Old news is old.
What I want to know is if the Devs will in future just shut down services when they're abused. It was a bad response to a terrible mechanic.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Requesting Sticky for this thread.

They did! But then they took it away again..

Server will go offline for a small patch on February 17th at 12:00 CET.

lets see what it brings

I'm guessing the devs didn't care when told about it before because they thought it wouldn't make much difference. And then when they woke up and saw the billions of NIC generated from it, they had a major "oh sh*t" moment.

Clearly it wasn't an "exploit" until it became a major NIC faucet, and the only way they could think of to handle it was to label it as one.

(Note: although I am the poster, the answers below are not necessarily written by me personally.)

Styx, although this starts to feel really pointless since apparently you just ignore everything we reply to you and just continue to live in your bitter bubble, we make one last effort to respond to this issue.

Fact: you still haven’t contacted us with any proof whatsoever that a DEV told you that insurance fraud was allowed. No wonder really, because that didn't happen.

The fact that insurance was implemented on the 11th June 2010 has nothing to do with the frauds itself, since (according to the logs that we have now), those started only mid-December, with the VAST majority of them happening only RECENTLY, in the end of January 2011 - that is also why we have only noticed them so late. Up until then we were convinced that it was working as we intended it to be.

I say again for the umpteenth time: we never said it was not our fault, because it was. But certainly not in a way you want to make it seem so eagerly.

You do not know why the insurance system did not work. It did not work, because a piece of another market mechanic was left in it, which was supposed to raise the NPC sell order prices to have items available, but not to ever compete with players. This mechanic pushed the average price - the basis for the insurance calculations - above what it should have been. If we must categorize it, it was a bug.

You never asked if you could make insurance fraud your primary function within the game, please do not suggest that DEV Crm gave you permission for this.

Again, we never knew it was calculating the wrong numbers and we still think, that with the right numbers it should work fine, with one addition. The insurance system can not only be used to create funds out of thin air (if it’s faulty), but also to generate an endless demand for a certain robot type. Let's say the average market value is 1 000 000 for a robot, the production cost based on component or mineral market prices is 700 000 and the net insurance payout is 600 000. This would mean you lose 100 000 per robot. IF there was an endless demand for these robots at 700 000.

However, since Perpetuum has a starting market in an MMO, it has way more production power available, than the market has purchasing power. If it didn’t, it would be called real life and would be very very hard to play. Like real life. So the insurance system can be used to convert minerals into NIC even if there is no demand for either minerals or robots on the market. Add your embargo attempts to keep your opponents from using your production capacity against yourself and avoiding the market to distribute equipment within your corporation to the formula, and you end up with neither demand, nor supply for that matter.

This aspect of the insurance system along with the classical fraud from this moment on is considered an exploit, judged and handled on an individual basis, and the penalties will include the termination of any accounts in relation with the organization, execution and income of these actions.

Might we also add, that the moment you stopped doing "everything humanly possible" to enforce your argument against this terrible mechanic was the moment you realized how much money you can make off of it.

All we can say is please do not call us blatant liars. We have been working our *** off, spent long months panicking about the launch and spent months of putting out fires after the launch. We did not realize the importance of this issue, we neglected it and in the light of this, yes, it is our fault that this happened.

Again, this is a fallacy. If you had asked whether you could make this your primary occupation for a month and creating billions of NIC out of thin air, whereby inflating this fledgling economy beyond repair, the answer would have obviously been no. The question was not this detailed however and again we were negligent in the processing of this information, because to us it was just something that consumed precious time without improving the game. Once again, we are sorry. The GMs were probably not even aware what you were talking about.

Our EULA states:
“It is forbidden to use any trick, hack or exploit that allows the player to gain ingame currency, or anything that an ingame monetary value can be assigned to, or any kind of unfair advantage over the other players.”

Please see our intent for not labeling this incident as an exploit, even though this agreement would enable us to do so. It was because our motivation was not to punish anyone - in which case the punishment would have been the termination of the involved accounts -, but to fix an anomaly in the economy without any regard to who was responsible for its creation.

