Major exploit

[Sharkith]

- the shit is going to hit the fan.....

Scrapheap Challenge :: View topic - So Long, and Thanks For All the F.i.s.h ^^

Hello Every one

I would like to tell you a short eve story
Today all of my EvE Online accounts were banned
I was sure that this day would come.
What surprises me is that it took CCP this long to catch up with me.
Even though they knew about it.

But now to the story:

The time is November 2004.
The EvE Universe is excited about the Starbase patch.
The new System Sov. is introduced.
The face of Eve has changed.
How right they are.

Two weeks after Patch day we built our first POS.
We wanted a piece of the moon mining pie and also wanted to figure out how it word as none of us knew exactly.
After our first try we were aggravated that we could get it working and decided to try again the next day to finish our project.
The next day to our amazment we found that the silos in our unfinished POS chain were full. After a short time we found out the reason for this phenomenon.
The POS system was BUGGED.
Of course a petition was sent to CCP to make them aware of this situation and the answer was sobering.

“Your petition has been received” CLOSE

But the phenomenon was still there.
After a week we decided what to do.
We built a POS network that included over a dozen POS’s in lowsec and checked the market prices. After a short look we decided on Ferrogel and Fermionic Condensates.

The Story today.

The expanse of this so far is probably lost on most people so I would like to make a few facts clear.
In the past 4 jears we are talking about ISK in value of 2.500.000.000.000 ISK to 3.000.000.000.000 ISK.
That’s 2500 – 3000 billion.
Everyone that owns a T2 item can bet that it was build in part from resources due to this phenomenon.
At this point I would like to thank CCP for making it possible to buy GTC’s with ISK.
So much about us.

What the other 3 large alliances did with this knowledge is unknown to me.
But I can tell you that we’ve sat with coverts in front of POS chains and watched it happen.

Titans are expensive !

In closing.

Some I’m sure will say “well are you proud of yourself?” or “You cheater-exploiter”
I only have one thing to say to that.
.
This issue allowed me to play Eve how and when I liked.
It didn’t matter what item or what happened in Eve. I spent ISK with out thinking about the price.
I haven’t paid a cent for any of my Eve accounts for 4 years now.
And have had many amusing moments reading posts in EVE-O.

I don’t know you and to be honest Eve and most of you I could care less about.
But my thanks go out to you all, you were wonderful statistics on this virtual stage.

Regards,

The Writer

 

[taB]

Buy invented stuff quick quick It's gonna get a tad more expensive.

Edit:

It's officially recognised now too - f'kin lol

We have discovered an exploit involving starbases that made it possible for some players to gain an unfair advantage over others. We have taken measures to address this by removing the starbases used in the exploit. Additionally, assets gained from its use have been seized and bans levied against the players involved. We will continue to monitor the game for issues such as this one. We encourage players to create a petition if become aware of any activities which may permit others to gain an unfair advantage in the game.

Double Edit:

Be interesting to see if any high profile players get banned because of this.

 

[Sharkith]

Yeah its the high profile alliances that we will soon find out about!! I am not sure that it will impact heavily on Tech II markets since production will have to continue. What will happen is that the underlying profit margin is going to go down heavily for those producing the materials.

It has gone on for a very long time though. This means it may well have become ingrained into the game and if that is so some major alliances are going to lose logistics. Crazy money that that guy is talking about.

 

[LordjOX]

4 years of great fun and unlimited resources to do whatever he wants in the game? Doubt anyone would have filed that bug
Must have been hundreds of POS owners that stumbled on that bug, the approach is noted a few posts down on the thread.

 

[Sharkith]

update regarding the starbase exploit
reported by GM Grimmi | 2008.12.11 13:29:29 | NEW

On December 7th 2008, a date which will live in infamy, a petition from a concerned player alerted us to a serious problem with Starbase reactors. The petition had been filed five days earlier, a far longer waiting time than we can accept with our current queue status and we have now taken measures to fix that. We immediately started investigating the issue and found that there was indeed a problem and that it was being exploited to gain unfair advantages.

We discovered seven corporations with multiple Starbases set up for the express purpose of exploiting the issue. Three of those corporations were members of two alliances. We took immediate action against the offenders and banned over 70 accounts and destroyed all the Starbases run by the corporations in question. All the offending corporations are now effectively inactive as a result of our actions.

The corporations were producing high end materials for T2 production. Working with the Research & Statistics team we have established that the effects on the markets have been considerable and far reaching. The effects of our actions against the exploiters will also be felt on the market as the production of the materials has been cut substantially. However, supply should increase again once players have mastered the alchemy process.

We are still conducting operations to deal with this matter and we will keep you posted on the progress and results as things develop.

Says it all tbh

 

[taB]

 

[Sharkith]

Base materials for Tech II are up between 20-35% in jita I am having to stop producing for a while whilst the market levels off.

