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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."
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.
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
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.
Not to be confused with the space-based MMO by the same name.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumpgate:_The_Recons
(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.
The corruption runs deep. There are more people involved.
The auditors are not as "independent" as you may think. It's the fox guarding the henhouse.
The resulting punishment is just to quiet down the community. There is no intent to punish the developerS responsible. t20 just offered himself up as a scapegoat to get a tongue lashing by the community.
The policy from upstairs is quelch the attention by continuing the deletion of posts and banning of accounts that bring the subject up.
When it blows over they are just going to market the game to boost the subscription base back up.
The problem is that nothing is going to happen internally to any of them so you can stop trying to whine about it. Friends stick together and they treat the community like a cash faucet not as people. They get something from the in game freebies they spawn. So you can continue playing in a game that is rigged with no real oversight or you can go and find someplace else to play and give your monthly checks to. But it really isn't going ot hurt their bottom line much if that is what you are expecting to do.
The way I see it you need to get this thing blogging and in the media. Get someone who has a decent viewerrship (penny-arcade.com) to write this up. Hit a few million readers. Fan the flames until it gets some mainstream press. Pitch it as a chink in the armor of virtual economies so it comes off the recent Second-Life media campaign that just went on. If enough activist comes out about little to no regulation or oversight of these virtual economies they become miniature fiefdoms where the citizenry as little to no chance of fairness.
Oh and I'm not not and insider or anything. I just stayed at a Holiday Inn once.