Jumpgate: EVE's Devs and the Friends They Keep

[Andrew Crystall [deprecated]]

Joe, I'm a Brit. But anyway...

Basically, I'm saying that a lot of what Kugutsumen / AnthonyZ has posted is...distorted from what is on the source forums. That he stumbled across something, and posted one element unchanged is no reason to believe what he said - it's a reason to *investigate* it. I disagree that he needs further airtime at this point, unless he has new information.

I also believe that CCP are still investigating, and the witch hunt isn't useful. Yet.

 

[goonygoon [deprecated]]

goonygoon, I suggest you read up about evidence admissable in court. How information is gathered DOES matter. A lot.

Whose court? Yours? Indonesia's? Just because something is illegal in America, England, or wherever it is you live doesn't mean it's illegal elsewhere. Furthermore, the truth is the truth, facts are facts. How they are obtained does not affect their validity, no matter what laws are in effect in your country. The only thing the laws effect is a piece of evidence's validity in the eyes of the law, which is different from plain validity. And if you didn't notice, this isn't a British court.

I am not BoB.

You don't have to be in BoB to be one of their muppets in this case.

You're flailing blindly in the dark looking for a target to draw away the repeated attention given to the Goon's client side hacking.

Do you have any idea of how the portrait pack worked? I'm going to guess that no, you don't. The portrait pack was just a simple script that generated a bunch of .png files. Hardly the type of hacking that you're thinking of. Besides, the "they did it too waaagh" defense doesn't somehow lessen the charges being leveled against the people that the devs gave shit to for free.

My hatred of the goons is entirely rational, based on their behavior every single time I have encountered them both online and IRL. If you don't want the lable, then change how you behave. That a community which specalises in muckraking crys foul when it gets raked itself...

Oh so I guess they really did have sex with your cat after shitting in your pillowcase. That's pretty funny. I think this is the part where you're supposed to bring up the time when Remedial and Firstname Lastname made fun of a dead guy.

 

[Andrew Crystall [deprecated]]

goonygoon... I'm afraid that the police are not, for example, allowed to tie someone up, beat them and then take their confession into court. How evidence is extracted is legally and morally important.

I'd read up on Indonesian law before you continue - and further, charges could be laid in a Western country because that is where the server was located. Sure, he couldn't be extradited from Indonesia, but neither could he ever go to a country with an extradition treaty.

"Do you have any idea of how the portrait pack worked?"

It modified cient-side files. Period. End of story. That is a permabanable offence under the Eve EULA. To be even handed, action has to be taken on ALL counts. The goons cannot be magically excluded.

And why would I care about an incident about someone I didn't even know? Sure, it was lame. Something to nuts about? Well, no. I am not in BoB, and my experience with goons spans many years and places. Every single time, the goons have made the experience radically worse.

 

[Echolocating]

Since we're arguing for argument's sake now... ;-)

goonygoon... I'm afraid that the police are not, for example, allowed to tie someone up, beat them and then take their confession into court. How evidence is extracted is legally and morally important.

Yes and no, Andrew. How the police obtain evidence is important, but this is not a case of the police (or law) illegally hacking CCP and obtaining damning information. This is a case of a civilian (or criminal, it doesn't matter) releasing said information to the public. In many real world cases, lesser criminals rat out higher profile criminals to lessen their own sentences. These lesser criminals typically obtain the damning information by (or while) performing criminal acts... yet the courts still accept their testimony and evidence.

 

[Jacob Majestic [deprecated]]

Small note, SS. The Sabre blueprint listed in Vincent's confession post is a Tier 2 ship [http://www.eve-online.com/itemdatabase/ships/interdictors/minmatar/22456.asp]. An Interdictor is not quite enough to win a battle on its own, but it's still a pretty useful print to have.

Thanks for the correction on Ammo only.
An Interdictor BPO raises the total effect to 2 players joining Reikkoku[SIC] for 30 days.

This is not precisely the case.

I'm sure in your position you know that it takes money to make money.

For readers of The Escapist that are not familiar with EVE in-game events, when freighters (the in-game 18-wheelers) were introduced there were easy ways to make billions in in-game money running NPC trade routes. If you had the billion you needed to purchase the freighter, you could make billions off the trade routes. By the time that avatars of lesser means had collected the capital they needed to get into freighters, the NPC trade routes had been fixed to be much less lucrative. A small amount of in-game advantage, properly invested, can be quickly converted to large amounts of in-game advantage.

