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.

To paraphrase Bill Clinton “It’s the MSN dummy!”. CCP got played by the Band of Brothers alliance. BOB dropped the CCP name and claimed CCP devs as their best friends and buddies while the rest of the players are actively denied that contact. What’s more, there’s some evidence that a BOB player was able to get in contact with a dev to rush a petition through, resulting in a volunteer player being banned. CCP haven’t addressed these issues.

I’m still stumped as to why CCP haven’t come out and publicly slapped BOB and also mentioned that they talk to players from a lot of alliances. It would be a good way to distance themselves from the BOB claims and to rebuild trust. Letting the BOB claim of ‘special friends’ stay out there resembles a situation where one of two people in a bar-fight claims to be good buddies with the Sheriff. How much confidence does that give the other guy in fair and even treatment?

What’s more, how are players supposed to bring their concerns to CCP? There’s no real legitimate channel that results in anything more than a “Thank you for your email. We’ll be in touch”. Goons tried the forums a couple of times and found threads locked and people banned (NEVER delete threads! Morons!). Uleashing their forum spam turned out to be the only way to get action. And it worked.

I’m giving CCP an A for effort, but a C+ for implementation and common sense.