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Hi Jita! o/
I was going to point out that its impossible for something to be glaringly obvious if it's not being glared at, but you understand what's up.
If the devs opened up the databases for players, what kind of exploits do you think we would find? I mean that in both senses, find ways to exploit as well as ways that are being exploited.
who asked for opening up for player?
I don't really know Arga tbh but I'm sure both the both insurance and beacon issues would show up before we get to the point that people have made so much its a problem. Its a dynamic game and people will always find an edge, its best to have a full view rather than driving with your eyes closed waiting for other cars horns to direct you.
By putting beacons and insurance (fraud) together are you implying they are both exploits?
I missed this but to answer I'm saying what I've always said really, neither were exploits. Both were just game mechanics in a way the devs didnt expect and people got rich until it was changed. The sad thing was the breaking of an important and founding corp to do it.
Correct info would have seen this creating nic in a short time in comparison with others very early and dealt with it BEFORE it was an exploit.
Boy, I wish I would of recorded your anti styx anti insurance fraud rants in TS.
A complete 180 from today.
Is crazy!
Because of the nature of this type of game there will always be things and mechanics that one person in game is in a better postions to take advantage of or use. Access to Gamma, or missions, having more EP, right place right time ... whatever ... It will always occur. But, I dont think one should compare the cargo "exploit" and the insurance duping to the current beacon and mission situation. The cargo and insurance were both cases of players deliberately using mechanics that were not functioning correctly, whereas the beacon and missions themselves are using mechanics that work in their own right. The problem with them is new mechanics have made them far easier to complete than were intended ... And the Devs simply haven't finished revamping the missions yet, or patched the beacons. Right at the time I entered the game I believe there was an issue with Observer spawns on Beta where they could be infinitely farmed for kernels ... The Devs "corrected" this , as they will soon do with the beacons, but not before the Powers of the day had already gotten their fill of kernels and a great jump up on the rest in regards to tech.
It happens, it gets fixed, the game rolls on. Same situation, beacons and missions, but not deliberite misuses like the cargo and insurance.
One other example ... Devs announced changes to Gamma and structures when it was first launched, making Norgalis far more required but also far easier to produce in higher yields. What myself and another player did was go and plant 300+ norg plants in some isolated Gamma and literally farmed for 2 weeks straight. I believed we produced roughly 50 mil units of Norg, which we sold at an average price of 40 per ... We anticipated the price would crash hard, and it did ... Current price is at 10 ... Would you consider this an exploit or just using your head and understanding what the future brings .. The same currently applies to mission running ...
who asked for opening up for player?
I'm not suggesting it is, only proposing that if we did have access to it, what would we find?
Also, because this is a free time game for most people, spending 4-5 hours a day looking through logs for a week would seem cool. But imagine it's your job, and your boss drops this load of sheet on your desk, with instructions to sort through it, but "Don't slack on any other duties".
It would be great if the devs could be more proactive, but as long as they are reactive, that's good enough for now.
Because of the nature of this type of game there will always be things and mechanics that one person in game is in a better postions to take advantage of or use. Access to Gamma, or missions, having more EP, right place right time ... whatever ... It will always occur. But, I dont think one should compare the cargo "exploit" and the insurance duping to the current beacon and mission situation. The cargo and insurance were both cases of players deliberately using mechanics that were not functioning correctly, whereas the beacon and missions themselves are using mechanics that work in their own right. The problem with them is new mechanics have made them far easier to complete than were intended ... And the Devs simply haven't finished revamping the missions yet, or patched the beacons. Right at the time I entered the game I believe there was an issue with Observer spawns on Beta where they could be infinitely farmed for kernels ... The Devs "corrected" this , as they will soon do with the beacons, but not before the Powers of the day had already gotten their fill of kernels and a great jump up on the rest in regards to tech.
It happens, it gets fixed, the game rolls on. Same situation, beacons and missions, but not deliberite misuses like the cargo and insurance.
