Hey, it’s a scandal du jour! Got sent the following two Eve-related links:
The Hax0rz (the “Reikoku” links are what are referred to below. The person who sent me this link gave me the dire warning: “Don’t register. Make sure your security’s up to date.” Apparently, the incriminating info was gathered from someone literally hax0ring guild message boards.)
The Devel0p3rz
Since I don’t play Eve I can’t comment much about the specifics (much of which is over my head anyway). And if there is some hanky panky going on with dev accounts giving access to blueprints (what seems to be the most toxic complaint), there would be quite enough logs to get someone very fired – which will happen away from the eyes of the public.
However, as someone who’s worked at a developer of PvP games, I can tell you there are three inerrant truths:
- The players will demand that you play your own game.
- The players will be incensed if they suspect you play your own game, because
- The players will be convinced that you are playing the other side.
These are all such accepted truisms, they’ve been relayed to me in person when I talk to players (the “in person” is what usually filters out most of the forum-ish gibberish). “Oh, we KNOW you all play X”. Which I then try to use my Thoughtful Reasoning skill and point out that (a) at a company of over 100 people, there is no monolithic “we all play this side”, and (b) this isn’t just a *game* to the developers, it’s a *career*. You don’t jerk around your career so your toon gets +4 to precasting. It breaks the self-interest test. This usually convinces whom I’m talking to. Sometimes it doesn’t. Because to the players, Occam’s Razor dictates that if there are stupid and clueless “adjustments” coming down that benefit one side unduly, well, there’s a reason for it!
But your players will always be convinced of those three truisms. Which, actually, is a good thing. The fallout is far worse when they figure out you quit playing your own game years ago.
{ 45 comments… read them below or add one }
I always knew you played friggin midgard you n00blet.
The Reikoku one…
whoah…
“You don’t jerk around your career so your toon gets +4 to precasting.”
Actually its not practical to assume this is true.
I’ve seen people take child porn into top secret areas just so they have something to look at while on duty as an example. Talk about jerking around one’s career (and life) just to get a woody. Why not similar for +4 precasting?
Game developers are humans and humans compete. To assume they all don’t because of some belief in their enlightnment above others is foolishness. From a player’s prospective to assume that other developers will act on those devs who do cross the line is similar to relying on cops to protect one from a bad cop. That’s why there are other watchdog units to investigate.
the allegations of dev collusion in corps like BOB and other in Eve are pretty old I thought. Funny thing about Eve is that it really is drama writ LARGE. Because CCP won’t differentiate between in-game play (and scams) and out-of-game playing on their forums, and maybe now 3rd party sites. There’s no real boundaries-of-play for them. And if you get taken or benefit from stuff on a forum, it’s all a part of playing. Makes me uncomfortable, but some people love it.
There are essentially two issues that people are up in arms over:
1) the t2 lottery issue. I think this is really about the *appearance* of impropriety. Eve’s system for crafting involves a “research lottery” that any player can particpate in. Research for a year or however long, and you have a small chance of winning a blueprint — typically, 12 to 24 are released for each “advanced” item, such as an advanced version of a particular ship or gun. The rewards from this can be stratospheric — winning the lottery isn’t like getting a purple drop in WoW, it’s like getting personal control over generating a particular purple item. Having a couple of the right blueprints (or managing to get all the blueprints for a particular item) can be enough of an edge to fund an alliance-wide war. I’ve heard of the blueprint original for a tech 2 1400mm artillery cannon, for example, selling for upwards of 30 billion isk (i.e, something upwards of two to four thousand dollars U.S. if you convert via ebay prices for isk).
So when evidence comes out that developers are winning the t2 lottery, and then giving their winnings to particular alliances, it just looks very very bad, for the same reason it would look bad if Bill Gate’s mom won the Microsoft Lottery, no matter how innocently she purchased her ticket.
