Tuesday, March 24, 2009

What's In A Name?

The corporations that were in Band Of Brothers alliance before the Goons swept it out from underneath them all joined a logistics alliance called KenZoku. They could not recreate BoB because the Goons made a corp of the same name immediately after disbanding the alliance.

Life moves on.

Then this past week the Eve GMs looked at a petition from the ex-Bob-now-KenZoku alliance leaders to rename KenZoku to Band Of Brothers Reloaded, and they acquiesced to the request. You can imagine the uproar.

Here are my thoughts on the matter:

1) If this is not a special circumstance like they claim, then I have no problem with it. As per the post:
"We have previously changed names provided a petition was created within a reasonable timeframe and the situation warranted such action."
2) People need to grow up. The temper tantrums and wild accusations of favouritism over a simple name change are pathetic.

3) CCP should have had better optics on this. If they did receive the petition two months ago and took this long to decided to enact the change requested, then they need to revise their planning. And simply saying "we've done it for others before" is inadequate for the attention starved Eve Online Forum Whores; they need to provide examples to shut them up.

4) It was a stupid mechanic that allowed not only the alliance to be disbanded in one night but the name stolen as well at the same time. Closed corporations and alliances should STILL reserve the name for a period of 6 months IMHO, and only after inactivity for that time period should the name go back to the public domain.

Stupid false controversy. Sigh.


  1. People will complain about anything.

  2. I'm certainly no goon, but it does smack of scummy favoritism at first sniff. Let's wait and see if your very salient Point 1 is addressed.

  3. CCP did right thing in opinion. There is no reason to forbid that change to them. We all know them as BoB and the blocked name was just silly. BoBR is quite funny though, especially for Slavic players. :)

  4. It's a name. Plain and simple. But this shows just how political this game can be when even uproars can be had over a simple name change. Band of Brothers, KenZoku, Band of Brothers Reloaded....it's still the same people (minus one director hehe), just a different name. It will always amaze me at how worked up some can get over such simple things.

  5. To address some points and issues, this about more than just a simple rename request. This is about the perception of "bending the rules" for a group that has previously had a CCP pet dev cheat for them. Not showing favouritism to a particular alliance is important. Not showing favouritism to BoB is /critically/ important because of the background.

    To address some of these points as well...

    1) Many people have put in petitions for name changes over the years (not including spelling mistakes and the like) that have been knocked back. If this was the start of a change in policy that would also be another thing, but petitions put in place since this name change have been knocked back. Even if it's not favouritism, the inability to see a clearly defined difference between these cases makes it appear to be so, so in the end, it may as well be (You do address this point in your post)

    4) It wasn't a stupid mechanic that allowed the alliance to be closed. BoB deliberately chose to get rid of all the shares in the executor alliance. Keeping shares would have meant a vote with a 24 hour timer. The fact they chose to remove this safeguard to get rid of the requirement to vote in other areas does not make it "stupid" that the timer does not apply to this mechanic. They made a choice that had repercussions in reduction of their security and ultimately paid the consequences.

  6. Bah, typing too early in the morning. Repititive sentences, "executor alliance" instead of "executor corp" etc. You get what I mean though I hope :)

  7. Cyron:

    1) until we see what name changs they agreed to, itsup in the air

    4) that is the first time I heard of anything about votes or timers.

  8. AFAIK all the corps in BOB joined KZ just to keep some sov. If they wanted to setup a new alliance with BOBR name, that would need DT to go through right? Thus losing sov?

    So they bent the rules to bend the rules (sorta if ya get me).


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