The Daily Grind: Devs behaving badly

"Feeling he had nothing to lose, "LFG" mined the developer's private messages,"

Wow, that's a real scumball, right there. So if you hang out at his forum, be well aware that your "Private Messages" to other forum users are anything but, since apparently this dirtbag has no qualms about reading his users' mail.

Shame on Massively for continuing to promote this person's story. I mined some private messages at http://www.bloggerexposed.com/ and found that Brenda Holloway is being paid by "LFG" to drive traffic to his site because LFG just bought a new car and needs more ad revenue to make the payments.

See how easy it is to fabricate a story? Has Massively done any fact checking here, or just accepted the story at face value? And frankly even if the story is true, "LFG" and Massively are doing more harm to EQ2 than this dev supposedly did.

"And in any case, I think reading someone else's private messages is a greater 'crime' than what the dev is being accused of."

Then you have some seriously screwed up priorities. An Internet message board is not some bastion of privacy, especially when it's run by one individual. This is not your bank account we're talking about. These SOE employees blatantly violated their own terms of service. Cheating devs have no business in a professional environment.

This is a clear case of a whistle-blower (LFG) exposing corruption. In other words, if you can't see the difference between a private message board using PMs to find evidence of further corruption and a *paid employee* of a company abusing his position to allow cheating in a game, then you need some serious help.

Just how much faith can you have in a site admin who posts one day that he'd never go through his users' inboxes, and then two days later is posting screenshots of exactly that? The fact is that any site admin could read and post personal information from that site's users' inboxes. Yet EQ2flames is the site that has done so, not SOE.

Considering that LFG's real name is well known, and there is quite a lot of interesting information about him out there on the internet, I would have thought he'd be paying rather more attention to the proverb about people who live in glass houses being rather unwise to throw stones.

Im really no suprised about who did this...SOE's devs are notorious for being scumbags. I don't doubt the allegations are true, but LFG should have gotten the intel through other means.

See, to me the difference is clear. I don't care if LFG is a hypocrite. I don't even particularly care for EQ2 flames as most of what I read there is useless bickering and immature locker-room babble.

However, I don't pay LFG $15 a month to provide a game/service in which it is expected that everyone has an equal chance to gain the measure of success that they earn within it. I didn't pay LFG $49.95 (and more, including expansions) over the years so that he would provide me a hobby with the expectation that I could, with talent and hard work and without inside help from SOE, have the same chance as anyone to be in the top guild, or be the top player in my class, or be the best at my chosen job in-game.

In other words, I don't care if LFG is everything you guys claim he is and more, because LFG is nothing to me. He is not the issue. The issue is the information he has brought forth, the evidence to support it, and the fact that it has not yet been refuted. No one that I have read, honestly thinks that he or the staff at EQflames made all this up. However, I suspect and hope, we will hear more this week from Sony.

Look, I don't want anyone to lose their livelihood, however I would like to see Sony address this issue, deal with the dev involved, and assure us that steps have been taken that this will never again be an issue. This is not the first time something like this has come to light with an SOE developer/insider and it is obvious that the last time sufficient steps were not put in place to prevent it happening again.

Sony's reputation and their business integrity vis-a-vis EQ2 have taken a strong hit (yes, I know, someone will crack wise about this), and I for one would like to see them take steps to help restore confidence that the game is as fair and equitable as it possibly can be.

It's my opinion that at least that much, for $15 a month, they owe to us all.

Drama feeds drama, good job Massively =)

At this rate, I'm beginning to expect that this will end up in court.

SOE is under no obligation to provide exclusive information to people it knows won't cover them positively. (This may not be a good idea on their part - people may start distrusting everything they read about SOE - and it's certainly not in the gaming public's interest, but it's not illegal.) In retribution, the EQ Flames crew has revealed personal information substantively likely to result in personal harassment of individual SOE employees, and now is breaking into someone's PM box (intercepting communication between two parties without consent of one or sometimes both is actually illegal in many jurisdictions). The only question is whether SOE wants this to go away badly enough to bite their tongues - they might actually have a winning case in a harassment lawsuit at this point if they're willing to publicize this even further.

None of which exonerates SOE for what is increasingly looking like a culture of cheating at their own game. MMO's aren't regulated to ensure fairness the way that, say, casinos are, so this probably isn't illegal, but it could cost them a lot of customers and customer confidence. This could mean libel damages if the allegations are untrue, though at this point I believe them. I don't know enough about the law on third party postings to know if this is a potentially groundbreaking case - as I understand it, a forum is usually somewhat protected against responsibility for material posted by third parties (e.g. if it's libelous), but that may go out the window when the admins actively solicit dirt on their enemies.

I wanted to comment what seem to be two issues.

First, should LFG have dug into the a users private mailbox and post it to the community. Regardless of what you think of SOE, LFG, or the legal aspects of being able to log into an email/pm account as an administrator, I believe there is an unspoken rule that admins have not do breach a users privacy. At work, I know I can dig into a users email account if I want to because I have admin privileges and according and as a guild leader I can do the same thing that LFG did on his message board, but it breaks that unspoken rule. I have had people who I had huge fights with on my message board, but I believe LFG went one step too far by reposting a private message. And if he had done the same thing to a regular user instead of a DEV his site would probably be in full revolt against him.

Second, is the issue about the Dev's. Again, what the Dev did is wrong plain and simple and I am not going to justify it. But if you think that SOE Dev's are any different than Dev's in other games, I think you are wrong. I believe there are posts on almost all of the online games about Dev abuse and exploitation. I remember in EQ1 it was said that Dev's were part of the most powerful guilds, I have seen it in Eve Online, I have heard it in DAoC, basically every game I have played. I was a guide/gm in several games as well and there is no way that you cannot use the information that you learned to your advantage if you played as well. I watched other guilds try to take down mobs, I explored zones to see what they were like prior to my guild going to them, was it wrong of me, yup...But I don't know how I could have turned off the switch and magically forgotten the knowledge I learned about as a guide/GM. I can only imagine what it would be like to be a Dev, they designed the game, they know what every encounter is going to be like, they know what strategy will need to be used to defeat a boss mob, what are you going to do, ban Dev's from playing? I don't know how you can be a good Dev if you don't play the game.

In the end, the question I have is did what the Dev do or LFG do hurt other players? If the Dev's guild was able to beat an uber raid mob in an instanced zone, does that hurt me or my guild? Not really, so I guess I only mildly care and I guess I just assumed that that sort of thing always happened. Did what LFG do hurt me, not really, I didn't really use his site and it wasn't my private message so I don't care. I am a little concerned about the backlash between the Dev's and the community. Does this mean they will be less interactive before? Are they going to be hesitant to form relationships or reach out to the community to learn more about what they can do make the game more enjoyable?

Anyway, my first post on Massively, I really like this site, sorry for the bad grammar I'm at work and have to do this quick.