When you add in the fact that Eve is a full-on pvp territorial conquest game (closer to shadowbane or old-era UO than anything else), and the fact that all of Eve takes place on one server, so these issues effect everyone who’s playing the game . . . it ain’t pretty.
2) the second issue is advance leaked knowledge of upcoming GM events. We actually know this has been an issue for a while — a different alliance won a Hel mothership (approx. value $25 billion isk) in an event that we got confirmation they got advance notice of (last we saw they still had the ship, too). So that’s been seen to happen, and those chats indicate it was happening with this alliance repeatedly and over a long period of time. Since they’ve won a bunch of stuff in GM events, it calls all those wins into question, which again ain’t pretty. Not the sort of thing that’s really provable at all outside direct confession, but it just looks bad.
Okay, a few things.
The hacker and the people who exposed the devs in BoB are one of their main in-ingame enemies, Goonfleet. Yes, THOSE goons.
Also, there is precisely zero credible evidence I’ve seen that the lottery is rigged. People have problems with math, and whine when they don’t allways win, and such. (And yes, some people really HAVE won 9 times. This isn’t that improbable when you run the math, and consider the “9 times winners” have 5+ accounts and often multiple characters per account getting research points, on multiple agents…).
Oh, and an Eve GM *was* caught buffing his play character a few months ago. He was fired on the spot. They *do* log everything.
As for leaking info to certain alliances, I broke that story back when they moved the blood raider stations. Nobody thought it a big deal at the time. Also, they changed the first PvP tourny rules midway through the first one in a way that favoured certain alliances. Again, nobody blinked.
I’m a member of Goonfleet and I used to be a director (I retired about six months ago because it’s too much work).
Goonfleet is IN NO WAY affilliated with the hacker in question. In fact, we’ve been targeted repeatedly by him over the past six months to the point where he got bored hacking us and went on to bob. He nearly drove our server admins to quit the game. He hacked our leadership’s game accounts, our private director forums, everything he’s done so far to BoB he did to us first and worse.
That said, when he came out with all this info, a lot of goonfleet members got their panties in a twist and started publicizing it. But goonfleet != kugutsumen and it’s simply false to state otherwise.
Damn, I wish EVE was as interesting to play as it is to read about.
I need to find a good EVE blog.
“Game developers are humans and humans compete. To assume they all don’t because of some belief in their enlightnment above others is foolishness.”
While I can only speak for myself – I’ll say that I don’t care enough to buff my own character for personal games. Why would I even bother? When you work on a game all day long, it’s not hard to see the game as just a game, and not see your character(s) as OMG THE MOST IMPORTANT THING EVER the way many players do.
To be honest, I think I risk overbalancing characters I -don’t- play more than ones I do, because I have less personal experience as to what they’re capable of (and am then more easily swayed by the ‘omg we suck, buff us’ whines from other players. If I get that for classes I play, I can just tell them to lrn2play instead.)
lot of saints here replying, goddamn bonified saints.I feel the light about to smote me.
Can I have your stuff?
Is this the right thread?
Calenth, the hacker is a goon. Remedial knew all about what he was doing. Just because Remedial finally paid him off and specified BoB dosn’t mean..
(The Eve goons REALLY need to purge “inactive” forum accounts, btw
)
Andrew, the hacker bought about sixty SA forum accounts explicitly to break into Goonfleet. He did that last november and it’s a matter of open record — search “anthonyz” in the SA games forum archives.
So, yes, he’s a “goon” in the sense that he has an SA membership, but that’s it. The reason he came to SA was because he was messing with Goonfleet in-game and wanted to get alts into Goonfleet.
addenda:
originally he was a member of SNIGG, I think. I will admit that his current anti-bob antics are getting a lot of goons “on his side,” at least for now, and a lot of individual goons are supporting what he’s doing (not a good idea, really) but he’s not a goonfleet member (insofar as we’re able to prevent him from being one, anyway) and we don’t have any role in “pushing” him towards this current endeavor. We’re just publicizing it, which isn’t the same thing.
