The EVE upset

 Posted by (Visited 31062 times)  Game talk, Reading  Tagged with: , ,
Feb 112009
 

Edit: I don’t actually play EVE, just watch from afar. I’ve corrected some errors below that players of EVE mentioned to me. 🙂

A few days ago, everyone wanted me to write about the massive destruction of the Band of Brothers alliance in EVE Online, and how Goonsquad GoonSwarm finally triumphed via an act of betrayal.

But honestly, another day, another giant EVE scam. Ho hum. Is there anything really good to say about this?

For the uninitiated: there was a huge aliance named Band of Brothers. There was another clan named Goonsquad GoonSwarm who hated them (edit: well, everyone, really) and worked against  them, but was not nearly as big or powerful. Goonsquad GoonSwarm would recruit BoB members in order to scam them. A BoB member joined under these false pretenses, but then chose sides and rather than be scammed, asked to join for real — and offered up BoB as his price of entry. He was a high-level admin of BoB, and he basically disbanded the whole thing, destroying it from within, and Goonsquad GoonSwarm made piles of virtual money.

The most intriguing aspect of the whole thing to me isn’t the way it happened, but the overall social dynamics of it — the fact that it was completely inevitable. There’s been lots of talk about how this was basically a sort of exploit, that one person should not have enough power to destroy the work of thousands. But I’ll make the case that this is exactly what CCP should want to have happen.

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Some misc links

 Posted by (Visited 5854 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , ,
Jul 072008
 
  • Oh look, another 3d engine in Flash.
  • EA and Hasbro have gotten around to launching a legit Scrabble on Facebook. But Scrabulous appears undaunted.
  • Once in a long ago, I half-heartedly suggested to Gordon Walton that the way to fix the SWG Correspondents program was to have them be player-elected. We never pursued it; the concern was always that they would feel that they would have the right to dictate policy and development priorities, thus taking away control from the dev team. Today, we see that EVE’s council gets covered in the New York Times. As a curiosity, for now — can the day when equivalent deliberations generate mainstream news be far behind?

Eve Online’s great experiment

 Posted by (Visited 6927 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Mar 212008
 

For those who don’t know, the  player council in Eve continues to move forward. In the past, I have commented that it seemed less like an actual player government than like an advisory council of sorts. But based on this article, it seems to have developed into more:

Giving players the control stick in EVE Online – Massively

I think it’s a question worth exploring as to why exactly this sort of thing is happening more aggressively in some game worlds than in social worlds, despite the fact that game worlds are more restrictive to the scope of user behavior in so many ways.

Eve democratic?

 Posted by (Visited 10940 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Jun 072007
 

The big news today is of course the announcement that Eve Online will allow players to elect an oversight committee, intended as a response to the recent charges of corruption.

I have to admit I feel ambivalent about it. I have been playing with the idea of player-elected representatives for a long time. At one point, I wanted the SWG correspondents to be player-elected. Ironically, players seem to react negatively to this sort of idea when it’s presented — take for example, the player commenter over on Scott Jennings’ blog, who basically dismisses elections of all sorts with the remark

So, players elect people to go check up on CCP. No way will those guys be favored stooges for the resident uber-guilds.

Kinda like Senators are favored stooges for lobbyists, I guess is how the logic goes.

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EVE scandal a frame job?

 Posted by (Visited 12077 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
May 302007
 

It comes up all the time: the question of whether managing an online community is like governance. Whether the users are at least somewhat like citizens, and not just like customers, and whether the admins are effectively policymakers, and not just game developers out to make a buck.

It’s an interesting question with tons of ramifications. Indeed, Ted Castronova’s upcoming book, which I was lucky enough to get a manuscript copy of, is entirely devoted to the idea that the real world is going to learn a lot of lessons from online governance.

In the meantime, what we get is the opposite. It turns out that the latest allegations of corrupt administration in EVE Online may have been a deliberate smear attempt by a guild. CCP, makers of EVE, have posted an evidence trail that in their opinion in damning — the fact that there was a prior beef between the guild in question and CCP, the fact that somehow the story hit all Net outlets simultaneously right at the start of a holiday weekend…

I can’t judge who’s in the right on this. To me what is interesting is that frankly, it looks like the action of a political party against their opposition. But it’s not like EVE’s “government” can be toppled. The only real result from an action like this is effectively a scorched earth policy: “we don’t like how things are run, so we’ll destroy the game for everyone.” Of popular reactions like these are dictatorships made.

Edit: the drama continues with the guild’s response.