Goons something something 5 trillion

[DevilDude]

they shouldnt fix it tbh....
wallet warfare - why not? now that everybody knows about it

the true culprit is the amount of shitty items (and desolate, deserted places) that just exist to make the game seem more 'complex'

if you can't the 2 minutes to figure out the huge number of reasons that's retarded youre dumber than I thought

Wait a second, how dumb did you think he was? I thought the general long-held conclusion was that RoemySchneider was dumber than a bag of smashed arseholes

Previously he had confined his retardation to matters of.the combat system. Now.my definition has to expand.

i must admit i've only 'skimmed through' the thing once, so walk me through it;

the only thing that gets pulled out of thin air is LP (as per 'intended', 'dynamic' game mechanic) - well and the subsequent items they traded them in for.
we're basically 'shocked' by the amount of said LP.
this was achieved by a) blowing up the value of the kill and b) 'buying into' FW for a better multiplier
with b) being fully intended, a) is to be blamed entirely.
granted, i don't see how ccp could include cargo in this consideration, but if it is now limited to ship&clone, there's a finite number of items to do it with.
in order to mess with the value of the kill, items' prices need to be controlled for... how long was it? 30days?
while they're trading a shitty 1% implant back and forth for 10bil over this period, imagine you spot it and start putting up a sell order.
now... you can either join the fray at 10bil and leech money off the goons or you can ruin their fun and repeatedly sell them for a 'more reasonable' 2xjita price until they go away. if you feel like a proper do-gooder, you can buy your own orders a couple of hundred times and settle the avg price.
goons will have lost the 10+ bil to your first sell order, the broker&taxes and paid FW for higher payouts - and yet there will be no payout at the end of the month because you market pvp'ed them.

if i understood correctly thus far, then the only troublesome part is finding those backroom shenanigans.

what did i miss?

Basically right. Their initial dodge revolved around the fact that the average value of LP was somewhat inflated compared to modifier granted by certain cargoes, specifically drone minerals. The Cargo drop bug didn't hurt but was quickly closed apparently. This allowed them to liquidate minerals at better than market values.

They then converted the LPs gained into datacores, and did it again, because the value of the datacores was out or synch with the LP rewards. After this they moved up to implants, using manipulation in a dead system to artificially inflate the value of one item by gaming CCP's market algorithms. It likely wasn't noticed because no one was monitoring the market wherever it was going down (I'd guess in some dead nullsec station somewhere) because the base price from the shop doesn't alter they were able to create a discrepancy. At this point they were able to print LP and further exacerbate the discrepancy by throwing some of the now limitless LP into minmatar FW. The T5 modifiers they were able to buy made their final cash out pretty huge.

It's true that you could theoretically counter it if you saw it coming, or leech off it, but the cluster is too big I think to easily track exactly what they were doing.

honestly, anyone with access to a few billion isk (of which there are many) could do this on their own. These guys just did it first and with a significant amount of capital. the real issue is that it doesn't take that many accounts to shift the market like this, I'd say a minimum of 5-10, if CCP had say inserted a modifier into payouts which either forced daily diminishing returns, or diminishing returns for repeat kills, this wouldn't have been possible without hundreds of accounts, and nothing like the efficiency we see here.

[Glyken Touchon]

I admire the ingenuity that went into figuring this out, but it's blindingly obvious that it was never intended behaviour, ergo it's an exploit.

It's also blindingly obvious that they never intended the Pax Amarria to limit Nocxium. Should everyone that benefitted be punished for exploiting?

[DevilDude]

I admire the ingenuity that went into figuring this out, but it's blindingly obvious that it was never intended behaviour, ergo it's an exploit.

It's also blindingly obvious that they never intended the Pax Amarria to limit Nocxium. Should everyone that benefitted be punished for exploiting?

I think the difference lies between bad game design, and exploitation of bugs. This system was working exactly as intended. It's just that CCP didn't think the mechanic through fully before implementing it, people even told them that this would happen. As I've said twice before in this thread a simple diminishing returns system tacked in would make it virtually impossible to game the FW shops on this level. The question I have is whether the rest of us are going to let CCP try to blame this on the players rather than force them to admit their own failure.

IMO we need to keep forcing them to own up to their mistakes, it's the only way so far we've found to keep them from fucking up too badly.

[ry ry]

I love the Goons. They still have the energy/creativity I ran out of long ago.

your antics were one of the things that attracted me to eve in the first place - and i'd imagine a number of the goons who scammed you out of your mantle too.

chin up champ, stop struggling to be relevant and enjoy the game ffs!