No, his first account was in an older Goon corp. He got kicked early on for badmouthing Remedial. The SNIGG account was his second.
And the Goons publicised it on the forums. When it comes to that sort of data sharing, I fully believe in collective responsability. Anyone who disagrees with it should be out of Goonfleet by now.
Oh, he’s an EveGoon? The Evegoons.com site is completely unaffilliated with Goonfleet; in fact, there’s a fair bit of hostility. If you’re getting your information from Evegoons, take it all with a LARGE grain of salt.
As to publicizing it on the forums, I don’t see any problem with that. Once the story was public knowledge it needed a better developer response than “thread locked.”
Read it. Skimmed it rather.
What a bunch of crap. Old news.
That some people in BoB worked for CCP. Lots of people knew. I did. That they’d try and get a friend hired? The gaming industry works in good part according to who you know. Really can’t get excited.
That a character donated BPO’s to RKK? Well, he wasn’t the only one. This would only be an issue if they were not legitimate. No evidence they are not.
That BoB, like many corps, got told out of game about an event? That the directors had a slapfest over it? (And yes, dmZ *is* emo)
RMT? Oh get over it. Never seen a corp or alliance where it DIDN’T happen. (No, neo-prohibition dosn’t work). My personal stance is I don’t in Eve, but I won’t condem people for it either.
Speaking as a guy who has godlike powers in a casual, pirate-themed puzzle MMOG (heh), I’d say that the primary reason that I have never snuck my civilian alt characters currency or other such bonuses is because it would bloody well ruin the game for me. Being able to summon any item in the game from thin air on a customer support character already dilutes the value of achievement to me enough without also removing the personal time investment of earning that stuff on an alternate toon from the equation. Heh.
In addition, one of the main reasons I still tool around in the game on a regular character is to see if broad assumptions we generally make about the gameplay hold after new releases and the like (i.e., can the average player make about 1,000 Pieces of Eight an hour?). Were I to load this ‘experimental’ character down with phat loot, I’d damn well invalidate the whole process; in that case, I might as well have simulated an hour of gameplay on an isolated development server populated only by myself and several hand puppets.
But yes, I’m sure there’s probably GMs out there who backslide and give their civ characters bonuses and the like, just like there are supermarket cashiers who sneak money from the till and wage slaves who steal office supplies. The trick is to monitor for that type of deviance and take a zero-tolerance policy on it. If you’re open and honest about that sort of thing to your playerbase, most of them will understand… Except, of course, for that small paranoid percentile that will always assume that you’re out to screw them over. Heh.
its funny this is turning into to a typical forum “Is so”"is not” ” was too” was not !”
Goons and bobs….who really cares ? I mean fall down,boohoo and gives a damn ? Its more of the players taking the game WAY to far..and im sure the people running the game just LOVE it.It is SAD i tell you,SAD !
Oceanmasters suck btw ~:)
It is sad that someone would pull such a dishonorable action as trying to ‘out’ an honest dev type. Devs that play 0.0 are infinitely more useful than carebear devs that sit around in empire all day farming missions.
Andy Crystall wrote:
>That BoB, like many corps, got told out of game about an event? That the directors had a slapfest over it? (And yes, dmZ *is* emo)
Holy crap, Emo Phillips was in Run DMC?
“Holy crap, Emo Phillips was in Run DMC?”
That’s a hard picture to deal with this early in the morning.
Andrew Crystall said a pile of nonsense including:
“The hacker and the people who exposed the devs in BoB are one of their main in-ingame enemies, Goonfleet.”
Nonsense. Kugutsumen isn’t a Goon. He is a crazy Frenchman living in Jakarta, and his contact with Goonfleet seems (I am not a Goon) to have been limited to hacking their boards on a virtually permanent basis. He has now decided that BoB is a more profitable target (he makes ISK off his profits).
