Ask CCP About EVE Online

The week after next, the annual Game Developer's Conference is happening in San Francisco. I'll be there providing coverage on the keynotes, and some of the talks that I think will appeal to the Slashdot sensibility. I've also been digging to see if there's any folks willing to speak with the Slashdot community 'in person'. The fine folks at CCP, makers of the Massively Multiplayer game EVE Online, have kindly agreed to take some time out of their busy conference schedule to answer your questions. So, what do you want to know about the present and future of this fascinating MMOG? One question per comment, please. I'll present your questions to CCP, and pass their answer back once I'm home from the event. Update: 02/22 19:51 GMT by Z : I asked Sharon Howell, the PR rep for CCP, who I might be speaking with at GDC. Unfortunately, they're still nailing down schedules. We'll be talking with one of the following: Hilmar Veigar Petursson, Chief Executive Officer, Magnus Bergsson, Chief Marketing Officer, Nathan Richardsson, Senior Producer, Halldór Fannar Guðjónsson, Chief Technology Officer. One of these members of the top brass will be available to answer your questions.

Comments

real sense of loss

[Digitus1337]

If you lose a ship in EVE it's gone, no free respawn once you walk back to your body. Diablo 2 is the only other game that offered anything like this. Why haven't other games caught on?

Re:real sense of loss

[StewedSquirrel]

To be clear, you do not lose your character, nor any skills trained because of the "clone" system.

Even without a clone, you only lose 60% of your highest-level skill... which usually amounts to less than 3% of your total skill base.

The loss of a ship may be painful, but the "Insurance" system makes it so that you generally only lose 30% of the value of the ship and the "loot drop" system ensures that only about 60% of the modules on the ship are "lost".

In all, it's quite fair and makes it a non-trivial thing to lose a ship, but not devistating to your long-term gameplay.

This is perfect....

One of CCP's mottos is "there is no 'easy' button".

Stew

Re:real sense of loss

[Sobrique]

I like the fact that there's a 'real loss'. It means it's actually possible to defeat someone strategically. If a pirate's harassing your mining operations, kill him and he's lost his ship. He may have a spare, but there's not many who keep a larger number of spares with Tech 2 fittings.

This of course, becomes increasingly relevant in alliance warfare, or 'group' PvP - it's possible to 'win'. (and lose) which makes the PvP so much better.

Band of Developers?

[Notabadguy]

The recent scandal involving a CCP Developer(s) abusing game mechanics to benefit an in-game alliance shook the gaming community, not only because of its ramifications to the company itself, but because the "whistleblower" was banned for revealing a developer's in-game identity -- despite the fact that his identity was already selectively known to an in-game alliance. Many feel that the issue needs closure -- that scandal was quietly swept away, and that CCP's punitive measures were misdirected. What steps does CCP plan to take in the future to keep from discouraging players from revealing illegal activity by others, and does CCP intend to bring closure to the Eve community on this game-breaking issue?

Re:Band of Developers?

[Andy Dodd]

"However, what you say about CCP trying to cover up does not in any way correspond to what I've seen. Every single dev-blog the last month has mentioned this, they are trying to change some of the mechanics to prevent anything like this ever happening again, not to mention that they haven't deleted a single (coherent) post about this on THEIR OWN forums."

I can't believe how utterly inaccurate your statement is.

There have been a total of three dev blogs on the subject. One was t20's confession, one was Hellmar's post, one was from the new "internal affairs" guy.

Keep in mind that despite clear evidence of wrongdoing, t20 wasn't fired or even really punished for his actions.

Kugutsumen discovered quite a bit of evidence that t20 was not the only developer doing "shady" things in regards to BoD. CCP has not responded at all to this evidence other than deleting threads and banning users, including Kugutsumen. (Your claim that CCP has not deleted any posts is blatantly false - CCP was deleting threads and banning users right and left to try and cover things up.)

Re:Band of Developers?

[aafiske]

There were two dev posts, one from the CEO, one from the guilty party, on the issue. Another post was made about a new internal investigations team being formed.

The player who was banned was supposedly not banned for being a whistleblower, but for other infractions.

Posts addressing the issue:
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topi c&threadID=473335

New internal investigators:
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topi c&threadID=475706

Come clean and do the right thing..

