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Goons 4x4ing through the Sandbox - Market Manipulation on a Grand Scale

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David Carel
SWAT Team Sales Consultants
#2361 - 2012-06-23 14:49:53 UTC  |  Edited by: CCP Spitfire
Please keep it civil. Spitfire
Imiarr Timshae
Funny Men In Funny Hats
#2362 - 2012-06-23 14:51:08 UTC  |  Edited by: Imiarr Timshae
Contribution to threadnaught :

The point that Screegs is missing is that all previous exploits have, to my knowledge, been covert. The ferrogel thing, rat manipulation (if any of you remember back that far) and the wormhole -1 tracking thing etc. Not that I am saying Screegs is wrong (pheer the banhammer!) but his comments are falling on deaf ears and so are everyone elses because you are having two different conversations.

Instead CCP wandered in, posted a "We're doing this and this and this.", some very smart players saw that and did the math and used that to their advantage in a seriously massive way.

It might not be the definition of what CCP considers an exploit or what the capsuleer population considers legitimate gameplay.

CCP has basically wandered into town with a billboard strapped to them that reads "If you're very smart and can be bothered here's a set of systems we are implementing that can make you astronomically rich." and now they are removing those profits.

There was no such announcement of ferrogel etc. This is the same as profiting from Technetium of PI in my opinion. You announced it, they read it, they took advantage of it.


Just because CCP didn't smart up and see the impact of what they are implementing (protip: They never do) doesn't mean the playerbase didn't.


Edit because I love this guy:

Holander Switzerland wrote:
Man you guys messed up by telling them, they had no idea. You can tell because they just took everything FW away from the parties involved, regardless if it was earned beforehand. Either they don't have logs for this stuff, or they are just too incompetent to use them, or they don't care.


The logs show nothing. Sorry! - Every GM, Ever.

Personal Standings Services - Free 3rd Party & Collateral Holding Service - 7+ Day Old Corps for Highsec POS Sales
Ban Bindy
Bindy Brothers Pottery Association
True Reign
#2363 - 2012-06-23 14:51:29 UTC
Amazing that you guys really think you can spin your way out of this and pretend it's not within CCP's rights to correct this. Listen to the gnashing of teeth and the moaning about the Holy Sandbox. All to justify doing something the perps knew was on the edge of game-legal. The fact that it was not working as intended by the devs is all over OP's original post. The guy even says later that it would have been a disaster to let this become a known mechanic for other people to manipulate in later posts.

Goons have thousands of members wringing their hands and weeping about the fact that they were called on their crap for a change. This is the best thread ever, even better than the one that got Mittani banned.

Goons can justify any kind of behavior that suits them. They're better than the US Republican party. These guys must work on Wall Street.
Jade Constantine
Jericho Fraction
The Star Fraction
#2364 - 2012-06-23 14:53:05 UTC
Paint wrote:

So you have no kills. OK Edit - I will freely admit I don't pay much attention to wars but when I look at the war browser, unless I am missing something, which is completely possible, it shows no kills. But please do feel free to show me kills and losses from the war. Especially yours. This seems important to you.


Look at the "Goonswarm Federation vs Star Fraction" war in the online war browser. It comes an overview of the campaign so far.

(Starting 31/05/2012) Current results are The Star Fraction coalition 14b isk killed and 110 ships blown up. (winning) vs Goonswarm Federation with 1.7b isk killed and 26 ships blown up (losing).

Now sure, I've not scored a personal kill in this particular war (its not our only one I've got 302 kills vs the Amarrians btw) But then neither has Mittani (and it was his big griefing initiative I thought.) In fact the only goons I've actually in space since you declared war have been 3 cowardly stealth bombers who all instantly fled from me when I locked them with a tornado.

So here's the thing. When you declare war on an entity the onus is on you to come disrupt their operations and make yourselves a pain. What's happened here is that I countered your dec by inviting hisec trade hub raiders in for free as allowed in the 1.0 wardec system and you guys are getting farmed by hisec players. You haven't had the slightest impact on Star Fraction playstyle or our own war against Amarrian Faction warfare.

And its pretty hypocritical for you to somehow think I should be personally fighting Mittani's "griefing war" when your leader isn't.

Where is Mittani on the killboard? Hiding as usual.

The True Knowledge is that nothing matters that does not matter to you, might does make right and power makes freedom
CCP Sreegs
CCP Retirement Home
#2365 - 2012-06-23 14:53:15 UTC
Benedic wrote:
CCP Sreegs wrote:
Benedic wrote:
I find it quite disturbing that you can be punished by finding clever ways to profit from the rules of Eve. This was no exploit, it was using the code and systems the way they were designed. Who knows what the **** you can get punished for next considering if it benefits you in any way they may randomly yank back all your profits.


