EVE Devs Dissect, Explain Massive Economic Exploit 139
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.
Re:Cool! (Score:3, Informative)
Before anyone posts the 'cliff of death' drawing...
It is the complexity that keep one playing the game, day after day, year after year. So think of it like this; When you first learned to ride a bike, it was a rather complex task just to stay balanced, no?
Learn to ride this bike, and you can have a lot of fun.
Re:Cool! (Score:4, Informative)
The market is entirely player driven - barring a few very limited exceptions, everything there is player made and traded.
What it's not, is it's not a PvE experience - they're looking at improving the PvE content in March, but as it is right now, if you want to go 'compete with the system' then
What EVE is is a massively multiplayer PvP game. It's got a lot of 'strategy game' type elements - whilst you fly your own ship, and don't control much else, there's very definitely supply lines, logistics, intelligence, espionage, diplomacy, tactics, unit experience and morale. You don't necessarily get to be 'commander' but the really good corps and alliances are those with strong and effective leadership teams, at every level, but only when supported by competent and intelligent pilots.
It's very open ended - you don't get told to 'go do this quest' or 'go level up' - this doesn't suit everyone, but once you grasp that it's just a case of 'go and do something you find interesting/fun/profitable'... well, that's the start of a giant space playground experience. I've been playing for
Re:They still don't get it though (Score:4, Informative)
To use an analogy, no one really cares if you've got god mode on in single player Doom. Maybe you find that more amusing, but no one really cares. Face off on someone in a deathmatch though, the fact that they're invulnerable and you're not
And yes, they're quite careful about the devs thing, because of that scandal. If they _hadn't_ mentioned it, then the question would have been asked. From what I've seen over the last
Re:They still don't get it though (Score:5, Informative)
Smart developers do not have an adversarial attitude towards the people that pay their salaries.
Who pays their salary more? The odd 150 cheaters or the 150k non cheaters expecting the cheats to be banned? They'd lose more customers if people got the idea than cheating wasn't kept in check than they lost with that round of bans.
Real fast summary (Score:5, Informative)
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.
YOU miss the whole point though...... (Score:3, Informative)
EVE provides a realistic, persistent world that is NOT totally controlled by the people that programmed it.
Game events depend on the players in many more ways than a simple MMO like WoW. (Not that WoW is simple but in comparison to EVE it plays like a kid's game in the simplistic play.)
It's more like the difference between driving an R/C car and an airplane. The Car (WoW) is more 2D in the gameplay. You're restricted to forward, back, left, right. All the characters pretty much play the same. With EVE, the sheer complexity of the skills and economic systems makes the gameplay extremely rich and absorbing.
In fact, that's the downside to EVE. It, like all MMO's becomes a timesink of immense proportions.
One of the best features is the fact that dying can bring with it immense setbacks, wiping out months/years of work and finances. That's an ever present edge that most all other MMO's lack. Keeps you glued to your seat during firefights. :)
As for the complexity? The game has one of the best tutorials and new-game experience of any game I've ever played. They know it's complicated (but then so is life) so CCP has gone to great lengths to make it EASY to learn how to play. It takes time and talent to play well. :)
RTFA you POS (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Where's the HOW? (Score:3, Informative)
Something like having a requirement to make a reactor (have a resource), then make it, then remove/reuse the resource without the reactor being shut down / removed, then rinse n repeat?
Basically, yes... someone removed the resource silo link when the reactor was running, and the reactor continued to create material after the resources were cut.
Re:Where's the HOW? (Score:1, Informative)
The second link. The devblog on the web page clearly explains how the exploit worked.
tl;dr;don't have the capability to understand english.
Set up reactor. Let it run for a few cycles. Cut the links while leaving everything online.
Re:Where's the HOW? (Score:3, Informative)
Quoted from the "incredibly detailed account" linked in the OP:
Reactors always need inputs, right, guys? Right. Let's save cycles here and just not evaluate this reactor! I mean, it'll never get evaluated and thus never come online, right? ... Right?
Oops.
