EVE General Discussion

What we do with individuals is never a public matter. It never was and it never will be.

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.)

I'm sorry, Sreegs, but the precise correlation between the information you communicated in this statement, and the facts in so far as they can be determined and demonstrated by this dev blog by GM Salmon, your VP of Customer Relations, causes epistemological problems of sufficient a magnitude as to place upon the logical and semantic resources of the English language a heavier burden than they can reasonably be expected to bear.

How long does it take for that price to change and how long does it stay that way?

I can state 100% that we did not intend the mechanic to function this way.

You know, not communicating with the player base seem to have been an issue before.

This whole thing is a win win for anyone who likes good fourm rage. Either CCP is going to let this go (and the pubbies will EXPLODE), or they're not (and everyone who values the sandbox will EXPLODE). There may be a 3rd option, but I certainly ain't seeing it.