Eve Online has again been shaken recently by the discovery of a major exploit in which several very large player run corporations have been exploting and taking advantage of for some time.
Eve Online recently announced this in their press release (see below). There is also a massive discussion thread on the forums here.
There’s also an interesting thread on Scrap Heap Challenge here.
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.
Update by Customer Support:
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.
Update: 11th December 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.
Possibly one of the funniest and yet informative video reviews ever of Eve Online is the very amusing review by Yahtzee from The Escapist.
Personally I think Eve Online is the most challenging, engaging and interesting MMO games available today. Having been a player for over four years now, I still find that I am just scratching the service in terms of finding things to keep me entertained - and keep me paying my subscription.
But here’s the video - it’s still a classic.
EvE Mag recently published an “anonymous” letter from an alleged eve player who has developed and uses a Macro to mine.
As all good eve players know, this is against the EULA and will get you banned. RPGN.net do NOT condone this activity, but it’s an interesting article and I’m going to re-post it here.
You can also read the original at EvE Mag here.
(mac – ro).Computer Science. An instruction that represents a sequence of instructions in abbreviated form.
Not only am I LIKE the Cheshire cat, I’m also just like you! ~The Evil Macro’er
Please let me introduce myself. I am an American, in my early thirties and I have two kids, two cats, and a neurotic dog with a Quaker Parrot buddy. I’ve played some MMOs for 4 years at a time. I like Front Lines: Fuel of War and ketchup goes on just about everything but a good steak. I am a degreed professional but not a programmer, I served in the military and I knew Obama would be the winner. I am also an amateur macro’er. Yes, I have macro’ed the holy crap out of certain video games. I’ve been doing it for more than 8 years now so tell me; at what point did you notice your Eve gaming experience going down the tubes because of me? I’ll bet your downward spiral really has nothing to do with me macro’ing, now does it?
Here’s the latest teaser trailer for Eve’s upcoming expansion Quantum Rise - which goes live tomorrow!
Here’s the latest upto date Expansion Patch Notes.
Players have great things to look forward to in EVE Online: Quantum Rise. Corporations will be able to set their products apart from the rest by building trust in their goods through customizable storefronts. The backbone of EVE’s vibrant economy, industrial ships are being rebalanced and optimized to better suit the needs of haulers and industrialists, including the latest edition to the fleet, a massive capital industrial ship dubbed the Orca. A new certificate system will give a quick and verifiable means to discern a pilot’s skill level in trading, gunnery or countless other professions, providing plenty of bragging rights. Meanwhile, the introduction of a medal system allows corporations to distinguish their most valued pilots and honor them for their achievements.
The staged delivery of EVE Online: Quantum Rise began with the recent implementation of technological breakthroughs such as StacklessIO and EVE64 which upgraded the server hardware and streamlined communication between server and client to severely reduce lag. The reality of thousands of ships simultaneously engaged in adrenaline-charged combat is at hand and several fleet battles have already been fought using this new technology. Emboldened by the significant effects these improvements bring to high-level gameplay, CCP will push forward with a myriad of hardware and server improvements to bring the most massive player vs player experience available, expanding a boundless universe into a limitless one.
“We are very proud to be delivering this expansion, both in terms of features and the sheer performance increases made possible by deep refactoring of selected portions of our network and server code, complimented with the finest hardware we could find,” says Torfi Frans Ólafsson, Senior Producer of EVE Online. “I can’t imagine a better game where you can engage hundreds of people simultaneously in highly immersive tactical combat or simply sit back and make millions off of the conflict via research, manufacturing or logistics. You choose your destiny; that’s the beauty of it.”
Further features also include:
Published quarterly, E-ON is EVE Online’s official magazine: now 84 pages of glossy, high-colour news, interviews, previews, exclusive fiction and player guides, all of it professionally written and produced by a dedicated team of writers and designers from within the EVE community and beyond.
Click here to order the Magazine.
SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE
The theme for this issue of E-ON is the economy. Yes, we know it’s all doom and gloom in the real world, but in EVE things are actually doing OK. Thing is, not everyone understands how it all works, yet perhaps we all should, beyond the buy low/sell high mantra that some like to wheel out to prove they’ve got it all figured out.
Like some great unseen power, the economy of EVE surrounds and penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together. Luckily we’ve found someone who can teach us all about its mysterious ways without continually putting nouns before adjectives and spouting lots of voodoo nonsense… and he isn’t all that diminutive either. And, no, we’re not referring to CCP Chronotis, who kindly lets us in on CCP’s thinking behind what will be the focus of the coming winter expansion, and why even those who might have already dismissed it as one for carebears should sit up and take notice.
Read more
EVE Online is a massively multiplayer game. Hundreds of thousands of players compete within a single persistent universe for military, economic and political power. Players explore the suns of New Eden, mine and refine resources, drive the economy, and wage war on one another in a richly detailed virtual world set 35,000 years in the future in a stellar cluster far from Earth.
This summer, CCP will bring EVE into the Empyrean Age. The four major Empires of EVE have broken their long-standing peace and are marshalling their forces for war. The outcome hinges on the actions of the galaxy’s immortal pod pilots, allowing players to direct the course of the conflict.
The events of Empyrean Age have been a long time coming, building upon nearly a century of political tension. Access to Jovian technology ushered in the age of the pod pilots and shattered the balance of power, and recent events have sparked a march towards total war.
The events leading to the outbreak of war in New Eden unfold in EVE: The Empyrean Age, the first EVE novel, written by Tony Gonzales and published in the UK by ORION Books.
With the inception of Trinity (Eve Online), there are now a dizzying array of implants available as LP rewards from your local agents. So many in fact, that it is a daunting task sifting through them. As I am a stand-up guy and moderately kind to you RPGN qwerz, I will be jotting down in this thread some of the more useful combinations of Skill Hardwiring.
Don’t be looking for any Snake setups here. The key to this is ‘cheap, while still useful… marginally’. Essentially a concentrated effort to strive for mediocrity. I use these as a minimum on all my PvP clones.
This is budget stuff guys. Pretty much anyone can afford these. And they are cheap on the LP side as well (around 375 LP for the 1%ers).
Quick and dirty reference below. Listings are generic (do not include the model number, only the model type). Assume I am talking about the low-end 1% model. I’m certain you can figure it out from there.
CCP are deploying a fairly large patch this week (delayed until Wednesday now) which includes a lot of fixes, and in particular the very long awaited “Amarr fix” . Judging from reactions on the Eve Online forums, the patch seems to be a generally positive one - so lets wish them luck and that the servers come back on line as expected.
And, as always, set a LONG training skill!
This month’s WDA is as fantastic as always. Be sure to check out the full archive over at the WDA site.
The time for EVE to evolve from beautiful to gorgeous is approaching! Trinity, EVE Online’s newest content expansion, will be deployed on Wednesday 5 December, commencing at 0200 GMT. Tranquility and the EVE forums will be unavailable for the length of the deployment, both are expected to return to service by 0200 GMT on Thursday 6 December.Trinity is EVE Online’s largest expansion to date and centers around a new graphics system. EVE players with DirectX9c and Shader 3 capable graphics cards can choose to upgrade their clients to Trinity’s Premium Graphics Content. Players without cards supporting DX9c and Shader 3 technology will play EVE with the Classic Graphics Content, but will be able to upgrade once their system meet the Premium Graphics Content requirements. To see a preview of EVE: Trinity, you can download the 102M HD1080p EVE: Trinity Trailer or the smaller 64M HD720p EVE: Trinity Trailer. Other features may be found on the EVE: Trinity Feature Site.
Detailed Features, Improvements and Balance Changes, as well as a comprehensive list of Fixes and Changes are now available. Due to the scope of the expansion, the list had to be split into two sections. Updates to the Patch Notes will be made throughout the weekend, new additions, edits and changes will be highlighted with green text.
Discussion may be found in this forum thread.