And the alleged Eve dev was good enough as to post his main and alt builds in one of the hacked messages, revealing that it wasutterly impossible for him even to do tech2 research (he had less than 325,000 skill points in non-combat skills, where he would have needed about twice that to even get a trickle of Research Points), let alone win the lottery over half a dozen times with a series of very desirable BPOs. Heh… maybe he RMTed a few billion ISK and bought them.
Ah, I wondered when another goon would show up. Kugutsumen IS a SA goon. And the Eve dev posted about ONE of his accounts, sure. I happen to know who his other accounts are. Am I saying? Like heck. (Yes, I was in BoB. This was some time ago. Do I get on with BoB now? Heck no. Drama queens their directors, all of em. There is plenty of stuff you can focus on about what BoB’s ACTUALLY done without making stuff up)
Also, to do research you need science 5 and another skill, some of which are combat-related, plus the specality skill at 1. So no, you don’t need a minimum of 650K to do T2 research, it’s more like 275K.
And yes, *gasp*, a trader and manufactuter can make lots of ISK and buy BPO’s. Yvonne Pyros, for example. Never won the lottery, 30+ T2 BPO’s. Day 1 character who figured out some early stuff like the Venal plutonium run.
There are other things to Eve than tinfoil hats.
Is it possible that EVE is an extra-special case for the stated rules, because of their uncommonly vast means to puppet-string the whole game economy in a way that most MMOG makers are unable, unwilling or without the imagination to do, and the players damned well know it?
Just curious but what is the typical policy developers have for thier employees playing their own game? Are their any restrictions on what kind of level of leadership you can take in guilds/outfits/corps/etc (i.e. you can be a guild leader if the guild has less than 10 people)? I imagine most places have policy of “don’t tell anyone you’re a dev”.
Most developers have what’s called an Acceptable Use Policy, which details what actions you can do in a game. Generally you cannot reveal that you work for the developer, reveal any in-game knowledge that the players have not already discovered, etc.
On the hax0ring: he mentions in this post that he’s using “donated SQL dumps.”
Damn! Where’s the fucking popcorn my soaps are on!
Now Playing :
Eve of our Lives.
From player run shards to full blown multi-million dollar projects, what Scott pointed out in this post remains the same.
And the more PvP that goes on in your game, the more they’ll shove it in your face.
As I said on MMORPG.com some time ago, “you can get the developers out of the greyshard, but you can’t get the greyshard out of the developers.”
Back in the days of MUDs, developer intervention was commonplace. Of course, since chances were participation in the MUD was free in terms of fees, you could just leave if the devs played favorites. On the greyshards (pirate servers), this sort of stuff goes on all the time, and if you don’t like it, you can leave just as soon as you arrive. It isn’t like you are paying to play, after all.
Money changes some things. It changes what the player expects from the game company, and changes what is “appropriate,” or “inappropriate” for developers to do.
I don’t think there is anyone who disagrees with you Lum, when doing this sort of thing in the open, “breaks the self-interest test.”
Then again, why choose? There is no need for devs to watchdog this thing among themselves, because nobody is stupid enough to talk about this thing in the open when it goes on. Who is going to know, outside of some hacker nobody has any reason to believe anyway?
Which leads me to believe that developers aren’t as concerned with taking steps to end this sort of “wink/nudge” system between guilds and devs, as much as they are concerned with keeping it hush, covering it up, and doing damage control when something like this happens. That way, devs can keep their jobs [i]and[/i] keep the +4 precasting.
EVE makes me LOL.
There’s really nothing laugh out loud funny about EVE. Its a well designed game, with a devoted, though smallish (though doing better than DAoC these days, from the looks of it) playerbase.
The item that’s pretty indefensiable is that BoB had Devs in it, and BoB knew it. One of them was even the BoB Captail Ship Fleet Commander. The Dev’s do need to be in the player alliences to see how BlOB combat works etc from a players point of view, but I don’t think they need to be a Fleet Commander to obseve how a fleet works, or let any players know the’re a Dev (though for EvE they can’t really mention they live in Iceland either). And there’s so few tech 2 items won in a random lottery, there’s not much reason why a Dev needs to particpate either.
