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Dev misconduct makes the game unfair
Ashtor
Member Posts: 7
in EVE Online
I would just like to point out to those of you that play the game, as I do, that the devs have been accused of buying their way onto the boards of alliances by handing out T2 BPOs and then helping their factions win. It really screws with with the concept of fair game play. They won't say anything about this, other than they are investigating the issue (but how far is that likely to go 
). There should be no devs holding political positions in 0.0 alliances and screwing with the game, through inside information and iinside resources, how many players do you know that have handed your corporation 8 T2 BPOs in one go?
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=468189
http://vnboards.ign.com/eve_general_board/b22281/101245438/p1/?56
They are locking all the new threads on this at Eve Online and hoping the issue goes away. But seriously, why should people invest their time and effort into an MMORPG where the gameplay is not fair.
). There should be no devs holding political positions in 0.0 alliances and screwing with the game, through inside information and iinside resources, how many players do you know that have handed your corporation 8 T2 BPOs in one go?http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=468189
http://vnboards.ign.com/eve_general_board/b22281/101245438/p1/?56
They are locking all the new threads on this at Eve Online and hoping the issue goes away. But seriously, why should people invest their time and effort into an MMORPG where the gameplay is not fair.
Comments
Why exactly would the creators of the game--who have the power to do what they want in it anyway--have to do that?
The devs have stated before that they play the game--that doesn't mean that they have to confine themselves to mining in Jita. They can be in winning or losing alliances and corps, too.
At the same time, I have not played in a while--but what yoiu're accusing them of seems unlikely and illogical (not that that's ever stopped people before).
Apply lemon juice and candle flame here to reveal secret message.
A Dev not the Devs. So One Developer has been accused and CCP has been upfront and honest with the community.
The reason for the locked posts as per CCP's explanation is that people were SPAMMING the board with complaints. They have acknowledged the complaint and are looking into it. More threads are not helpful but are spam and hence are being locked. The EVE Form is not locking ALL new threads they are locking any new thread about the alleged misconduct of the Dev in question.
It seems the Dev has been accused and rigging the Tech II Lottery and making sure that his Alliance BoB got Tech II BPO's that they used to make money and win the War.
CCP is investigating and taking it very seriously. They are also as open and up front as they can be up to now.
Edit: This is a quote from CCP when they locked the thread.
"I'm putting a lock on the thread. The discussion has degenerated into a number of arguements, flaming and trolling. I have made a number of statements regarding the investigation, what is being done internally and what will transpire once the investigation is complete.
I would ask the community to exersize patience and wait for the results of the investigation. Please do not start new discussion threads over this topic."
There have been a number of posts on Eve Online asking to see if there is a code of conduct for the devs playing the game. All these threads have been locked, with similar comments, do not talk about locked threads
It is well know that the Dev's do play and are in 0.0 Corps and Alliances. Hence they would be on those boards. Where that is correct or not is not up to debate, yet, but probably will be.....and should be.
So there is no code of conduct based around what they can and cannot do ingame as long as it is within the game rules. In hindsight this is incorrect and it should have been in place. CCP trusted their Dev's to act with maturity and honesty and this seems to have been shortsighted on their part.
The BPO is a serious crime and if it is true that this was done should be taken care of. They have stated that is what they will do and if this person is found to have done what is suspected then they will probably lose their job.
Sorry if I came across as Flaming or bashing I wasn't but you intial post sounded like they were locking everything down and many of the Dev's had been doing it which is not the case.
Thanks for sharing. Gives a new perspective to MMORPGs if this becomes a trend. On the other hand I can understand a developer that wants to influence his/her own creation although I can see that it might not make for the most level playing field.
It is a morale dilemma more than a gaming dilemma, sort of like whether to buy items/money off web sites (for "real" money). Some would say that is unfair, some would say everybody could do it so why not. It is a breach of the EULA, but I doubt that stops too many players who has decided instant wealth is better than gaining it on their own. My personal stand is that I would feel stupid if I paid even more for an online game and that I would in effect pay an increased subscription fee to only see part of the game content - seems illogical to me.
As I don't play EVE any more (quit after 6 months) I don't have an oppinion regarding this particular case other than I can understand the developer who wants to control his/her game. It is a sandbox game yes, but somebody owns the sandbox, so they decide if you can borrow their bucket...
There's really no way a dev could influence the game in this manner on his own without getting found out in the continuous audits, other then by passing one his knowledge of forthcoming changes to the game mechanics. Those changes go on the public test server weeks in advance anyway and as such any damage done this way would be very very limited, if it happens at all.
