Malloc Memrel
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Posted - 2007.05.30 00:33:00 -
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Crossposted from the "other" thread, I think this sums up nicely the reasons for insisting on invisibility of developers on the public server:
 Originally by: Malloc Memrel
By way of anecdote since I ran out of room last post, we used to joke about an associate of mine at Blizzard having "Magic Dice". As is common in large dungeon crawls, the best loot would be "rolled" for by asking the system's random number generator for a number between one and a hundred, with the highest roller being allowed to take the most coveted items. This employee would almost always win the rolls. It didn't matter if the next highest roll was nine or ninety, he'd win it most of the time.
When he played on the public servers, his guildmates gave him good-natured grief about it- "Argh, you lucky son of a~! "- but they just chalked it up to him being really lucky, as some people simply are.
Think, for a second, what their reaction would be if they knew he was a developer? Would it be so easy to pass his consistent good fortune off with the knowledge that he knows the people who designed the random number generator? Would it be impossible to concieve that he knew, somehow, how to fix the dice? Even if it was the farthest thing from the truth, there'd be the suspicion, and it wouldn't be unreasonable, which is why he's never told anyone outside the company anything about his character, his guild, anything, ever. His guildmates have no reason to suspect him because they have no idea they're playing with a Blizzard employee. Nobody ever has any idea that they're playing with Blizzard employees, not even to each other. I've heard of Blizzard people who went to guild meets incognito and discovered that their co-workers have been right there in their guild with them for months and months without even realizing it, so total was the secrecy.
I think EVE as a whole needs a new set of blinders put on it, one that obscures all vision between the customer side of the line and the corporate side of the line. Mixing the two is a pandora's box that has, is, and will inevitably lead to more public outcries over accusations of impropriety which ultimately hurt the company as a whole. I don't know how things are in Europe, but stateside the video game industry is one big incestuous family where everybody knows everybody else. How many times will "EVE Scandal!" have to appear on the front page of Slashdot before the company becomes a Resume' Stain? We're at twice, and that's pushing it already.
Of course, the problem in only bringing it up now is that in order to actually fix the problem, every internal character would have to be wiped clean. I don't mean renamed, as that would be too easy to figure out- in a game like this, there's pretty much only one conclusion to come to if you find a character with four years' worth of skills and an empty corp history that no one's ever seen before. No, I mean wiped clean, day one, "Welcome to EVE, here's how you mine Veldspar" new characters. Painful as it may be, it's the only way I can see of re-establishing developer annonymity. That, and a gag order under pain of termination.
Also, I'd like to re-iterate my "Rubbish" comment to anyone who claims that developers need to be playing the game as their professional personas. You should never, ever be able to see any player with "CCP" or "GM" in front of their names unless they are confronting you with something that absolutely requires their presence. They should be invisible, intangible, at best identifiable only so much as they can be held accountable. And corporations shouldn't mean a thing, either- we created, filled, tested, and disbanded guilds every day. When you can create an infinite number of accounts/characters at will and can spawn in any and every asset in the database with a snap of your fingers, there is absolutely no reason to "test" anything out on the public servers.
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