The interesting thing about MMO games is that they enable humans to interact, with all the normal disagreements, controversy, and possible scheming which go with that - wonderfully evidenced in Scott Jennings' post on the latest Eve Online shenanigans at Broken Toys.

As Jennings notes: "In an astoundingly detailed (with many screenshots of internal tools and emails), vehement and visceral news posting, CCP’s internal affairs posts a detailed journal of their investigation, which concluded: Goonfleet deliberately attacked Eve Online... It’s not every day an MMO declares war on a huge segment of their own community. Then again, Eve is pretty damn hardcore."

As he goes on to note: "PvP games are serious business. You have the hardest of the hardest core, looking for every advantage possible. And Eve is the hardest of the hardcore PvP game out there. If you’re working on a game with a PvP component, there’s a lot to learn from all this in how to run your own game - and how not to." Which certainly makes it unmissable from an external observer's point of view - there's an almost Al Swearengen level of Machiavellian interplay in this and previous dust-ups which make it fascinating to watch, whoever is right.