EVE Online Scandal Deliberate Frame-Job? 382
Last Friday, we discussed serious allegations leveled against CCP by players of the game. The comments on the discussion were lively, and pointed. Perhaps a bit too pointed, as CCP's internal affairs investigation claims that a plot to smear the company with false accusations over the long holiday weekend was behind the flurry of online activity. "The objective of this scheme was to permanently paint CCP as a biased and corrupt company that favors a select group of players over the rest of our community. In this particular case, instead of receiving notification of a possible problem and sufficient time to examine and address it, we faced a coordinated and hostile attack executed on our forums, Digg, Wikipedia, Slashdot, and other outlets at the beginning of a three-day weekend. We believe this speaks volumes of the intention of the person(s) responsible for orchestrating this scheme. Verification of this can be readily found on the forums of the people responsible--or at least could, the last time we looked." Scott Jennings over at Broken Toys points the finger at the Goon Fleet corporation, an organization based out of the Something Awful forums. As I noted in the original post, the evidence presented on both sides is challenging to verify independently. Take everything you read about these events with a grain of salt.
Not really (Score:3, Informative)
Re:misleading, as always (Score:5, Informative)
The relevance is related to the subject:
1) Intersetallar Kredits(ISK) are worth a lot of real-world money, the 100 billion stolen was worth at least $20,000 at the time when the perpetrator attempted to sell them. If they had made off and actually sold 700bil, that would have been a couple years' salary for most people around here.
2) As for the Goons, EVE is known as a game where it's best to try to cheat as much as you can in hopes of getting away with it, and that its developers are not above this. The fact that people are paying money to lose is both saddening and remarkable, and such is why it's on the front page.
I wonder... (Score:4, Informative)
Let's not forget that the goonfleet internal forums show standing orders to tarnish CCP's image.
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=top
From dev blog:
Since last Friday, an unnamed corporation posted over 4000 times on EVE's message boards concerning these allegations. In addition, 1046 posts were made on Digg.com; 235 comments were added on Slashdot; and made multiple EVE-related edits on Wikipedia. Each of these sites was hit within a few hours of each other, at the start of the three-day Memorial Day weekend in the US and a three-day weekend in Iceland, all referencing unfounded allegations -- now proven to be false -- that occurred three weeks ago or longer.
Goon fleet members spammed the forums so much that CCP was forced to shut them down (I saw it happen; an entire front page worth of spam). And some people still thing its a CCP conspiracy?
Re:Bad PR move: Never whine (Score:1, Informative)
Re:hoo boy (Score:3, Informative)
http://goonfleet.com/reply_to_CCP.html [goonfleet.com] - SA/Goon's response to the latest CCP devblog. It is extremely well written, and I agree with it completely despite the fact that I think the SA crew (and GoonFleet) are assholes.