:/

 

[LordjOX]

Base materials for Tech II are up between 20-35% in jita I am having to stop producing for a while whilst the market levels off.

:/

Traders got there before you

70 accounts banned, I doubt they've even scratched the surface of it.

 

[Sharkith]

Bob contact wrote as follows (not sure of source on this).

my bob contact wrote:
Firstly i'm very happy to confirm that noone in BoB has been affected, or remotely implicated. The general reaction was - wtf you can do that?? Shocked


Lots of very angry people, as for 4 years this alliance has developed a massive industrial section that requires 1000's of man hrs a month to maintain, and people work round the clock to continue this. (Turns out certain entities had a free isk printing machine for 4 years). Fortunately on the + side, because we have such an extensive chain of moon miners, we have ferrogel stocks flowing out of our ears - so apparently we're gonna make a killing from selling our hoards with the market spike!

So JUICY GOSSIP TIME!

Firstly there is Evoke, specifically ASW (ex G/D2 corp) 70+ players have had all their accounts banned. 2ndly there are 2 other corps in a specific NC alliance. One is strongly linked, the other is less linked. In both circumstances it seems to be a small 'ring' of players that run this and 99% of the corp and alliances were obvlivious and totally innocent.

Just wanted to make that an important point.

Suffice to say with the information out there now, a few strange things fall into place. And this is something you may wish to take note of.

A few ex Shinra and MM guys in RKK have suddenly put 2 and 2 together. Two notable occasions.

1) When Goons joined with RA, they recieved a 'donation' from a northern entity corp, for trillions of isk. The donation was huge. (100's of billions of isk). This was at the time when a Titan (60 billion was a HUGE thing). The isk donation to goons was to help them fight LV. I'm not sure whether goons could have taken LV without this. Do you remember the near unlimited ships that goons had? Rolling Eyes

2) When Molle’s titan was killed it was a significant morale blow for BoB, But they kept going. However a few days after this, Goons received another SIGNIFICANT donation from the same Northern Entity Corp. Again this provided goons with impetus for a massive sudden burst of pos spasm and beat bob out of Tenerifis and Omist. Again – the donation was something at th time which shouldn’t have been available. Dysprosium moons were not as valuable. The ISK amount was HUGE. Where did it come from? Confused

3) The last final piece of evidence is the corp itself. This Northern entity corp struggled for an entire year to buy a 90 billion BPO. That is a significant investment. Yet with all the money printing going on it would seem easy? The people ‘in the know’ were not working in the interests of the corp – more so they were using this ‘printed money’ to fund campaigns against their alliances interests. Titans and shiny toys were not at the start of use – simply because building so many titans would draw attention to the people with the isk.

These are generally hearsay and rumours, though there is a significant debate going on, and there is proof off the massive cash injections. Of course at the time it happened, people just assumed – WTF they have SO MUCH ISK – how did they make it?

Now it seems we know how they made it. Of course there is NOTHING WRONG with making isk donations to affect wars!! But donations made with trillions of exploited isk which should never have been there, and probably have funded multiple wars in the north and south, both vs BoB, IAC, Insurgency, RISE and TCF (so not just a certain side) has left a very sour taste in the mouth.

How different could eve have been with out it? We’ll never know.

 

[taB]

Heh, everything comes back to Bob Goon smack, just how it should be.

 

[Sharkith]

yeah and I don't believe a word of that Boob post.

The market is really screwed up :/

 

[Tallen]

To get away with this for 4 years? The devs must have realised at some point that this was keeping the entire economy afloat, then when they axed it, the economy crashes...hmm, something about life imitating art immitating life maybe?

 

[taB]

That's quite a bit:

4. How much contraband resources were produced through this exploit, and how big a share of the overall production is this?

EyjoG stated that the exact numbers weren’t known currently, but will be part of the entire investigation. Diagoras provided the rough estimates: Roughly 35% of the Ferrogel market. He noted that that is a very rough and an early figure that needs further analysis.

 

[Sharkith]

It is indeed! A bit too much for my liking.

 

[Ctuchik]

To get away with this for 4 years? The devs must have realised at some point that this was keeping the entire economy afloat, then when they axed it, the economy crashes...hmm, something about life imitating art immitating life maybe?

especially since they DID file a petition about it when they noticed it. so if CCP didnt do anything about it then, then why bother?

i probably would have done the same if it was me

and if its taken CCP 4 years to come to a conclusion........ >.<

 

[Sharkith]

Update: (12/19/2008)

Here is an update on the investigation into the Starbase reactor exploit that we are currently conducting:


1. CCP has confirmed that this bug has been exploitable since February 2007. Changes to the Starbases code from launch until February 2007 are minimal and very unlikely to have caused the bug. So at this point we are working on the assumption that this bug has been exploitable since the release of player owned structures on November 24th, 2004. We will therefore focus solely on looking at Starbases data in order to determine who has been using this exploit, and for how long.

