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EVE Online Scandal Deliberate Frame-Job?
Last Friday, we discussed serious allegations leveled against CCP by players of the game. The comments on the discussion were lively, and pointed. Perhaps a bit too pointed, as CCP's internal affairs investigation claims that a plot to smear the company with false accusations over the long holiday weekend was behind the flurry of online activity. "The objective of this scheme was to permanently paint CCP as a biased and corrupt company that favors a select group of players over the rest of our community. In this particular case, instead of receiving notification of a possible problem and sufficient time to examine and address it, we faced a coordinated and hostile attack executed on our forums, Digg, Wikipedia, Slashdot, and other outlets at the beginning of a three-day weekend. We believe this speaks volumes of the intention of the person(s) responsible for orchestrating this scheme. Verification of this can be readily found on the forums of the people responsible--or at least could, the last time we looked." Scott Jennings over at Broken Toys points the finger at the Goon Fleet corporation, an organization based out of the Something Awful forums. As I noted in the original post, the evidence presented on both sides is challenging to verify independently. Take everything you read about these events with a grain of salt.
Regardless of wheter they have been wrongly accused this time or not, this isn't the first time by a long way that CCP have been in the headlines following accusals of corruption of the game.
Having seen both sides of these latest allegations I'm inclined to agree with CCP, it really doesn't look like they did anything wrong in these cases. Whether their actions were deliberatly taken out of context in these allegations or not I don't know, but many people felt this is exactly what would happen after the monumental mishandling of the first incident involving t20.
The damage done in that first scandal is going to take CCP a long time to fix and anything fishy between now and then is going to be portrayed in the wrong light by default.
However I have no doubt certain groups in the game have benefitted from having developers in their ranks. Not just BoB, though I'd suspect they've gained more than the average advantage over the years. I personally know a few people who are either good friends with developers or have access to certain databases internal to CCP's development and testing team. Although they're hesitant to share "inside information" I've learned a lot about the game from them that can't be found anywhere else. Put one of them in charge of an entire alliance and you can be sure they'd put that information to good use, gaining an unfair advantage for an entire group of players in the process.
These latest accusations may have been baseless, but there are still problems that need to be addressed. A major one is transparency. If CCP employees are going to be playing the game there can only be two policies; complete secrecy or complete transparency. They tried the former and failed, time for another approach.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
They spent pages debunking the part that every reasonable player knew to be false and then basically said what amounted to 'oh yea that wasn't true either' to the real allegations that actually concern people. Then they played the high horse victim card.
It is sad. Eve Online is a good game, with crap management.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
hobbesmaster, you've missed a bit.
I'm guessing you're a player. I'll assume that you've seen and can verify that the most recent developer blog is written to cover exactly three accusations -- it says so within the title. There are four acknowledged accusations overall:
1. A developer joined a player corporation for an unknown reason.
2. Roleplaying events were rigged.
3. An ISD volunteer was inappropriately fired.
4. Certain players are using private communication links to talk directly with developers.
Aren't these the issues? Don't you think that the fourth one will be covered in time?
I'm inclined to agree with you. I've been watching the latest scandal and CCP for the most part handled it well. Especially after the last SNAFU.
Personally I see it as the game maturing. Anyway remember Ultima Online from years ago? Various tales of GMs helping friends, looking after castles for famous baseball players and manufacturing gold faster then Rumpelstiltskin. They put in a lot of processes/systems to stop this.
CCP is just doing the same.
Btw, I believe any game where the players have interaction with GMs/dev team at any level will eventually call claims of favoritism/cheating. I recall stories like this from Asherons Call or City of Heroes. In those games the Dev/GMs vary become visible in the game.
Goon fleet members spammed the forums so much that CCP was forced to shut them down (I saw it happen; an entire front page worth of spam). And some people still thing its a CCP conspiracy?
Goonfleet members spammed forums after a single thread, asking for investigation of allegations was deleted by censors. The web site worked prefectly fine until CCP shut down the forums, because the censors couldn't delete fast enough the posts.
