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EVE Devs Dissect, Explain Massive Economic Exploit
In December we discussed news that a major exploit in EVE Online had just been widely discovered after being abused by a few players for up to four years, creating thousands of real-life dollars worth of unearned in-game currency. Representatives from CCP Games assured players that the matter would be investigated and dealt with; a familiar line in such situations for other multiplayer games, and often the final official word on the matter. Yesterday, CCP completed their investigation and posted an incredibly detailed account of how the exploit worked, what they did to fix it, how it affected the game's economy, and what happened to the players who abused it. Their report ranges from descriptions of the involved algorithms to graphs of the related economic markets to theatrically swooping through the game universe nuking the malfunctioning structures. It's quite comprehensible to non-EVE-players, and Massively has summarized the report nicely. It's an excellent example of transparency and openness in dealing with a situation most companies would be anxious to sweep under the rug.
They should find and fix exploits in the real economy.
Earth-online.
Internet Spaceships are SERIOUS BUSINESS for a lot of the people in EVE, who tend to be much more in to the game than players of other MMOs. If the Devs didn't come down hard on this, the forums would be in open revolt.
Note how, at the end of the article, they are careful to inform us that no Devs were involved in carrying out the exploit. The last time a big story like this broke, it was to do with a Dev cheating, and the players were in uproar.
Eve is all about breaking the 4th wall. Hell, CCP employ a real, Phd-equipped economist to analyse their game, and provide market analysis every few months. The spy scene in Eve is quite famous too - most of that is carried out through mechanics outside of the game. Eve is not WoW, the userbase demand a completely different treatment of bugs such as this, that could potentially effect the balance of in-game politics.
There was a bug in the way items were produced, making free items.
The economy reacted accordingly by decreasing the market cost for these items.
Items that need these free items were also accordingly cheaper.
When discovered, the costs of the free items and the items requiring them shot up due to market speculation and decreased supply.
The economy in general will have some bumps, but will eventually recover.
The perpetrators have been shot.
If anyone is wondering what POS is short for, it's "Player Owned Station".
Personally I think the article reads a lot better if you instead use "Piece Of Shit":
CCP Games explains the scenario from the ground up, detailing the POS game mechanics for those unfamiliar with the industrial side of the game, and pointing out how the POS exploit worked.
The proper order in which to evaluate a POS is essentially breadth-first traversal....
POS Reactors are complex beasts, but not quite so bad as POS Control Towers.
and so on.
Learn to ride this bike, and you can have a lot of fun.
If Eve is a bike, then instead of having pedals and handlebars to control, it has complicated and unintuitive set of buttons that take a full day of tutorials to understand. Then once you get this bike, you have to ride the same trails over and over until you can get a better bike. Then once you get a better bike you ride a more challenging set of trails over and over, until the boredom is unbearable. Once you get a good enough bike to race against other bikes (or you just get sick of the trails), you find that all the veterans will always have better equipment, skills, and money then you. So only way to way to win at bike races is to get a bunch of friends, sit outside a gate, and beat the shit out of any unsuspecting bikers that come through, and then race them while they have broken legs.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game