[Tyrus Tenebros]

i must admit i've only 'skimmed through' the thing once, so walk me through it;

the only thing that gets pulled out of thin air is LP (as per 'intended', 'dynamic' game mechanic) - well and the subsequent items they traded them in for.
we're basically 'shocked' by the amount of said LP.
this was achieved by a) blowing up the value of the kill and b) 'buying into' FW for a better multiplier
with b) being fully intended, a) is to be blamed entirely.
granted, i don't see how ccp could include cargo in this consideration, but if it is now limited to ship&clone, there's a finite number of items to do it with.
in order to mess with the value of the kill, items' prices need to be controlled for... how long was it? 30days?
while they're trading a shitty 1% implant back and forth for 10bil over this period, imagine you spot it and start putting up a sell order.
now... you can either join the fray at 10bil and leech money off the goons or you can ruin their fun and repeatedly sell them for a 'more reasonable' 2xjita price until they go away. if you feel like a proper do-gooder, you can buy your own orders a couple of hundred times and settle the avg price.
goons will have lost the 10+ bil to your first sell order, the broker&taxes and paid FW for higher payouts - and yet there will be no payout at the end of the month because you market pvp'ed them.

if i understood correctly thus far, then the only troublesome part is finding those backroom shenanigans.

what did i miss?

1) You can't "get in" on the action other than to identify the manipulated items and cash in on them yourself. This would involve an alt or accomplice in the opposing faction blowing you up (preferably an alt). This is silly, among other reasons, because faction warfare is the closest thing to in-game RP that eve has, and thinking it's "fine" that part of the gameplay of this supposed bastion of RP where you've chosen an empire to defend.... is having yourself ALSO in the opposing faction for the purpose of generating LP based on faulty market values is absurd. I know eve's not keen on RP but still that being a key factor in strategy is a bit derp.

2) You also can't get in on it because you can't resell at a higher price (part of the game is to sell to yourself, so higher bids would be ignored). You could stop them up a bit by buying their supply and relisting at lower, but then you've simply lost (high - low) ISK to them, and they don't care anyways, since all of their transactions are otherwise internal, you've simply injected the difference of the price in to their wallets. That's stupid also. You also haven't changed the price much.

3) You could try to counter their manipulation by choosing another region, and repeatedly listing and buying the item for .01 isk. You have an advantage in that you can do this with a higher volume of items simultaneously, but since the item is otherwise worthless, you've "sunk" all of the LP+ISK with no hope of recovery (unless you can dock in the station they're trading at and get really lucky inserting your items in to their buy queue but that's almost certainly next to impossible). They simply switch to another useless item and you have to sink again. This (A) turns the entire FW system in to a game of who can click the market faster or program better bots and (B) eventually bankrupts the guy who is trying to compete with the .01 ISK side of the "wallet war".

4) "real life comparison" or not, you're also proposing that there is generally nothing wrong with the fact that, say, the minmatar will sell you thousands of an implant nobody has ever previously used, and then not bat an eye when you claim a kill worth hundreds of billions involving.... those same suddenly strangely popular implants? I know it's virtual but that's OBVIOUSLY unintended and utterly absurd to even consider as an intended part of the gameplay, since you literally are creating LP out of nothing (which is an obvious "exploit"). The implant sells for, say, 100, and is worth, say 10,000 LP when it subsequently explodes. Imagine if wal-mart sold basketballs for $10 and ran a promotion giving you $100 for every deflated basketball you brought to them. I would end up very rich and owning a LOT of deflated basketballs very quickly. And everybody would think it was stupid. That's EXACTLY what's happening and to classify it as anything other than an exploit is nuts.

5) since LP has a material effect on how faction warfare sovereignty is upgraded, this also completely buggers the system. FW is now who can turn exploit-LP profits fast enough! what a fun game!

TL;DR


The people who think this is ok and just "market manipulation" think that Eve would be more fun if it entirely consisted of seeing how fast you can buy an item, blow yourself up, and then buy more of it. While the other half of your faction saw how fast they could buy and resell an item at either very high (the ones you're using to exploit) or very low (the ones your opponents are using to exploit) prices..

edit; I not mad, just in a wall of text mood and people not seeming to realize just how broken this was are causing me to a bit.

