CCP has reason to feel good about themselves right now. They recently hosted GM Week, a multi-day event that highlighted the hard work of their GM team. They bookended the event in perfect EVE fashion: with explosions. On both the first and last days of GM Week, CCP teleported players into Yulai for summary execution. The crime: botting. But that isn’t the only thing they’ve gotten right lately. A article in Polygon places CCP ahead of the curve on harassment issues as well.

Polygon sent out inquiries about harassment policies to major game studios, in response to the recent firing of two devs at ArenaNet. Those devs clashed with an aggressive fanbase, in a Reddit exchange that quickly became toxic. Most of the companies they contacted did not respond. Nintendo and Riot offered statements, but those statements read like boilerplate platitudes. CCP, on the other hand, had CCP Falcon sit down with Polygon for an interview.

Falcon laid out CCP’s policy on harassment pretty clearly: “If someone in our community is harassing anyone or repeatedly breaking rules, they’re out. We’re not interested in them being part of our community. If we see abuse in-game, we’ll shut them out. And if we see abuse coming to us via social media platforms, we’ll report them and request that the person’s account be shut down.”

Falcon is also known for his willingness to engage on Reddit, and addressed the potential for echo-chambers and mob-mentalities. “When we’ve experienced brigading from places like Reddit, we’ve been able to handle it by going in to those spaces and saying, ‘this isn’t cool, you need to take a step back.’”

And this trend seems to be born out in other, lower-profile ways, as well. In their recent devblog about team-security’s ongoing work, CCP included this paragraph:

“As part of ongoing work to keep support for our pilots up to date and relevant, the Customer Support team are currently in the process of reviewing their internal policies and documentation around in game harassment, anti-social behavior and real-life threats.”

This appears related to ongoing community pressure. Additionally, INN has information from multiple knowledgeable sources within the northern bloc that at least one previously-banned player has now been banned a second time. If true, this could indicate the policy change is moving beyond the ‘review’ stage, and may have some teeth.

Header inspired by the image sourced to the European Institute for Gender Equality, via Polygon.