Massively^™

One of the reasons this divide exists is due to the way CCP handled the t20 incident itself.

For those not in the know, in EvE there exists a player alliance named Band of Brothers (BoB). BoB is composed of your typical MMO power players, and like to play the "bad guy". t20's character was in BoB, and worked his way to a position as a director of the alliance and the head of their capital ship fleet. He revealed his status as a developer to the BoB high command spawned several very valuable t2 blueprints (which, at the time, could only be achieved by winning a lottery) for the alliance, and provided the BoB leadership with knowledge of upcoming game changes and exploits. BoB used this knowledge to great effect, becoming the most powerful player alliance in the game. An EvE player (who was hacker) discovered evidence of all this and posted it on the official forums.

In response, CCP banned that player, and went completely mum about the whole thing. Only after much ranting and raving by players demanding a CCP response did CCP announce that an investigation was conducted, stating that every allegation but the spawned blueprints was false, and the dev posted a very short and weak apology.

Besides this incident, the greater problem with the game is that they selectively listen to the player base; devs in the past formed close relationships with players, who ascertained (or were told) of the devs true nature. Players then, for the their own selfish motives or thinking in terms of the good of their alliance, (or, worse yet, the dev was motivated as such) provided poorly thought out ideas that were implemented. Such ideas (the introduction of capital ships as a whole, carriers and titans in particular), coupled with the inability of CCP's servers to handle any real stress, have largely ruined the large scale PvP aspect of the game and led to the current static territorial situation in player conquerable space.

The current CCP CEO has stated that had he been in charge at the time, it would have been handled differently. CCP should have fired t20 and punished BoB (preferably by banning those in the know). Everything that CCP has done to regain the trust of the player base (from the CSM to their internal affairs department) has failed. Most all but the most casual players believe that BoB is still the "Band of Developers", that they have cheated to achieve and maintain their current position, and BoB does nothing to disabuse them of that notion.

The devs should play the game, but they should come up with their own ideas of game balance and implement them in spite of the players caterwauling. Almost all player input is motivated out of self interest, and not game balance.

Unfortunately, CCP has made noise for a LONG time about "fixing" player conquorable space, but nothing has been forthcoming. The patches for the rest of this year focus on very minor bug fixes and boosting Empire space (largely composed of casual players and ISK (gold) farmers). I left the game due to CCP's apparent focus on becoming "WoW in space."

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CCP just has bad devs, so they get yelled at. Good game designers though.

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With the officially sanctioned trading of in game money (isk) for monthly subscriptions, most of the established players I meet haven't paid CCP any real money in ages. Since skill leveling is almost completely real time based, new toons have a hard time competing against characters created even a year earlier. This of course encourages new players to try to even the playing field by buying isk either sanctioned or not. So now you have a community where the most influential players have the ear of developers (or are the developers themselves) but don't contribute to the revenues of CCP. Some separation needs to occur.

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The problem is that the t20 incident is not a standalone event. I remember we got intel that a BoB corporation was camping a star system hours of traveling away from their current operations. We was wondering why when CCP hosted an event in the system and several CCP actors jumped into the gatecamp and died , leaving lots of valuable loot behind. How did the BoB corp know about an event noone else knew about? Half a year later the eve community finds out that the guy in charge of events is also a director in said BoB corporation. The guy withdraws from his position of "unrelated" reasons.

The popular alliance tournament had prices that was valuable enough to shift balance between alliances. It was won by BoB several times in a row. At one time the secret eve character of the developer hosting the tournament was revealed. Going through his corporation history you discover that he joined the BoB corporation that won the tournament the week after the final. Was he a neutral judge? (his eve character is known for a high profile scam, so we already know he is not the trustworthy kind) The developer is no longer with CCP, but I am not aware of any official explanation why. My theory is that CCP forced him to choose between his eve character and job. CCP delete/rename any character that the community find out is owned by a CCP employe. He still plays his character and he left ccp shortly after the connection between the character and developer was made.

There are lots of these kind of incidents, but only CCP is in a position to look into it. It looks like they are cleaning up their act , but they got almost 4 years of incidents they are not willing to admit to. There are a lot of cheaters from that time in CCP, and neither they or the players that knew and benefitted from it got any punishment. CCP still keep quiet about it and until they go back and deal with them I cannot trust CCP.

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Looking how WOW employees "blue posts" deal with the much larger WOW forums I don't know what CCP can do. I'd hope CCP isn't as condescending as Blizzard employees are in their forums.

Also, you can find emo-rage there too; "Blizz favors the Alliance!" or "Blizz hates the [insert class name here]!" and so on can all be seen in Blizzard's forums weekly if not daily.

"You can't please all the people all of the time"

You get a community of a certain size you're always going to have unhappy people who are more than willing to jump into the forums to vent. Plus your typical forum-trolls will always be there fanning the flames too.

Having the players police the game, like the hacker in the article, is a great way to keep the company honest. He said in a interview months ago he's still in the game watching.

We have yet to see how the CSM goes, but it could be promising to have a group of player-elected representatives have meetings with CCP.

Speaking of which, isn't this T20 thing old news by now?

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