Why you should not invest anything within CCP or EVE Online

Preamble

I wasn't planning on posting a second blog about CCP or EVE Online after my last post, but this is too important and sickening to ignore. I feel it important to let others know how dangerous it is to invest their time and money into a company who's idea of customer support is about as misleading as I've ever seen.

I also would like anyone reading this to know that I've seen a lot of bad shit go down. I've been engaged in the MMO scene since EverQuest: The Scars of Velious. I've either subscribed to the retail version, trial played or beta tested almost every major MMO that's come out since. Sony Online Entertainment was bad, but nowhere near as bad as what I'm about to describe.

It should be known that CCP does not have a clean history. While it's hard to believe anything you read on the internet (including this post), it's not very difficult to find news and blog posts about corruption within CCP. Particularly in regard to game masters using their power to help players who in-turn help developers through a system of player-voted development.

The Crime

Enough foreword though. The real meat of this post boils down to a situation in which a family member of mine is entangled in with CCP regarding his account. CCP has been recently running a crackdown on illegitimate players, as any reasonable community would expect. Players who abuse the system by running bots, selling ISK illegally, buying ISK illegally, and whatever-else-have-you are are serious detriment to the game. Given the number of players that play EVE, CCP decided to take an algorithmic approach, which is understandable. The problem starts, though, with their use of an extremely under-thought systematic evaluation technique which has resulted in a vocal minority of players being falsely flagged as violators. You would think perhaps that accounts would be given a few strikes before banning, since mistakes do happen on both ends, but this is not the case; players flagged as violators by the over-zealous automated system are permanently banned. I suppose such an adjective as "permanently" must be taken with a grain of salt. For some authorities, permanently simply means an infinite duration which is very open to contesting.

For the infantry-level at CCP though, it seems that the judgement to permanently ban a player is also infallible, even when performed by an automated system. For those that doubt the innocence of whom I represent, it should be known that he has always abided by the rules. He has never had any prior incident with CCP which would have marked him as having a bad record. He purchased ISK through the sanctioned CCP system and never sold his ISK for real world money. To our knowledge, none of our friends participated in such acts either. Most importantly, his account was banned while it was inactive. Not only was it inactive, but he had been invited to a free reactivation of his account well after he had deactivated the account. His account had been banned after any feasible time frame of the "crime" he was unjustly accused of.

CCP's Hypocracy


Einar Hreiðarsson was quoted as saying "We are quite confident that false positives are practically non-existent, but we examine all requests for review," and that "So far less than a dozen have been found to be false positives." in an article posted by Ben Kuchera and in another article by G4TV.

Einar was not being honest though, or perhaps he was speaking out of turn. CCP has completely refused to review the case, which goes directly against their established policy on banning. When he submitted his case via a petition, his case was completely disregarded and tossed aside. While the language that the GM used was formal, the tone was clear: "you're banned for good and we're sure we made the right decision". His further attempts to interact with the GM have thus far been ignored, and there is no existing phone-based support to default to. Without much effort, we were also able to find a wealth of posts from innocent players in extremely similar circumstances. 

Conclusion

Such thinking by the "law" of EVE Online should seriously and deeply concern any player out there who still plays EVE Online. The thought of having years of invested money and time immediately and irreversibly taken from you without any real evidence or backing should really make serious players rethink their decision to play EVE or any CCP game in the future. If I had any real investments in the game, myself, I would have already jumped from a ship that's slowly but surely sinking.


As I eluded to earlier, it is easy to lie on the internet; as a reader you should not implicitly trust this post. Though given the amount of similar horror stories, I'm hoping readers will, at the very least, be wary of any interaction CCP.


Supporting Links

Player permanently banned for revealing corruption with CCP
Official CCP post on banning (not respected in this case)
Player unjustly and permanently banned with no appeal
Post by DrFaulken regarding corruption within CCP