[Taelron]

Will they ever give the game community a satisfactory resolution to the incident where their staff have cheated in the game? Any other game company would have fired those employees... Theirs kept their jobs and simply created new accounts, that with their developer access, can just quickly ramp back up... The way they treated the whistle blower was much harsher than those actually guilty of deceiving and betraying their player base. I know I will never purchase any additional services or titles from CCP as a result of this gaff.

Re:Come clean and do the right thing..

[Is0m0rph]

And please let us know if some or all of Eve Online's group will be cheating or not and which factions they will be cheating for so we can plan.

Game Developer should not be able to play your....

[Joe The Dragon]

Game Developer should not be able to play your game with out saying that they are one as they can easily work scrams , help people they know play for free, and so on. As in that game you can use in game money to pay for time card and you can also unofficially sell it for real money as well. If the IRS where to stat taxing people for they type of games I don't thing they would like people who run the game helping other covering up there taxable income.

CCCP

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia... wait, you said CCP. Never mind.

Satsisfying New and Old Customers

[hardburn]

As a community grows, it tends to attract more diverse viewpoints, not all of which are healthy for things such as game design. This can be seen on the Eve-O forums after nearly every dev blog about an upcoming change, the recent nano blog being a prime example. Almost immediately, you get a hundred posts of someone suggesting a completely contrary solution, and threaten to leave the game if their demands aren't made.

Over time, this tends to draw away some of the smarter members of the community to other boards, such as Scrapheap Challenge.

Given that no company in its right mind would ask to have fewer customers, how do you handle being able to keep new subscribers coming in while also keeping existing ones happy?

User limits per system?

[TwoStep]

It has become clear in the recent LV-Goon war that the servers are not capable of handling more than 300-400 players per system. What is CCP planning to do about this? No matter how many optimizations the server team makes, the users will always be able to gather enough people to overwhelm the server.

Employee Players

[Vrallis]

Given the recent events (mainly surrounding Band of Brothers) of employee misconduct, have you considered changing your privacy policies in cases where an employee is involved?

I understand the privacy policy concerning the average player, and not wanting to discuss GM actions. However, when it is an employee involved who has been found guilty, some things need to be aired out in public in order to instill confidence in CCP by your playerbase.

We aren't looking for their real names. We want to know:

1) What exactly was the offense?
2) How was the offense corrected? (ISK or items removed)
3) What characters were terminated as a result of the investigation?
4) Is the person still a CCP employee?

*avoided mentioning BoD even once!
**oops!

Re:Employee Players

[Vrallis]

I am aware of what was given out already on this particular incident. My comments were about incidents like this in general (a GM was caught recently with a faction ship loaded with officer's modules headed into his character's alliance territory).

Besides, in the BoD/T20 incident, there are apparently a number of BPOs unaccounted for still.

White Wolf

[flymolo]

What White Wolf IP will see electronic editions from CCP?

Many players dislike...

[arson51]

The fact that eve is so open ended that when the player considers his or her freedom for a few moments they realise that this game just like RL life has seemingly no purpose. Is there any content that would be added in the future that would appease players who want a traditional mmo experience (linear story, enless grinding and mind numbing repition)?

Do they plan to change EVE's beginning

[mmalove]

So in their most recent patch, CCP apparently altered the way character creation works to give starting players more skill points, enabling them to do more out of the starting gate. This is an interesting turn to me - as one of the things that drove me away from that game was the fact that I faced potentially months of basically waiting for skills to train before I could try my hand at flying a real ship - getting involved in meaningful pvp, and, well, participating in the game world at all really. What other steps does CCP plan to introduce new players to the game economics, without destroying the depth that is a main attraction of EVE?

Re:Do they plan to change EVE's beginning

[kindbud]

This is an interesting turn to me - as one of the things that drove me away from that game was the fact that I faced potentially months of basically waiting for skills to train before I could try my hand at flying a real ship...

You got bad advice. Many new players are told by older players to train the Learning skills up (which raise the character's attributes, and cause him to learn other skills faster - a lot faster) before starting on combat and ship skills. That's terrible advice. New players are not intended to sit in station for two months waiting for non-combat skills to train. You can train Frigate 5 and a small weapon to level 5 before the 14 day trial runs out, and Mechanic and Engineering to 5 before the 1st month subscription is done. You can do that with the attributes you got at character creation, no implants. Now you're in a Elite Frigate and can take on almost any agent mission, even some level 4 missions. You can kill belt rats in 0.0 space without breaking a sweat, although not as quickly as larger ships can. Still, that's some good cash for a 1 month player.

