Eve Appoints Special Prosecutor; Moveon.org Preparing FRAPS Movie In Response

Posted on June 7, 2007 by Scott Jennings| 19 Comments

After coming out swinging against the Goonswarm corruption allegations last week, Eve brings out the good cop; in an interview with the New York Times, CCP’s CEO announces that they are setting up a player-run oversight committee.

The company will then fly those players to Iceland regularly so they can audit CCP’s operations and report back to their player-constituents. And taking cues from transitions to democracy in the developing world, CCP says it will call in election monitors from universities in Europe and the United States.

“Perception is reality, and if a substantial part of our community feels like we are biased, whether it is true or not, it is true to them,” Hilmar Petursson, CCP’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview. “Eve Online is not a computer game. It is an emerging nation, and we have to address it like a nation being accused of corruption.

“A government can’t just keep saying, ‘We are not corrupt.’ No one will believe them. Instead you have to create transparency and robust institutions and oversight in order to maintain the confidence of the population.”

Election… monitors? I mean, I know the wonks at Terra Nova have their bags packed ready to go anywhere at a moment’s notice, but this is getting too surreal, even for Eve.

The response of Goonswarm partisans:

…It will be hilarious when the oversight committee turns out to be five BoB/minions and four random Empire players that have never gone below 0.5 sec.

Yep, can’t win. Just like politics in the real world.

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  • Demolira

    So, players elect people to go check up on CCP. No way will those guys be favored stooges for the resident uber-guilds.

  • Chacki

    Sounds like a free holiday for some lucky BoB’s.
    As if its really going to change anything even if it isnt.

    Come on… are CCP really going to be letting this committee of ‘gamers’ look into anything they please , at any time they please , with no prior warning so possible issues cant be ‘laundered’?

    I have a doubt.

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  • Freakazoid

    Jesus christ. All they have to do is fire that cheating dev, cut off all ties to BoB, and hire a real community relations person. Is that so damn hard?

  • Axecleaver

    I’m amazed they have room in their budget for such shenannigans. I knew you guys were making bank!

    I agree with the “surreal” comment, though — this has gotten completely out of control.

  • Duane

    I believe CCP has surprised everyone with this move. Good way to produce positive publicity out of an attempt to slam them with erroneous claims.

    Great job CCP!

  • http://www.killtenrats.com Zubon

    …It will be hilarious when the oversight committee turns out to be five BoB/minions and four random Empire players that have never gone below 0.5 sec.

    Not to imply that this is what CCP is doing, but that is a brilliant notion. Wouldn’t you love to fly a bunch of friends into town for a visit and write it off as a business expense, with good PR to boot? This is me assuming the best of people again, but it did not even occur to me to stack the deck with your own guys as “observers.” I’m sure my cynicism would have kicked in eventually…

  • kalain

    You don’t need to stack the deck with observers. Quite frankly, the playerbase at large will probably not vote for people with the most forensics skills, nor will CCP even slightly allow them to, say, grab the outbound connections logs from the office for the past month and see if any of the developers are spending an unhealthy amount of time on a specific group’s internal forums, then question them on the appearances issues of such.

    Let’s face facts. A few people will be elected to fly out and meet devs. Response will be “they seem like really nice folks!”, because most of us ARE nice folks when we’re not given the whole anonymous fat guy on the internet thing to play with. They post about it, everyone’s happy, nothing’s actually happened. I’m pretty sure no actual oversight will ever be done, and even if it IS a few dozen meetings and Q&A sessions, this gives CCP what, 6 months of lead up to the event to do their own investigation and make sure a few people take well timed vacations and some logs are lost?

    That’s all me being an ex DC resident and bitter. Maybe this will turn out GREAT! But judging by past reactions by CCP and their aversion to ever actually admitting something went wrong even when they know it internally, I honestly doubt anything good will come of this.

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  • http://www.plutospage.com/wow/ yunk

    This is just ridiculous.
    They need process, they need a code of conduct, they need auditing. They should have that internally already like most companies with more than 50 employees already do. (well not everyone is so good on process).

    maybe they should hire , oh , business consultants to help teach them how to get some process control and auditing going so they themselves know what’s going on, instead of flying a bunch of yahoos to Iceland who won’t know the first thing about oversight or even how to identify problems or know what to look for.

    It will be like every other election: the lowest common denominator always wins, because they have to appeal to the masses. I can bet whoever gets elected won’t be people with process or management experience, they’ll be too busy with their day jobs for this joke.

  • Pentagony

    I think a lot of you are missing the point. CCP is not doing this because they don’t have internal auditing, etc. They are doing this to gain and maintain the trust of their players. Are these elected players going to sit in Iceland for a week and mull over thousands of logs etc.? No, probably not…unless they REALLY wanted to. Are they going to be able to view CCP operations and see *how* records and internal auditing and affairs go on and the company? Probably so.

    People bash CCP for being corrupt. CCP creates an internal affairs section to deal with corruption. It’s rejected by players for being corrupt. The internal affairs section answers new criticism for being corrupt. Players reject it for being corrupt. CCP tries to create a panel of players to check on its internal affairs. Players reject it again…for being corrupt.

    Seriously, what else is there that CCP (or any government/business/organization in the real world) can do? How else can CCP prove that it is conducting business in a fair manner?

  • kalain

    By reacting to the next issue fairly and transparently.

    CCP lost a LOT of face with the t20 incident. Not because a dev cheated, that’s the SMALLEST issue.

