They say the internet never forgets. Seven months ago penifSMASH, who is no stranger to controversy, denounced on reddit racist behavior showing how, in his words, “TEST Alliance was harboring white supremacists at the highest levels”:
Creecher Virpio uses the N-word (derogatory term against African-Americans) no less than three times in that conversation. Does TEST support hate speech? Or will Sapporo Jones do the right thing by admonishing the hate speech and kicking him from the alliance?
I guess we will see the true nature of TEST…
The logs in question contained six instances of the n-word being used in game, sometimes in conjunction of adjectives as “turbo” and “stupid”.
Despite gathering over 144 responses back then, the thread seemed to have died down with no other result than deriding comments from TEST alliance members diminishing and in some cases justifying the offensive terms in the conversation.
Well, fast forward to today; it’s election time and you know what that means? Hell yeah; skeleton hunt, no closet is safe! Yesterday we received the news that Council of Stellar Management candidate “Creecher Virpio” was disqualified from the ballot due to improper behavior. Here’s the official CCP Games take:
We have decided to exercise our discretion to remove candidate Creecher Virpio from the ballot in accordance with our internal guidelines due to chat logs which surfaced recently and would have resulted in exclusion during the background check period.
Votes already cast will be transferred to secondary choices according to the design of the Single Transferable Vote system.
On reddit, user xXxCREECHERxXx gave his side of the story:
In regards to the post CCP Guard made recently, I would like to formally apologize to the community as a whole for my behavior. In january of 2016, when I was the CEO of warbois, a friend of our corp awoxed a carrier during our transition out of the alliance. In a personal exchange with him, and an attempt to get him to understand how mad I was about how it made our community look, I grossly overreacted and said things that are indefensible. The unfortunate truth is that casual racism and edginess are all too rampant in our community. I’m not sure how it happened, but at some point words that used to draw gasp are now commonplace in memes, conversation, and discourse, and we have all as a community been desensitized to them. This is a problem, I am not here to defend the things that I said, and you all have my word that I will do my best conduct myself in a manner becoming of someone that you could have been proud to represent you.
As for everyone who voted for me, I thank you for your support and apologize that I will not get to represent your ideas as I had planned to.
We’ll be doing a take on recent bigoted/hateful behavior within the EVE Online community, including some takes from personal experience. For the time being, it’s that time of the year where CSM candidates get to revisit their previous posts, tweets and discord chats just to be safe from being an embarrassment to the game. For trivia’s sake, it is a bit ironic that this is the very same candidate vouching to push for local chat emojis.
– R