Maxing out Learning skills first is something older players do with their second character, their "alt." And yeah, it makes the alts skills train up a lot faster. But the older player can do this because his first character is financing the skillbooks for the second one, and he has a developed character to play already while the second one "cooks."

I really wish players would stop giving that advice.

Physics, the Legal System, and Geography

[amper]

I only recently heard about EVE Online, thanks to all the brouhaha that appeared here on Slashdot a few weeks ago. I downloaded the client and signed up for a trial account. After 14 days, I plunked down my credit card number for a full account. The game is very fun to play, but I have a few questions about certain decisions that the designers have made.

First of all, why is there no Mac OS X or Linux client? I despise having to use Windows for any reason at all. The only reason it's even installed on my Macs is because I'm a technology consultant and I have to deal with Windows professionally, but I'd really rather not have to.

The second thing I'd like to know is why the physics are all screwed up, specifically, why are ships limited to a particular velocity. This flies in the face of logic, and makes no sense whatsoever. Ships should be rated according to their acceleration characteristics. As an aside to this, the spaceship designers might want to study the concept of "moment of inertia" to see why it is highly unlikely that real spaceships would exhibit the highly asymmetrical designs that are so prevalent in EVE.

Thirdly, what's up with the seemingly bizarre layouts of the solar systems, as relates to the legal system? There are many pockets of high-sec regions and systems in EVE that are ony reachable through long strings of low-sec jumps. This really doesn't make a whole lot of sense, as in any real empire, if a particular part of said empire were similarly isolated, it would very quickly cease to be viable.

I play a character which is part of the Gallente Federation. I have noticed that many Federation stations are located in low-sec space. This also doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The construction of a station would require a massive investment, making it highly unlikely that any entity would choose to locate such an expensive piece of hardware in such a place, unless they felt they could defend that space easily, which almost by definition would make that space relatively high security.

I suppose that you could some up my questions here by saying that I'm really requesting that the game be made much more realistic than it is.

Re:Physics, the Legal System, and Geography

[LakeSolon]

First of all, why is there no Mac OS X or Linux client?

Short answer: Microsoft's DirectX. Slightly longer answer: this comment.

The second thing I'd like to know is why the physics are all screwed up

Simplicity. I couldn't tell you if it was simplicity for the purposes of the physics engine/network coherency or game balance that came first, but both contribute. Trying to balance the gameplay without an over-simplified speed model (I can't actually think of any games off the top of my head that respect real-universe physics in a space environment, though I imagine someone has tried it) would be excruciating if not impossible. Even in the simplified model there have been issues and several overhauls. Just the other day there was a dev blog that mentioned the issue of the "Nanophoon" (a particular ship+configuration that's hard to counter in PvP).

Thirdly, what's up with the seemingly bizarre layouts of the solar systems, as relates to the legal system?

You might be referring to something else, but my first guess is that you're trying to get from one empire's hub to that of another. There are barriers of low security between center of each of the Amarr, Caldari, Minmatar and Gallente empires. There are higher security paths available, but you'll likely end up going slightly out of your way. You can adjust your autpilot to prefer safer routes.

The construction of a station would require a massive investment, making it highly unlikely that any entity would choose to locate such an expensive piece of hardware in such a place, unless they felt they could defend that space easily, which almost by definition would make that space relatively high security.

Actually, there are many player-constructed stations in EVE these days. Every single one of them has been (and must be) placed in "zero security" space, purely controlled by players. You're right, they're not cheap.

I suppose that you could some up my questions here by saying that I'm really requesting that the game be made much more realistic than it is.

Warp Drives, Jump Drives, wormholes, tens of thousands of years in the future... but you want realism you say? =)

Re:Physics, the Legal System, and Geography

[levell]

> First of all, why is there no Mac OS X or Linux client?

Given that they have announced that they are working a linux client the question is: When when will it be ready? rather than why not make one.

(I can't wait personally!)

Alternate Clients

[Judeccan]

I would love to play your game again, especially after the last few expansions-- but I've abandoned Windows in the years since my old EVE account lapsed. Will we ever see a Mac client? Linux?

