EVE General Discussion

PLEASE stop writing lol as words.
Please.
It honestly hurts.
A lot.

...what the heck did I just read?

Apparently Iceland is home to the Fair Folk, who do not broker the words of man

i move that the relatively low amount of gnashing of teeth in this thread is a ~CoNspIrAcY~ to avoid enabling us with said gnashing of teeth

your move

i wonder if ccp will break out the old ban hammer and start playing wack-a-mole

Um we were not read our Space Miranda rights so none of that is eligible testimony

I don't know, ask about that guy who blew up about BoB being dev fed, and the insuent cover-up, and the fact that they whiteashed the whole thing.

please continue to cherry-pick quotes to make yourself look right, it suits you

Yeah, I'm not a fan of cherry-picking either.

However, the quotations were not out of context and if you like I will repost in entirity and highlight the terms exploit/bug/illicit again.

Ok, so here is the definition of Exploit in a video game. Now let's see what the Goons have said:

1. As we’ve said, in most ways, Inferno was a bust. But a throwaway blog about an obscure part of the upcoming faction warfare revamp was much more interesting than it seemed. A small group of market and game mechanics wizards sat in a channel, put their heads together and designed a theoretical exploit to game the system. It succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

Right there, they are admitting that they may have found a way to use the game mechanics to their advantage. Sure it was theoretical, but they have put it in practice.

2. The revamp to Faction Warfare in Inferno was the single biggest mistake CCP has ever made. It was bigger than guidance systems, which merely made us a couple of trillion isk. It was certainly bigger than deleting boot.ini, which merely cost CCP some bad press. It was possibly even bigger than Incarna, a potentially game ruining ‘expansion’ *** cash grab. Simply put, Inferno was released with a way to destroy the value of missions.

Again they are clearly stating that they may have found an exploit, still theoretical at this point, since there is no admission of using it.

3. The original theory came about as many of the theories in the Jewbal do: Aryth wondering what the implications of X may be if we did Y. Every theory in the collective is always vetted, and so, Mynnna went to work on a super spreadsheet. This sheet would end up breaking down every niche of FW into its components and checking them for leaks; much like everything in Spreadsheets Online, once created, the sheet had to be tested via running the numbers countless times. Luckily, they added up.

Here they are clearly stating that they ran simulations and that they did in fact show signs of an exploit.

4. When CCP originally released their devblog on Inferno and revealed the formula they intended to use, we sat in shock. I immediately stated a phrase I would repeat many times: “/10000 will not save them”. CCP made the assumption that rewarding a player 1/10th of the value of the player’s kill at 1K ISK/LP, for a total of 10K ISK destroyed CCP Value/1 ISK reward, would prevent manipulation of the system. While this was an understandable mistake, it turned out to be several orders of magnitude off.

Here they clearly show that the initial setup of the game mechanics for FW in a devblog, it also clearly states that CCP thought it would prevent manipulation, therefore stating the way it was intended to work.

5. The test quickly became even bigger than anticipated because upon release, FW turned out to have a bug that rewarded LP for both dropped and exploded cargo, doubling the rewards.

Here the Goons clearly state that the bug was in fact real once put to test in a live environment and that they used it to double their gains.

6. CCP reacted quickly and patched this out, but the damage was done (not that it really mattered since it would merely have delayed the inevitable); the cabal had our “seed” LP. From here on out, the next step was to manipulate the outcome of Faction Warfare to dictate the tier level of the Minmatar faction.

Now here we can see that CCP fixed it to a point where they thought it would work as intended. The Goons also stated that with the gain they have made, without reprimands following, they were able to manipulate the system of FW.

7. The “cost” in this equation was CCP’s own metric, which you can see by opening your cargo window or your station hangars and looking in the bottom right of the window. Therein lies the heart of the break — CCP’s item value calculation was very vulnerable to manipulation. If you picked the right item, loaded hundreds of thousands of them into a Badger, then blew it up in the context of Faction Warfare, you could generate as much LP as you want for practically no cost. As long as you did the math right, the result was foolproof.

Here they are stating exactly what they did and how to use it to their advantages. By also stating they could "Generate as much LP as you want for practically no cost" is another sign that it is an exploit, that the system wasn't working as intended.

8. At this point, we had a problem: we still had not puzzled out CCP’s pricing update mechanics formula. Fortunately, we caught a break. A person tasked to figure out the CCP formula was able to come up with a fair guess at the CCP Price of a given item – a three month EVE wide moving average.

Here we can see that they had found how CCP fixed it and therefore acknowledging that the exploit was still possible.

TO BE CONTINUED IN A SECOND POST