Topic: Follow-up to our investigation of the "cargo overload" exploit
If you haven't heard of it yet, we had an exploit where you could put more items in a robot's cargo than the limit would allow. We have conducted an investigation to find out whether this exploit has been used to gain any excessive money using transport assignments.
There is some weird hearsay going on among you that we picked certain corporations and only did the investigation on them. I'd like to stress that this is not true.
Since the cargo overload exploit could be brought in relation with a high number of aborted transport assignments, this is the pattern that we were looking for. We did the queries for individuals; their name, their corporation membership, or who their friends or enemies are had no role in this. Unfortunately we don't have the time to follow ingame politics, so we have no idea even who your friends or enemies are.
And I would like to take this opportunity to inform you that this is how we always conduct our investigation. Sure, we usually get a report that mentions a certain player or corporation, but if we find out the exact nature of the exploit, we immediatelly extend our search to all players, using the available patterns.
As I mentioned, the available pattern in this case was an excessive number of aborted transport missions. Unfortunately this also created a lot of false alarms, since apparently some of you do transport missions with this method. Legally, without using an exploit, but in a different way than how we designed the game mechanic. Our current standpoint on this method is that it only helps you perhaps to do a large number of missions more conveniently and together with friends, but it stays within the allowed game mechanics. The method will become obsolete once we implement the random assignment system mentioned in our latest devblog.
So when I say that this pattern created a lot of false alarms, I actually mean that of all the suspected individuals, each one of them turned out as a false alarm.
Most of the suspected and suspended accounts have been already reactivated after a few hours, the investigation of the last one has been concluded today and it also has been cleared. Naturally we have extended the expiration time of all involved accounts to cover for the lost time.
Moral of the story?
I guess it's the case where a number of you knew about the exploit and none of you used it like this. I think this is something to be proud of.
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However, this is only a part of the case.
We concluded that the exploit wasn't used in transport assignments, but it could be used in other parts of the game, where you don't necessarily gain excessive wealth from it, but an advantage in combat for example.
And these are the cases where we have hit a wall. We do not keep logs that a robot cargo has been overloaded anytime, anywhere. We do not keep logs when you put an item from your storage to your cargo or the other way, because that would be an unnecessary stress for the server. We only keep logs when an item switches owners.
We can only make some vague deductions based on stacking/unstacking events or when items are actually put back and forth into a corporation storage. Because of this, we cannot conduct a global investigation for "overloaded cargo used for whatever".
Even if we could prove the usage of the exploit, cases like "this guy would have lost his robot if not for the exploit" or "this gamma base couldn't have been evacuated if not for the exploit" is a can of worms that we don't want to open. These events carry so many consequences that we would get hopelessly entangled in trying to straighten them out. Pretty much like when someone wants to correct the future from the past in a time travelling movie.
Yes, we could ban the individual for using the exploit, without trying to set it right what he did, but for this we would need a suspect. The reports we have received so far turned out to be false, which already gives me the feeling that the hysteria surrounding this exploit is larger than the actual usage of it. But I don't blame you, better safe than sorry.
Well, that's pretty much all I can tell you. If you still have questions I'll try to answer it here, but since this already borders on discussing moderation, I won't promise that you'll get an answer. Also please no namecalling or "but but ban xy because I hate his face!!1".