Besides that, as Kieron stated, there's most likely devs in every major alliance in Eve. Not very strange considering CCP has now over 200 employees, most of which will also play the game.
Wait and see what CCP come up wioth after a repeat audit of all logs concerning the accounts of the devs that were in BoB. The most deluded out there won't believe it if the conclusion is nothgn happened, but so be it. I for one don't believe any of the accusations made, and know for fact that some of them are simple insuinations supported by conversation taken out of context, because I was personally involved with some aspects of them.
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/31/1822226
One should of course should be very skeptical of hacked forum logs. However the fact that so many names and so much detail is given, and the fact that in a 30 page Eve Online thread on this issue there was not one denial by anyone mentioned would leave one with the conclusion that these events happened as reported. Its hardly like the people listed are low profile members of the Eve community, they are usually quite vocal in their opinions on the Eve boards. Yet total silence on this issue which concerns their reputations.......
1) there is a difference between developers, devs, and GM's. I read one of the dev blogs and it said all the dev's are required to play eve as part of their job, ie, must play 1 hour a day or something like that. That was so the dev's would stay in touch with the actual game and not just in what they happened to be working on.
2) The dev's do have access to information not availible to the typical player and should not under any circumstance be using that knowledge to further their, their friends, or corp or alliance mates position in a the game. This could easily be done by directing all their corp mates to use agents that have the fewest people using them for research thus increasing their chances to win the bpo lottery. Also having explicit knowledge of changes being introduced and thus directing their "friends" to commence training in this area, or obtain these items or dump items that may be nerfed soon and thus will lose value. The possibilities for a dev to interfere with fair play is enormous and hopefully CCP with establish a code of conduct from this incident.
Please, CCP can't win this, they can say they fired the dev/gm, they can say that it didn't happen, they can post logs, they can do any number of things.
There will always be those who think the other side isn't playing fair because either they can't beat them, or they are doing "too well".
The BPO thing aside...
I LOVE that the devs play the game.
How many other games have you played where you thought that the devs "Just didn't get it" and there was an obvious disconnect between the players and the devs and what was happening in the game? *cough SWG cough* Most Devs play thier games. But to give an example, having a dev with three level 20 characters in a 60-level game doesn't help inspire that the dev knows what the game is about or the major issues.
The fact that the devs play the game and take part in the end game is a huge factor in having them stay on top of the issues and move the game forword. As well....they're people to, it's a great game and they probably enjoy playing it. There shouldn't be any type of membership restrictions placed on any dev. If they want to be in BoB or D2 or AAA or ASCN leadership, there's no problem with that, as long as they don't do silly things like hand out T2 BPOs that were aquiried outside of normal gameplay.
There's a reason a lot of real world competitions won't allow their own employes to enter. It makes people think that bias has occurred even if nothing is going on.
That's exactly what has happened. A dev was caught being director in RKK. He was in command of the capital fleet, gave the corp t2 bpos and lots of isk. Even if it was in the best of intentions, how is the community to know? And what if he did do something wrong? How are people to know again? Acts like this puts into question everything BoB has achieved. Some people are calling them Band of Developers now. Is that fair? And what about all the other people who fought BoB. What are they to think?
From what I can tell the community is very upset. Only reason you don't see it on the EvE-O is because they are locking every thread about it. I've always been a big fan of the game and have played it for quite some time. Until now, I've also been a huge fan of CCP. But this is not acceptable. If all the accusations are true, this is probably worse than anything SOE did. Making false promises and putting in bad game design is one thing. To play the game as devs with advantages purely at the expensive of the customers is something else. This isn't a small problem. The act of devs or even the preception of devs helping certain groups is something that will destroy the game.
I don't know what the results of this "investigation" will be. But how CCP handles it will go a long way towards whether I will keep playing or not. CCP really needs to clean up their act.
It's quite simple, the accusation about tech2 bpo's being "produced" and then given to BoB is not true.
It *is* that simple, since a dev would not have been able to do that IN 2005, and not get found out, because all gm/dev/isd actions involving "gm powers" and the like are logged and audited continuously.
The rest of the accusations are nothing better, but in those cases there simply is no way for me to make you believe that so I'm not going to bother again. One thing I do know, I myself petitioned the 'farmers' that we are accused of renting out a complex to when we first fought them for control of it. CCP reacted by investigating them and then leaving them alone. That means that there's nothing mroe to say about that. Maybe they share accounts, maybe they sell isk, maybe they farm the complex, maybe not, because if they do, CCP couldn't prove it or couldn't be arsed to, so don't blame us for assuming that it's then ok to rent it out to them.