One other example ... Devs announced changes to Gamma and structures when it was first launched, making Norgalis far more required but also far easier to produce in higher yields. What myself and another player did was go and plant 300+ norg plants in some isolated Gamma and literally farmed for 2 weeks straight. I believed we produced roughly 50 mil units of Norg, which we sold at an average price of 40 per ... We anticipated the price would crash hard, and it did ... Current price is at 10 ... Would you consider this an exploit or just using your head and understanding what the future brings .. The same currently applies to mission running ...
I dont disagree with anything you have said. What it would allow the devs to do is perhaps change the mission reward or what you have to do to make it in line with other missions. Or make insurance dynamic based upon number of bots killed etc. Make changes to balance rather than stop it once its imbalanced.
I'm not suggesting it is, only proposing that if we did have access to it, what would we find?
Also, because this is a free time game for most people, spending 4-5 hours a day looking through logs for a week would seem cool. But imagine it's your job, and your boss drops this load of sheet on your desk, with instructions to sort through it, but "Don't slack on any other duties".
It would be great if the devs could be more proactive, but as long as they are reactive, that's good enough for now.
its actually nothing a DEV has to do on regular basis when done right. with the whole economy thingy - for example would create an automated allert like support ticket if something out of the ordinary happens - like the global average income per active player / corp suddenly goes exceptionally up, and a comparision chart showing the actual income per player/corp lists the responsible corps.
A few clicks and a GM would know where and when to look what happens, and could identify an issue.
true, 2 years into the game and broken game mechanics its kinda late to implement something like this.
another example is the beacon thing - those things have been meant to be rare loot drops at the beginning, and i dont't think it was intended to access like 100 beacons per day from syndicate supplies was an intended amount either.
Since the syndicate supply has no visible rate display, like the regular market, there is no obvious way for non-DEV agents to see something suspicious there. And if the DEVs do not run any constant analysis - they wont see something there without looking into countless logs.
beeing reactive all the time seems like the worse way, as Lemon or Syndic writes here and there...
Jita's right, a lot of the fiascos in PO could have been avoided entirely or caught earlier then they did (cargo exploit was around for ~1 year w/o getting fixed, for months various devs were claiming to me that M2S wasn't duping it was just them being super-organized, etc) if logs/stats were routinely checked.
However, I think it's painfully obvious that the remaining devs can't keep up with their development plans as it is. Steam went from being around the corner to being later this year, with only two logical explanations; a) they're shortsighted greedy little piggies b) if they give steam the % steam wants, they can't pay the bills and gotta shut down. Either way, the wallet-cows will find out last. 
I have a vision of a small Dev crew that is barely hanging on to this.
I get the feeling there are guys working on this project that arent getting paid, the coders, not the people reviewing tickets or whatever.
I think this game was probably going under and prevented by people donating their time.
Data Mining and BI, which is what your describing, isn't an intuitive skill. This is something that is easy to describe, but difficult to implement. I know, because we installed Clickview that can read all our databases, but we're still not getting usefull information months later because our DBA guy isn't an accountant. That is, he can see the raw data, but he doesn't know how to compile it into anything usefull. The accountant just uses our accounting software, so doesn't know the mechanics behind the information that he uses daily, so the two have been doing their 'day jobs' of keeping the databases and finance running, while also trying to build usefull reports; and it just takes a long time.
I would bet $3.10 that AC doesn't have BI software, which means they would probably try to grow their own; even if its only writing scripts within MSSQL, that is still time consuming. And they would still need to learn accounting at the lowest levels.
As an aside, I was playing around with game dev, and the engine I proposed had an economist module built right into the infrastructure. But the game itself was more of a fantasy based world simulator, and not so much pew pew, so it was more critical. The EC mod would dynamically adjusted drop rates based on supply and demand... well, it would have if the game was ever programmed, but it wasn't. Probably because it was so frick'n complicated it would never be released... Perp is released, so at least AC did that part right (not making the programming too complicated to ever be produced).
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