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.

There’s a thread on it over at Kug’s forum, and a long thread about it on the EVE Online forum. The original allegation came from another Kugs thread which might be interesting if you’re into these scandals. Deep in the EVE Online forum thread lies a post by a BOB member where he admits senior BOB players do in fact have direct lines of communication to EVE developers. Needless to say, this is pretty worrying for the community in light of the accusations.

So far CCP’s response has been a news item (which is now unavailable, and only addressed the GM logging in to a corp) and the EVE Online forum thread linked above. Most players are concerned, and worried that the scandal will largely be ignored. BOB players are largely blaming Goonswarm for causing trouble (by spamming the forums to get CCP to notice the issue). Frankly, I side with the Goons on this. Petitions were deleted and messages ignored by CCP. In EVE Online it’s been shown before that the squeaky wheel gets the noise, and the Goons can be very squeaky when they want to be!