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Sorry, when I saw the Comments button, I thought I was allowed to comment. My mistake.

you forgot the cattleprod.

In the end we will be denied to use the mechanics. That is wrong and will be the death for the sandbox, which is more important for the fun in this game than sanity. When something is going wrong CCP has to change the mechanics. Making the players responsible for using bad designed mechanics is hillarious stupid, because the sandbox with it's implemented boundaries makes the fun in the game. This newly created morality is the opposite of CCP makes advertizing for.

CCP has to decide either to repair bad mechanics or push gamers out of the game. Morality in this game like someone could destroy the game is a really bad idea.

This makes no sense. "fairly robust amount of entertainment" ... right ... I've played quite a few of those F2P mmos and on a scale of 1-10 they've all been at about a 2 as far as entertainment value goes. If you want to buy the advantage then you're going to spend way more for pure **** than you ever will on EVE. EVE is cheap, and easily the best MMO to date (nothing else so far even comes close.)



This, however, makes total sense. It's why the $15 a month is both justified and competitive. It's the equivalent of buying a newly released AAA title every 4 months (and everyone knows that a AAA title is not going to entertain for 4 months like EVE will, most of those are only slightly less garbage than F2P mmos.)

I look at it in terms of abusing the information the EVE simulation has to your advantage, versus trying to fake the information to the EVE system. An exploit is somehow convincing the simulation to think that something is true, when it isn't.

The moongoo duping was an exploit. Players managed to convince the system that a silo was connected, when it in fact wasn't.

The FW ISK to LP conversion was an exploit. Players managed to convince the system that destroying a freighter full of crappy widgets was worth praise, glory, and one's weight in LP. Note that this is different from market manipulation. Market manipulation is trying to convince other players to pay more for the item than it's "worth" (however we define worth of an item). Intentionally trying to manipulate the CCP-determined market value of an item should, in my opinion, always be classified as an exploit.

(Worth noting though, in my opinion CCP shouldn't try to guestimate item values based off of anything. The value of an item is not a single number constant across the entire universe. Any attempts to assign a single number only screw with the market - making people think something is worth more or less than it actually is. Basing game mechanics on such a number is completely stupid.)

Insurance fraud was not an exploit. To my knowledge nobody ever intentionally faked mineral prices to the EVE system to make it profitable. People simply discovered that the existing prices and insurance values make it profitable, and took advantage of it.



As far as punishment handed out, Sreegs explained it well enough in the blog. The perpetrators of the moongoo duping exploit ran it quietly for nearly a year without saying anything. The exploit was revealed by a third party. This time the five people did it just to see if it could be done. If money was ever the incentive, you'd see way more tears and accusations. Once they saw they could, they promptly reported the exploit. I would argue that maybe a temporary ban would be acceptable - seeing as someone can be tempbanned for saying :words: outside of the game - but it's not my decision to make.



And last, all the lolgoons omgmysandbox EVEisdying posts are hilarious. Keep them coming, I need a good laugh!

i like the proposition of a logarithmic scale for the "ISK value to LP reward" translation, coupled with a basket price baseline.

a linear multiplier like the proposed 4.5x may work, but it does not make the system more resilient, it just fixes this one instance where we know the exact numbers.

i'm not sure whether putting a logarithmic basket tether into the avg. price formula would make too much sense. some items are just priced higher because the player base as a whole deems them more useful, e.g. 1% tracking implant vs 1% defender missile implant. and if the avg. price does not reflect this, players just start ignoring it for everyday use.

but once the avg price display is used to calculate payouts of any kind, it becomes exploitable, so much is clear now. in this particular case, i don't think it would shave off too much LP if outliers were dampened when calculating LP rewards from these average prices. and the way i would do this is to create basket prices, and tether the individual constituent prices to the basket by a log scale[1]. as stated before, this only applies for items not made from minerals. it may lead to a situation where you kill an officer fit ship and you only get rewarded like it was deadspace fit, but... who cares? the payout is still nice, just not uber-nice. and you aren't exactly entitled to it in the first place.

[1] payout for item = min (item price, basket price + log( abs(item price - basket price)))
items currently cheaper than the basket are priced at their price (e.g. you cant blow up unmanipulated 1% defender implants and get paid like they were a basket of average 1% implants that are more expensive), items above the basket price are priced with the basket price + the logarithm of the difference between their price and the basket price. that way, you still get a little more than the average basket price when you blow up 1% tracking implants, but you get less than they're worth).


on the way CCP handled this, i have to say the punishment does have a whiff of the SEC or CFTC on it. if you cannot make sense of the acronyms, i encourage you to use your internet powers and read some Matt Taibbi. what basically happens is the following: a complex system is gamed, the regulator is not able to police the system fully by itself due to the complexity and requires the exploiters to come forward to fix things. this requires leniency on the regulators part, or no-one would snitch. and from there on out it is very hard to keep the moral hazard in check. once you're able to broker "no-one got hurt" deals with your regulator, you start to get creative with your concept of the law because you know you can always negotiate. win some, loose some... but never loose all. not good for a culture in the long run. given capsuleers are the "1%" of the eve universe, this might be in keeping with the lore, but i advise caution.

The morale of this story is: Dont be the ones doing the risky stuff (the 5 goons), be the coward making a smaller amount of isk by living off the secondary effects.

Hi Jade, hows that 8 bil?

Out of curiosity, how many PLEX did they give you guys (or just you?) for finding / reporting this whole deal?

So, to get this straight, they exploited a huge hole created by CCP, they did this for 2 weeks, them and lots of their little buddies profited from this, not to mention the trickle down effect that affected positively and negatively many other players and the whole market in general, and instead of a ban, which is what the EULA says (CCP really needs to read it sometime), you're actually going to "award" Them multiple PLEX for exploiting the game? Wow. ------- Cut by ISD Stensson ------- CCP seems determined to make 2012 more of an epic fail than last year, and the players numbers still haven't rebounded from last year. Well done. Another lost opportunity to show the player base that you know what you're doing, but all it really did was make CCP, what, 0 for 5 on major issues so far this year?

Edit: Rumors removed - ISD Stensson

Usually, hostile take overs by banks are done with $$$ and lawyers and not guns. Are you suggesting there will be a significant financial assault on Delve residents? If so I'd love to see a detailed post on how it was done and what impact it had.