Alliance Panel at Fanfest 2012: The Conclusion

As some of you might have heard, one of the Alliance leaders speaking at the Alliance Panel during EVE Fanfest 2012 breached our EULA/TOS with some ill-advised remarks about a fellow EVE player. It goes without saying that CCP deeply regrets this incident and will work towards reducing any possibility of this happening again in the future.

CCP requested that all panel PowerPoint presentations and discussion topics be handed in beforehand for approval.  Regrettably, the offending comments were made during an unscripted Q&A session after the main presentations.

Following a thorough internal review CCP has decided to respond to this clear violation of our Terms of Service and wholly inappropriate use of the Alliance Panel. According to our existing policies, we have issued a 30 day ban from EVE Online to the panel speaker.

The policy of CCP is not to publicly discuss warnings and bans on an individual basis. This situation is entirely unique because the panel was displayed via CCP’s Fanfest video stream component, a platform analogous to our forums.  As a result we have published this statement due to the special circumstances involved. However, our policy remains that we will not publicly discuss warnings and bans.

The panelist has subsequently posted a public apology as well as a private apology to the victim of his attack. He has also resigned from his position as Chairman of CSM 6 and has forfeited his right to serve on CSM 7.  As per our policies, this candidate may be eligible to run at a later date subject to candidacy review.

The Council of Stellar Management is a democratically elected council that represents the players of EVE Online.  Although council members may represent the players in any manner they choose, being a council member does not permit actions or playstyles that violate our policies.

GM Salmon

VP of Customer Relationship Management

Update 16:45 GMT, March 29th: CCP Xhagen has posted answers to some common questions from the comments thread for this blog.