So, presume you've run a few cycles of your POS. Your reactor is humming along nicely. It has produced stuff this cycle. It has produced stuff last cycle. The Control Tower is running all of your stuff in the right order. Everything is fine. Until something unexpected happens.
The user cuts off all the links to the reactor.
The Control Tower, crazed by its optimization logic, careens through the production code. Wide-eyed, it reaches your reactor first. In its addled eyes, it sees only that the poor reactor has no links.
The Control Tower speaks.
"We can't stop here! This is bat country!"
Onward the Control Tower drives, speeding towards the silo at the far end of the reactor's link.
The reactor has not been evaluated. It does not know that another cycle has passed. It still remembers, fondly, grazing on inputs during its previous, un-bugged production cycle. Without this information, the silo goes ahead and adds another cycle's worth of goods to its stack.
Free stuff has entered the system.
Re:Where's the HOW? (Score:3, Informative)
The starbase production contains several steps.
At the start of the run it is determined which structures are active.
When it has been determined which structures are active, the next step is for each structure to perform one work step. One structure reduces its material stack. Another structure produces an item. Yet another structure adds the item to its output stack.
The bug was in the algoritm that determines if a structure is active or not.
All structures are assumed to be chained together in a particular order. Reactors must have an input silo with materials ahead of it in the chain and an output silo behind it. Because it was assumed that a reactor would not be online if it didn't have an input silo ahead of it, it was skipped during the check if it was first in the particular chain of starbase structures.
The exploit worked because you could remove a structure from ahead of the reactor chain while it was online. The reactor therefore became first in the chain while still being online and since it was now first it would be skipped in the activation check. The reactor would therefore remain online forever, producing materials during each production run, but without consuming any reactants.
Re:Cool! (Score:3, Informative)
Let's see, of the four times I've filed petitions, one was taken care of in seconds, two within a day, and the last (which would have required some digging into logs on their part) about a week. In all cases, staff was nothing but friendly and as helpful as they could be.
I've played for several years now, and I've seen my share of bugs (as you see in any other software). Of all the bugs I've encountered myself, only two persisted very long (more than a week), and only one continues to be an intermittent problem today. The first was a bug (since quashed) which resulted in improper arrangement of items within a storage container. For some odd reason, they always wanted to occupy only a single column every time there was a session change until I resized the window for that storage container. That one lasted a couple of months. The other is a very intermittent issue that happens almost exclusively after combat wherein right-clicking for a context menu on an object in space doesn't work unless it has an icon (only man-made objects have these icons) on which to click. The problem will persist for less than a minute and then fix itself. It works fine if I right-click in the overview.
99% of the bugs I've seen have been killed within days, unlike plenty of other games (hey there Dungeon Lords). So I'm curious what all these different bugs are in the game which have been complained about for years which I've somehow never managed to encounter throughout Empire, 0.0, low-sec space, mining, ratting, trading on the open market, fighting in fleet combat, and running missions.
What really happened. (Score:1, Informative)
I have read the source article on what the bug was and read several "summary" attempts and all the summaries are lacking.
I know this does not have a shot at getting read, but whatever.
What Happened
--------------
Some people figured out how to make their space stations produce free resources.
How they did it
----------------
Space stations take some raw inputs, spend "time" processing, and produce valuable outputs. Since no real work needs to be done in the "processing" stage, there were code optimizations to make processing 1000s of space stations more efficient.
Some people figured out that if they get a station running and then cut off the inputs and outputs from the "processor" at a certain time, then the outputs kept coming even though there were no inputs. The optimized code was running on cached data from the "processor" that it was creating output. You got the "processor" stuck in this mode by removing the inputs at the right time.
Re:Cool! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Cool! (Score:3, Informative)
>>Every couple of dozen laps they give you a new streamer, or a thimble of paint, or a sparkly sticker for you to put on your tricycle.
Yeah, that's WoW in a nutshell. I logged on for the first time in ages because I saw that there was some quest that'd put "Elder" in front of your name. Okay, cute, I thought.
Then I looked at the requirements to get it.
(http://www.wowwiki.com/To_Honor_One%27s_Elders)
Then I logged off.