[DevilDude]

i must admit i've only 'skimmed through' the thing once, so walk me through it;

the only thing that gets pulled out of thin air is LP (as per 'intended', 'dynamic' game mechanic) - well and the subsequent items they traded them in for.
we're basically 'shocked' by the amount of said LP.
this was achieved by a) blowing up the value of the kill and b) 'buying into' FW for a better multiplier
with b) being fully intended, a) is to be blamed entirely.
granted, i don't see how ccp could include cargo in this consideration, but if it is now limited to ship&clone, there's a finite number of items to do it with.
in order to mess with the value of the kill, items' prices need to be controlled for... how long was it? 30days?
while they're trading a shitty 1% implant back and forth for 10bil over this period, imagine you spot it and start putting up a sell order.
now... you can either join the fray at 10bil and leech money off the goons or you can ruin their fun and repeatedly sell them for a 'more reasonable' 2xjita price until they go away. if you feel like a proper do-gooder, you can buy your own orders a couple of hundred times and settle the avg price.
goons will have lost the 10+ bil to your first sell order, the broker&taxes and paid FW for higher payouts - and yet there will be no payout at the end of the month because you market pvp'ed them.

if i understood correctly thus far, then the only troublesome part is finding those backroom shenanigans.

what did i miss?

1) You can't "get in" on the action other than to identify the manipulated items and cash in on them yourself. This would involve an alt or accomplice in the opposing faction blowing you up (preferably an alt). This is silly, among other reasons, because faction warfare is the closest thing to in-game RP that eve has, and thinking it's "fine" that part of the gameplay of this supposed bastion of RP where you've chosen an empire to defend.... is having yourself ALSO in the opposing faction for the purpose of generating LP based on faulty market values is absurd. I know eve's not keen on RP but still that being a key factor in strategy is a bit derp.

2) You also can't get in on it because you can't resell at a higher price (part of the game is to sell to yourself, so higher bids would be ignored). You could stop them up a bit by buying their supply and relisting at lower, but then you've simply lost (high - low) ISK to them, and they don't care anyways, since all of their transactions are otherwise internal, you've simply injected the difference of the price in to their wallets. That's stupid also. You also haven't changed the price much.

3) You could try to counter their manipulation by choosing another region, and repeatedly listing and buying the item for .01 isk. You have an advantage in that you can do this with a higher volume of items simultaneously, but since the item is otherwise worthless, you've "sunk" all of the LP+ISK with no hope of recovery (unless you can dock in the station they're trading at and get really lucky inserting your items in to their buy queue but that's almost certainly next to impossible). They simply switch to another useless item and you have to sink again. This (A) turns the entire FW system in to a game of who can click the market faster or program better bots and (B) eventually bankrupts the guy who is trying to compete with the .01 ISK side of the "wallet war".

4) "real life comparison" or not, you're also proposing that there is generally nothing wrong with the fact that, say, the minmatar will sell you thousands of an implant nobody has ever previously used, and then not bat an eye when you claim a kill worth hundreds of billions involving.... those same suddenly strangely popular implants? I know it's virtual but that's OBVIOUSLY unintended and utterly absurd to even consider as an intended part of the gameplay, since you literally are creating LP out of nothing (which is an obvious "exploit"). The implant sells for, say, 100, and is worth, say 10,000 LP when it subsequently explodes. Imagine if wal-mart sold basketballs for $10 and ran a promotion giving you $100 for every deflated basketball you brought to them. I would end up very rich and owning a LOT of deflated basketballs very quickly. And everybody would think it was stupid. That's EXACTLY what's happening and to classify it as anything other than an exploit is nuts.

5) since LP has a material effect on how faction warfare sovereignty is upgraded, this also completely buggers the system. FW is now who can turn exploit-LP profits fast enough! what a fun game!

TL;DR


The people who think this is ok and just "market manipulation" think that Eve would be more fun if it entirely consisted of seeing how fast you can buy an item, blow yourself up, and then buy more of it. While the other half of your faction saw how fast they could buy and resell an item at either very high (the ones you're using to exploit) or very low (the ones your opponents are using to exploit) prices..

edit; I not mad, just in a wall of text mood and people not seeming to realize just how broken this was are causing me to a bit.

There are also people like me who think that CCP did shit half assed and need to be called to task for it, and market manipulators doing their thing should be mostly left alone. Sure letting them continue this scam would be bad, but IMO creating a situation wherein the only answer is to take toy's out of the sandbox is worse.

[ValorousBob]

I love the Goons. They still have the energy/creativity I ran out of long ago.

your antics were one of the things that attracted me to eve in the first place - and i'd imagine a number of the goons who scammed you out of your mantle too.

chin up champ, stop struggling to be relevant and enjoy the game ffs!

I'd hardly say he's struggling to stay relevant if he's posting under a name that most people here (including myself) don't readily associate with his ingame name. :P

There are also people like me who think that CCP did shit half assed and need to be called to task for it, and market manipulators doing their thing should be mostly left alone. Sure letting them continue this scam would be bad, but IMO creating a situation wherein the only answer is to take toy's out of the sandbox is worse.