Instead of telling us how crap our system is for the 100th time. You were so zealous to use our negligent words as a cover, that you even forgot the best excuse. If it is possible and the enemy does it, we will fall behind if we don't do it. You knew you were in the wrong and knew that we weren't aware of the magnitude.

You are unfortunately wrong if you think that it helped the market in any way. What it did, was create a secondary bloated market, that had nothing to do with the real economy. The wealth you created with the hyper efficient cash cow project inflated the efforts of everyone involved in the game that did not enjoy being your beneficiaries, as in members or allies. You also cost us two months of market data, that would have allowed us to take measures to improve the balance of the economy.

No you weren't hit for over one billion unless you had individual operations running that we had now way of linking to your corporation. During the whole operation we removed approximately 1 billion from all involved corporations and about 450 million from individuals.

How did we calculate this: Our original idea was to simply take all NIC back and refund the robots. This seemed like a very analog method, that involved no calculations or considerations. However it quickly turned out to be impossible to implement. The main reason for this was that the sum of the whole operation never existed, it was done in multiple turns, no corporation or character account had anything near the numbers we were looking for. So then we had to assess what the manufacturing cost, the mineral cost, the insurance fees and some overheads were and then calculate the amount of NIC that should not have existed in the game.

Please try to understand, that our reason for taking it is by no means disciplinary. We did it to protect the market and we firmly believe that in this we simply had no choice. It was especially difficult - mostly for DEV Crm - to do it at those people's expense who have helped us the most during the development.

No, we are not lying. And what motive would there be for us to lie about the amount? We could list all names and the exact amounts we removed from you and your corporation here but you would just attack us again for publishing names.

No, it was our faulty market mechanic that manipulated the prices. We never said it was you. Again, please stop with the lying accusations, it really hurts our feelings.

I gave you the reasons above. If you really felt that we were having some sort of vendetta on you, you would have left a long time ago. Two weeks ago the news was the DEVs are favoring M2S. Are you sure there is absolutely no e-honor involved in your perspective?

You are wrong, we did track it. We selected all the transactions and sorted them by amount, and started tracking them to where they came from. If there is someone in your corp that you believe did not deserve his NIC taken, why don't you go ahead and compensate them from the wealth you still have because it was taken from them instead of you? There were two individual cases, that approached us discretely and asked for a revision. We looked into them and they did prove to be mistakes.

Again, you are wrong, we did track it and it was a very simple task at that. We selected all the transactions and sorted them by amount, and started tracking them to where they came from. (If there is someone in your corp that you believe did not deserve his NIC taken, why don't you go ahead and compensate them from the wealth you still have because it was taken from them instead of you?)

There was one corporate and one individual case, which approached us discretely and asked for a revision. We looked into them and they did prove to be mistakes. Both were taken care of in a very civilized manner.

If you gave your innocent players donations from the fraud that were spent and replaced by mission running money, then yes, we took that without actually looking what tags those NIC had on them.

There was no disciplinary action against anyone, this was a market balancing operation. There is no shame involved, you do not seem to be ashamed of committing it on the forums. We encourage you not to be ashamed, or at least no more than us. We did not leave 1 NIC on your account. Perpetuum stores the wallet data with up to 6-7? decimals and a round number was removed from everyone. Your leftover balance was simply above 0.4999999 NIC, which rounded up to 1 NIC in the client. Please stop with the paranoia.

Again, if you thought this was the case for a minute, you would have already left. You want to win this war against us. We do not wish to fight you. If we did, you would have been banned long ago and we would not be putting communication efforts into this case unprecedented within the industry.

You have built a beautiful case, brought it, delivered it. Can we kiss and make up now, so we can start working on developing Perpetuum again? This is all rather time consuming. We are handling this in an unorthodox way within the industry by having this conversation at all. This is because we are an unorthodox team doing an unorthodox thing and we would like to keep it that way. Please start inching our way, so we don’t have to stop and fall in line.

for the love of god lock the thread now

I almost feel like being the 'bad child' so I can get some one-on-one dev time!

