TinyPirate

News reports state that there will be a player-elected oversight body to watch CCP and be available to audit CCP operations in supporting EVE Online. It’s an interesting, unique idea and I hope that it works out. But despite this enlightened approach, it seems people in CCP still do not get why their players got so riled up recently. This is evidenced by a quote from an interview CCP dev Magnus Bergsson conducted:

Ten Ton Hammer: Ever since this story was released, I have a hard time wrapping my head around the reasoning behind a player base as large as Goonsquad willingly undermining the foundations of the company that created their game. Why would a group of people do that?

Magnus: They refuse to admit that they’re losing to another alliance, and the only explanation that they can figure out is that those guys are cheating. Not just that they’re cheating, but that they’re cheating in cooperation with employees at CCP. That seems to be the only logical explanation that they’re coming up with. Read the rest of this entry »

EVE Online’s developers, CCP, have produced a formal, written reply to the community about the recent accusations of developer collusion with players and other problems. Before I begin to nitpick I would like to applaud CCP for going to the effort and it’s a good start. Note, I say start. This is the second controversy to come from EVE Online, the first being referred to in an earlier post here and in many other places. They handled the first complaint so poorly back then that players are going to have a hard time swallowing what is a better effort by CCP to engage with the community.

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There’s more developer controversy around EVE Online. An open letter to CCP has been penned by the SomethingAwful alliance, Goonswarm, where various claims of impropriety are put forward. Most troubling is the accusation in the letter of a direct coms line between a Band of Brothers (a large, powerful alliance) player and a developer, where the developer, on the player’s word, banned a member of the EVE Online customer service team.

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