2. CCP has been able to restore older databases that show us that the bug has been exploited since at least January this year, but at a lower scale than in the last few months. The players involved then were the same ones that we found and banned recently. We are now working on restoring data from 2006 which will take us several days. It is uncertain if we will be able to have answers on that before holiday vacations.

3. CCP has been able to access data from our old petition system. We have been unable to confirm that a petition was filed in 2004, 2005 or 2006 pointing out this bug with Starbases. We urge anyone with information on who and when a petition on this issue was filed to contact us directly through the petition system under the Exploit Category. Alternatively, an email sent to community@eve-online.com with details on the matter would be much appreciated.

4. The full investigation will take several weeks. CCP will be in direct contact with the CSM to discuss this issue and we will provide information to the community as it becomes available.

5. We have done a thorough investigation on our staff members and CSM members and found no links to this exploit.

6. Our actions so far have included the eradication of 178 starbases that were exploiting this issue. Some had multiple reactors running in the bugged state. We have also banned all those we have found directly involved and all accounts we have found to be connected to those players. The investigation is still under way and will take a while to conclude.



We will continue to work hard to understand the overall impact of this exploit and how widespread it was. We ask for your patience until more information becomes available.

Found here EVE Online | EVE Insider

 

[LordjOX]

Hope they get them all. Although I can see the process being lengthy. Is there a noticeable increase in t2 equipment and ship cost?

 

[Ctuchik]

Gotta hand it to CCP tho. they provide good information on stuff like this.

 

[Sharkith]

Totally agree that they are spot on with their information. The openness of CCP really rocks.

T2 stuff has jumped in some respects but not in others. It is going to take a month to settle I reckon.

 

[rynnor]

It always suprises me that bugs this big can survive for so long without the financial impact on the economy being noticed by those running the game?

Presumably they have tools that can show financial flows and should have spotted the massive increase in the income of certain corporations?

A log of fuel v output would have shown this fast too - I mean 4 years of serious duping sounds a hell of a long time?

 

[LordjOX]

If it started already when they launched the POS patch, they would see it as being the norm and not seeing any deviations. Even so deviations (sudden increase in ferrogel production) might have been alot of towers coming online in the early days of T2 production.

 

[rynnor]

I wonder how much this cost them in lost subscriptions? - presumably there were a large number of accounts buying all their gametime with isk - a few trillion isk could fund a fairly large corps entire subscription costs with CCP getting nothing from them except overheads and a busted game economy.

Wouldnt it be a good idea to stop people buying gametime with in-game cash now since this makes the game very attractive to scammers/exploiters and gold farmers?

Couldnt they have also setup flogging the gamecodes on the net thus blocking even more CCP subs? How many accounts actually pay CCP you have to wonder?

 

[rynnor]

If it started already when they launched the POS patch, they would see it as being the norm and not seeing any deviations. Even so deviations (sudden increase in ferrogel production) might have been alot of towers coming online in the early days of T2 production.

They should have spotted fairly quickly that there were more products of reactions coming out than raw materials going in - seems pretty fundamental to me?

 

[LordjOX]

True, but it's apparent that they either had bad reporting tools for such or was confident that nothing was wrong with the reactions. And now you see the fallout, 4 years later.

 

[rynnor]

Mmm - all this talk of Eve has lead me to re-sub now

 

[Sharkith]

its one of those things. If you don't think anything is wrong you don't look for it. If you don't look for it you cannot find it. They obviously cannot monitor everything in the game, so it slipped through.

T2 prices still moving up....

 

[Ctuchik]

had a 5 day "come back and see" code i used, took the opportunity to start advanced spaceship command 5, no idea what i'm gonna do with it tho lol

not like i'l ever get my hands on a capital ship if i decide to resub


owell, still stuck in MP5

cant someone go and take over that station and let me join that corp?

last i logged in it didnt have any owner. tho i had a ton of evemail stating that unless i paid rent they would take all my stuff lol... that was sent ~7 months ago and i had 30 days to comply, so i take it they were trying to scam me?

 

[taB]

Kugutsumen's blog

Ho ho ho. Lots more naughty people There are 3 threads titled RELAX to read.

Basically, Es and Whizz were making a permenant loss on their booster sales and using the POS exploit to break even. Round of applause for you lot, you cheating fuckers.

 

[LordjOX]

Hah, nice find.

 

[rynnor]

Kugutsumen's blog

Ho ho ho. Lots more naughty people There are 3 threads titled RELAX to read.

Basically, Es and Whizz were making a permenant loss on their booster sales and using the POS exploit to break even. Round of applause for you lot, you cheating fuckers.

Seems a bit dumb to waste money supporting something that took a lot of time and effort yet was still unprofitable - they might as well have stuck to mining and saved the cash?