Skywarrior wrote:KlikhizzGrimscale wrote:Actually there are legal issues that arrise from telling an employee to do something that is against company policy 'or find a new job' because you've technically put the employee in a situation where they loose their job if they don't do it and they can loose their job if the DO do it. As such the employee has the right to sue ... though admitedly unless said employee is actually fired (whether he did what he was being forced to do or not) he'd probably find it a difficult case if SOE fought it. (if he was fired for not doing it and could show that it was against policy at the time ... or if he was fired for doing it and had proof that he was told to do it or be fired by someone with authority over his job ... well then he could be sitting in a nice corner office very shortly.)
Again, what you say is possibly true but we don't know, do we? Why speculate at all on something that 1) is not really any of our business; 2) the facts of which are essentially unknowable by we the community (unless we are told by an SOE source).
If you have a copy of the SOE Employee Handbook and formal job descriptions of SOE executives and know who actually authorized the move and know whether or not such statements as described were actually said and know whether or not corporate policy (internal) allows discretionary game policy adjustments by executives and/or producers, then we really don't have a whole lot to discuss here. Speculation can be fun but it usually serves little purpose and often spreads a lot of untruth and obfuscates the real issues.
I was refering to employee rights in general ... not nessicarily this specific instance, because, as you said, we only have rumor to go on in this instance. My statement was essentially that IF an employee is told to do something that is against the standing policy or they will be fired, they have the right to sue. Otherwise any company could easily use this to 'justify' fireing any employee they wanted to without repurcusion.
The thing here is that the move was against the publicly stated company policy ... and that policy has, apparently, not changed. Now the question of who has the authority to bend the rules is moot unless someone (without the authority) gets caught doing it ... in this case we're essentially being told that it was officially sanctioned .... and we, the consumers of this service, are expressing our displeasure about said choice. But how many have gone un-noticed ... how many times did they dip in and help friends and not get caught .... how often have they done it directly on live servers?
In the end SOE will do what they have always done in these cases ... they've already come in here and slapped the players of thier game .... now they'll close the curtains and turn out the lights and wait for the mob to go away ... and in another year or so when someone gets caught doing it again .... we'll go through the same motions. They'll act surpirsed at the player outrage ... say that they'll make it right, but that we should be ashamed for being outraged that they did something for thier friends that they won't allow for anyone else and then they'll close the curtains and shut off the lights and wait for that mob to go away.
In EQ it was a guild moved from one of the old servers to a 'non-split' server ... this was before you could pay for a character transfer at all. ... They got caught because one of the members had on armor that had stopped dropping before the 'non-split' server had been started (thus was impossible to have on the server). There was another issue in EQ with GM favoritizim, but I don't remember the details of that one as it was during one of my forum absences and I only heard about it from others that were following it. I believe as well that there have been a few instances and accusations in EQII prior to this that I didn't specifically follow.
At LEAST in the past SOE has generally at least given us the 'we're looking into it' ... but it is obvious from the official responces in this thread that SOE in this instance feels that they were completely in the right, and that bending or breaking the rules, including the use of development time, as a 'favor' for someone with whom they have connections is perfectly acceptable and that we, as players, should be more understanding and simply accept the fact that the way to get anything that you want in the game is to buddy up to the Devs and GMs.
It's called Favoritizim and it has destroyed online games since the earliest MUDs ... that the new head over EQII seems to feel that it is acceptable is disturbing in the least.
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