONSTANTLY bash on WoW, saying it's the "stupid-man's" game, and how intricate and complex EVE is. I wonder what they'll think of their "high-and-mighty" game when they realize the developers are nothing but cheating scum. When reading that article, and saw that they were going for a mothership, I knew something could not have been right. Other than the Titan-class ships, motherships are the most expensive ships in the game. And then to have all those BPO's. BPO's are EXTREMELY hard to find and worth ALOT of money (especially for those items). Someone needs to pod-kill that dev a few times. So what have we learned today? Play WoW
Actions have consequences. Looks as though it's time to eliminate BOB as a factor in the game. Grand Alliance of all their competitors anyone?
Why not hire the GHSC to take BoB down?
http://eve.klaki.net/heist/ (PC Gamer article scans)
I hope kugutsumen ( Anthony Zboralski ) gets prosecuted for hacking into servers over a computergame.
Want to talk about the topic on the forums? Censored! Fight back against BoB? 'Thats a nice looking territory you've got there... we'll take it. Literally.' Go to the developers (government)? Fool! They ARE BoB.
Even "pure capitalism" has safeguards against the extreme collection of power one corporation can have. Capitalism can bring down even the biggest corporations, governments can push back in extreme cases (usually militarily) and in the real world money/assets/munitions cannot be magically created at the whim of a CEO. What you see in EVE right now is a mega corporation (BoB) literally destroying its competition (territories that took years to establish are being swept away in months), the government (EVE developers) has put a gag law against the public (censored forums), is supplying the corporation with weapons (tier 2 weapon blueprints), technology (tier 2 ship blueprints) and information (information regarding where and when certain targets will spawn ahead of time) and the market is as free as a Guantánamo Bay prisoner right now (with overwhelming firepower, sooner or later you WILL get muscled out of the market.)
We're SUPER gods!
This is a perfect example of why I don't play games online anymore. Too many assholes and cheats.
If you look at the little corner that bob currently has, they have maintained their boarders almost entirely the same for two years. Never using their military might to expand and encroach into other peoples territories. Many people are very loud on the forums, the most rescent example was Acendant Frontier. They claimed their prowess above bob, and mocked bob. Bob, in return, marched into their space, and took everything they had until nothing was left, and gave it to some one else. Though admittidly its flagged as bob space, My assumption is that its only clerical.
Lets look back further, Goonswarm, not to long ago they proclaimed them selves the greatest power in all of eve, they even had the audicity to attack bob. Bob responded by taking everything from them that they could find, Goonswarm flamed the forums and smacked in chats so horridly that bob decreed that goon would never be allowed to hold space again. which they don't to this day....they help hold some one elses space. Once bob removed goon, they left the space to whom ever wanted it.
And now, The northern Coilltion, and the Red Alliance Coalition (roughly 70% of 0.0 combined) are going to war with bob. Bob's few friends numbering that can be counted on one hand, are putting in as much support as they can. The the war rages forward today. And as bob cuts peices out of all of its opponents and hands it to smaller alliances it friends get stronger and more numerous, whiles its enemies will struggle to survive the spring.
I honestly think that people hate bob for the simple fact that bob truely has figured out a self sustaining business model. Their prowess in pvp allows for their boarders to be very safe, which means that the people that rent outposts from them flourish, and I truely mean it. Flourish. Bob hands out space to small alliances and corporations that just want to get a good start. Bob even hands out, in certian circumstances, BPC packs (blue prints that have limited runs) to budding corporations in exchange for the products that come of those bpcs are sold inside bob space at empire prices. People in bob space make a killing out there. Its easy to get absolutely rich, just by paying bob a tiny sum in rent every month. All of those renters that are getting rich off of bob, are also inturn, making taking bob filthy rich too. How often do you see bob mining? Compair that to every other alliance in the game, which spends hours and hours and hours trying to keep their war machine running, while bob can keep their's running for eternity off the dividends of their prior work.
Another reason not to dable in this game. All this talk about this game makes me want to play it less and less. Don't get me wrong, what has happened is unfortunate. I would be shocked if this happened in any MMO game I play. But all the posts describing the game do not make it sound fun. Seems you need to invest insane amounts of time, and if you do you are invulnerable. And there seems to be no way for a player starting the game today to catch up.
MY OPINION: The article is so slanted its not even funny... What happen to proper journalism? The issue is that a dev was cheating, but the fact that CCP did what they did should be the focus, not everything else. Yea CCP should have said something months ago when they found out about T20, but they didn't and have ADMITTED to making a mistake about it... When was the last time you saw a MMO Company's CEO ADMIT to mucking things up? Overall CCP was far more open in this then all the other MMO companies would have been, and there is a very vocal minority of the forums that are blowing this way out of size. Its that group of the forums that are getting our of hand and think that they are being silenced and muffled and they need to strike back by giving CCP bad press... CCP did the best they could, and did better then any MMO company has in the past, and probably will in the future when dealing with these sorts of issues, and its about time people start respecting that. Just for everyone to know, Ive listed the facts below, to compare with the story and trolls account(s) of what happened. I care not about what alliance, or how the info came about, just what CCP did and how they reacted, as its them under fire here right? FACTS: CCP found out a Dev was cheating, They disciplined the Dev 8 months ago. They didn't inform the community ;(
CCP created the tools to monitor thier staff and hired someone to do that 40 hours a week. They are paying someone to just watch over the Devs to try and prevent this in the future...
The Community found out about this months later and wanted to know what happened, and if there was anything CCP missed.
CCP communicated with the community as best they could, and better then any other MMO company ever would have saying they would investigate and find any more details they could.
CCP found that the Dev had given illegal items to someone in game, that may have not been removed. CCP then removed illegal items.
CCP allowed discussion on the events, in the open, for everyone to talk about.
CCP then answered all the questions they could about it without infringing on anyones privacy.
CCP then decided to state there was no more need for discussion as they cant give any more details out.