EVE General Discussion

To expand on this:

The problem here had nothing to do with timing. It had to do with items that have no market volume, because they are useless, and yet are available from the Faction Warfare store. For example:

Let's say there is an item, which I'll call 'Faction Warfare Boondoggle 44-z0r' for the sake of simplicity. This item has literally no use in the game except allowing the pilot who has it fitted to always efficiently complete every z0r chain he sees. Because few people care about this ability, the market price of this item languishes around 5 million ISK, with about 100 of them actually being traded per month.

The Faction Warfare Boondoggle 44-z0r, meanwhile, is available from LP stores for 5 million ISK and 5000 LP. This makes it extremely unprofitable to buy with LP.

But, now let's say that I take advantage of the item's low market volume to increase its average price. I do this by buying 5,000 of the 44-z0r Boondoggle (from the LP store, naturally), putting them on the market for 500M ISK apiece, and then buying out my own sell order. This costs me a tiny amount of ISK in the form of broker fees, as well as 25B ISK to get the material initially. But now the average price of that item is just under 500M ISK, since my own sales (to myself) utterly dominate the normal market volume of the Boondoggle in question.

Now all of a sudden the worth of this item is 500M ISK. That means that for each Boondoggle I blow up, I get 50,000 LP. Basically I can now buy 50,000 LP for the cost of 5M ISK and 5,000 LP invested. (This is 111.11 ISK per LP, right around the actual value cited in Aryth's article.)

Now then, what is the takeaway from my explanation? The takeaway is that there is no timing issue like Sreegs is saying. The market value of that item isn't affected by me repeatedly blowing it up for profit. It still has no use and it still isn't being sold on the market. I couldn't do this to a normal item, because the sales volume on the normal market would make my attempt at manipulation invisible.

This is the key point. This doesn't depend on timing -- it doesn't matter when CCP updates their internal price index, because the average market price of this item is going to remain around 500M ISK. The market won't bring it back down because the market has no use for it. What we are looking at here is not a bug or a programming issue or an abuse of a timing problem.

It is a design flaw.

Using an average market index is a design flaw because it can be manipulated by players in the case of items that have no market volume. And I'm pretty sure that all of the players of EVE see a large difference between taking advantage of a design flaw and exploiting a programming bug (like the Ferrogel dupe.)

Only because a developer decided to include a value that the players can move, which in retrospect was a terribly bad idea. The math worked exactly as designed.

Flaw in code was a bad way of saying things v0v You're correct that the code was doing what it was written to do. However when the new mechanic was introduced a system was being leveraged to determine the value of a currency that was not built for that purpose and that's what caused this.

As has been previously said both by CCP Sreegs and others; CCP is well within their rights to do pretty much whatever they want.

That does not mean that whatever they decide to do is right, however.

Man, this is such fun to read.

Screegs, I have to feel for you, just a little bit. Now YOU get to feel the power and wrath of the goon propaganda team.
How does it feel to try to keep up with dozens of posters all working together?

2 separate things jump out at me:

1. If you remove the assets from these asshats (and no, I don't think you should, but I would just ban them for being goons), you are not removing THEIR assets, you are removing the assets from all the FW people they scammed/manipulated/smart gameplayed ( I truly hate to say they played the game well, but it is true).

Essentially, you would be introducing a one-time 5 trillion ISK tax into the game, that affects anyone who ran FW missions, or any mission involved with a Minmatar agent.

2. Maybe, just maybe, you guys at CCP will start listening to your player base before rolling out changes.

UI: Sisi screamed murder, yet you rolled it out.
Incursions: The player community screamed the OTA's would pile up, you ignored them, now you are "looking at changes".
War dec mechanics: You were warned, yet you rolled it out, then had to hot fix it.
Now this. I have yet to see a post, but several people have stated that CCP was warned about this prior to release.

How about improving or creating a QA team, or at least listening carefully to the people on Sisi and in-game?

If you intend to use such inappropriate language to describe the actions of people in an internet spaceships game, then you should possibly sit back and reflect on your communication skills. I think you should retract your word, apologise and make your point again using different language that does not offend, nor hyperbolise.