Cheats-Area.com

   Following last week's scandal that sent shock waves throughout the EVE Online community, and through the gaming world at large, the devs from CCP stood by their promise to return with more details in response to "recent allegations of developer misconduct" (though both "recent" and "misconduct" are something of a euphemism). In a follow-up topic titled "t20 and Hellmar speak on recent events", Community Manager kieron directs the angry mob of players to a couple of dev-blog entries confessions - the first one authored by CCP's t20 (the scapegoat), and another one by Hellmar (Hilmar Veigar Petursson, CEO) - regarding the abusive handout of very rare BPOs (blueprint originals) by CCP staff to other players, most notably from the game's largest alliance, Band of Brothers (BoB).

   In his confession, t20 admits to the allegation regarding unlawfully obtained blueprints during June 2006, but claims that he acted alone, in a doubtful attempt to clear his co-workers and corp/alliance mates of any (alleged) wrongdoings.
"Sadly enough, the allegation regarding unlawfully obtained blueprints are, in my case, true. I'm here, laying out the facts of what happened in June 2006 so this whole issue - which jeopardized my colleagues, my company and our community - can be put behind us, I hope for the better.

The blueprints in question will be returned to CCP and reintroduced through a new raffle in the future. Specifically, these are:
- Flameburst Precision Light Missile Blueprint
- Phalanx Rage Rocket Blueprint
- Havoc Fury Heavy Missile Blueprint
- Bloodclaw Fury Light Missile Blueprint
- Spike L Blueprint
- Sabre Blueprint"
(our marking, for those who know how important this one is)    Naturally, many players are still not satisfied with just returning the blueprints, claiming that t20 is not the only CCP developer guilty of breaking the rules (he just got caught), and poiting out that BoB made billions worth of isk (EVE's currency) by using the fraudulent blueprints. Here's what one commenter writes in the aforementioned topic:
"A quick profit calculation based on this post yields a total benefit, over the course of 8 months, of around 14 billion isk. Or, to put it another way - approximately one mothership. To be clear - that's just from the Sabre BPO."    Hellmar's post in the CCP dev-blog is also worth reading, as it offers a more detailed story about the incidents leading to this scandal, and explains what measures the studio is currently taking against their own employers who are caught cheating:
"We now have resources dedicated to performing audits of dev activity on Tranquility (ed. - the "live" EVE server) with much more frequency than before. This, combined with additional layers of security, and the non-negotiable penalty of employment termination upon conviction of such acts, represents the full extent that we will go to deter dev misconduct."    Had they come forward with these responses and measures last summer, most of this scandal could have been avoided. But some players feel that all this is too little too late, and nothing more than a last-minute attempt of damage control. Since kieron's follow-up topic already boasts over 100 pages (!), there are obviously more issues that have yet to be resolved, but there's now a new thread in which kieron will try to provide players with answers. So you might want to check that, as the scandals drags on.