Recently CCP, the company that created and runs EVE Online, was accused of multiple abuses of their power and knowledge of and within EVE itself. The misconduct was discovered by a player known as kugutsumen who posted his discoveries both on the Eve Online forums and on his own personal blog/forums. Obviously this caused uproar from the player base, after all who wants to pay for a game in which some of the creators may be cheating? CCP locked the thread containing the initial allegations and pages of responses with the promise to investigate.

The result of this investigation was posted six days later by kieron, the community manager and apparently former Nixon administration employee:

Our goal is to provide the best possible game, gaming experience and development process possible. In light of that, we would like to address the recent allegations of CCP employee misconduct. CCP has taken these charges very seriously and since they surfaced we have launched a thorough investigation consisting of an examination of character histories ranging back to their creation as well as into any connected characters owned by the developers involved. This examination was performed by the same internal division which is also tasked with standard periodic audits of all developer and volunteer accounts. Areas of investigation include, but are not limited to: messaging history, financial and transactional history, combat and corporation logs, item and cash transfers and IP logs.

As for the allegations themselves, they consist of two parts. The first part involved a case that happened seven months ago when a CCP employee’s identity became public knowledge within his corporation. Per company policy, the incident was investigated and actions taken where appropriate, including the removal of characters whose identities were compromised.

The second part of the accusations stem from a leak of information pertaining to an in-game event arc. Due to the amount of time that has passed since the planning and execution of the event arc, we have not been able to confirm nor deny the veracity of these allegations.

In both cases, these accusations were recently brought forward when a player revealed the identity of numerous CCP employee characters. Since these play characters are known to belong to CCP employees, they will be removed from the game. Many of them have been around since the creation of EVE and it is most unfortunate that these developers are now forced to end their relationships with their in-game friends, but that is our policy when the anonymity of staff members has been compromised.

Last summer, CCP implemented stricter monitoring procedures and audits on all CCP employees’ EVE accounts. We are confident that our rigid procedures and protocol will prevent any misconduct or, at least, allow us to quickly discover it, should such an unfortunate scenario arise.

As the community knows well, we at CCP enjoy not only playing EVE Online, but improving EVE and interacting with our playerbase. We feel EVE benefits from the developers playing EVE as any other members of the community do, and to impose artificial limitations -- such as no access to Tranquility or special flagging on a developer’s player character -- would greatly hinder the development of EVE.

CCP is very passionate about EVE Online and is committed to its continued growth. We hope that this statement will put this issue behind us once and for all and allow us to continue moving forward with the support of our community.

kieron
Community Manager,
EVE Online

As you can see in the heavily moderated thread that follows, kieron whitewashes the issues he does address and completely ignores many other points brought forward by kugutsumen in his investigation.

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