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."

Comments

Re:If this was seen more in real life

[Lord Kestrel]

Well, the items involved and the isk (in game currency) they represent is worth tens of thousands of US dollars on ebay. The BPO bit is supposed to be a random lottery, spreading wealth out to different people. Instead, this one alliance got a number of them, allowing them to build ships and modules that have no rival. The alliance that has been implicated in all of this just recently finished conquering one of their neighbors, and controls 30-40% of space in the game. This makes all of their actions suspect, and makes it appear that the company running the game (CCP) wants this alliance to finish taking over the entire game.

Re:If this was seen more in real life

[WuphonsReach]

Here's the Current Political Map

Look at the area of control for "BOB" down in the lower-left. I wouldn't call it 30-40%. Not even of 0.0 space (which is the area outside of empire influence). Well, maybe 30% of empire space. The area they just conquered is the region in the lower-right (now colored blue).

They do control a sizeable junk of 0.0 space though. And most of the rest of the corps in 0.0 space consider them a threat.

Broken Aspect in Eve

[Cornflake917]

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.

Re:Broken Aspect in Eve

[ZorbaTHut]

If you're curious:

First, find a research agent in a corp you like. You can find lists of research agents, as well as what BPOs you're likely to get out of them, in various places (the one I use is locked behind a corporate login, but I'm sure they exist. This is data available freely, too - you could just download the Eve database packs and read it out of there yourself.) High-level agents are far better. Ideally, you want to find four or five L4 Q10-20 agents, all of which specialize in research types that you're interested in.

Next, grind faction with that corp. I recommend kill missions. You'll need to get your corp standing up to around 5, as I remember, and your corp/faction standing up to around 7. (These can be the same standing, of course.)

Meanwhile, you'll need to train the research skill you want. These invariably require Research V and some other tier 1 skill at V. Gallentean Starship Engineering, for example, also requires Mechanic V, while Laser Physics requires Engineering V. You'll probably want to train these skills up to 3 or 4, since they govern how many research points you get. On top of this you probably want Research Project Management at 3 or 4, which will also require Laboratory Operation V. So you're looking at maybe a month or two of training. The skills aren't trivial.

Once you've done all this, you can talk to a research agent (or 4 or 5, or even 6 if you took research project management to V for some reason) and tell them to start researching. From here, your job is essentially done. You'll get RP every day at a constant rate. There are daily "research missions" you can do - they're always courier missions - to double the RP you get that day. But there's no penalty for ignoring them, beyond not getting the RP.

If you're lucky enough to be picked in a BPO auction, the agent will send you a mail and hold the blueprint for a time period (I think it's two weeks.) You'll also lose all your RP on that agent - not that you'll care. Grab the BPO and profit . . . and remember to restart research with that agent, since it stops after you get a BPO. And if there's anything better than a T2 BPO, it's got to be two T2 BPOs.

Now you know everything about research.

Personally, I hate the idea of bind-on-equip and bind-on-pickup. I like how economic Eve is. There's undercutters, resellers, even price control cartels (ever wondered why Improved Cloaking Devices have been so expensive? All the BPO owners are in a cartel. Price seems to be dropping now though, I wonder if the cartel was broken.) Eve is a bitch of a game, but it's supposed to be, and that's why a lot of us play it.

There's nothing else in the world where you can destroy $4000 of someone else's property without their permission and then brag about it without having to worry about cops.

The Significance of Cheating in EVE

[rsmith-mac]

Since most people still don't know anything about how EVE works, I though I'd set up a little explanation on why the devs cheating in this game is so significant.

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.

Re:The Significance of Cheating in EVE

[Plekto]

http://www.eve-files.com/media/corp/CRII/Latest.jp g

rsmith-mac is 100% correct. Our entire alliance was kicked out of Stain - the area down south that is grey(it's BoBs - make no mistake about it now). So we went from owners of a small but great region to a bunch of smaller groups all mostly up in the northern areas - as far from BoB as we could manage.

Look at the map. The Blue and contested areas down south are BoB. The dark green Dusk and Dawn areas at the top are also BoB-or their alts and allies.

BoB a YEAR ago was Fountain(contested), Delve, and Period Basis. Now, it's uncontested, and is several areas larger. Three areas to Seven and three more by proxy up north.

The areas in the far east of the map - all *six* of them weren't there two months ago - so redraw the map withut those and it's an apalling amount of area. It's the area north of the big Red Alliance area with a few small colored blobs in it.

BoB is funding mercenaries and groups to keep the groups near it from getting access to it. ths would be Pure, Roadkill, Ratel, Smash, Curse, and Red Alliance. It's not likely to work, because we are all banding together on this, but the problem is that they have an insane amount of power, players, and blueprints.

Getting back to the debacle in Stain. Our alliance was at war with them and one of their allies in the area and doing pretty well. This was about the exact time these incidents happened, in fact.

- Dreadnaughts just came out - the big ships. These are "Tech 1" - which means that the plans aren't rare, but the money to make them is astounding. And they can be insured for 99.9% repayment if they get blown up(Tech 2 ships cannot).

We all started trying to get these ships, most of which required weeks to learn skills and get items built to make them. But BoB, surprize - they had the ships weeks before anyone else in the game. And proceeded to do huge damage to us. Eventually we just got ground under by their economic mmight - which it turns out was started and created three years ago by DevS cheating/aiding their friends.

It's the snowball effect - they were always a few weeks or months ahead of everyone else and guess what - that translates into a huge advantage three years alter that threatens to ruin the whole game.

P.S. 0.0 is effectively EvE because if you are in the center of the map, mining and gringing for a few pennies a day is all you can do. It's effectively the "newbie" area(s) on WoW and most MMORPG games.

Re:it's all in the name...

[merreborn]

The Escapist has published a complete investigation of what they're calling Jumpgate.

With a name like that, it's got to be good.

Not to be confused with the space-based MMO by the same name.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumpgate:_The_Reconst ruction_Initiative

rplayer reations to the news to not fire the dev

[Anonymous Coward]

Read what the EVE players have to say about the cheating dev remaining an employee of CCP:
t20 and Hellmar speak on recent events