Um. http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257&tid=107 Slashdot History 101.

Oh my god get out.

I can work a scram myself. The skill training is pretty minor, so I'm not sure what your beef is. They're handy, cause it keeps the other ship from warping away while you kill it. But I think you mean scam, and frankly, scams are half the fun of Eve. I've been subject to a few, it's just part of the experience. As to the IRS angle, you can't really address a taxable income issue where the taxation would be on illegal funds, as CCP does NOT sanction selling time cards for real life currency except through their licensed dealers. If we're going to try to enforce that, I'd like to see all the illegal gambling income from last year reported as well. While we're at it, I'd like a unicorn and the power of flight.

Your only salient point is the concern of cheating. Fact is, game developers SHOULD play their games, they SHOULD participate in the community. As far as I'm concerned, a game developer can run an alliance or rule the known universe as long as CCP is ensuring the guy/gal isn't cheating. I want devs interested in the game, improving mechanics, finding problems, sitting through the system lag. I want them invested in the project. The problem is tracking their activity, and generally one of trust. If I'm CCP, I'd have clear policies denoting real-life consequences for employee in-game misconduct. A dev doing what this dev did has opened a Pandora's Box of paranoia and a chorus of players claiming every victory/loss is a result of developer intervention and player misconduct. If I found one of my devs cheating in-game, I'd can them outright. Their head would only marginally account for the potential damage to the community's trust and the changes in both meta-game and in-game politics and social order, not to mention the massive number of issues it creates for game masters and other devs who play fair and have fun.

Also, I just can't help myself:
-Spaces come after commas, not before as in "That grammar nazi is awesome, isn't he?"
-Without is one word as in "Without grammar nazis, the whole world would exist in chaos."
-"As in" in your context is a sentence continuance not a start, as in this usage right here.
-Time card requires an article to address it, as in "That grammar nazi has a time card."
-"can also" negates the need for "as well"
-Where denotes a place, were denotes a state of being, example: "Where is that grammar nazi? We were going to give him a hug for improving our writing by an order of magnitude!"
-Thing is not think
-There as in "He's over there with the grammar nazi.", They're as in "They're being grammar nazis.", Their as in "Their grammar nazi is the best grammar nazi in the whole world."

I don't claim writing perfection, but I do claim due diligence in ensuring I did my best. The parent does not demonstrate this effort. Shun the non believer!