I can’t agree, entirely. The guild leadership game is an experience unto itself, and really one of the most vital from the perspective of the health of a guild-based PvP game. I don’t think I could have understood SB as well if I hadn’t had low level officer experience. Maybe a dev shouldn’t take the top spot, but they definitely need to have some experience with guild leadership.
Although how they would have time to do that and their job is hard for me to fathom.
Comstar, re-read the emails. Only 1 people in BoB knew about the cap ship commander , and that’s because he’s also a RL game dev (lead designer, Rockstar North to be precise).
The other incident with the emails…they are RL friends. So yes, he knew his RL friend was working for CCP. Again, can’t get excited.
Also, if you want to bias the lottery then you are just validating the bias calls. It MUST be random – and BPO’s ain’t that rare.
Also Eve has a lot of Icelandic players, soo
Amusing..he’s made it so you have to register. So not.
Even presuming there was no explicit misconduct and the developer’s character obtained the t2 bpos legally within the confines of the game, there are a host of ensuing issues.
Primarily among those issues is the issue of conflict of interest. No company in the world that runs a real-world-dollar lottery lets employees participate in said lottery. Yet here we have an employee of CCP winning a lottery for items that have a real-world dollar value in the thousands and possibly tens of thousands. The very participation in the lottery, by itself, represents an impermissible ethical conflict.
So saying “he could’ve gotten them legally” misses the point. Either way, he failed to adhere to necessary ethical standards merely by participating in the lottery at all.
So they should what… bias the lottery? That’s the very thing that they’ve been accused of in other ways. ANY bias is wrong. Or, what, artifically limit the participation of the devs in an area of the game?
How the HECK do you think they can judge subjective complaints about the lottery without participating in it? (And frankly, it’s fine and allways has been).
If you have proof of a CCP employee engaging in RMT…present it. Because there is no such evidence, frankly, and you’re whistling in the wind. The concern about lotteries is because of real-world gain, and trying to translate it into untaxable (currently) virtual-world only transactions does not hold water.
Goon, go home. Moral relativism is a specality – every last member should of been banned allready for the cache hack. Then again, consorting with hackers seems to be another speciality of yours.
Lecture others on ethics when your hand are not dripping blood. Even if you had a point, which you do not.
Oh quit your whining, Crystall. I like how you keep trying to somehow make rampant GM & developer corruption in BoB a Goonfleet issue.
If “people who run lotteries, for assets worth tens of thousands of dollars, shouldn’t compete in and win those lotteries” is too difficult a concept for you to grasp, there’s not much point in arguing with you further.
The hacker is a goon. The people who brought it to public attention are goons. Goonfleet exploited.
I’m not whining. Goons are, plain and simple, bad for a MMO.
If “the reason they may not participate are legal” is too complex for you, and you can’t ebven be bothered to read reasoning (including that you’d create the very situation you decry of lottery bias by biasing it against the devs – unless you also want to argue that they shouldn’t do invention, which has NOTHING to do with the lottery, frex….)
But I know complex reasoning is typically beyond goons, shrug (Why do I hate goons? It’s called experience of dealing with them).
The hacker wasnt a goon, the hacker had hacked goon forums several times previously and had/has absolutely zero connection with the goons.
If you still insist on thinking differently, feel free to post some evidence instead of spouting off crap.
About the t2 bpo… Well he made public that he cheated about the bpos. He spawned/or manipulated the lottery to get 10 t2 bpos >
Don’t bother acknowledging others’ points even enough to present refuting arguments, just counter with another unrelated, unsubstantiated acusation. After all, everyone who doesn’t agree with you is either insane or has a sinister agenda.
Did Jack Thompson take over these Eve comment threads?
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