I find it disturbing that you think you could exploit a system to print money and crash markets and we'd just be like "Oh haha those cards".

We haven't punished anyone to date. We haven't even decided if we will but boy howdy are we well within our rights to do so and I'm just astounded that I even have to explain that.


Like the other posters in goonfleet I take exception to this idea that it's 'exploiting' a system when CCP designed these systems to do -exactly- what was done. When you build a system to allow you to lower LP costs and so forth it's not really an exploitation to use those systems to profit.

An exploitation is when you use a system in a way that it was not intended to be used or find a way to outright break the system and use it wrongly. None of that was done, all the systems were used in the way they were intended and combined in a way that generated profit.

I will say that I'll await the results of your investigation eagerly. Maybe the people responsible have lied to us and they really 'exploited' a system but so far all they've done as best I can see is use the systems you built in ways you didn't see when designing them and that means the fault lies with CCP, not the players. THAT is the nature of a sandbox. If you can't stand by your own bad design but instead seek to punish the players for finding the flaws in your designs then you deserve to lose the playerbase. Stand by your own shoddy work, not fling blame at the players.


Not once has anyone blamed any players. We're well aware of what a sandbox is. We made it.

If you print isk and I take away what you printed then you're in the same state you were prior to printing. That is not punishment it is fixing the problem.

"Sreegs has juuust edged out Soundwave as my favourite dev." - Meita Way 2012
Ban Bindy
Bindy Brothers Pottery Association
True Reign
#2366 - 2012-06-23 14:53:30 UTC
Imiarr Timshae wrote:
Contribution to threadnaught :

The point that Screegs is missing is that all previous exploits have, to my knowledge, been covert. The ferrogel thing, rat manipulation (if any of you remember back that far) and the wormhole -1 tracking thing etc.

Instead CCP wandered in, posted a "We're doing this and this and this.", some very smart players saw that and did the math and used that to their advantage in a seriously massive way.

It might not be the definition of what CCP considers and exploit or what the capsuleer population considers legitimate gameplay.

CCP has basically wandered into town with a billboard strapped to them that reads "If you're very smart and can be bothered here's a set of systems we are implementing that can make you astronomically rich." and now they are removing those profits.

There was no such announcement of ferrogel etc. This is the same as profiting from Technetium of PI in my opinion. You announced it, they read it, they took advantage of it.


Just because CCP didn't smart up and see the impact of what they are implementing (protip: They never do) doesn't mean the playerbase didn't.


Just because CCP didn't hear the warnings amid all the other crap that fills the forums doesn't mean they're not going to correct it when it's abused to the tune of 5 trillion isk or whatever. If the warnings were even given. Do I believe Goons or do I believe CCP? I'm not going to sweat THAT decision for long.
Haquer
Vorkuta Inc
#2367 - 2012-06-23 14:53:39 UTC
CCP Sreegs wrote:
Holander Switzerland wrote:
Man you guys messed up by telling them, they had no idea. You can tell because they just took everything FW away from the parties involved, regardless if it was earned beforehand. Either they don't have logs for this stuff, or they are just too incompetent to use them, or they don't care.


We knew what was going on but it takes time to see scale. I'm going to warn you once not to misrepresent us in this thread and then I'm going to have your posting privileges revoked forever. Please do not interfere with our communication to our customers by inventing falsehoods.


You're doing this just fine yourself.
Richard Dongue
Racism. Inc
#2368 - 2012-06-23 14:55:11 UTC
Haquer wrote:
CCP Sreegs wrote:
Holander Switzerland wrote:
Man you guys messed up by telling them, they had no idea. You can tell because they just took everything FW away from the parties involved, regardless if it was earned beforehand. Either they don't have logs for this stuff, or they are just too incompetent to use them, or they don't care.


We knew what was going on but it takes time to see scale. I'm going to warn you once not to misrepresent us in this thread and then I'm going to have your posting privileges revoked forever. Please do not interfere with our communication to our customers by inventing falsehoods.


You're doing this just fine yourself.


careful mate don't disagree with sreegs or you'll get your posting privileges revoked forever
Haquer
Vorkuta Inc
#2369 - 2012-06-23 14:55:17 UTC
CCP Sreegs wrote:
Benedic wrote:
CCP Sreegs wrote:
Benedic wrote:
I find it quite disturbing that you can be punished by finding clever ways to profit from the rules of Eve. This was no exploit, it was using the code and systems the way they were designed. Who knows what the **** you can get punished for next considering if it benefits you in any way they may randomly yank back all your profits.