Just to clarify though, we are getting insurance back? and Build'n-bash is an exploit, that is converting ORE to NIC by blowing up bots even at a net loss is a no-no?

even if M2S doesn't thank you for responding, I will. You admitted you could have done better, and I will hold you to that if there is another issue.

And I will thank M2S too, maybe just for some cool points.

Can you clarify what you consider insurance fraud to be?

to be clear the reason i'm asking is because I dont believe that this was insurance fraud nor do I think that there is a way to consider it an exploit or not.

If you've not fixed the problem with mechanics it will always persist. An arbalast for instance under the previous rules could be bbuilt and fit for around 700k profit when destroyed.

Couple of staged examples.

Corp A has thirty agents and gives each of them five arbalasts with synitec / t1 gear. You then proceed to charge an island of choice dying horribly repeatedly in the process. Do this once a day and you make over three billion a month.

Corp B blows up 150 arbalasts once a day on one character. They make three billion a month.

Corp C has thirty agents and gives each of them five arbalasts. As they blow up through pvp they put the money from that into buying minerals which means that they dont have to mine. They spend the potential three billion in a month on minerals to produce t4 meaning at the end of the month they have saved three billion so they can pvp with high tech gear. In the end they spent nothing.

All of those examples are simplified versions of what was true to life pre patch and all essentially do the same thing for the same advantage.

Any change in insurance that does not directly link the payout on insurance to the mineral completed buy order cost will create a situation exactly the same to a varying degree.

i think my point is that you cant draw a line. Its just not possible, its all just conjecture and you can do the same thing they did with a little more finesse for the same result and so what got fixed?

All of those scenario's are real life simplified examples of how three different corp economies worked before the patch. Only one of them got the nic took off them.

What you're saying here is that the scale of the operation made it an exploit. This is the second time you have said this. Wrong. Something either is an exploit, or it is not, the scale is immaterial. If a game mechanic is used on an industrial scale, and this is harmful for the economy as a whole, don't put it in. If, by some oversight, you have put it in, you can't blame the players for using it.

This game is supposed to be a sandbox with a free market economy, and all the cheating, scheming market pvp tricks that entails. That's why your mechanics and systems must be robust enough to withstand anything the player base can throw at it.

Please provide more information on how this damaged the economy beyond repair. I would like to see it. I suspect that you are exaggerating here.

The manner in which this was handled...the tone the blog was written in, the removal of NIC, the corps named in the blog. How else can people react? It came across as an attempt to publically humiliate certain corporations.

This is not an excuse to penalise players for using the tools the devs gave them. If it's in, it's in; if it's allowed, it's allowed. If not, declare it an exploit, or don't put it in.

You mentioned previously that you named corps because you wanted to prove that the Dev team are not favouring one corp over another. In my opinion, a dev team should basically ignore these comments. They will be made even if you are the fairest handed dev team in the whole of the universe. Any time there is a new patch, or a moderating decision, or a reaction to some community issue, some portion of the player base will scream that devs are clearly in bed with some other part of the player base. It's as annoying as hell but it's endemic and you can't do anything about it. Just be as fair and professional as you can and don't lower yourself to respond to it.

How come you deducted NIC from corporation wallets that had not ever engaged in insurance fraud? How did this mistake come to be made?

I don't think this is a worthy comment from a dev. Either NIC should have been taken, or it should not, and if it was, it should have been done so in a fair manner. And we are not convinced that it was.

Also Jita: good post

Actually you can trade insured bots by corp insuring them and using the corp hangers.

What if a corp fit them with cheap equipment and then fought each other. i'm sure you could destroy a lot that way.

What if i set up two corps, one called red, the other blue and then hired anyones alts for pvp giving them free corp insured fit bots. 500 die a day and i make 10 billion a month.

Maybe i'm not being clear so i'll say it simplyu. If you dont fix the mechanic the players WILL find a way. Its the nature of a sandbox.

lol.. and that would be Fun for everyone win win!

Don't be surprised to see Infestation show up in sequars tooled up for war... the battle to lose bots has begun!