As others have astutely pointed out, if any players wanted to ruin the game, they could easily do so by creating multiple trial accounts with Eves ridiculously lax trial system (requires no CC) and proceeding to make life absolute hell for everyone in ‘Safe Space’ with suicide alts. Or use the same, loophole-filled system to macromine to hell out of the same ‘Safe Space’, while afk, and then fund their favorite corp/alliance..oh wait, that’s already widespread.

That’s without getting into desynchs, location hackers, ISK sellers, etc. My advice to CCP is to get the house in order – perhaps less time should be spent playing the game and more time spent fixing it. This is year 5 of perpetual beta, and yet a senior dev has time to join an endgame alliance and dick around with their ‘intertubes friends’?

While I have no doubt CCP is gaining accounts in the short term thanks to the publicity, if they don’t get it together they will lose in the long run as players leave in frustration.

As a sidenote, I generally enjoy your articles, but your comparaison to DAoC is absolutely meaningless. Realm warfare was pretty pointless – fun, sure – but pointless. DAoC has far more in common with WoW than EvE and they are such different beasts that I find your example irrelevant. A DAoC GM won’t be leading an attack on your guilds base – using equipment provided by the GM – in which they can steal everything you own and burn the remains to the ground.
People have a lot more invested in EvE than a couple hundred hours grinding and loot whoring for some semi-random pvp over capture the flag locations.

Anyway, everyone’s moved on to this week’s new EVE drama by now: “Disgruntled ISD volunteer splatters petition emails (including customer emails/RL names) all over the web” / “CCP CEO hates Goonfleet and doesn’t know how titans work interview”

Although, to give CCP’s spin doctors some recognition, they got Magnus to issue a retraction pretty quickly this time around. Who knows? Maybe, with another year or so of dealing with weekly scandals, CCP might be up to SOE-levels of PR competence!

And as I recall, 1-2 ship BPOs. Sabre and Crusader?

The issue didn’t come about because some asshole hacked forums and found it out. The issue happened because some asshole spawned items. Do not confuse things here.

If a company does some illegal stock moves, which is at fault:

A) The company for doing something illegal.
B) The employee for blowing the whistle and telling on them.

The crime happened if someone tells or not, someone finding out is NOT the issue, the actual act having happened is. Hell, it’s like claiming cheating on your wife is perfectly ok as long as she never finds out, and if she does, it’s entirely the fault of whoever told her. Serious blame issues there.

The CCP hate thing is because they had a dev cheat, and didn’t really do anything about it (knew about it, didn’t actually fix any of the cheating or tell anyone, and in fact tried to cover it up). The CCP hate is that their default reaction to any complaint is to delete threads and hand out warnings. Mass banning goons would just look like an amazing admission of guilt and inability to fairly run a company.

For the record, I don’t even Play anymore, and I was never a goon or related to them in any way. But I do follow the PR fallout of this whole mess because, well, it’s a textbook example of how to not run an MMO company. Abashi was better PR than this.

Just a reminder to those who do or don’t know, this whole Bob/CCP dev thing came about because a certain asshole Hacked their way into a PRIVATE FORUM. The BPOs spawned were about 10 tech2 missile bpos. Not much to build an empire on. Before the T20 incedent BOB was very well established.

This whole Bob/CCP hate thing is because we are beating them ingame and all they can do is to make up stories and tarnish people’s reputation.

Mass banning of Goonies would make the game better.

The same is inversely so.

DAMN THIS POPCORN IS GOOD!

CCP lost a LOT of face with the t20 incident. Not because a dev cheated, that’s the SMALLEST issue.

Because they came out publicly and said “nuh uh!” when accused of it.

Then they lashed out at people for making things up about it.

Then t20 confessed.

Then they admitted they’d known about that incident for a year. No apologies to anyone they accused of lying.

Fast forward to the new issue: Instead of calmly addressing points, the instant response was to Delete Threads that were politely asking for a few answers.

IA may not be at fault here, but at the very least it appears that any attempt to raise an issue to IA beyond direct email will be instantly destroyed by the moderation sqaud. That causes serious transparency issues (not to mention the after the fact renaming/whatever of the CCP QA employee’s ingame rep with no explanation, after stating he did nothing wrong at all)

Basically, it just LOOKs bad on every possible angle. The only proper response is the next issue that comes up. You can talk about how great you are all you want, but unless your response next time is not deleting threads and simply having an IA rep quickly post “I read your allegation and I’m looking into it, give me a day or two” before going slash and burn on the forums, you’re going to keep looking like you want to hide things instead of answer them.

People bash CCP for being corrupt. CCP creates an internal affairs section to deal with corruption. It’s rejected by players for being corrupt. The internal affairs section answers new criticism for being corrupt. Players reject it for being corrupt. CCP tries to create a panel of players to check on its internal affairs. Players reject it again…for being corrupt.

Seriously, what else is there that CCP (or any government/business/organization in the real world) can do? How else can CCP prove that it is conducting business in a fair manner?

maybe they should hire , oh , business consultants to help teach them how to get some process control and auditing going so they themselves know what’s going on, instead of flying a bunch of yahoos to Iceland who won’t know the first thing about oversight or even how to identify problems or know what to look for.

It will be like every other election: the lowest common denominator always wins, because they have to appeal to the masses. I can bet whoever gets elected won’t be people with process or management experience, they’ll be too busy with their day jobs for this joke.