I find it disturbing that you think you could exploit a system to print money and crash markets and we'd just be like "Oh haha those cards".

We haven't punished anyone to date. We haven't even decided if we will but boy howdy are we well within our rights to do so and I'm just astounded that I even have to explain that.


Like the other posters in goonfleet I take exception to this idea that it's 'exploiting' a system when CCP designed these systems to do -exactly- what was done. When you build a system to allow you to lower LP costs and so forth it's not really an exploitation to use those systems to profit.

An exploitation is when you use a system in a way that it was not intended to be used or find a way to outright break the system and use it wrongly. None of that was done, all the systems were used in the way they were intended and combined in a way that generated profit.

I will say that I'll await the results of your investigation eagerly. Maybe the people responsible have lied to us and they really 'exploited' a system but so far all they've done as best I can see is use the systems you built in ways you didn't see when designing them and that means the fault lies with CCP, not the players. THAT is the nature of a sandbox. If you can't stand by your own bad design but instead seek to punish the players for finding the flaws in your designs then you deserve to lose the playerbase. Stand by your own shoddy work, not fling blame at the players.


Not once has anyone blamed any players. We're well aware of what a sandbox is. We made it.

If you print isk and I take away what you printed then you're in the same state you were prior to printing. That is not punishment it is fixing the problem.


You didn't give back the assets/isk that they sunk into "printing isk" (that they got from other players so they, in effect, printed no isk whatsoever).

So no, they're not at the state prior to printing, and they were, in fact, punished.
Robus Muvila
Caldari Provisions
Caldari State
#2370 - 2012-06-23 14:55:42 UTC  |  Edited by: Robus Muvila
This has been an absolutely fascinating arc of events and has made for wonderful reading.
The first thing that comes to mind has been the knee jerk "Burned Earth" approach, as they started in regards to the Constantine Conspiracy, CCP is a big company, it takes time and planning to make anything happen, that's just how big companies work.

Hotfixes are drastic measures usually reserved for situations where there is something that is truely game breaking on a engine mechanics level, or it is a liability issue (Like deleting boot.ini Cool). What is essentially a balance issue (A huge one, but a balance issue none the less).

The sheer whammy and speed of this reaction combined with sicking CCP Sreegs on the forums in addition to the recent new rules about being mean to CCP staff on the forums to me looks less like a company dealing with a game exploit, and more like a company trying to save face on a PR level. They liked Burn Jita because although it involved upsetting a large section of the player base, they still had control of the situation, it was going to get out into the blogosphere and they could shape it and mould it to reflect positively on their product like pro's.

This wasn't a hack where players manipulated code or expanded on an engine error, messed with packet transitions or used any third party elements to cheat the system, this is a cut and dry case of the games playerbase being CONSIDERABLY smarter than the development team and a CCP that is clearly getting sick of disrespect from the playerbase.

I feel sorry for CCP in a way because they are in a clear Catch 22 situation here. If they rolled everything back, they're disturbing the sandbox, if they DIDN'T roll everything back Jade Constantine and Jester would have a god damn party about favouritism and goons being in CCP's pocket. They were damned if they did and they were damned if they didn't.

In the end regardless of what happens to the money the history of it all cannot be rolled back and cannot be hotfixed.

Goonswarm executed the scam of the century right under CCP's noses. And that is awesome, no matter what happens to the money.


And money is everything.

TMC Senior Developer http://themittani.com - Because EvE has needed a proper news site for ages
Weaselior
GoonWaffe
Goonswarm Federation
#2371 - 2012-06-23 14:56:16 UTC
CCP Sreegs wrote:
Holander Switzerland wrote:
Man you guys messed up by telling them, they had no idea. You can tell because they just took everything FW away from the parties involved, regardless if it was earned beforehand. Either they don't have logs for this stuff, or they are just too incompetent to use them, or they don't care.


We knew what was going on but it takes time to see scale. I'm going to warn you once not to misrepresent us in this thread and then I'm going to have your posting privileges revoked forever. Please do not interfere with our communication to our customers by inventing falsehoods.

When you do the devblog on this, could you be clear what is/isn't allowed with the system, going forward? I think it's pretty clear that what was done here won't be allowed going forward (manipulating a price, then using that manipulated price), but as long as this mechanism is in the game there's going to be edge cases where you can make a profit essentially converting items into LP, though in much less crazy game-breaking ways.