Seconding this. They discovered a loophole that is pretty clearly CCP's fault. Good job Goons, they deserve to keep their profits. BUT, CCP needs to quickly fix this and probably make any further attempts at the same scheme bannable. It would be unfair to ban the Goon people seeing as this is most likely outside the realm of exploits, but CCP needs to get a handle on things before this gets out of control.

[Jack Coutu]

Trying to argue with a faggot like Roemy is like trying to teach a retarded child math. They both end up drooling and frustrated and you've done nothing but waste time.

[Glyken Touchon]

I think the difference lies between bad game design, and exploitation of bugs. This system was working exactly as intended. It's just that CCP didn't think the mechanic through fully before implementing it, people even told them that this would happen.

That's what I mean.
In the noxcium case, it could be argued that the limit was unintentional, but actual mechanics.
In this case, the actual mechanics behaved exactly as they were intended.

So if this is punished, then the nocxium eploit was even worse, as it used unintended mechanics.

I can never remember how to spell noxcium/nocxium/nocumix properly.

[RoemySchneider]

oh, i admit it's broken - we blew up rokhs before the insurance was 'adjusted' (also in yulai) with opposing FW alts as well and that 'felt' wrong, too.

a lil confused though: does your 2) apply to a situation where you can't bring in (a virtually infinite amount of) fresh items they'll have to buy out if they wanted to keep it up?

as per 3)
devildude just stated that the mechanic worked 'locally' on a system-by-system basis (or worse?) - you mention regions and even assume the avg then works globally
i'd like some clarification on that, pl0x


but yes, i've always signed any motion towards making lollystore prices dynamic; let the market decide the value of an item, not ccp. if a scytheFI then costs 1mil, why not vOv
this ofc goes both ways, be that for caldari navy ballistic controls, datacores or implants -.-

[DevilDude]

oh, i admit it's broken - we blew up rokhs before the insurance was 'adjusted' (also in yulai) with opposing FW alts as well and that 'felt' wrong, too.

a lil confused though: does your 2) apply to a situation where you can't bring in (a virtually infinite amount of) fresh items they'll have to buy out if they wanted to keep it up?

as per 3)
devildude just stated that the mechanic worked 'locally' on a system-by-system basis (or worse?) - you mention regions and even assume the avg then works globally



but yes, i've always signed any motion towards making lollystore prices dynamic; let the market decide the value of an item, not ccp. if a scytheFI then costs 1mil, why not vOv
this ofc goes both ways, be that for caldari navy ballistic controls, datacores or implants -.-

the mechanic was cluster wide, basically by clandestinely passing around buy orders in a backwater system you can change the mean price of an item in whatever analytic CCP is running for the entire cluster. So they shipped a freighter full of something off somewhere, and just passed it back and forth between alts at some obscene price, and then waited for the algorithm to do it's thing. The items didn't show an increase in the hubs, but did on CCPs books, which they probably weren't even monitoring or else they'd have pegged it pretty quick. Then the system just factored in the new average on LP payouts, they stated that they didn't know if it worked this way, but were able to track it down by manipulating worthless junk items and checking what that did to the payouts.

edit: now that I think about it it might not even be that complex, if it's just average price all you would need is one item and just shuffle it around for like 20b or so per transfer, you'd lose more in taxes, but you'd probably make it back by not having to dump worthless inventory, hell if you did it in nullsec where you control the taxes you wouldn't even have to worry about them either.

[Tyrus Tenebros]

I think the difference lies between bad game design, and exploitation of bugs. This system was working exactly as intended. It's just that CCP didn't think the mechanic through fully before implementing it, people even told them that this would happen.

That's what I mean.
In the noxcium case, it could be argued that the limit was unintentional, but actual mechanics.
In this case, the actual mechanics behaved exactly as they were intended.

So if this is punished, then the nocxium eploit was even worse, as it used unintended mechanics.

I can never remember how to spell noxcium/nocxium/nocumix properly.

What.

Youre saying that being able to purchase LP at a rate of 38 ISK/LP (quoted from their post on the issue) was EXACTLY what CCP intended? Keeping in mind a typical 1k isk / LP ratio quoted for.mission runners

Yes, the code that ccp wrote did what it was written to do and dids it "correctly"... but then so did the reprocessing code.

I rather doubt the intent of the changes were to make the LP for sov and implant markets a complete joke.

[fffuuu]

next time they find something like this and receive a reaction like this, i hope they dont go public :P

They will ALWAYS go public. Goons aren't in it for the ISK, they are in it for the tears and drama.

[Glyken Touchon]

What.