The oly thing true about all this, and the only thing proven to be so (assuming the private messages weren't edited, which i personally don't think happened in this case), is that more then one dev at one time was part of RKK, that one of them was made a director of the corporation, and that one of them asked another RKK player to send his resume to CCP and thus made his identity known. Other then that, there's ntohign to get all deluded about.
Do the research yourself, but you should not be surprised. IGE and every website they own is boicotting Vanguard. Why, you ask? Sigil refused to let IGE in to farm. Now, IGE and Sigil are at war with each other. Have you ever wondered why on the day a new server goes live in WoW (or pick any of your favorite MMOGs), you buy as much gold as you want from IGE for that server? It doesn't matter the game, nearly all of them let IGE in because the companies know that with easy access to game currency/items/accounts, the more people will be there playing and paying subscriptions.
Don't believe me? The next time WoW opens a new server, go to ige or any other website and see how much gold you can buy on day one of a new server with most deliveries available in 30 minutes.
If you are a gamer, you should be proud that Sigil has decided to say no to the normal "wink and nod" hand shake that these game companies have with the IGEs of the world.
Fear not fanbois, we are not trolls, let's take off your tin foil hat and learn what VAPORWARE is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware
"Vaporware is a term used to describe a software or hardware product that is announced by a developer well in advance of release, but which then fails to emerge after having well exceeded the period of development time that was initially claimed or would normally be expected for the development cycle of a similar product."
I haven't played in like a month and I don't intend on playing EVE again for awhile so it doesn't concern me as much as it would have, I'm very intrigued to see where this investigation goes though. I think CCP will have to do something just to satisfy the bloodlust of the mob, and I'm eager to see what that something will be.
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MMOs Retired From: Earth and Beyond, Project Entropia, There, A Tale in the Desert, Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft, Eve Online, City of Heroes/Villains.
MMOs Currently (worth) Playing: None.
MMO hopefuls: Age of Conan.
I do find it funny though, all these alliances complain about BoB, but these alliances never attack BoB.
Forum wars is all that they do.
Disbanding a alliance to make some weak alliances happy is stupid.
This concerns only one 10/10 complex and one group of people we rent it out to. In total we contorl about 7 or 8 of these complexes (which is a fairly large part of the available total in the game), and we rent out multiple of them.
If CCP would have banned these people for ebyaing, we'd have rented out the complex to the next group on the list of takers. It's that simple, people are dying to get a shot at the best source of ingame income, even if they have to pay for the access because we control the space. We have no reason to refuse to rent it out to these guys, because CCP have checked them out and found them innocent. If I cant assume that people are innocent untill proven guil;ty in Eve then I'd havge to stop interacting with about half the playerbase, as that'd be my guess of the size of teh tinfoil-hat problem Eve has been developing in recent years. Rampant accusation are all over the place these days, by people that simply shouldn't be playing multiplayer games because they're not mentally stable enough to deal with the competition.
I love posts like this.. It always bringsa out the sheep, misinformed, the anti-bob crowd and the tinfoil hat brigade..
To the op ... 'Proof or STFU' .. Its all well running around like chicken little shouting the "The dev are cheating, the devs are cheating.." but where is the proof?
As I stated in another post on this page.. Its common knowlage that T2 BPOs are constantly tracked.. This is so if one gets destroyed or ends up on an account that gets banned, they can reseed another one to keep the correct numbers in play.. A new one would be spotted straight away as it would put the number above the set limit.
Ahhh but the dev can tip people off about the lottery you say... No they can't.. how the lottery works is also common knowlage.. it works roughly like this..
Amarrian frig BPO is seeded. -> its sent to a randomly selected Amarrian agent that deals in amarrian spaceship research. -> a player is randomly selected from those who have RP's with that agent. (1 RP = 1 chance at winning.) -> offer is made to winning player -> player either accepts the offer, or rejects it. -> if the player rejects the offer, the BPO is put back into the pool. -> its sent to a randomly selected Amarrian agent that deals in amarrian spaceship research.... And so on.
This is all handled by the server automatically once a BPO is added (reseeded) to the BPO pool.
But, a dev can just bypass this and hand a BPO straight to a player.. Yep, but it would be picked up as all Dev/GM/ISD commands are logged (again common knowlage.) and as stated recently everything is constantly being audited.
In other words... step away from the tinfoil, and do some reserch rather then taking what has been posted on a third party forum by someone know for using illigal activities (I.e hacking, cracking and phishing) to gain information as gospal truth.
