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It happened early June already, though it apparently took quite a while for it to propagate to the mainstream news.

I play the game, Eve and there's a bunch of hate going on for the developers, CCP as a result of this bug. I think the bashing of CCP is excessive, but it's worth considering why it might have happened.

First, much has been made of the claim that CCP "knew" about the exploit. Why has this assertion been made? Because the exploit in question was "petitioned", that is, someone complained about the exploit to an ingame admin some time four years ago. I gather this was reported multiple times in the same way though it's hard to figure out who's telling the truth. But what is the petition proces for? Resolving an ingame problem with a user. If the user is ok with the outcome ("I have free stuff!") and isn't currently cheating, then I gather the petition is closed. So one possibility for the failure is simply that the exploit never got reported as a bug either by players or by the admins handling the problems. I wouldn't be surprised, if the admins never bothered either because it wasn't their job (since the bug wasn't resulting in actions that required immediate admin correction) or because that part of the game was notoriously buggy.

Now as I understand it, the bug is as follows. There is something called a "player owned station" or "POS". You start by anchoring something called a control tower which for our purposes can only be anchored in a fixed number of spots, one per "moon" in the game (my SWAG is hundred thousand locations). Near that tower, you can anchor other POS structures. Some are for defense. One is to extract a resource "moon minerals". You can attach factories, drug labs, asteroid ore refineries. The most important structures are (chemical) reactors. You store various moon mineral resources and reactor products in "silos". The reactors take input products from some silos and dump the output in other silos. Think of it like a flow chart made of industrial widgets. There are two layers of reactions known as "simple" and "complex". Every moon mineral (of which there are maybe 15-20 types) goes through a simple reaction (where it is combined with another moon mineral) and then a complex reaction (where the resulting simple reaction product is combined with 1-3 other simple reaction products).

Economically, most of the value coming out of reactions comes out of the second layer of reactions. The reactors for complex reactions are bigger and most POS can only handle one such reactor. That often means that a chain of reactions can spread over half a dozen reactors or more. The really efficient corporations (Eve equivalent of guilds) can run dozens of these things to generate all the reaction products that the Eve markets consume. That's if you do it the fair way.

Eve like many such games has a one hour downtime. Some enterprising players apparently discovered that one can manipulate a single reactor so that over downtime it fills the output silo with the desired reaction product even though no input material was used. Normally it takes a week or longer in real time to fill that silo and you need to fill the input silos with the appropriate materials. The complex reactions, being the more valuable ones and the final product of POS reactions (which would immediately be bought by manufacturers), were the ones that were exploited. Certain moon minerals were far more scarce than others. In fact, it was to the point that a lot of the game activity centered on controling sources of those moon minerals. This was all bypassed by creating the complex reaction products that had the valuable moon minerals in them.

For your edification, here's a screenshot halfway down the page showing a control tower (the big vertical thing), a bunch of silos (9 of them present along with a "coupling silo" which looks identical, meant to buffer the flow of output product), and two reactors (on the far left), one complex and one simple. "Online" means it is active and able to do something. "Anchor

Kind of ironic they make such a fuss about their economics now, considering today they've announced the closure of their official moderated Trade forums. Their suggestion? For everyone to use a third-party site.

The most likely reason? Because they're terminating their volunteer service departments who did most of the forum moderations. While this might be an effort to try and erase their image as having players cheating at these levels, it doesn't mean much for those who still trusted CCP and EVE to maintain a fair and effective way to trade in an out-of-game setting (say, from at work). Now who's to trust?

It's a sad day for CCP.

I ran into this problem a few months pack, trying to paste the url http://www.scrapheap-challenge.com/ to a friend of mine. Absolutely refused to send unless I put a space in there somewhere.

According to This page the current UK Series (called Scrapheap Challenge) finishes with a TRANSATLANTIC CHALLENGE (their caps) after the final.

Is this going to be a link up with this US based show prehaps or are they just going to pick some random stateside folk and claim they somehow represent the country?

There are a few good links at the bottom of that page to Channel 4's site, the production company's site, a mailing list etc...

It is certainly one of the best shows on TV a the moment, but please can we have more of the massive machines of destruction (as in the DemolitionAerial Bomber shambles).

Anyone wanting to know more about the UK series, which is at least vaguely similar to the US show being discussed, should probably start at The Channel 4 Site. Good site, same the Javascript is broken and they seem to like realplayer a little too much for me.

According to This page the current UK Series (called Scrapheap Challenge) finishes with a TRANSATLANTIC CHALLENGE (their caps) after the final.

Is this going to be a link up with this US based show prehaps or are they just going to pick some random stateside folk and claim they somehow represent the country?

There are a few good links at the bottom of that page to Channel 4's site, the production company's site, a mailing list etc...

It is certainly one of the best shows on TV a the moment, but please can we have more of the massive machines of destruction (as in the DemolitionAerial Bomber shambles).

Anyone wanting to know more about the UK series, which is at least vaguely similar to the US show being discussed, should probably start at The Channel 4 Site. Good site, same the Javascript is broken and they seem to like realplayer a little too much for me.