A week since the JumpGate story took off, the story of EVE‘s allegedly corrupt developers has come to a close. Earlier this week, former GM Arkanon was publicly introduced as the Director of the Internal Affairs division Hilmar Petursson announced in his blog post from last week.
In his blog post, Arkanon said:
My job entails monitoring staff accounts, both CCP player accounts and developer accounts, compiling reports on any findings that need to be addressed and asking the questions that need to be answered. I can enlist selected personnel from all departments to help me with my investigations. I have the authority to run database queries, conduct interviews, hire witch doctors and, in general, do what it takes to get to the truth about any ingame conduct I find questionable. On top of that, I have access to all available TQ logs and work with a programmer to provide more detailed logs and reports, as needed.
I am furthermore within my rights to shut down any accounts I find in possible breach of our rules, pending investigation or permanently. I am responsible for setting and enforcing CCP in-house policies. I answer directly to CCP’s Chief Operating Officer and my actions are reviewed by an internal committee to ensure that my decisions are based on verifiable facts.
First and foremost, I still consider myself a GM, here to serve the game, the players and CCP, in no particular order. As before, my job is to understand and enforce our rules, to take action when needed and raise the alarm when something is wrong. Only my jurisdiction has changed.
Arkanon is a name respected by the EVE community at large. Dan “Remedial” Dargon, leader of GoonSwarm and an outspoken critic of the developer corruption, said he’s comfortable with Arkanon guiding the Internal Affairs division. “The impression I got from him was somebody who took the game seriously enough to be interested in comments and criticism from players in person,” he told me. “Thumbs up on the appointment.”
But the story hasn’t ended for everyone. I spoke again to Kugutsumen, the player who broke the story originally. He says a chunk of his accounts are still banned, though CCP has again revised their reasoning, this time only citing term 16 of EVE‘s rules:
16. You may not engage in any activity that increases the difficulty and/or expense of CCP in maintaining the EVE Online client, server, web site or other services for the benefit and enjoyment of all its users.
Despite quite a few players publicly asking for Kugutsumen’s accounts to be reinstated (numerous threads in regard to Kugutsumen’s account status have been deleted), it appears he’s going to be battling with CCP over his return to EVE for the foreseeable future.
When I asked him if he’d keep his spy network up and running, he said he would. When I asked him about the story he broke, he issued this warning: “There will be more.”