Also, Serenity is deliberately discounting the true value of a Sabre BPO. In EVE, ships can enter and leave the field of battle freely unless they are warp scrambled. Generally, small, fast ships are equipped as "tacklers" -- if your ship is tackled, you cannot escape the field. Interdictors are critical to fleet combat (where territory changes hands) because they can warp scramble many ships at the same time. Furthermore, Sabres are unique among interdictors in that they're the only one that can solo -- other interdictors can't do enough damage to fly without friends.

Because the supply of T2 equipment is fixed through the T2 lottery, the price fluctuates wildly with demand. For example, the retail price of Sabres in hub systems right now is about ten times the build cost. The value of having a secure, steady source of these ships cannot be underestimated.

(Full disclosure: I am a member of Goonswarm. I was previously a member of ISS with Serenity Steele. My relationship with ISS was terminated after I sabotaged an ISS-controlled system, which was subsequently conquered by an ally of Goonswarm.)

(Full disclosure #2: I created one of the major portrait "hack" programs. To my knowledge, every successful fleet commander in EVE uses either my program or another program of similar design. Furthermore, in EVE the definition of client-side modification is poorly defined. EVE is coded in Python, which means anyone that can install IPython can introspect EVE objects and create client-side modifications. The portrait "hack" does not hook into EVE runtime code or otherwise change EVE's runtime behavior. This discriminates the program from other common EVE hacks, which hook into the client at runtime and do all sorts of unpleasant things like scrape data and script client actions with macros.)

 

[Joe]

Hey everyone, I updated two of the articles but wanted to let you all know here, as well.

We've received some emails from people asking why we haven't interviewed BoB yet. We sent out an interview request to them, to which they replied: "CCP's official announcement can be found on the Eve Online forums. We have no interest in expanding on that."

So there's that.

 

[viramor]

Of all the parties feeling betrayed here I would imagine BoB and Reikoku are at the top of the list; I'm sure most if not all members were oblivous to what happened. A huge shadow has been cast upon them by the actions of T20 which will not go away easily and is already having in game consequences.

 

[Val Korry [deprecated]]

OK, I am very new to EVE. I'm 8 days into my 14 day free trial. Feel free to look me up. I play as Val Korry. A Caldari soldier and am currently flying a Kestrel. I have no idea where I am in space because I can?t figure the damn map out.

Here are my thoughts:

A. Do I want to invest in a game that has Developers granting an unfair advantage to either themselves, or their friends?

B. How do I know that the Player who just blasted me out of my ship and then podded me didn't have some advantage given to him by a developer?

C. Since I haven't even figures out how to join an alliance, yet, I now have to consider things like:

1. If developers are members of a particular alliance, do I believe that they will not give that alliance the upper hand through unfair means?

2. Are all alliances that are enemies of the developers' alliance doomed to be defeated.

3. Should I be suspicious that the alliance that seemingly controls the largest amount of space and seems to be one of, if not the, most powerful apparently has developers as members?

D. Maybe all developer characters should be labled as such. That way at least their comings/goings/doings would be at least in the open.

E. I'm still trying to decide if this a game I want to pay to play. With this latest cheating development, I really wish I had longer to sort things out and see what the fall out is before I started dropping cash to play.

I don't ming getting smoked in a fair fight, but when there is the possibility that the person smoked me beacuse a developer gave them some sort of advantage, then I'm going to have to think really hard on whether this is the online game I want to pay to play.

Thoughts?

Val Korry out

 

[Black Dawg [deprecated]]

Remedial was just unbanned by CCP and I and 3 other LV members were perma banned. I was reinstated when no evidence was offered to support of ebaying. When I asked remedial in local and eve mail about the banning he got for Game time code fraud, I was perma banned for selling isk or buying it on ebay. I pointed out that his ban was lifted by same guy that banned everyone with access to pos fuel in an LV corp 1 day prior to Goonswarm breaking a treaty and attacking those exact poses. GM Nova has acted without evidence and with malice on every suspiscion he can come up with. I am posting a video with all logs and petition screen shots to demonstrate that a really great gaming concept is beong slandered by a bunch of geeky GM's and Dev to a point where the game will die a quick and rapid death in an undue fashion. Perhaps if these people had someone look over their logs they may find quite a story. PS Why didn't CCP ever change its passwords to dev access. 8) Gu1ness for the win

 

[Black Dawg [deprecated]]

Let's keep things on topic and coherent, please.

