High BPO Research Costs And An Old FW Loyalty Point Exploit

Sometimes in a long-running software project new people come in and make changes that don't quite work as expected. I heard of one such example today in an interview The Oz did with CCP Rattati in a preview of the Legion expansion next week. In the interview The Oz asked about the high cost to research supercapital BPOs. Apparently the formula changed to include the expected item value calculated by the game. I smiled as I heard CCP Rattati blame a factional warfare exploit for expected values not being calculated correctly. 

The great FW exploit of 2012. Here's an explanation of what actually occurred almost 13 years ago with the launch of the Inferno expansion. The results of the investigation by Team Security were published as a dev blog.

Here's a fairly high-level explanation of how the exploit functioned and some background. With EVE Online: Inferno we released a change to the Factional Warfare system in order to encourage and reward PVP. What the change entailed was that we essentially decided to award people with “Loyalty Points” for killing other players rather than just awarding them for activities such as missions. The amount of LP rewarded is determined by the value of what is destroyed. The number we use to determine that is the “Average Price” value of each of the items destroyed which is calculated by taking an x day rolling average of how much the item was purchased for every x days. This is handled by a scheduled database job.

This system becomes exploitable when a player is capable of dictating a disparity between the actual value of the item on the market and the average price we use to calculate LP. This is most easily accomplished using items that are virtually never traded, as one or two major purchases can change the average, but it is not a requirement that the item be rarely traded in order for manipulation to occur. The most common method of doing so is that once the price has been manipulated enough it becomes possible to generate LP by simply buying the manipulated item, killing yourself with an alt in the opposing militia, then buying another one and killing yourself with it repeating infinitely. LP in this regard functions as a separate currency which can be converted back into ISK (Interstellar Kredits - the main currency of EVE Online) at a profitable rate. This can be compared to foreign exchange manipulation.

Team Security even provided a nice graph to show the impact of the exploit although the title was not-exactly accurate.

The impact of the Inferno FW exploit

And as CCP Rattati stated, the developers introduced some changes to the code to prevent the disparity between actual cost and "Average Price" in items in the future. But apparently the fix put in during Inferno was removed in Havoc. CCP issued an exploit notification at the end of November 2023.

Since the release of Havoc two weeks ago, it has become apparent that certain player groups have utilized both market manipulation as well as repeatedly destroyed their own characters (in some cases hundreds of times) in order to farm large amounts of Malakim Zealots Loyalty Points (LP) way faster than intended. Warnings have already been issued to the groups that were the biggest offenders along with confiscation of the LP and Blueprints that was acquired in this way.

Any groups that are found to be manipulating the market to increase the amount of LP gained from destroying friendly targets, or repeatedly farming large amounts of friendly targets, will be punished in accordance with our exploit section of the EVE Online Terms of Service.

Likewise, this exploit is now once again included in our Known & Declared Exploits list.

So I don't know if the Inferno code was put back in to stop the exploit. Looking at the known exploits list I see the LP exploit is still listed. Perhaps the exploit is still listed because who knows if someone else will remove the exploit fix in order to fix the pricing issue. After all, on a 25-year old software project like EVE Online who knows when someone who "knows better" undoes something preventing a huge problem.