EVE Developer Fesses Up and Lord Acton Laughs
Last week a little news blip floated to the top of the MMO world from EVE Online. No, it wasn’t an assassination of a high-profile corporation head. It wasn’t passing a new subscriber milestone. It was an accusation that one of the game’s developers had abused his power and given his corporation an unfair advantage.
It started with this Slashdot post, which asked if it was going too far to hack a web forum to get intelligence on your EVE Online rival corporation. Apparently someone did just that and ferreted out something unusual was going on. They found what looked like one or more CCP developers playing characters in the employ of the game’s biggest and most powerful corporation, and possibly feeding them resources most easily granted by a game’s developer.
The accusations flew, and a few days later CCP responded, a response that was considered weak and didn’t address the issues. This fanned the flames, and the fire under CCP got hotter.
Two days later CCP came clean, revealing that one developer-run character had fed very high-level ship blueprints to the corporation in question, and that character had been deleted, with the developer reprimanded for his actions. The other notable thing about this is that CCP has in response already instituted an internal watchdog group to watch for any possible developer abuse in the game. To me, instead of just the fox guarding the henhouse, there will now be a fox watching the fox guarding the henhouse, but we’ll have to see how transparently they run such an entity. Will they announce findings or just keep it under wraps and make problems go away?
With so much at stake in political organizations like guilds, and with even more at stake in massive resource-rich entities like the corporations in EVE Online, it should come as no surprise that Lord Acton’s wisdom, even 105 years after his death, still rings true: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
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