-Joe

 

[Popsikle [deprecated]]

MY OPINION:
Your article is so slanted its not even funny... What happen to proper journalism? The issue is that a dev was cheating, but the fact that CCP did what they did should be the focus, not on everything else. Yea CCP should have said something months ago when they found out about T20, but they didn't and have ADMITTED to making a mistake about it... When was the last time you saw a MMO Company's CEO ADMIT to fucking things up?

Overall CCP was far more open in this then all the other MMO companies would have been, and there is a very vocal minority of the forums that are blowing this way out of size.

Its that group of the forums that are getting our of hand and think that they are being silenced and muffled and they need to strike back by giving CCP bad press...

CCP did the best they could, and did better then any MMO company has in the past, and probably will in the future when dealing with these sorts of issues, and its about time people start respecting that.

Just for everyone to know, Ive listed the facts below, to compare with the OP's and trolls above account(s).


FACTS:

CCP found out a Dev was cheating, They disciplined the Dev 8 months ago. They didn't inform the community ;(

CCP created the tools to monitor thier staff and hired someone to do that 40 hours a week. They are paying someone to just watch over the Devs to try and prevent this in the future...

The Community found out about this months later and wanted to know what happened, and if there was anything CCP missed.

CCP communicated with the community as best they could, and better then any other MMO company ever would have saying they would investigate and find any more details they could.

CCP found that the Dev had given illegal items to someone in game, that may have not been removed. CCP then removed illegal items.

CCP allowed discussion on the events, in the open, for everyone to talk about.

CCP then answered all the questions they could about it without infringing on anyones privacy.

CCP then decided to state there was no more need for discussion as they cant give any more details out.

 

[Andrew Crystall [deprecated]]

Echolocating, then why are journalists not allowed to pay criminals for their stories? Come on!

Black Dawg, yes, there are certainly factions within the devs as well.

Popsikle, they've let a wholly inadequate statement stand. There is a LOT more they could chosen to say, and they're not. I really DID think that they'd clear certain things up...they haven't. Of course, they don't NEED to say anything but it's now clear they have no idea how to deal with this and the damage is going to roll on.

 

[Jelreyn [deprecated]]

Glad this article came to light. Now here's one game I won't ever play.

 

[Echolocating]

Echolocating, then why are journalists not allowed to pay criminals for their stories? Come on!

Because it's illegal to profit from crime. What are you trying to get at, Andrew?

Are you saying that because police cannot illegally obtain evidence and journalists can't pay criminals for their stories... that Kugutsumen's findings are irrelevant? That doesn't make any sense. I'm not following you on this, Andrew.

 

[Andrew Crystall [deprecated]]

Okay, I'll spell it out.

This is a moderately well known hacker, who'd been doing this for over a decade. He is paid to hack websites. You are giving him all the free publicity he could hope for. This entire affair isn't even ABOUT him, in the end - it's about CCP, it's about BoB and it's about the metatopics of devs playing their games and even handed moderation.

 

[hammarus]

Glad this article came to light. Now here's one game I won't ever play.

Now thats a shame. Its a really good game.

 

[ReedRichards]

Okay, I'll spell it out.

This is a moderately well known hacker, who'd been doing this for over a decade. He is paid to hack websites. You are giving him all the free publicity he could hope for. This entire affair isn't even ABOUT him, in the end - it's about CCP, it's about BoB and it's about the metatopics of devs playing their games and even handed moderation.

Also, everyone who keeps ranting about how the article is skewed and such should remember it is an editorial. Editorials are opinion pieces. If you don't believe me check wiktionary.

 

[vizacahmin [deprecated]]

I used to play this game. It's tough for a player association to make it in this game. I just gained a new appreciation for alliances that stand up to BoB who did it without cheating.

Reinforces my belief that this game is a cluster****.

And by the way, you didn't need to hack Remedial's site. It's doubtful anyone ever hacked it. Why would they when you had to do was sign up? Goonfleet let anyone that wanted one have an account on it. They did 0 vetting of forum members and actually left the door wide open for anyone. I did it myself when we were fighting them in XZH (I was in RAZOR when I played) to get intel on them. I simply joined the forum LMAO. I didn't even have to lie to anyone. No "hacking" or any machine comprimise necessary.

They actually had a very nice wiki that told new players exactly what to do. The forums were very entertaining to say the least.

Nice try remedial. "Hacked into my site" what a maroon LMAO.

-Viz