This is probably not worthwhile news to discuss, because the sources may not be true. Or the events might not be a big deal in the final analysis. But it is interesting and disappointing that more revelations of employee conflicts in Eve Online keep coming to light. It’s sad that more examples keep coming to the fore and disappointing that players keep seizing on them (let alone ferreting them out). It’s only interesting insofar as a game which basically has no boundaries for play, and thus behavior, has players that have turned the meta-game of attacking/defending the provider to a new level of tension. A very small minority of people seem intent on attacking the credibility of CCP. But what’s startling is that they keep discovering evidence that shows CCP employee malfeasance. Or at least collusion and TOS violations. It’s very, very strange.

The two new examples are loosely described here and elsewhere I won’t link to: It’s lengthy and tricky to follow, but it seems to boil down to CCP’s head of the event GMs being in Evolution; their membership knowing for the last 3 years that he was a GM (after he dramaposted about leaving the events team for a while); him arranging to get them privileged access to events (test event on server: 48 out of 50 invites went to Evolution members, which is SirMolle’s Bob corp) with early access to new techs and gameplay; substantial EULA-breaking account sharing (one was passed between about 6 people on their forums and so on….

Last year, ISD ran an event involving a Serpentis invasion of BoB-space. The NPC dreads, when killed, dropped officer loot. (This was also when CCP added NPC stations into BoB regions…for no apparent reason). Other, similar events run elsewhere have the NPC ships dropping T1 or named T1 at best. So:

Head of the GM staff in BoB, & BoB know about it.BoB get to play around with POS warfare on Test ahead of everyone else and discover quirks/exploits (e.g. the “shooting through POS shields with no password” thing) which remain a mystery to the rest of the playerbase for years.Lead GM all-but-spawning top-end loot for BoB.Account sharing involving CCP staff & volunteer accounts, in direct contravention of their own EULA.

Make of this what you will.

Many years ago there was a similar meme with people claiming that SOE employees where creating and/or winning highly prized items and selling them on eBay. This rumor lasted for years, and was never ever proved. In fact, SOE demonstrated enough organization and consistency in their own policy against RMT that it made the claims ridiculous. CCP on the other hand suffers from running a game that has a laissez faire attitude towards player actions within and outside its game, and this is coming back to really damage them.

I already made my peace with Eve when evidence and confessions of paid employee cheating had occurred, and while I don’t play anymore it’s not for those reasons. The issue of online providers needing their customer’s trust is not trivial. And while you can distinguish various levels of customer expectations with an online service, there’s just no way you can excuse or cover up employee misconduct. I doubt there are many more examples of this within CCP, but I guess what leaves me disappointed is that maybe — and this only speculation — CCP’s internal culture is so aggressive or unprofessional that these kinds of things 1) could’ve happened at all, and 2) keep popping up. We need to be fair, like in the SOE example, and allow some time to pass to see if more examples come to light. But unlike with SOE, the original allegations were sadly true.  In any final consideration, this kind of stuff doesn’t help anyone, let alone CCP or the majority of its customers.

There’s an old thread about UO on f13 that a couple of rednames (MMO professionals) have recently commented within on community management. Check it out. It’s very interesting to see so many experienced and active professionals bringing to light how they regard working with players — on a 3rd party player forum. Great stuff. Calandryll, Dundee, Moorguard… even Lum makes an appearance. It’s like the Cannonball Run of threads!

Official forums are good. Moderation is good. Both for the developers and for the players. And I say that having been on all sides of the fence, community, developer, and player… (Calandryll)

Oh, unofficial forums are not unmoderated. The question is why players feel they are better served being moderated by the company, rather than by themselves. But maybe the answer is just that simple: In spite of how little they trust us, they trust each other even less… (Dundee)

I understand Sigil’s desire to allow fansites to blossom and drive the community. In a perfect world, that would be the ultimate foundation for a healthy player-dev interaction. But the world isn’t perfect, and more often than not you need to cut through a ton of noise to help the majority of players get the info they need. While you could do that without official forums, it becomes much harder (needlessly so, in my opinion) to provide the focus needed to pull it off. (Moorguard)

I think the providers that are successful with community management realize it’s as much a responsibility to manage a forum etc. as in-game activities. They know there is a unique meta-game going on, and the main losers are the provider and the uncommitted player when irrational members gain attention. That is, it’s easier to put a casual player off a game permanently with negativity than it is to moderate a hard core player, who can be at any time either pro or con the development team. FWIW, the sense of community I got from the EQ2 forum was one of the reasons I kept resubbing, and in the exact reverse, why I’m done with Eve.

This stuff matters — how communities are managed become an indication to players for how the provider regards their customers and in short, how they might develop the game. Those inferences aren’t always correct, but players still take how the providers care & feed their community as an overall signal for how a player’s time and money investment is regarded. It’s all pretty visceral, but the savvy providers know that.

They frigging killed Lord British??Dude, these guys are just Racers. Chill. We’ll just up the timers on their specials. And Booya!