Allegations of Dev Misconduct in EVE Online… Again
By Ron on Sunday, May 27th, 2007 at 9:15 AM PST In Computer, Game Companies, Game Platforms, Games
We’ve all heard past allegations of misconduct by EVE Online staff. Now, there’s an open letter to CCP that’s popped up on the net alleging dev misconduct. Not only is the letter out there, but it’s spawned a forum thread discussing the issues raised by the letter, and complaining about the censure placed on the issue by CCP.
Here’s an excerpt from the open letter:
Once again, it seems that several of your employees have been up to no good. We’ll get into the details a little later, but the highlights are quite juicy: CCP employees abusing their roles to join player corporations and give themselves director access, RP-events being rigged and what I really thought we were over, further fraternization between your employees and members of BoB and the subsequent cover-up. These latter two events actually stem from the same source, a former ISD member.
I don’t know how true the allegations are, but the actions of CCP thus far don’t seem to be what you’d hope for from your MMO company.
CCP sucks and anyone thinking of playing this game be warned. They screw you out of your 15 bucks and then chso they can spend their time blowing you up. Find another game if you want to have fun.
CCP are investigating the allegations thoroughly. The links below show you the updates so far. However, the allegations have been made by Goonswarm, who are not paragons of virtue. They are probably exaggerating or twisting the facts as they normally do.
http://myeve.eve-online.com/news.asp?a=single&nid=1466&tid=1
http://myeve.eve-online.com/news.asp?a=single&nid=1467&tid=1&sid=281497807
To be honest, this is the current state of affairs:
The leadership of one of the most powerful alliances in the game is openly admitting to bypassing the established “petition” system in favor of directly contacting the CCP Dev/GM teams via MSN.
In an almost 100% PVP oriented game, this has direct effect because your issues are dealt with faster than your competitors – sometimes days faster. I’ve had a petition open for a couple of weeks to get something resolved – the exact same kind of matter was handled for this alliance in just 40 seconds via MSN.
There are further allegations of CCP directly/indirectly giving this same alliance bugged high-end dungeons (complexes) that respawned hourly instead of at the same rate as everyone else’s.
To be honest, CCP Arkanon’s responses so far have been less than forthright, and CCP Kieron has openly invited people to leave Eve if they feel that CCP is not being transparent enough in its investigations.
Of course, previously, CCP openly admitted that their developers were spawning T2 BPO’s (perhaps $7500 USD worth, if sold for ISK, and ISK for GTC) for this same group of players that is now admitting (and flaunting) their MSN access to the Dev team.
The only (current) allegation that is “guaranteed” to be true is that a certain group of players have direct MSN access to the Dev team, and use these connections to bypass the petition system and obtain valuable in-game information (and in Eve, information *IS* power).
Excellent post EVE Player. It’s all right on the mark.
Oh, and you can add to your guaranteed list:
Devs in this single server MMO are allowed to play the game and join so-called Player Alliances and Corps (guilds). They also have close ties and friendships with the most successfull Alliance(BoB) whos members boast about having MSN Messenger acces to the Devs.
Not a level playing field, not even close.
It hurts me to say this, but Blizzard handles their Dev/GM -> player interaction about as good as it can be handled. Devs and GM’s do not play at work. Sure, a lot of them play on their time off, but they have no access to GM abilities or powers, and their accounts are closely monitored for any inappropriate behavior.
The fact that ANY player-run organization can have a ‘direct line’ to GM’s via MSN or any other communication method that is not available to all players sounds VERY bad to me, and would be reason enough not to try the game, although I was thinking about giving it a go.
Hopefully, CCP will come through with some better info on what’s going down, and maybe some new policies as well. However, from what I have seen on their site, it doesn’t look likely.