EVE Online Dev Responds to Accusations, Admits Fault

It's as if the UN just dissolved and India declared war on Australia. I think the end of the world is near. DEVs GIVING THEMSELVES IN GAME GOODIES!!!
AHHHHHHHHHHhhhh......

I'm surprised they haven't just fired the dev and issued a statement of zero policy.

boy, reading about this shit makes me wanna play the game.

One of the gaming magazines (The SHack included) should make a WWO scandals countdown starting with the Lord British death issue in UO.

They have handled this situation poorly from the start, if the word poorly can even begin to describe it. The doubts that are festerring within the community are not going to die down after this half-hearted attempt at a conclusion.

So many questions remain.

How many other developers were/are involved in similar activities?

What actions are going to be taken against said developers, and if none, why?

Why did it take a third parties uncovering of these activities for them to ever see the light of day?

What happens to ALL the material and money generated from unfairly gained items?

What happens to Alliances who knowingly accepted unfairly gained items?

This whole situation is disturbing, and if I still had an active account with CCP I would be cancelling it immediately. They have in no way shown me they are capable of handling these things appropriately in the future, if at all. They are unfaily stacking the game against their own customers in favor of themselves. That could be the single most grievous offense any developer can make.

They should take all the BPCs of those BPOs out of circulation too, and go through the logs and take money away for the sale of any BPCs or items made from those Blueprints.

Can someone who is playing Eve discuss how valuable the BPO's in question are? Here's the list:

Flameburst Precision Light Missile Blueprint
Phalanx Rage Rocket Blueprint
Havoc Fury Heavy Missile Blueprint
Bloodclaw Fury Light Missile Blueprint
Spike L Blueprint
Sabre Blueprint

I remember thinking all rockets were useless, but I never got into PvP and I was mainly using the arty/howi's for my guns. I also recall thinking that T2 light missiles just weren't worth the extra cost, but I don't remember which mods were available or what they specifically did.

Meh... Every MMORPG game has people like this. Sometimes they get exposed (like this t20 dude in EVE or Nebu/GFrazier in WoW), sometimes they do not... Nothing really surprising.

In response to diabolicc and a few other commenters, a bit of explanation is probably in order for those who don't play Eve.

Instead of leveling, Eve has a skill tree, where the time to learn a skill is in real-world hours. You pick a skill to learn, and it learns it at a constant rate (whether you're in-game or logged out) until it's done. This makes it extremely convenient for people with real lives and prevents powerleveling. However, once you have the skills to pilot a ship / use a weapon / etc., you still have to purchase the equipment.

With a few exceptions, nearly every item of note in Eve is crafted, either by an NPC or a PC -- and Eve is partial permadeath (you lose your ship, but not your skills), so there's always repeat buyers. Eve is in many ways a gigantic economic simulation that's fueled by PvP; money is everything. People do PvP in order to maintain control of resources like rare ores and reprocessing stations so that they can have the ability to churn out equipment in bulk and make huge ass profits on the market.

However, even if you have all the resources in the galaxy, you need a blueprint to make an item. Blueprints for high-end items (Technology Level 2) are currently incredibly valuable and rare, bordering on priceless.

The problem in this case isn't just a dev giving themselves a phat ship and uber weapons (although that's happened in the past). The dev gave blueprints, that should not have been in existence to an alliance, who had ample industrial resources. The result is that they were able to instantly corner the market on a number of high-demand goods for months at a time, making huge amounts of money in the process.

Imagine that you're drag racing. You and your competitors have equally matched engines and bodies and are accelerating at the same rate. Suddenly, one of your competitors starts accelerating past you because they've got a secret rocket engine. Through an act of god, the rocket engine disappears... but the damage has already been done, because even though you're now equal in horsepower, he's still accelerated and is now going faster than you, and that gap will only increase as time goes on.

BoB in this case has had seven months to benefit from this; they now vastly lead the other alliances in firepower, fielding multiple titans and having the cash on hand to contract out mercenary groups like MC indefinitely, and have already killed off the only alliance of equal size (ASCN). The only way for them to be beaten now is for the rest of the in-game alliances to band together and collectively take out BoB. And this, my friends, is what we call imbalance.

I don't play EVE, but I find this situation really interesting as a social experiment of sorts.

A faction in a similar real situation might also acquire a large (unfair) advantage which would put it in a really favorable position. What would everyone else in such a situation do to level the field again?
Dev fuckups aside, it'll be interesting to see how this develops in-game.

This is such bullshit that nothing has happened to him. Way to stick up for your community CCP.

I don't know much about EVE, but don't those types of blueprints let you build unlimited ships? They say the character and the prints were removed, but what about all the ships which were probably given away. (or whatever the blueprint was used for). I think it would be fairly easy to look at who is now the owner of what the illicit blueprint created and see if they obtained it without knowing or if they obviously knew it was not above-board. I wonder if there will be a balance of power shift.

Go Goonfleet.