NOTICE: Regarding Pennsylvania Zoner Pilots Exploit

[Synts]

But as it was previously pointed out here, this exploit/bug appeared because someone from the staff team messed up. Of course now it's easy to swing the banhammer and blame it all on the players (you should have reported it, you should not have done it). But this fault is the same with the staff team, and I have not yet seen here that someone who made this exploit/bug possible has stepped up here and admitted it. I understand that these days you need to have big balls to look in the mirror and say: "Shiet, because of me now many players are getting shiet on their necks"
And I still don't understand how such a business could last 2 weeks, so there was no alarm about it anywhere?

To explain what had happened here, I was implementing a new system to generate prices for pilots. Basically, bases "produce" pilots of the same affiliation.

This means the automated price calculator will then set those pilots as their "base" value ($50), which will increase at a steady rate to other stations based on the amount of time it takes to fly to them.

Commodities that we then want to use as a "price anchor" to create the above effect - but not actually allow to be sold to players - are then suppressed through a parameter in a second, separate file.

The issue here was threefold.

1) The Zoner pilots were set to produce, but I did not correctly apply the suppression parameter in commodities.ini. This meant players could buy Zoner Pilots from Bethlehem Station and a few other places. Normally this wouldn't be an issue, because the pricing calculator would scale prices at a steady 7csu (or whatever) so all you'd have is a standard non-HRC trade route with a silly looking commodity, however:

2) Valley Forge Station has serverside price overrides for pilot prices to help new players that are doing PVE and missions. This station buys pilots at $250. The pricing calculator can't see serverside price overrides and only takes account of information defined locally in the game files. Unfortunately:

3) One of the pilots types Valley Forge was buying was Zoner Pilots, because Militant NPCs did not have their own specific Pilot commodity and were also using Zoners.

This exploit occurred for just under 2 days, and was spotted when I was doing the work to implement Militant Pilots. I then noticed the obscenely high csu for the route on Darkstat, with several other people reporting it shortly after.

At that point, Admins urgently removed the Valley Forge prices, serverside disabled pilot sellpoints and began investigating who had been trading using this obvious exploit. At the point the exploit was discovered, several staff were outside Bethlehem when a barge jumped in, to attempt to trade more pilots and was Bastilled.

Over the last few weeks staff have been tracing cash transfers and server logs to determine who was involved in this activity, and the preliminary findings were that the majority were clustered as members of a particular faction. That led us to conclude one of them had probably spotted the issue, shared the news and told their friends to get on it while the going was good.

We've Bastilled several ships in order to prevent further money transfers that at least appeared to be intended to obfuscate how the money had been earned and where it was. We've offered this process to allow people to come clean and remove the exploited funds and assets. Given the names involved, most of them absolutely should have known better.

For my part, I am sorry for my oversight, mostly for the amount of grief I've caused server staff and the hours they've had to spend unpicking money transfers. We've made some changes to pre-emptively catch these kinds of issues going forward, including a revised QA process and pre-patch checklist.

I understand that the staff team works for free for this game and that small mistakes will happen. I am not justifying those who took advantage of it, unfortunately there are many of these people and in every video game. Just the way I see it, there are always two sides to things. And the fact that they are pardoned, if they admit their mistake, is really a great response from the staff team.

---

I am not a native English Speaker, so i make grammar errors.
But it annoys me when people make silly comments about that... especially brits who for the most part can't speak their own language let alone anyone elses!