I'm off to get myself banned from the Eve-Online forums...
That might seem an unusual thing to do. Eve-Online being a lol-internet-spaceships game that I've played for a year or so, and their forums being a dreary, childish message-board that I habitually avoid. But new evidence has come to light that certain of the game developers are flagrantly cheating, and I am rather keen to get myself banned.
CCP devs have cheated before: One of them, T20, was involved in a rather squalid little scandal where he gave himself rare and expensive items (blueprints) that allowed him to make money at will. He also turned out to have been head of the capital fleet of the alliance band of Brothers, and to have been feeding them information on upcoming developments in the game. On another occasion, roleplaying events in the game were rigged to grant extremely valuable items to BoB members, and to prevent those items falling into the hands of their enemies.
It transpires that several new instances of cheating have occurred recently. one is yet further cheating and favouritism in the RP events.
A second is that a director of Goonfleet (Bob enemies) member corporation Dark Star noticed an email saying that "CCP Sharkbait has left the company". That a dev (indicated by the prefix CCP) had ever joined his coporation was news to him, so he checked the logs. It transpires that CCP Sharkbait joined the company at 1:27, made himself director, then left 14 minutes later. Presumably having looked at the location of their secret capital ship yards and other such assets. This is big, big stuff. I can only assume that his ***-up in missing the logs means that he'll be fired. If he isn't then CCP has big problems.
Finally, this. I'll post the transcript of the person who reported it, an in-game reporter with roles in a semi-official organisation run by CCP:
I was floating around in my Polaris frig, watching one of the massive,
270+-in-local battles in the south, BOB vs COALTION, BoB had already destroyed
thier second POS in the system....when I 'text-jumped' (using admin "tr/
'playername' jumpto command) to a certain Dread pilot I knew was in the action.
Doing so teleports a polaris frig to that players ship...at 1 FOOT distance. I
jumped to this position and immediately orbitted the gaggle of 20 dreads at
80KM, standard operating proceedure for ISD reporters....
A minute later,
Daakon, of BoB, began yelling in local "Hey, Reporter, you bumped our dread!!!"
This was a falsehood, since the dread I jumped to was on the outside of the
group and I made sure not to do just that.
I ignored him. A year and a
half of Reportering and you get used to ALL BoB members trying to order/bully
you around. It is a common practice (WAY TOO GODDAMN COMMON) that ISD members
are ordered to completely ignore.
Eventually, Mr. Daakon began giving me
DIRECT ORDERS. "You must leave the system. Now. Move, you ***!!"
My
response?
"Um...no?"
Their response was pretty indicative of the
manner in which BoB is used to ordering CCP personnel around...in LOCAL CHANNEL
of 250+, Daakon replied:
"Well, I guess I'll have to call up my friends
in CCP and get you dealt with."
I was sitting in ISD's IRC channel, as is
required anytime you are logged in as an ISD char, and I decided to inform my
dept. head of this development. He seemed amused....
Until 40 seconds
later....
ISD IRC acounts have a lot of symbols in their usernames. They
signify time-in-service, department membership, and other things, but after 40
seconds, a BRAND NEW userID appeared, bereft of any such demarcations or
designations...an illegal and brand new ID...
"Hey, anyone know some
reporter named Raekhan!?"
Me:"Um, yeah, that's me."
"LEAVE THAT SYSTEM
NOW, YOU ARE EMBARRASSING THE ISD AND CCP THE COMPANY!!"
Me: ORLY!?
My ISD
BOSS: 'ORLY!'
the next minutes were interesting, as my ISD-IC dept head
began briefing me on the minbute-by-minute actions of the internal affairs team
(formed after your T-20 revelation I should point out) LEAPED on this matter in
seconds.
Me: "So I guess a BoB director claiming he has CCP buddies at
his beckon call, and the fact that said buddy showed up 40 sec later, will raise
some heads at CCP?"
Boss: "Oh, I think it already has...."
Me: "Well, at
least something good will come from all this mess..."
Boss: "We have his IP
address."
Boss: "He's posting from CCP, he's Staff."
Boss: He's in the QA
department...."
*after long pause*
Boss: Well, I'll tell you how this goes
tomorrow, take care, Rae..."
I signed off.
Turns out, within 3
hours, every ISD-related account I had was banned.
ISD-ingame char,
banned.
Forum-ISD, banned.
EVE-Online.com Admin access,
banned.
AURORA-TEAMSPEAK, banned.
The freaking ISD-COUNTERSTRIKE server,
banned.
In other words, a player who was a BoB member threatened a member of a CCP-sponsored organisation that he would have a dev deal with him if he didn't obey him. Within a short time, that BoB member had pulled sufficient strings to have a developer at CCP make up a new username for anonymity, warn him off, then have him fired and have his rights revoked. Nasty stuff, and deeply corrupt.
So our glorious fuhrer, the Mitanni, has ordered us to prepare to unleash the threadnaught. Several percent of the entire userbase of Eve-Online is made up of Goonfleet members. If CCP won't show willing to investiagte these issues, then we will post publicly about them. When that is locked and hidden, we will all post. Thousands of us. We've done it once before and they buckled, accepting that they had corruption present and setting up an internal-affairs team. Let's see what happens this time.
Edit: We took their forums down. Or, more likely, they took them down themselves, with thousands of posts detailing their malfeasance and linking to our open letter. They were providing the very stocks in which they were being pilloried.
Next stage will probably be spreading the word to media outlets, as well as slashdot, Penny Arcade, digg et al. There are over ninety-thousand paid-up goons, with a lot of contacts.
I am intrigued as to whether they got round to banning me.
Edit Again: if you're coming to this post directly, then I've put a lot more evidence on the
main page.
Edit Yet Again!:
Hi, Raphael Scoria
You are receiving this notice in regard to the Forum warnings you have received.
Your posting privileges have now been suspended for 24 hours. This temporary ban
will be lifted in 24 hours from now.
Huzzah. I can hold my head up in SpaceGBS after all.