Roleplay

[John Nowak]

Eve markets itself as a MMORPG --A Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. However, in my brief experience with it, I could not find a single person engaging in roleplay beyond "Arr, surrender yer ship!". All channels of communication are filled with out of character conversation. For me at least, this makes it impossible to get truly immersed in the game, and hence I cancelled my account.

I'll admit I still find MUDs to be the best way to engage in decent roleplaying. My question is, what are your thoughts on roleplay in modern, graphical MMOGs, and is it possible to have RP on the level textual a MUD can offer?

PvE

[mikkelm]

My fiancée and I recently played through the 14 day trial, and at the end of it, we both agreed that if the PvE elements were more organised, we would probably have bought the game and kept playing.

My question is whether or not CCP has any plans on expanding the PvE mission system to allow gang missions where all party members can participate in the same mission, as long as they all have the required standing.

The game is brilliant and it has a lot of potential to us, but what's keeping us from playing it is that playing PvE together seems less co-operative and more like we're just lending eachother a helping hand, which isn't really what we look for in games.

Re:PvE

[ShOOf]

Your questions has been answered in the latest dev blog, short answer is yes they have some serious plans for PvE.

http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid =432

Stackless Python

[Hitokiri]

Over the years of development how well has Stackless Python scaled to your demands? Is it still a valuable tool or has it become a bottleneck? If you had to do it all over again would you still consider its use?

Re:Stackless Python

[rsmith-mac]

And the same question for MS SQL(the DB system they use for their backend).

Re:Stackless Python

[synx]

I wish I had modpoints - I am interested in this question as well.

Specifically, the rise of safer highly concurrent languages such as Erlang that provide a different concurrent approach, would you reconsider the use of stackless python if you were doing Eve all over again?

Re:OS X client

[LakeSolon]

While most of the high-level logic is written in Python there's still a great deal of C++ code, but the main issue is that it's written against Microsoft's DirectX.

Real advance in game mechanics

[hine_uk]

I play the game, I was an ardent FPS fan but a friend reccomended me to this game and I now play.

BUT

The inherent problem with MMORPG's is that they reward players for time spent in game rather than player skill. For instance, no matter how skilled a player, a 6 month player will always perish to a 4 year player. Are there any real idea's to create a level playing field and bring skill into the game rather than grind?

Re:Real advance in game mechanics

[scoser]

For instance, no matter how skilled a player, a 6 month player will always perish to a 4 year player.

This is actually wrong. Eve's skill system is set up on diminishing returns. For each of the 5 levels of a skill, the amount of time spent to train each level increases drastically. So while someone might have trained a skill to level 5 for 2% bonus at each level, a younger player might have trained it up to level 4 and only be 2% behind on the particular skill.

Ship fittings and player tactics also play a great deal into who wins a combat as well. Even if you're outskilled by an older player, get a friend or two to come and help you fight, and you will often have a great chance of overwhelming the older player and killing him, even if he's in a Battleship and the three of you are in Battlecruisers or Cruisers.

Re:Real advance in game mechanics

[kindbud]

For instance, no matter how skilled a player, a 6 month player will always perish to a 4 year player.

If you're talking about manufacturing, yes. If you're talking about mining, then yes. Those skills are character skills, and they act the same for all characters, and the only way to get better is to spend more time training the character skills.

But PvP, no way. There's plenty of opportunity for player tactics and yes, 6 month players can kill 4 year players in PvP, if the 6 month player knows what he is doing. And I guarantee you that gangs of 6 month players take down 4 year players all the time. There's a corporation dedicated to training players with new characters how to effectively PvP in small ships, called Agony Unleashed. Check it out. On weekends, they have wolfpacks of 30+ frigates roaming Placid and Syndicate.

Re:Real advance in game mechanics

[Llywelyn]

There's a corporation dedicated to training players with new characters how to effectively PvP in small ships, called Agony Unleashed.

The link for anyone who is interested in their classes ^_^

These days they work out of Pure Blind instead of Syndicate, but the class is the same.

Re:as good as WoW?

[Maserati]

I'll field this one. Each blade in the datacenter supports a few to a dozen or so solar systems. They're all linked so it's one seamless universe that is usally running 20-25,000 connected users.

