CCP strikes again

[Revthought]

Apparently, for the last 4 years, there has been a bug with Gallente large towers--the building blocs of player owned stations.

This bug has allowed some large alliances to create complex reactions--something needed to produce tech 2 components and ship--out of nothing. That's right. Out of nothing.

Now they've "corrected" the issue, handed out bans, etc. Expect the eve-o forums to explode, and the price on tech 2 to go through the roof.


http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=945010
http://www.eve-online.de/page_text.php?news_detail=2474&qsprache=e
http://www.scrapheap-challenge.com/viewtopic.php?t=21936
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=944871

 

[Scott Tortorice]

Ex nihilo production in EVE - who would have thunk it? Sounds like an Amarrian plot.

 

[Dr Zaius]

What I see is an announcement that an exploit was removed and a whole lot of whining.

 

[Revthought]

What I see is an announcement that an exploit was removed and a whole lot of whining.

Lynch mob comes to mind. As I've pointed out on the forums. However, as someone who previously worked in MMO development, it is completely unimaginable to me that the outputs of the economy exceeded what was being put into the economy, and nobody noticed this for 4 years.

-Scott

 

[Dr Zaius]

Lynch mob comes to mind. As I've pointed out on the forums. However, as someone who previously worked in MMO development, it is completely unimaginable to me that the outputs of the economy exceeded what was being put into the economy, and nobody noticed this for 4 years.

EVE is an unusually complicated MMO with a tremendous number of moving parts and ongoing issues. It's bound to happen that things will be missed.

 

[Revthought]

EVE is an unusually complicated MMO with a tremendous number of moving parts and ongoing issues. It's bound to happen that things will be missed.

Yes, that's true. But that's a big metric to miss. The economy in an MMO is usually very sacrosanct. Its even more baffling because CCP hired an economist to actually monitor the game economy.

What's he been doing?

-Scott

 

[Dr Zaius]

Okay, there is some truth to that argument.

But don't you think it's a bit hypocritical for the EVE community to feign outrage over this exploit fix when it was the community that knew about it all along, exploited it, and never bothered reporting it to CCP?

This whole thing reeks of crocodile tears and feigned outrage. People got caught with their hand in the cookie jar; now they want to point fingers at CCP for baking all the cookies.

 

[Revthought]

Okay, there is some truth to that argument.

But don't you think it's a bit hypocritical for the EVE community to feign outrage over this exploit fix when it was the community that knew about it all along, exploited it, and never bothered reporting it to CCP?

This whole thing reeks of crocodile tears and feigned outrage. People got caught with their hand in the cookie jar; now they want to point fingers at CCP for baking all the cookies.

You are right obviously, though some have claimed to have petitioned the issue 4 years ago, only to the petition closed without comment.

I guess for me, its not really about the cheating, exploiting, etc. This POS thing effects very little (except maybe the price of tech 2 mods increasing) and this stuff happens in every MMO out there.

The thing that really baffles me, as I've said, is the length of time it took to discover an exploit of this scale.

-Scott

 

[pward]

It seems odd to me that this lasted 4 years.

You have to remember that the economist was only recently hired (last year about this time?) and probably took his initial readings on the economy from whatever was going on at the time. I highly doubt his analysis of the econ in EVE has included all the inputs and outputs and stock levels etc. for all the various production chains.

Are there even metrics available telling them how much <input X> is collected in a given time frame? Say for veldspar mining, how much was collected in Lonetrek last week? How does that compare to The Citadel or The Forge? What's the history for those three regions look like? What sort of imports/exports between those regions took place (or to/from other regions)?

Just to look at the tritanium market, the inputs are mining ores (13 of the different types provide trit) and recycling (to include rogue drone bits). IF (big IF on purpose) there is/was an exploit that created trit out of thin air, would whatever data they have actually show this exploit? Or could a small number of exploiters hide the problem in the noise of the unknown inputs? Say mining and refining is tracked, but imports/exports or recycling isn't...

 

[Revthought]

It seems odd to me that this lasted 4 years.

