Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

What's Next for EVE?

Part Three of Five

Ethec: I don’t want to make a big deal out of it, but do you have anything to say about the recent issues you’ve had with the GMs?

Magnus: Yes, there are a number of things I can say about it. It was a complete mess on our part. We were just naïve, because we’d never gone through something like this before.

When this occurred, it was actually during the European vacations, and – of course, almost the entire management team was out when this happened. The people that were in charge then, they decided to deal with it in the way that they dealt with it. They had virtually no experience – I mean none of us had experienced something like that – and we thought nothing like that would ever happen.

It sounds extremely naïve, but the mentality was that we were so committed to this game that we never thought one of our own would do any harm to it. It’s like harming your own child.

But now we know that it CAN happen. The whole situation made me so sad. It was a big downer for us, and to see some of the users still going on about this….it just makes you miserable.

I’ve talked to the individual who did this, and he still doesn’t understand why he decided to do it. He had access to certain databases that only a select few people had access too, so it was just an extreme case all around. We couldn’t double judge him after the fact – it would have been like double jeopardy. However, now we have VERY strict rules and internal audits concerning our employees. We have a department that does nothing else but track this sort of thing.

Then we have these people who think CCP is on a secret mission to help one alliance succeed in the game, and it’s so ridiculous and out there that it makes absolutely no sense. We did a query on all employees, and they’re very evenly distributed through the top twenty alliances. So how could we just help one alliance, without our own employees jumping in to make sure that the rival alliance doesn’t gain an upper hand?

At CCP, we play this game because we love it, but there’s still that question: Should we be playing this game at such a high level, because we are developers? There are some valid points saying we shouldn’t, but also some counter arguments noting that if we’re not there, how do we know how the game is played there?

The game evolves so quickly with the players, and if we’re not there how could we keep up? I don’t think there’s a magic solution, in this case.

 It’s just a mess, but we’re coming out of it with more control and it should be better for everybody.

Ethec: Do you think it was a symptom of your growth?

Magnus: Absolutely. We were just growing so fast. We stopped paying attention to things like this because we thought it wouldn’t be an issue.

Boomjack: Did it affect your subscription numbers at all?

Magnus: Actually it didn’t. We leveled off because of World of Warcraft, but now we're growing again. If somebody quit because of that situation, I think they were probably ready to quit anyway.

But we know that people are still very angry at us because we did something really really wrong. Hopefully in time people will see that it was just human error. We are no different than our users; we can make mistakes. It won’t happen again.

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