Fleet actions with hundreds of ships fighting lag the hell out of whichever node they're running on. CCP says they're optimizing as fast as they can, but with each ship moving, launching missiles and drones and so on there's a staggering amount of data going back and forth in a large fight. The largest I've been in was a 40 v 50 action and that was pretty much a slideshow.

I'd love to see hard data on how they're progressing, but other than hardware upgrades and additions you really can't make a solid time estimate on optimizing existing code. They are trumpeting the new Need For Speed initiative in their dev blogs, I wish them all the luck - and to hurry the frack up.

Oh yeah, it's better than WoW. No "endgame" to finish, no raid loot grinding, nd PvP with consequences. Yeah, it's better.

Dev/GM Cheating

[joelleo]

Background: I've been playing eve since august of 2003 with two accounts

Currently: I've cancelled both accounts due to CCP's flaccid response to the dev/gm cheating scandal

Question: Why wasn't the scandal - discovered by CCP back in the middle of 2006 - publicized and the dev (t20) properly punished (fired, per CCP policy) at that time? Why, after the scandal was publicized 6 months later haven't you taken appropriate action per your own policies and yet stretched your policies to ban the person that publicized the events? Why haven't CCP publicized the full extent of the cheating and the damage caused to the rest of the eve public?

Most of the allegations were publicized via http://www.kugutsumen.com/forumdisplay.php?f=2 but suspicions have been rampant for ages.

The allegations were confirmed by one of the dev's involved, t20, in this post: http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid =424.

CCP's limp-wristed response is here: http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid =423

CCP

[brkello]

In a game like Eve, T2 BPOs can give an alliance a huge advantage since they are able to essentially print money. Since the GM scandal, the alliance BoB was able to take advantage of ill gotten T2 BPOs for many months allowing them to dominate the game. Why didn't you address the issue of the BPOs before the GM was outed? Why did you not fire the person responsible? How can you regain the trust of the community? Currently, it seems like you just delete posts and hope it goes away. But Eve has been permanently been tainted by one employees action. Are you going to take any steps in the future to further address this?

Also, it is clear Eve can not handle its current playerbase (gate queues, lag in large battles). Have you considered multiple servers to lighten the load?

They're still slap-fighting for the job.

[Rob T Firefly]

We'll be talking with one of the following: Hilmar Veigar Petursson, Chief Executive Officer, Magnus Bergsson, Chief Marketing Officer, Nathan Richardsson, Senior Producer, Halldór Fannar Guðjónsson, Chief Technology Officer. One of these members of the top brass will be available to answer your questions.

All through the hallways of CCP headquarters, you can still hear the plaintive cries of "You talk to the Slashdotters!" "No, you do it!" *

* translated from Icelandic crying

Re:They're still slap-fighting for the job.

[HalliS]

"ú talar við Slashdottarana!" "Nei, ú gerir að!"*

*translated back to Icelandic crying

EVE Online for a GNU/Linux and OS X platform?

[Gerbo]

Suggestion for a question:

Are there any plans to port EVE Online to the GNU/Linux or OS X platform?

Software

[zefrer]

My question is regarding the technical reasons of using Windows based servers to run the cluster that EVE runs on. Is that because you've tried Unix or Linux or BSD or what not and found it lacking, is the code base not easily portable to a different architecture or is there some other reason? It seems to me from a purely technical perspective that using windows to run such a large cluster is a waste of resources and a very expensive one at that.

Re:Game Developer should not be able to play your.

[elfurbe]

Oh my god get out.

I can work a scram myself. The skill training is pretty minor, so I'm not sure what your beef is. They're handy, cause it keeps the other ship from warping away while you kill it. But I think you mean scam, and frankly, scams are half the fun of Eve. I've been subject to a few, it's just part of the experience. As to the IRS angle, you can't really address a taxable income issue where the taxation would be on illegal funds, as CCP does NOT sanction selling time cards for real life currency except through their licensed dealers. If we're going to try to enforce that, I'd like to see all the illegal gambling income from last year reported as well. While we're at it, I'd like a unicorn and the power of flight.

