Developers often have their hands full with players looking for any loophole in the game's structure or engine. And it's a good thing too since it keeps them busy! The EVE Online/CCP dev team has been busily working to close the POS exploit. Find out what that is, how they're doing it and what the implications are below.

"War makes thieves and peace hangs them." - George Herbert

EVE pilots go through a lot of hardship and mind-boggling planning to gain the upper hand in the great wars that are ongoing in EVE. Some go beyond the bounds of legitimate gameplay and, in the end, pay the ultimate EVE price - getting themselves banned from the game. Such was also the story with the latest POS bug, exploited by a relatively small number of players, but on an industrial scale.

The POS exploit has now been researched thoroughly both from the technical perspective as well as with regard to the impact on the economy in EVE Online. We have left no stone unturned in order to be able to understand how this bug came into our code and why it was not spotted sooner, learning from this event in order to help prevent this from happening again in the future.

We also feel strongly that you, the starship pilots of EVE, should be able to understand this as well so we have decided to present, in detail, the information that we have on bugged reactors that has become more commonly known as "the POS exploit".

The preliminary findings of this report were introduced to the Council of Stellar Management around mid-January. The CSM members gave us very good feedback and helped us in fine-tuning our research and reporting on it.

As you'll see in the report that follows, work like this requires a collaborative effort from many different departments within CCP. From the software team, we have CCP Pleognost who tells us all about the initial code, how this bug was introduced and what we did to fix it. CCP Diagoras and CCP DrEyjoG researched economic data estimating the overall impact of the exploit on the EVE economy and GM Grimmi explains the actions taken against those utilizing the exploit for their own benefit. Many more were involved at different stages of the research so we would also like to thank all of them for their involvement as well.

It is a lot of information to sift through but we hope that you will take the time to read it and share your thoughts with us in the corresponding discussion thread.

The POS: What it is supposed to do and what it did by CCP Pleognost

Understanding the POS exploit is not, from a technical standpoint, terribly difficult. The problem is that you need to know what the heck is going on underneath the hood.

In this case, the objects involved represent three things in the game: POS Control Towers, POS Silos and POS Reactor Arrays. For the purposes of this discussion, Coupling Arrays are really just tiny silos. Moon Mining Arrays are similarly extremely simple Reactors - they basically just spit out a steady stream of free stuff without consuming inputs.

POS Structures: What They Do

Behind the scenes, the arrangement of these objects is of the utmost importance.

POS Control Towers are the big bad boys of the POS system, composed of a half-kilometer of code that does everything from detecting when a POS should switch over to Reinforced Mode to sending annoying alliance mail to your enemies when it gets anchored in claimed space. The bit we're concerned about is the POS Production control system, itself a large chunk of the already-titanic Control Tower file.

In this role, it's useful to think of the Control Tower as the boss in a really tightly-controlled factory; it tells its workers when to work and is really particular about the order in which their jobs are done.

POS Silos are basically big cargo bays in space. They love holding stuff. It's really all they do. We have some restrictions slapped on top, though. A POS Silo is only allowed to hold one type of commodity, and even then it's only allowed to hold one stack of one commodity. It makes sure to cache-off the size of the stack it's holding, allowing us to manipulate that stack freely over the course of the production cycle without hitting the database.

This is good, because database lag sucks. Lag Sucks will be an important theme moving forward.

POS Reactors are complex beasts, but not quite so bad as POS Control Towers. They seem rather simple on the surface. In the naïve view, reactors accept loads of stuff from silos, convert it into more valuable types of stuff according to the reaction blueprint they contain, and then hope that stuff gets taken from them by someone else before they have to make more stuff.

In reality, we don't actually do all that item manipulation. Moving stuff around is expensive; it hits the inventory system - the system that tracks the locations of everything in EVE. Unduly using this system can sap precious CPU and database time from the rest of EVE. We need to avoid that, if at all possible.

There is a WHOLE lot more to read so head over to the official site using the link above and check it out!