It's extremely odd that the article completely fails to mention the real apocalypse that almost broke Eve, and was the real motivator for the establishment of the CSM years before the Summer of Rage: staff cheating. In an MMO, not having staff play the game often leads to a strong disconnect between the company's interpretation of the state of the game and the reality, but in an MMO like Eve where the entire game is built on forging long term interpersonal relationships on a massive scale, having staff play the game can present a great danger too.
The most successful of the early 0.0 power alliances was fueled in part by having a developer who revealed his identity to the alliance leadership, funneled limited rare items (blueprints) to them which were used to fund the alliance's growth, and abused their GM powers to threaten other alliances.
The revelation was a massive blow to the playerbase's faith in CCP and the CSM was established in large part to increase the transparency and communication between CCP and the playerbase, as some of the foul play was long-suspected but the concerns unheeded.
It is odd that they didnt mention the T20 incident, but, I guess they went for the more well known incidents, and the GHSC and Summer of Rage are more well known outside eve, when compared to say, the T20 scandal or the 4 year unfixed duping bug which resulted in quite a lot of the T2 items in existence being there because of duping.
The T20 incident was massive but I would like to make make some points.
T20 never gave bob the t2s he keep them in RKK yes RKK was in bob and one of the original 4(5) depending on how you look at it.
Originally he just rented them to bob for a cut via his corp (which was very common in bob to share Tech). Yes Bob got access to some T2s they might not have otherwise but in no way is it the reason that bob got where they were in the EvE world. In the upper levels of bob (I cannot say 100% as I only spoke to those in my corp) people were not aware until the incident broke. A few people in his corp knew based on the originally leaked emails. I think CCP did mess up by not removing the T2 BPOs and being slow to deal with the issue but that is not what we talking about now
That being said you say "abused their GM powers to threaten other alliances." I have never seen this claimed or proven, I would be very interested if you can show me anything on this. T20 was never fired from CPP, the idea he was threatening alliances based on his job(GM powers) would have been instance dismissal
On a side note, the T2 lottery had meant that it was very possible he did have these BPOs. I had one friend have 3 alts, 15 research agents and he himself got 2-3 T2 ship BPOs and 10+ items. I got 2 from 1 research agent
The worst out of all of it from my point of view was that this derailed BoB and made us look like cheaters. Bottom line is we did not need those T2s to achieve what we did, they did not give us the edge. What gave us the edge was the trust between us all (Band of Brothers) which started to erode with this incendent and was smashed when bob was disbanded over night a few years later.
All Hail BoB and SirMolly. the true creators of the political/military structure we see today in eve.
The biggest impact of the T20 incident referred to here was on EVE-politics rather than CCP's policies.
Context: The T20 incident happened during a three year long galaxy-spanning conflict that erupted which pitted numerous smaller players against a dominant feudal-like political entity. As implied in the article, this war was not about resources or territory, but about ideology: "roleplay and serious business" vs. "we are bad at this, let's have fun". The T20 event was seen by many as evidence of corruption and organisational rot within the "serious business camp", bolstering the opposing camp's numbers and morale significantly.
It should be clear from the article which side has won in the end.
In the post above, tinfoilman is giving a fine example of five year-old political spin of the aforementioned great war. Figuring out which side he was on is left as a trivial exercise to the reader.
I worked at CCP and was on the same team as t20 for a while. He definitely wasn't the reason BoB succeeded for as long as they did.
In random point, I (while a dev) was a member of ASCN. I was there the day Steve was unveiled and the day it died in C9N-CC. We lost to BoB "fairly" (everybody suffered from the state of the servers in those days, so maybe it was "CCP won"). There was some bad blood, of course; I'm still a little bitter about Steve's death. But the cookies crumbled and that was that.
Ultimately: I don't think t20's actions contributed substantially either way to BoB's ascendancy. Organization, good play, and a willingness to use all avenues (within the game) turned out to be pretty successful.
(Also... no longer employed by CCP, but still play EVE. 12 years later... still the best game I've ever touched.)
Some further information regarding the allegations from someone inside RKK at the time and who was heavily involved in the practical running of the corp.
I was involved in RKK from late 2004 to 2007, the period when BoB became a true powerhouse in EVE and helped out with a lot of the more delicate stuff. The allegations I can remember were T2 BPOs, inside information regarding upcoming features which weren't fully disclosed and placement of goodies (particularly plexes) in Delve.
So the inside information regarding upcoming features is true to a certain extent. Before the CSM they bounced some ideas off players in the corps they were playing with. This was not BoB only. Also, sometimes things slipped from their mouths when speculation ran amok on TeamSpeak. Again, I cannot imagine it being BoB alone. The directorship also tried very hard to limit this information, so when the T20 incident broke out many were surprised.
