EVE New Citizens Q&A

Hi

I just wondered where the line is drawn as to the exploitation of game mechanics. I noticed an article today on a popular eve news site, and it mentioned that a certain corporation had been exploting a recently added game mechanic, greatly to their benefit.

My question is, if you manipulate the market to exploit a game mechanic isn't that against the Terms of Use of Eve and therefore bannable?

This topic may need to be moved, but I am a new Citizen and I would like a question answered, as I noticed that for example with Sov exploiting downtime was a grey area.

At a guess, I'd say making sure your Sovereignty Blockade Unit is only vulnerable during a patch or something. I recall after a patch a large number of systems were SBU'd like that. Some were removed by GMs, but on another occasion some weren't.

From what I've seen and heard, the general consensus I've seen (as handled by the GMs) is that twisting the system to exploit an oversight is perfectly fine. Abusing a glitch or error, especially after being told that it is against the rules can lead to you getting banned.

Pretty much, if someone/something official tells you to stop, you should (and if it's a bug, you should stop and also report it). Otherwise most stuff should be fine.

Another stealth "Goons are bad" thread.

Ooh the Goons FW, LP output.

I wouldn't count it as an exploit. It's a game mechanics and Goons just found a way to make massive money out of it. CCP didn't think through that this would be possible.

It's not a bug in the game, it's making use of the game mechanics, so it's not an exploit. Though I'm happy that CCP is going to fix it.

btw, I HATE Goons, but people complaining on the forum should stop and fight them with spaceships.

Market manipulation is completely valid gameplay and never an exploit, no matter on what scale. Stories are told about enterpreneurs controlling universe-wide markets for months and gaining untold riches.

As far as actual exploits go, in the vast majority of cases when CCP finds something they don't like, they post a news item telling people not to do it (and promptly fix the bug). Very rarely are people punished retroactively before explicitly being told that something is an exploit. This involves trivially obvious cases such as item duping, breaking modules to inflict infinite damage, etc.

I believe what you are specifically asking about is anchoring sov structures right before a known extended downtime, such as during patch deployment. This has been deemed an exploit by CCP about a year ago. Without going too much into detail about sovereignty mechanics, these take several hours to anchor and online, during which the defending alliance usually has time to respond to the attack. However if one deploys them immediately before an extended downtime, the defender has no way to respond while the game is down, and the sov structures are effectively invulnerable.

If you find a mechanic that you are not sure about, you should always petition just to be sure what you're doing won't get you in trouble (and in case it actually is a bug, to help CCP find it and patch it sooner).