They actually tried this in the last scandal, which actually ended up having some truth behind the allegations, to solicit sympathy from the player community and, I guess, to mitigate the any harsh feelings directed at the devs and CCP in general. In an announcement that the company's investigation was complete, the game's community manager mentioned how the whistleblower who was responsible in large part for bringing the whole controversy to light outed the player character identities of a few developers. He stated that, as per company policy, these developers had those characters removed from the game, and, boo-hoo, were forced to end their long-standing relationships with friends and corp-mates in game.
I was flabbergasted by the ineptitude of their PR.
It didn't help that some of the specific allegations of wrongdoing that were made by the whistleblower went unaddressed until a later post, some of which turned out to be on the mark. One of the developers admitted to supplying items to his corp-mates using by abusing his dev tools. For the record, he wasn't fired (I don't recall what disciplinary action they took, if any, beyond removing his player characters and possibly compelling him to make a public apology.)
One thing that should have been made more clear in the open letter and all the posts was the fact that every reasonable method of trying to find answers was ignored/removed by CCP and the mods. The reasonable forum post was instantly deleted, petitions questioning the DS1 thing (which would have answered teh whole thing right away!) were deleted with no responses, and since only BoB have MSN access, there really wasn't much left.
CCP went out of their way to ignore the questions until they needed to be made public enough to not be ignored.
//FIXME: Bad
Having your developers actively play in a game where cheatng, lying, and spying are part of the game play is a first grade game developer mistake. Even in the old text based MUDs, this was known to be a Bad Idea.
I used to be a developer and admin on Nightmare LPMud. In the year or so before it finally died, it was a hugely bad atmosphere to play in. We had a new coder who dreamed up and implemented many cool features. She was, by far, the most active developer. She also had a couple of kids who played the game. Turned out they were pretty good and quickly got a reputation. She also played. Cue the inevitable accusations from players about her cheating, giving information and/or items to her kids, using admin information to help them out, etc.
I investigated. Didn't find anything...but it _is_ so easy for developers to cheat, who really knows. Anyway, I believed her.
Cue the endless complaints about the administration ignoring the situation, blah blah blah. And this for a free-to-play text based MUD. Add real money to the situation and you're gonna have the same type of complaints, except people are going to have real reasons to be angry: they are paying to play.
Its just a bad idea to let developers play the games they build if player versus player conflict, physical (playerkilling) or economic control, is part of the game. People are ALWAYS going to expect cheating. At least in the MUDs i've seen, cheating happens quite a bit. Its easy to do, its pretty easy to cover your tracks (hell, you designed and coded the system), and it really doesn't seem like you're hurting anyone. You can show off a bit to your friends, help them out a bit, etc. Its wrong, its a bad idea, and it leads to a lot of ugliness...but if the other players, the ones who aren't getting helped, are actually paying to play...then obviously you can make the argument that people ARE getting hurt.
Just a hugely bad idea.
As far as I know, T20 is a Sr developer that was part of the beginning team. He may have stock in the company and it may have been legally impossible to fire him.
Just a thought and not a defense. I love eve and play it quite a bit. The acts of T20 were unconscionable and should have been handled differently. "Those that were responsible for sacking the producers have been sacked" type thing.
Anyway end of my rant.
-Infodragon
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
Arrogance has nothing to do with it. With CCP holding all the keys, public outcry is the only alternative left. It just so happens that the Goonswarm is just really, really good at internet based public outcry. I would be willing to bet it was less than half of the goons that took part, so by blaming all of them - especially those like myself that just watched - you're severely over generalizing.
The leadership is not "the brain", they're just the crazies shouting "WITCH". You continue to think of the Goonswarm as one large coordinated entity. I already told you it's not. It's a big uncoordinated mob from my perspective (sorta on the inside - when I bother to pay attention). It's just that when somebody yells witch and 10% or more of it moves in one general direction it makes a big impact because it's 300 people. Yeah, 10% of the alliance is enough to get a a story on the front page of digg and slashdot. It's a pity we can't all pull in one direction all the time.
Question everything