Now... onto the T2 BPO:s. At the time RKK was setting up its industry for replacing all the ships in the expensive wars. Before it had been up to members, but we wanted to build up a model where we were somewhere half in between the pure communism that existed in Evolution and the pure capitalism that existed in ATUK/DICE (iirc they were the capitalist corp). What we borrowed from T20 were 2 or 3 T2 small ammo BPO:s (all of them pretty much useless) and one Interceptor BPO which was the Malediction. As anyone who played at the time remember the Malediction was near the bottom of the Interceptors (Ares was worse I think?) and so wasn't worth much. The corp allowed members to buy them for the ridiculously cheap price of 5 for 20 mill. That's how little they were wanted on the market. And that's it... nothing more was gotten. We did have a Deimos BPO, but that one we bought for a heavy price (range of 20B at the time I believe, and everyone in the corp pitched in to buy it) which had a terribly ROI and frankly... we should have bought that damn Vagabond BPO instead (money printer for 4-6 years maybe?).
Then the issue of Delve which turned out to be an incredibly good region. There were 3 reasons: Moon goo, plexes and easy to tank rats. But first... a bit of history. BoB, which at the time was not an alliance, but rather a loose collection of corporations, decided to attack FA (Fountain Alliance). We decided to do that through Delve which was a region FA claimed, but did not have a lot of presence there. At the time you had your three basic stations in the region (before you could build your own stations) and they were fairly awkardly placed. After having driven out FA we (RKK) started to scout the region, because at least 2 of the corporations in BoB wanted to set up place somewhere. At the time we were building up our industry to support our war efforts and had started to look into setting up an entire production chain, as well as selling stuff for that lovely ISK. We did an entire scout of all the moons (I was involved, and boy was it boring. DAMN YOU CCP), did an inventory of the minerals and what we found was that Delve was a fairly defensible place (1-SMEB was not yet connected to empire) and you could box yourself in at the bottom at one of the arms of Delve with a defendable station, there was a good distribution of all the minerals, the tunnel to the A2 system and the Y2 system would give us ample time to prepare for defence and we had an angry neighbour in the form of FIX which gave us fights and kept the rabble away. Pretty sweet deal. Then with the T2 production chain (moon goo... pure money printer) we discovered we had nearly all the important moons in Delve (and this distribution was given before T20 even had joined the corp). So... we settled down there, took out FA, had a ton of good fights with the germans in Cloud Ring (those tempest volleys were just wiped you out). Then we discovered that you could easily tank the 6/10 plexes by yourself and that they dropped incredibly valuable platings. This was eventually nerfed. Then they added 10/10 plexes for the blood raiders which gave even better loot (was needed, every pirate faction needed 10/10 plexes) and the Blood Raider stations (did not like those... and in the eventual war with GoonSwarm and all their friends they proved to be a crucial weak point). The important factor though is that Blood Raider space is very cramped compared to the other factions. It's only 3 regions, which means that by its very nature resources are more compact which makes for good 0.0 living.
And that's it... that's the defence I can give and I hope it will put some doubts to rest for the people who were involved in that amazing and time sucking game which have caused I don't know how many dubious real life legal activities just to gain insider information. I mean... that's just crazy when you think about it. Espionage and cracking servers, just to gain an in game advantage :D.
Random trivia: dmZ and Haze from RKK wrote the original killboard. When other killboards sprang up some enterprising individuals though it a good idea to scrape the original killboard for killmails. Haze did not like that and so set up a pollution system for the scrapers giving out fake killmails. It ran for years pollution all the popular open killboards. He was very proud of this fact ^^.
Finally... for all the people out there who did play the game during this time. All we ever wanted was to give drama to the game, give you someone to hate and above all... we wanted you to attack us so we could have good fights. And take over 0.0 as well... you gotta have goals in life. Kudos to the ones who finally brought us down, even though you had to backstab us to do it. Which shows how macho we were ;).
I never went to the bbqs being young and poor when I was in bob but damm was I jealous about not being there. Sitting in IRC as people were there was fun tho
Anyway I logging out, even a thread about eve is taking up my frigging day.
The most successful of the early 0.0 power alliances was fueled in part by having a developer who revealed his identity to the alliance leadership, funneled limited rare items (blueprints) to them which were used to fund the alliance's growth, and abused their GM powers to threaten other alliances.
The revelation was a massive blow to the playerbase's faith in CCP and the CSM was established in large part to increase the transparency and communication between CCP and the playerbase, as some of the foul play was long-suspected but the concerns unheeded.