Science & Industry

There is a game mechanic that can be exploited to make certain that you have research slots available in an NPC station (and prevent all others from using it):

1. Buy a BPO for a medium ship, a BPO that you will not need.
2. Put the BPO in a research slot, for the maximum time, or at least 20 days.
3. At any point before the BPO research is done, cancel it and start it again.
4. Whenever you need a slot, cancel your unneeded BPO research to start what you do need done.
5. When the needed BPO research is done, restart at step 1 or 2.
(This exploit is not needed in a POS, only in NPC stations.)

Possible ways to prevent this (again, not needed in a POS):

1. Make the cancel button unavailable after a few short hours (3 should be reasonable). Only the player that started the job may cancel it.
2. Log how many times an account will cancel/start jobs on one line (if cancellation is limited to 3 hours frequency will be high).
3. Flag BPO's as having been canceled too often, so that they cannot be canceled again. Inform the player of such with a popup.
4. Increase the number of lines available in NPC stations (hisec is too crowded for so few lines).

I believe this exploit to be very widely used, as I was told of it by many players that told me to do it (though I never have). This should also be considered griefing, as I have found no place to do ME research in hisec (even though the lines are there). First come first serve is great, except when I can't get served at all.

Actually, right now, if you cancel a job, the line remains active for the full time. So it'll stay active for the full 20 days.

Not the first time this has come up recently. It still doesn't work. But go ahead and try it. I suggest a titan bpo though. Just to be sure.

Good grief, I have way better things to do with lab my jobs than to commit them to just keeping a slot open, even if this did work. I have 6 freaking alts, and will soon train more, just to be able to run more lab jobs. Tying up my limited pool of lab slots just "waiting" for something useful to do seems crazy. I ALWAYS have something useful to do with lab slots.

When you go to cancel a job, you get explicitly told that cancelling the job will not free up the slot. There's sometimes a tool top on the character selection screen that says the same thing.

The people telling you to do this are either clueless or messing with you.

In the Forge lines even in low-sec are now busy for 25 days.
Congrats, research service went up in value.

Clearly the OP is either a. Trolling trying to get people to tie up a bunch of research slots, or b. an idiot who has never actually tried this method.

I am voting for both a and b.

im pretty sure discussion of exploits is bannable ofence in forum. I do hope you did petition this under game bugs.

Except that you don't get the slot back. So there's no exploit. And therefor, what I described is not at all what you were saying.

And reducing the ability of your competitors to do business using free, risk-free NPC research slots is not griefing, it's simply sound business practice.

There has been no attempt to fix something that is not a problem (duh).

And posting to explain that the entirety of your knowledge of the subject is, at best, second hand does not put you in a position where you can claim that other people look like idiots without looking like one yourself.

Honestly, for once I might have to agree with Brewlar.

I think NPC research slots are similar to NPC mineral buy/sell orders. They were useful while the game was young and CCP was unsure if players would be able to deal with an entirely player run market of something so basic, but now that players have shown that they can, it's time to let them go.