You have to remember that the economist was only recently hired (last year about this time?) and probably took his initial readings on the economy from whatever was going on at the time. I highly doubt his analysis of the econ in EVE has included all the inputs and outputs and stock levels etc. for all the various production chains.

Are there even metrics available telling them how much <input X> is collected in a given time frame? Say for veldspar mining, how much was collected in Lonetrek last week? How does that compare to The Citadel or The Forge? What's the history for those three regions look like? What sort of imports/exports between those regions took place (or to/from other regions)?

Just to look at the tritanium market, the inputs are mining ores (13 of the different types provide trit) and recycling (to include rogue drone bits). IF (big IF on purpose) there is/was an exploit that created trit out of thin air, would whatever data they have actually show this exploit? Or could a small number of exploiters hide the problem in the noise of the unknown inputs? Say mining and refining is tracked, but imports/exports or recycling isn't...

Pward,

I have never worked for CCP so I cannot comment about them with any amount of certainty.

What I can comment about is the MMOs I have worked on. And in my experience working on those MMOs the answer to your question is a resounding yes. We had access to every metric you can imagine regarding the economy. The amount of currency generated by killing NPCs and questing, the amount of currency sunk out of the economy, the number of player trades, currency transfers, market transactions, trade components harvested, trade items made, etc...

This is actually something that needs to be monitored and adjusted constantly. This is especially the case as the game gets older and you start to have currency saturation problems (inflation) and older players/guilds dominating the markets. You need to be, as a developer, pretty diligent because things can get out of control quickly... and this costs you subs.

Scott

 

[pward]

Yes, that's true. But that's a big metric to miss. The economy in an MMO is usually very sacrosanct. Its even more baffling because CCP hired an economist to actually monitor the game economy.

What's he been doing?

-Scott

Apparently, not getting his quarterly economic reports out as promised and not posting as the reasons for another delay. There's another micro-storm on the eve forums about that as well.

You can't please all of the players all of the time.

 

[pward]

@ Revthought,

Man I would love to see just a statistical page on mineral mining per region (constellation would probably be better, and system level might be toooooo much to digest).

Double points for making that sort of stuff available in game. The industry bits at least, I don't care about player direct trades or ISK made ratting (but others might). "Hrm, Veldspar mining is down 20% in the Citadel this week"... Or "Production of <widget X> is way below the posted number of reasonable buy orders, this could sell if I can make some"...

Make it available to the public in Empire, and grouped by alliance control elsewhere, with the alliance manager choosing to publish or not.

 

[pward]

Updated devblog on the EVE website with explanation of the bug and what was done to fix it etc.

In case you missed it: http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=626

 

[Dr Zaius]

What's surprising to me is that some people are still complaining that CCP was unfair. EVE is filled to the brim with outhouse lawyers that want to second guess every little thing.

 

[pward]

What's surprising to me is that some people are still complaining that CCP was unfair. EVE is filled to the brim with outhouse lawyers that want to second guess every little thing.

Well, there is the "T20 episode" where their reputation was fairly well tarnished, if not sent directly to a "rusted" status. Any player who was active at the time should still carry a bit of a grudge for that kind of abuse.

I'm a bit miffed about both of these incidents, but I'm also a programmer and understand CCP's position on both. Shortcuts in the code on the POS exploit, and probably not enough of an audit trail on the superuser abuse (T20).

The next outrageous thing to happen will likely be something else that got past the developers and bug hunters (and players for a while) until it gets blown out of proportion by some chunk of the player base. Errors will make it into the live code, some will be found and fixed, others will be exploited mercilessly when discovered by a few select players.

Given what I know of the followups to these exploits. If I were in a position to exploit something like this in the future, then I would immediately start a new account on a new email from google or yahoo etc. Run the exploit on the new account and just jettison goods to my principal characters. Or rig sales orders so that I benefit but have plausible deny-ability on the "mains".

Sell the "reaction bits" generated by the exploit to a low buy order, only to resell them with the main. "Don't ban me, they were just filling my buy order on the edge of Empire, and I'm reselling marked up in Jita."