Your only salient point is the concern of cheating. Fact is, game developers SHOULD play their games, they SHOULD participate in the community. As far as I'm concerned, a game developer can run an alliance or rule the known universe as long as CCP is ensuring the guy/gal isn't cheating. I want devs interested in the game, improving mechanics, finding problems, sitting through the system lag. I want them invested in the project. The problem is tracking their activity, and generally one of trust. If I'm CCP, I'd have clear policies denoting real-life consequences for employee in-game misconduct. A dev doing what this dev did has opened a Pandora's Box of paranoia and a chorus of players claiming every victory/loss is a result of developer intervention and player misconduct. If I found one of my devs cheating in-game, I'd can them outright. Their head would only marginally account for the potential damage to the community's trust and the changes in both meta-game and in-game politics and social order, not to mention the massive number of issues it creates for game masters and other devs who play fair and have fun.

Also, I just can't help myself:
-Spaces come after commas, not before as in "That grammar nazi is awesome, isn't he?"
-Without is one word as in "Without grammar nazis, the whole world would exist in chaos."
-"As in" in your context is a sentence continuance not a start, as in this usage right here.
-Time card requires an article to address it, as in "That grammar nazi has a time card."
-"can also" negates the need for "as well"
-Where denotes a place, were denotes a state of being, example: "Where is that grammar nazi? We were going to give him a hug for improving our writing by an order of magnitude!"
-Thing is not think
-There as in "He's over there with the grammar nazi.", They're as in "They're being grammar nazis.", Their as in "Their grammar nazi is the best grammar nazi in the whole world."

I don't claim writing perfection, but I do claim due diligence in ensuring I did my best. The parent does not demonstrate this effort. Shun the non believer!

Re:POS Warfare

[sorcerersystems]

Dear EVE Online

I thought your product, based on its name, was pr0n! I want my money back.

MASS Post deleting.

[Anonymous Coward]

As mentioned, CCP WAS _MASS_ deleting posts.

The ONLY reason they addressed the issue was that the community was posting and re-posting the deleted threads and posts faster than the mods could keep up. It was several days between the first posted evidence and when CCP finally said ANYTHING about the issue.

Re:as good as WoW?

[maestro156]

I recently participated in the single largest "battle" in the history of Eve.

A grand coalition of alliances gathered more than 1000 players to assault a single system, within which the Lotka Voltera alliance was defending a capital shipyard. That shipyard was in the process of building a Titan, the largest most expensive ship in the game, costing several times more than a player built outpost, and worth several thousand US dollars of minerals and components.

Lotka Volterra was defending with a fleet of more than 250 players, as well as several hundred drones, controlled by the players as separate entities. They had taken a defensive position around the one and only jumpgate leading into their system, and were awaiting our assault.

Unfortunately that's where the story gets dull. Upon jumping several hundred of our fleet into the beseiged system, the server node crashes. For the next several hours, the node crashes repeatedly, in spite of the services provided by one of CCP's server administrators in moving the system to one of their most powerful server nodes.

In the end, the battle was won through sheer stubbornness, when the coalition was willing to out-wait the Lotka volterra alliance. Eventually a few dozen ships were able to take control of the system for long enough to allow capital dreadnoughts to jump in and destroy the Titan in its construction bay.

So in closing, Eve has the largest PvP engagements of any game that I know of, but it still cannot actually _handle_ the scale of fight that the players are willing to engage in. I have been involved in non-lagged fleet activity with numbers of 100 on a side, but usually battles of that size are fairly laggy.

Why not ban SirMolle?

[X.25]

Why you ignore any questions in regards to banning SirMolle, for posting someone's real-life information on forums? Yet you decided to ban others who did the same?

Is it because he's the CEO of alliance that houses biggest number of CCP developers? Or he is also developer, and they don't need to follow rules that we mortals need to?

Thank you.

Why do you keep a cheater in-house?

[X.25]

Why is it that developer who has been found to abuse privileges can keep his job, while you permanently banned person who exposed the whole thing?

Trust via censorship?

[X.25]

How do you expect your customers to ever trust you again, when you continously censor most comments/criticism in relation to your actions?

Other means of CCP suppression

[StCredZero]

Eve Online devs and GMs also:

• Summarily "lock" forum threads they don't like. (Particularly ones mentioning corruption.)
• Orders players to stop trying to escalate a petition
• Threaten players trying to escalate a petition
• Ignore attempts to escalate a petition

If the 1st GM is corrupt, and players cannot escalate, then what recourse is there? What checks and balances are there? None. So it should be no surprise that there is widespread corruption in Eve Online.