For over ten years in Eve Online, there has been a strict company policy that required game developers to keep the identity of their player characters anonymous. But soon, CCP Games employees will be allowed to shed that anonymous status if they choose to.
According to an announcement during Eve London, starting in December, CCP employees will have the option to shed their anonymity if they choose to. Under the new policy CCP employees will be able to freely announce themselves as developers to their corporations (large player group not unlike guilds) and in-game acquaintances, talk on voice communication software, and generally be allowed to forge closer bonds with other players.
According to the old rules if a developer’s character name was ever discovered by a normal player, they were forced to report themselves to Internal Affairs and go through a “Witness Relocation” process. This forced them to leave any player corporations they might have belonged to with no warning, and to change their character’s name and portrait in an attempt to restore their anonymity.
The policy from CCP started back in 2007 when a developer going by T20 was found to be using his developer account to spawn unique and valuable blueprints and sharing them with his massive and influential player organization. In the scandal’s aftermath, CCP employees lost the ability to play with others without complete anonymity.
Of course there are still restrictions to this new policy change. CCP employees will not be allowed to fill any kind of leadership role in player organizations. They will be barred from conducting any kind of large scale in-game market operations due to their knowledge of future game changes, which gives them a massive advantage in this area. Finally, any kind of behavior that could be interpreted as “griefing” will be off-limits, such as killing new players in the starter zones, scamming players, or any kind of cheating.
While the consequences of this sweeping change have yet to be fully revealed or explored, so far the developers have remained optimistic, At the very least players can find out whether a dev is a part of their corporation, which is pretty interesting.
Eve Online, the space-based MMORPG from CCP Games, revealed balance updates and Invasion World Tour details in two new developers blog entries as well as the Eve Pulse developer video from the Senior Community Manager.
Eve Online, first released back in 2003 for PC, is renowned for its scale and complexity in terms of player interactions — its single, shared game world allows players to engage in unscripted economic competition, warfare, and political schemes with each other. The Bloodbath of B-R5RB, which was a battle involving thousands of players in a single star system, took 21 hours and was recognized as one of the largest and most expensive battles in gaming history.
The post EVE Online Game Devs Can Shed Player Character Anonymity for First Time in Over a Decade by Allisa James appeared first on DualShockers.