EVE General Discussion

Rest assured, the vast majority of us are in complete agreement with you, all jokes aside.

Just because some people over play things, doesn't mean that the concerns of the more reasonable players are groundless.

Two recent examples that have certainly raised a few eye brows are (incorrectly named GM removed) tendency to lock threads critical of Goons and the seemingly priority petition queue enjoyed by the Goons. My petitions always seem to take days or weeks to be answered I've rarely had a petitions answered in hours never mind minutes.

When allegations are made in most free western countries, the police (authorities) investigate and if necessary collect the evidence, not expect the public to do it. Internal Affairs needs to be more pro-active and seen to be so. However I don't believe that means the Dev should automatically loose their job, but lesser punishments for lesser transgression would make this less of all or nothing scenario. e.g. lose the Character in the alliance is appropriate for creating a conflict of interest by seeming to favour that alliance.

Mainly this is because most threads created about Goons are the same whining nonfactual accusations, that do nothing but clog the forums up.

i dont know what the big fuss is, all goon forum accounts are just alts of npc corp players

Nobody said IA doesn't collect evidence. Quite to the contrary. What we said is that if there's some basis for your accusations (which I presume one would have before they made any) then you should send it to IA.

Soundwave can't even lock threads to my knowledge which would put that one right up there with the rest of the baseless accusations which have been made in this thread. If you feel this is happening somehow you can send the locked threads in a list to IA and an investigation will be performed. THAT is how you do it. They will see who locked each thread and why.

Your request for IA to be open is as common as people asking for proof when it comes to our investigative process. The bottom line is that the nature of the job is such that this is never going to happen in many cases for legal reasons. You can keep banging that drum if you like but it's never going to become reality. You may as well ask to see everyone's HR file because it's the exact same thing.

I want to be clear as well that my posts were not a request but a rather pointed warning that the behavior in question is completely unacceptable. This isn't a situation where I'm lamenting impotently the loss of civility in the social discourse, but rather one where I'm stating quite pointedly that this behavior is going to cease one way or another.

If CCP employees are so easily trolled and possess so little restraint, one wonders about their ability to maintain self control. If they feel compelled to respond with snark under their own name, will that compulsion lead to further action under some other name? Ingame actions? Petty bannings and forum pruning? GM's who recognize a name and deny petitions? Are my account details being relayed to Mittens via cell phone? Who knows? The flip side of secrecy is the inability to prove your innocence. We have to trust you. In case you haven't noticed, EVE has a way of destroying trust. It doesn't help that the things we're discussing have actually occurred. As I said previously, perhaps you should consider nice bland, stock responses for these sorts of threads. Jumping in with both feet to kick the asses of trolls is probably not a good thing. It just keeps the thread alive longer with a little blue tag that makes it all that more seductive. If the posts were truly libelous, then "not tolerated" should be manifested as bannings, deletions, and locks.

Personally, I think anything that might appear to be collusion betwee CCP and EUNI (another favorite target for these types of accusations) or Goons is simply a manifestation of a CCP initiative to help build long term good guys and bad guys into the game. Player driven content provides a lot of challenges and a consistent environment of aggressive, hostile acts is hard to keep going outside of RL. Why allow Burn Jita? Pissed victims want to inflict harm on their attackers. Why keep EUNI safe from wars? To keep noobs from quitting before they pay for their first sub. If people stopped placing the Goons at the top of the boogeyman list, they'd see most of what happens for what it is: RL business decisions.

PS- I love your anti-botting efforts and your dev blogs are always a good read. You might want to occasionally take a step or two back from things to realize that all of us posters are playing a game. The manipulation of reality is part of it. Accusations from random trolls shuoldn't lead to feeling insulted and libeled. You're just feeding them what they want. They have clearly ruffled your feathers.

The IA email address which has been linked repeatedly is the perfect place for this post.

"All of this has happened before and will happen again".

CCP got dragged into this largely pointless argument back when Band of Brothers was in the ascendency. Players demanded CCP withdraw from EVE and the games development took a nose dive as a result.

Conspiracy theories and tin foil hattery will always abound in EVE Online - if players don't trust the devs then they can take the ultimate sanction and vote with their wallets and unsub.

Its time to lock the thread.

C.

Would you like an investigation to happen or would you prefer to just make posts on the internet? If you want an investigation to happen then you can send your issue to IA. Would that I could simply query the magical answer to every question ever asked on the spot database and spit one out for you, but I cannot. The forums are also not the place for this and I encourage you to check out the TOS.

Just lock the damn thread and have done with it.