Originally by: Noogy

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Originally by: Garia666

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Originally by: Mahavy Seth

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Originally by: Galtan Deus

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Originally by: Malloc Memrel

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This is the first and probably only post on eve-o I'll ever make, as I've never been much of a "Game X Forums" kind of guy, but I had to say this.

As an ex-Blizzard employee, I am flabbergasted at the extent to which developer presence contaminates the player pool. With WoW there wasn't a line between our player accounts and our personal accounts- there was a wall, a moat, a spike-filled trench, and electrified barbed wire. You so much as tried to enter a developer command into the console, you'd be kicked from the server, your account would be flagged, and unless you had a really damn good rason for attempting to bring developer capabilities into the game your ass was fired. You told no one anything about the game behind the curtain, you never told anyone in-game that you even worked for the company, or your ass was fired. The impetus for crossing that line in eve is entirely beyond me.

And don't start for a second with "We need to see how things work." Rubbish. You've got one of the most robust test servers known to MMOs, you've got ridiculously fluid interaction from your player base (At least from the bottom-up) and if nothing else you could have internal servers to try things on. Having anyone with even the possibility of developer powers in the public server is nothing short of madness. Having powers above and beyond normal players, or having access to information beyond the average player, is akin to putting water in chocolate- a single drop can cause a whole batch to sieze and it's ruined just like that.

"But what about GMs?" you ask. Fair enough, they need certain powers to set things right. But they should only ever exist in the game when no other option presents itself. They should be invisible, intangible, a last resort for a coding malfunction or dispute that requires GM omniscience to solve. They should not be people but a service, identifiable only to the point that they can be held accountable for their actions. If you tried to log in as a GM account anywhere but at Blizzard's GM center, hell, if you even hinted that you had a GM account, you'd be canned so fast your head would spin. That CCP would willingly and intentionally contaminate the public player base with what amounts to demi-gods with varying degrees of moral fortitude just boggles my mind.

The thing is, I know some CCPers here on the american side of things, people I've worked with in the past, and I just feel so sorry for them. I just want to say to them, "What the hell is going on over there? What kind of people are you working for?" but I know it isn't their fault.

Bottom line, CCP doesn't care. What exactly they don't care about, I'm not sure; it could be that they don't care about people being in a position to abuse powers beyond what normal paying customers can do, or it could be that they don't care about the effect establishing an Old Boy's Club with their closest pals has on the rest of the game, or it could be any number of things. But the inevitable conclusion is that there is some aspect of the past and current troubles that they are simply turning their noses up at.

The sad thing is, I left WoW for EvE because despite all the work I had put into it, EvE struck me as the superior product. Ironically, I was half wrong and half right. Eve has the potential to be a superior product, but this kind of customer relations seems to spit in the face of everyone who wants to play a game with a firm set of established rules applicable throughout the playerbase.

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