Handling scandal isn’t just for politicians. It’s now part of running a successful online game– but as CCP has shown, developers have a lot to learn.

The Escapist has done a great job of reporting on the scandal, but here are the highlights:

• A player named Kugutsumen uncovered that an EVE developer used his position to give some useful information and seriously fat loot to his corporation (an EVE guild). These ill-gotten contributions may have played a part in that corporation becoming the dominant force in EVE– a major coup in a PvP-centric, single universe game.
• Kugutsumen went public with this information, exposing the identities of many developer-players in the process.
• CCP banned Kugutsumen, citing a portion of the ToS that prohibits making the game more difficult to administer– by, say, pointing out that the developers are sending loot to their friends.
• CCP claims they disciplined the offending developer last year, when they uncovered the incident independently. Until now, the ill-gotten loot remained with the corporation. The developer still works at CCP.
• The head of the guild that received this preferential treatment retaliated against Kugutsumen, by posting his personal information and encouraging people to call and harass him at home and work. That player has not been disciplined.

Sound bad? The more you read, the worse it gets. CCP’s posts are a model of what not to do: they give lip service to the actual scandal, while complaining about the loss to the developers (several of whom were forced to delete their accounts). It’s a tasty helping of scandal: dig in.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 12:26 am and is filed under Game Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.