Next the anti-bobbits.. 'BoB cheats as they have devs in their alliance' and 'Bob must be disbanded coz they had devs in their alliance' is your battle cry.. So I ask you.. What about the other alliances that have or have had Devs as members .. After all Kieron stated that quite a few alliances have BoB members here (post 457) This Includes Red alliance, ASCN, Star Fraction and other alliances (and iirc two of the players named as Devs belonged to Ushra'khan ... the Matari RP alliance.). Now lets look a few things.. ASCN before they went bust.. built the first titan in the game... not only that their former leader CYVOK stated two more was completed at X-mas.. does this mean they had Dev help to build them? and some on RA killed the most Dreads ina single engagment while losing only two... hell they must of had dev help..
So if you want Bob disbanded because their had/havve devs in them, then with the same words you want all alliances and corps that have had a dev player in them disbanded, after all whats good for the goose is good for the gander.
and it seems like the BOB Devs/GM's/ISD is now playing defence and instead of rectifying the problem they are just trying to supress any information about it to their paying customers.
this is really bad news as it means that eve just took a turn for the worse.
ive already cancelled multiple accounts as i wont pay these guys anymore when it isnt and havent been a level playing field for all the paying customers.
/SkitBra
Oh look another member of the bandwagon club, with the same level of mis-information and lack of a clue.
Well is it 3, 4 or 5 Devs? come on now you must know oh you don't otherwise you wouldn't have been so vauge.. So FYI you don't know... so we fall back to that classic phrase 'Proof or STFU'
I guess you don't play eve as you would know that all upcoming changes are found on Sisi the PUBLIC test server where you can find out about ever change that is set to happen on TQ.. For example, the T2 expanded cargo change.. where expanded cargo bpo's changed from T1 to T2 happend on Sisi a few days before it happend on TQ.
As for you cancelling multipul account... sorry, but I don't belive you. You may have had one account and well throwing your toys out the pram, because of a 3rd party website hacked bobs forums and found out that there was several CCP staff members (Devs/GMs ... ISD are not staff members but players who give up their freetime to run RP events.) Its only the idiots who don't realise that BoB is sucessful because of its members and not GM/Dev help, but because they can't accept that and its because of this they get beat/have been beaten/not doing as well.. It has to be bob getting help.. Its not like ASCN was as successful now was it
... oh wait they was.. and they had CCP staff as members.. Great scott ... they must have had help as well.. and that means my corp has CCP staff as well.. as we have 6 t2 BPOs (Nighthawk, Falcon, Arazu, Heavy missle launcher II, 425mm rail gun II, Null M) ..
Eve is not Salem even if Kugutsumen is trying to play the part of Abigail Williams.. If your going to quit.. then quit.. But I still have this bridge for sale.. you interested?
To Itsmee:
Basically put: You can't know that what is being written as the way they handle certain mechanics is the way they ACTUALLY handle mechanics.
Point in case: Audits. It is a phenomenal word commonly misused to waylay any suspicion into any potentially negative publicity situation. Unless you or people you absolutely trust are involved in the audit you should assume the audit hasn't passed.
Having worked in the financial corporate sector most of my professional life setting up strategic performance management and ERP systems I can assure you that it is foolish to trust in the official story. It has nothing to do with deliberate cover-up, it has to do with maintaining credibility and an oppinion of stability and trust.
It is not possible for the player base to actually know what goes on with the game, they have at a certain point decide who they believe and if they are willing to risk that what they believe isn't correct. It is the same in every aspect of life, you have to weight the various possibilities and decide on that ground what you will believe.
Don't fool yourself, Itsmee, you are closing your eyes to a possibility that could be true. It might not be, but it could be. In my oppinion your aggressive attitude hints at you being aware that this might be the case and you don't want to look like a tool for having played a game that you thought fair and transparent.
Again, unless you have access to the actual server logs, directly from the server, you only have faith. And faith is only really meaningful for the individual. Start pushing that belief structure unto somebody else, and you're a bigot.
To me personally it seems EXTREMELY unlikely that a developer would insert hugely important game elements and include them in a 100% random lottery. They are better used to leverage community development, inter-player competition, and a favorable atmosphere between company and identified key VIP subscribers/users. When it comes down to market dynamics it is not important to have the individual's attention it is much more important to establish, control, and maintain large-scale rolemodels for the common non-VIP content subscriber to aspire to and letting them think it is attainable.
Basically it is marketing 101 and you cannot blame CCP for having been to business school.
If any true misconduct is going on CCP will fire those responsible and probably revoke the BPO's in the scandal as well. They've fired employees for far less in the past.
"A ship-of-war is the best ambassador." - Oliver Cromwell