It increasingly looks like Goonfleet may have managed to wring some concessions from CCP after all. Obviously, they've been publicly defensive of their devs' right to rank highly in a certain player alliance, to play BF1942 with a small group of players and so on, but there are some cracks beginning to show. The NY Times covered the GF protest, and reports that CCP are going to set up an elected, player-oversight committee. The dynamics of what that can do will be important, particularly given the numbers involved. Will it be one-account-one-vote, I wonder, working on a PR-list system? Will they have any powers beyond being flown to Iceland and getting a powerpoint presentation and a nice tour of the offices? I massively doubt it. But to be fair to CCP, at least their PR seems to have improved.
I wonder if the large numbers of players who comprise Goonfleet, IAC and other such anti-CCP organisations might lead to some embarassingly outspoken appointments. We, in Goonfleet are notoriously good at getting out the vote, after all. Will terms of membership include highly restrictive gagging clauses? How will CCP deal with a series of infuriated resignations carried out amidst claims of inadequate access?
The CCP individual who was at the heart of the inappropriate-contact-with-elite-players scandal, and who seems to have got one of the long-standing volunteers fired, has been defended by CCP. Yet he has also had his character deleted or renamed, which at least points to the fact that he was seen as irretrievably tainted. If only CCP would swallow their pride and spin what they are doing as confession-and reparation instead of trying to hush them up then they might actually salvage some goodwill.
An interesting aside from the NYT article is the continued assertion by the head of the Band of Brothers alliance (deeply implicated in most of the scandals to have been unearthed) that they intend to take over the entire game. Allowing for a bit of tongue-in-cheek roleplaying, the fact is that this is a fair possibility in the long run. It has happened in China, where the game seems to be suffering as a result: all of the player-conquerable systems have been controlled by a single alliance since early in the game (oh, those wacky Chinese and their one-party states).
As Timothy Burke pointed out in his comments on a previous posting, CCP seem not to have mechanisms in place to handle such a contingency. Rather than having "natural" factors within the game fiction that limit the growth of an alliance, it seems to be the case that it becomes easier and easier to conquer as an alliance grows, so long as that growth is managed carefully. Empires traditionally butt up against limits of control: the Roman Empire in the third century could conquer Mesopotamia, but not hold it; Syracuse was over-reach by the Athenians; the British were simply incapable of holding the American colonies and so on. But with instantaneous communications and structural constraints such as logistics that are necessarily limited in their onerousness by the nature of the world-as-game, those limits do not seem to apply within Eve.
As Tim mentions, this is a real problem for MMOs in general, and for Eve in particular: it would be far from the first time that a player-vs-player conflict driven world has suffered due to the runaway dominance of one "side" once a tipping point is reached, whether this be in something as complex as Shadowbane or as simple as Travian.
In most MMOs, someone who thought that they perceived developer bias in favour of one player group could simply move to another server or "shard", and play where those individuals are not to be found. Entrenched but fair dominance can be similarly, if temporarily, escaped. This is not the case in Eve. At least, not without a knowledge of Mandarin and a Chinese proxy server. I know many ex-players who would immediately sign up for a clean start, and from years of experience with MMOs I am quite certain that this would be a huge success for CCP. But CCP assert that this is simply not possible.
Thus, one of Eve's proudest boasts and biggest selling points - the single, unsharded world (sotto voce: for all those not speaking moon-languages) - risks becoming its greatest flaw, unless CCP can bring themselves to eschew their A Tale In The Desert-style fascination with what might happen regarding such dominance (obligatory whine: such dominance by their admitted friends!), and instead introduce game mechanics which act strongly to prevent it.