EVE General Discussion

Not sure if serious.

The logic isnt the same. If X then Y does not follow If A,,B,C then Y.

I wonder why CCP aren't heralding yet another "awesome player driven event by Goonswarm!" this time? Will heads roll at CCP over this? That would be a sad turn of events, IMHO.

Did Mittens and co just throw CCP "under the bus" for a bit of post Fanfest/CSM election fiasco payback or is this a deflection strategy over the Inferno 1.1 war dec change drama. /me adjusts tinfoil hat

How many alts could you create with the profit to influence the outcome of, say, CSM8?

This post, while accurate, will be completely ignored.

Heads will not roll, because this is a game, and further, a computer program. Computer programs have bugs, it happens. CCP (hopefully) won't destroy a person's livelihood because he failed to write perfect code.

This is not a big deal in real life, at least for them. The same can't be said for quite a few members of this board.

God ******* damn this is brilliant, just brilliant. Well played Illuminati Goons.

I believe that this particular argument was used by Hydra/OB, in the ATX incident. I also seem to recall that it was rejected.

So, I rather doubt that anyone involved in this incident is planning to throw down a repeat of that failed logic.

I see no bugs or exploits here. Just a malleable game mechanic some people cleverly optimized on and gained from.

Actually, it's not that simple. If this case would ever be brought to a real-life court, the Goons would likely go free. The problem is that there is no decisive evidence to support that the Goons did do this on purpose.

"Whaaa? They admitted doing this! There's your evidence, dude"

Precisely. It's the Goons admitting the scheme, which holds no value whatsover. They are of the same value as the ramblings of a madman. It can not be proven whether the Goons were deliberately abusing a system or they merely discovered this by accident and thought it was just working as CCP intended. In real-life court, the Goons would use the latter as a valid means of defense and would get away with it.

The key here is to realize this is not a real-life court. CCP has to act, but needs time to fully investigate what has happened. It is very likely that CCP was not even aware of this during their internal testing. That is because of one thing and one thing only:

The Goons know this game better than the CCP developers do.

Bottom-line is that the Goons gather around and wonder how to abuse and manipulate the system. That is the sole-purpose of their meetings. CCP does not have these. They don't have a group of hackers ready to do internal testing on how to abuse a system CCP designed. They release it to the live-servers and the Goons are the ones testing it.

Without the Goons, this would not have been discovered for a while. And clever players would have found out eventually, by accident or on purpose. Regardless, it would likely be abused over a longer period of time as the Goons are honest enough to publicize their findings in a relatively short time-frame (within a month upon release on the live servers).

Should the Goons be punished? Ban their accounts? Possibly. CCP has the right and ability to do whatever she deems fit. They can ban the Goon players admitting that they did this, or the entire corp. Perhaps even the entire alliance. Problem is that there is no right-way of dealing with it. If they ban players or a corp/alliance, they no longer hold on to the concept of the sandbox: give players the freedom to develop themselves. If they won't take action at all, other players will be disheartened knowing that "crime pays off". An example of this attitude is given by this post:



I really wouldn't want to be in CCP's shoes right now. They were beaten in a game that they created, outsmarted by its players.

CCP, if you do decide on actions against the Goons, may I suggest keeping this only to a small core group of developers? The more CCP employees know about actions against the Goons, the more likely the chance they will be tipped off giving them ample time to prepare for the upcoming ban or any other action you may take. As I said before, Goons will outsmart you and they will find a way to get around your ban or roll-back, or whatever you come up with. The only true way to punish them is a shift, sudden action with no time to prepare.

It will be interesting to see what the outcome is of this.

Oh and as personal opinion, I highly favor a ban of all Goons for a month. Determine whose accounts are from Goons players and ban all of them without any warning given. Give out the message that this was one abuse too many.

but... I'm realist enough to know CCP will likely not do such action and I won't be disheartened if CCP doesn't do anything at all. CCP knows the Goonswarm will always be one step ahead of them like true hackers trying to enter a protected system.

I think in general this is great, another of those EvE stories that make people want to play the game. It would be nothing without the drama.

However, its spoilt by the usual low level intellect posts by the Goons. "buhuhuh pubbie tears, I r waiting here for my tears" (when really, 2% of people reply here who are upset, 98% of EvE couldnt give a ****)

I can appreciate the thought and execution by the top level who set it in motion, less impressed by the brain dead dribbling masses of goons who think spamming the word "ground floor!!" somehow means they were involved.

I suppose its a little like Stephen Hawkings figuring out how the Universe began, and his colostomy bag cheering for joy and claiming it had something to do with it.

I disagree with the part in bold.

Creating a system where the reward to the killer is potentially 4x the loss of the person whose ship just diaf'd (or eve 1.5x for that matter) is a sure way to introduce an easy exploit in a game where everyone knows that the same RL controller can be both the killer and the victim.

A great many people saw this merely from reading the dev blog... so for the devs not to spot it .... hmmmm....