Head of the Goonswarm Economic Warfare Cabal Pubbie Management and Exploitation Division.
CCP Sreegs
CCP Retirement Home
#2372 - 2012-06-23 14:56:57 UTC
Haquer wrote:
CCP Sreegs wrote:
Benedic wrote:
CCP Sreegs wrote:
Benedic wrote:
I find it quite disturbing that you can be punished by finding clever ways to profit from the rules of Eve. This was no exploit, it was using the code and systems the way they were designed. Who knows what the **** you can get punished for next considering if it benefits you in any way they may randomly yank back all your profits.


I find it disturbing that you think you could exploit a system to print money and crash markets and we'd just be like "Oh haha those cards".

We haven't punished anyone to date. We haven't even decided if we will but boy howdy are we well within our rights to do so and I'm just astounded that I even have to explain that.


Like the other posters in goonfleet I take exception to this idea that it's 'exploiting' a system when CCP designed these systems to do -exactly- what was done. When you build a system to allow you to lower LP costs and so forth it's not really an exploitation to use those systems to profit.

An exploitation is when you use a system in a way that it was not intended to be used or find a way to outright break the system and use it wrongly. None of that was done, all the systems were used in the way they were intended and combined in a way that generated profit.

I will say that I'll await the results of your investigation eagerly. Maybe the people responsible have lied to us and they really 'exploited' a system but so far all they've done as best I can see is use the systems you built in ways you didn't see when designing them and that means the fault lies with CCP, not the players. THAT is the nature of a sandbox. If you can't stand by your own bad design but instead seek to punish the players for finding the flaws in your designs then you deserve to lose the playerbase. Stand by your own shoddy work, not fling blame at the players.


Not once has anyone blamed any players. We're well aware of what a sandbox is. We made it.

If you print isk and I take away what you printed then you're in the same state you were prior to printing. That is not punishment it is fixing the problem.


You didn't give back the assets/isk that they sunk into "printing isk" (that they got from other players so they, in effect, printed no isk whatsoever).

So no, they're not at the state prior to printing, and they were, in fact, punished.


and you're not qualified to discuss the matter because anything you type is hearsay

"Sreegs has juuust edged out Soundwave as my favourite dev." - Meita Way 2012
Haquer
Vorkuta Inc
#2373 - 2012-06-23 14:58:24 UTC
CCP Sreegs wrote:
and you're not qualified to discuss the matter because anything you type is hearsay


Oh damn son, you got me there.

Pack it in boys, the things that we heard straight from the people this happened to is hearsay.

We're finished. End of Goonswarm.
Tomytronic
Perkone
Caldari State
#2374 - 2012-06-23 14:58:25 UTC
Hey Jade, how's the 8.7b isk doing that you made from this? Playing both sides of the argument doesn't do much for your respectability you know.
CCP Sreegs
CCP Retirement Home
#2375 - 2012-06-23 14:58:45 UTC
Weaselior wrote:
CCP Sreegs wrote:
Holander Switzerland wrote:
Man you guys messed up by telling them, they had no idea. You can tell because they just took everything FW away from the parties involved, regardless if it was earned beforehand. Either they don't have logs for this stuff, or they are just too incompetent to use them, or they don't care.


We knew what was going on but it takes time to see scale. I'm going to warn you once not to misrepresent us in this thread and then I'm going to have your posting privileges revoked forever. Please do not interfere with our communication to our customers by inventing falsehoods.

When you do the devblog on this, could you be clear what is/isn't allowed with the system, going forward? I think it's pretty clear that what was done here won't be allowed going forward (manipulating a price, then using that manipulated price), but as long as this mechanism is in the game there's going to be edge cases where you can make a profit essentially converting items into LP, though in much less crazy game-breaking ways.


You know as well as I do that I can't conceive of every potential future scenario to clearly lay out the lines and requesting that is really bad forum lawyering.

"Sreegs has juuust edged out Soundwave as my favourite dev." - Meita Way 2012
Andrea Roche
State War Academy
Caldari State
#2376 - 2012-06-23 14:59:08 UTC
Haquer wrote:
CCP Sreegs wrote:
Benedic wrote:
CCP Sreegs wrote:
Benedic wrote:
I find it quite disturbing that you can be punished by finding clever ways to profit from the rules of Eve. This was no exploit, it was using the code and systems the way they were designed. Who knows what the **** you can get punished for next considering if it benefits you in any way they may randomly yank back all your profits.


I find it disturbing that you think you could exploit a system to print money and crash markets and we'd just be like "Oh haha those cards".