Youre saying that being able to purchase LP at a rate of 38 ISK/LP (quoted from their post on the issue) was EXACTLY what CCP intended? Keeping in mind a typical 1k isk / LP ratio quoted for.mission runners

Yes, the code that ccp wrote did what it was written to do and dids it "correctly"... but then so did the reprocessing code.

I rather doubt the intent of the changes were to make the LP for sov and implant markets a complete joke.

So market manipulation is an exploit then?

[Tyrus Tenebros]

What.

Youre saying that being able to purchase LP at a rate of 38 ISK/LP (quoted from their post on the issue) was EXACTLY what CCP intended? Keeping in mind a typical 1k isk / LP ratio quoted for.mission runners

Yes, the code that ccp wrote did what it was written to do and dids it "correctly"... but then so did the reprocessing code.

I rather doubt the intent of the changes were to make the LP for sov and implant markets a complete joke.

So market manipulation is an exploit then?

"Exploit".... you keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

Come back when you've trained reading comprehension past 1

[kyrieee]

inb4 summer of rage mk 3

[Me]

I wonder what CCP's reaction would have been if Goons had performed the same ISK making actions then just sent a report to the CCP dev's without all the gloating on public forums.

In their posted story they seemed to have utilized several loopholes that CCP caught (or else they flat out told CCP) without any form of punishment. Then they decided to call out CCP's ineptness to the public and are all surprised that CCP responds in a negative manner.

No sense in trying to operate in hindsight, they're getting their wallets and assets messed with now and we'll see where it ends. But so many goonswarm tears crying on that thread.

CCP are sore losers nbs. Remember the problems with the new forums and when people told ccp about it via the forum they got banned? I'm sure there's many more instances of people pointing out a ccp cock-up in a public manner getting banned.

[Ophichius]

There are also people like me who think that CCP did shit half assed and need to be called to task for it, and market manipulators doing their thing should be mostly left alone. Sure letting them continue this scam would be bad, but IMO creating a situation wherein the only answer is to take toy's out of the sandbox is worse.

The problem here is that 'taking toys out of the sandbox' as you call it is a better alternative. The 'toys' in this case happen to be polonium candy canes.

The sheer amount of LP and LP-goods that goons created, if allowed to continue existing, poisons the entire faction warfare risk/reward scenario. And given the utterly mental quantities they generated, it could theoretically continue to poison the system for months. They learned from the ferrogel exploit, which suppressed T2 prices for months after it was discovered and the culprits were banned, because in that situation there was no easy way to remove the offending material once it had made it into the production stream. Here they have a way to reverse their fuckup before it can wreck the system, especially since they're still in the process of trying to balance that system.

Is it a bad thing that they had to do this? Yes. Does this mean they screwed up? Yes. Is the alternative worse? Very much so.

-O

[Plutonian]

So... CCP was warned multiple times, on their own feedback forums, that their proposed changes could be 'gamed'.

CCP did not listen to their customers (what they do, not what they say... right?), and implemented the changes anyway.

Customers took advantage of the loophole these changes created.

Group of said customers informed CCP (admittedly, rather smugly) of the scale of the loophole.

CCP started yanking the reporting customer's assets.


To be perfectly honest, the one to punish is the fool in CCP who greenlighted the changes in spite of the warnings.

If you're reading CCP: Maybe next time you'll listen to people who understand your job far better than you do.

[DevilDude]

What.

Youre saying that being able to purchase LP at a rate of 38 ISK/LP (quoted from their post on the issue) was EXACTLY what CCP intended? Keeping in mind a typical 1k isk / LP ratio quoted for.mission runners

Yes, the code that ccp wrote did what it was written to do and dids it "correctly"... but then so did the reprocessing code.

I rather doubt the intent of the changes were to make the LP for sov and implant markets a complete joke.

So market manipulation is an exploit then?

"Exploit".... you keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.

Come back when you've trained reading comprehension past 1

I think the crux is that CCP should have known exactly what would happen because a bunch of people told them. I can understand reversing the changes to protect the market sure, I get that you don't like goons fucking with FW, what I can't abide is the kind of thinking that lets CCP blame this on the goons because if we let them do that they'll just pull this shit again like they always do. I really give no shits about weather those guys keep their shit, however I dislike the fact that CCP had to interfere at all, the fix for this is extremely simple, and there's no reason that the loopholes should ever have gone live. That's the real issue, you can sit there braying about the symptoms with the rest of the herd, or look up, see the source of the problem and go after that.

If you still haven't gotten the point: CCP getting sloppy is the real problem, they'll do what they have to to keep the market strait, our task is to make sure they don't put us in a situation where they have to interfere.