Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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.