We haven't punished anyone to date. We haven't even decided if we will but boy howdy are we well within our rights to do so and I'm just astounded that I even have to explain that.


Like the other posters in goonfleet I take exception to this idea that it's 'exploiting' a system when CCP designed these systems to do -exactly- what was done. When you build a system to allow you to lower LP costs and so forth it's not really an exploitation to use those systems to profit.

An exploitation is when you use a system in a way that it was not intended to be used or find a way to outright break the system and use it wrongly. None of that was done, all the systems were used in the way they were intended and combined in a way that generated profit.

I will say that I'll await the results of your investigation eagerly. Maybe the people responsible have lied to us and they really 'exploited' a system but so far all they've done as best I can see is use the systems you built in ways you didn't see when designing them and that means the fault lies with CCP, not the players. THAT is the nature of a sandbox. If you can't stand by your own bad design but instead seek to punish the players for finding the flaws in your designs then you deserve to lose the playerbase. Stand by your own shoddy work, not fling blame at the players.


Not once has anyone blamed any players. We're well aware of what a sandbox is. We made it.

If you print isk and I take away what you printed then you're in the same state you were prior to printing. That is not punishment it is fixing the problem.


You didn't give back the assets/isk that they sunk into "printing isk" (that they got from other players so they, in effect, printed no isk whatsoever).

So no, they're not at the state prior to printing, and they were, in fact, punished.


when CCP nerfed the sanctums and all the billions spend per alliance of upgrades of systems, they did not give anything back either. Nothing new there, regarding investments. So this completelly destroys your argument.
Tomytronic
Perkone
Caldari State
#2377 - 2012-06-23 14:59:39 UTC
Shouldn't the PR team be doing the communications here?
Holander Switzerland
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#2378 - 2012-06-23 14:59:44 UTC
CCP Sreegs wrote:
Holander Switzerland wrote:
Man you guys messed up by telling them, they had no idea. You can tell because they just took everything FW away from the parties involved, regardless if it was earned beforehand. Either they don't have logs for this stuff, or they are just too incompetent to use them, or they don't care.


We knew what was going on but it takes time to see scale. I'm going to warn you once not to misrepresent us in this thread and then I'm going to have your posting privileges revoked forever. Please do not interfere with our communication to our customers by inventing falsehoods.


Could you look at my previous posts in the thread about what is and isn't considered an exploit by CCP so I don't accidentally stumble across bad coding and end up banned?
Vera Algaert
Republic University
Minmatar Republic
#2379 - 2012-06-23 14:59:55 UTC  |  Edited by: Vera Algaert
CCP Sreegs wrote:
Enaris Kerle wrote:
CCP Sreegs wrote:
By that standard the ferrogel exploit was also within the parameters. I don't know why this seems to not be sinking in. All exploits were programmed.

The difference is that all of the components of this alleged exploit were working exactly as designed. You've always been able to manipulate the market. Shooting ships to get LP for the value of their cargo was what was stated on the devblog regarding the FW changes. So was upgrading the FW systems with LP to get lower prices from the LP store. The only thing that wasn't intended was a combination of all of these factors.
This is entirely different from duping ferrogel, where it was never designed you could react stuff without using the inputs.
It's closer to the insurance fraud scheme, where a working design (shoot ship, get insurance payout) was "abused" because you got more than the ship was worth.


If we make a correction it clearly wasn't what we intended. You're not manipulating the price so much as taking advantage of time lapses in the calculation of value which pins a different currency to a seldom-changing somewhat arbitrary number that you can set.

did CCP intend ship insurance to form a price bottom for minerals?

guess they did not, as insurance payout calculations were reworked to prevent such a thing from happening again...

An obviously flawed game mechanic that had massive effects on the mineral market, injected huge amounts of ISK into the economy and was exploited on a truly industrial scale (too lazy to dig up old numbers, Kazuo alone destroyed a few thousand battleships iirc) - but resulted in absolutely no backlash against the involved players.

Winter 2009/Spring 2010 was probably still before your time at CCP but until now we had no indication from CCP that their approach to balance "sandbox" vs "impact on game economy" had changed.

Whatever action you decide to take, please make sure that we leave this whole affair with a clearer understanding of what is acceptable vs what is considered an exploit.

The old precedents don't seem to give reliable guidance anymore.

.
David Carel
SWAT Team Sales Consultants
#2380 - 2012-06-23 15:01:11 UTC
Tomytronic wrote:
Hey Jade, how's the 8.7b isk doing that you made from this? Playing both sides of the argument doesn't do much for your respectability you know.


Sick burrrrrrrrrrrrn