    Because they came out publicly and said “nuh uh!” when accused of it.

    Then they lashed out at people for making things up about it.

    Then t20 confessed.

    Then they admitted they’d known about that incident for a year. No apologies to anyone they accused of lying.

    Fast forward to the new issue: Instead of calmly addressing points, the instant response was to Delete Threads that were politely asking for a few answers.

    IA may not be at fault here, but at the very least it appears that any attempt to raise an issue to IA beyond direct email will be instantly destroyed by the moderation sqaud. That causes serious transparency issues (not to mention the after the fact renaming/whatever of the CCP QA employee’s ingame rep with no explanation, after stating he did nothing wrong at all)

    Basically, it just LOOKs bad on every possible angle. The only proper response is the next issue that comes up. You can talk about how great you are all you want, but unless your response next time is not deleting threads and simply having an IA rep quickly post “I read your allegation and I’m looking into it, give me a day or two” before going slash and burn on the forums, you’re going to keep looking like you want to hide things instead of answer them.

  • ajeba

    In the ratio of entertainment vs. taste of popcorn, you will notice as the quality entertainment gets better, the taste of popcorn gets better too.

    The same is inversely so.

    DAMN THIS POPCORN IS GOOD!

  • Armois Delgato

    Mass ban goonfleet. Bring about real oversite. Profit.

  • Zagum

    This is silly. Can you imagine any other developer doing this? They can never satisfy everyone, and this will not work.

    Just a reminder to those who do or don’t know, this whole Bob/CCP dev thing came about because a certain asshole Hacked their way into a PRIVATE FORUM. The BPOs spawned were about 10 tech2 missile bpos. Not much to build an empire on. Before the T20 incedent BOB was very well established.

    This whole Bob/CCP hate thing is because we are beating them ingame and all they can do is to make up stories and tarnish people’s reputation.

    Mass banning of Goonies would make the game better.

  • kalain

    “Just a reminder to those who do or don’t know, this whole Bob/CCP dev thing came about because a certain asshole Hacked their way into a PRIVATE FORUM. The BPOs spawned were about 10 tech2 missile bpos. Not much to build an empire on. Before the T20 incedent BOB was very well established.”

    And as I recall, 1-2 ship BPOs. Sabre and Crusader?

    The issue didn’t come about because some asshole hacked forums and found it out. The issue happened because some asshole spawned items. Do not confuse things here.

    If a company does some illegal stock moves, which is at fault:

    A) The company for doing something illegal.
    B) The employee for blowing the whistle and telling on them.

    The crime happened if someone tells or not, someone finding out is NOT the issue, the actual act having happened is. Hell, it’s like claiming cheating on your wife is perfectly ok as long as she never finds out, and if she does, it’s entirely the fault of whoever told her. Serious blame issues there.

    The CCP hate thing is because they had a dev cheat, and didn’t really do anything about it (knew about it, didn’t actually fix any of the cheating or tell anyone, and in fact tried to cover it up). The CCP hate is that their default reaction to any complaint is to delete threads and hand out warnings. Mass banning goons would just look like an amazing admission of guilt and inability to fairly run a company.

    For the record, I don’t even Play anymore, and I was never a goon or related to them in any way. But I do follow the PR fallout of this whole mess because, well, it’s a textbook example of how to not run an MMO company. Abashi was better PR than this.

  • Simond

    I’m a polearm now?

    Anyway, everyone’s moved on to this week’s new EVE drama by now: “Disgruntled ISD volunteer splatters petition emails (including customer emails/RL names) all over the web” / “CCP CEO hates Goonfleet and doesn’t know how titans work interview”

    Although, to give CCP’s spin doctors some recognition, they got Magnus to issue a retraction pretty quickly this time around. Who knows? Maybe, with another year or so of dealing with weekly scandals, CCP might be up to SOE-levels of PR competence!

  • Machinator

    I’m an unaligned Eve player and I will tell you this: the malfeasance displayed by CCP here disgusts me. It is obvious that they lack the sort of internal audit controls that a typical corporation – not family business – requires.

    As others have astutely pointed out, if any players wanted to ruin the game, they could easily do so by creating multiple trial accounts with Eves ridiculously lax trial system (requires no CC) and proceeding to make life absolute hell for everyone in ‘Safe Space’ with suicide alts. Or use the same, loophole-filled system to macromine to hell out of the same ‘Safe Space’, while afk, and then fund their favorite corp/alliance..oh wait, that’s already widespread.

    That’s without getting into desynchs, location hackers, ISK sellers, etc. My advice to CCP is to get the house in order – perhaps less time should be spent playing the game and more time spent fixing it. This is year 5 of perpetual beta, and yet a senior dev has time to join an endgame alliance and dick around with their ‘intertubes friends’?

    While I have no doubt CCP is gaining accounts in the short term thanks to the publicity, if they don’t get it together they will lose in the long run as players leave in frustration.

    As a sidenote, I generally enjoy your articles, but your comparaison to DAoC is absolutely meaningless. Realm warfare was pretty pointless – fun, sure – but pointless. DAoC has far more in common with WoW than EvE and they are such different beasts that I find your example irrelevant. A DAoC GM won’t be leading an attack on your guilds base – using equipment provided by the GM – in which they can steal everything you own and burn the remains to the ground.
    People have a lot more invested in EvE than a couple hundred hours grinding and loot whoring for some semi-random pvp over capture the flag locations.