What this means:
Control of a system is determined by having 51% of the moons in that system controlled by having a starbase at them. Without the starbases you lose control of the system and this can be seen on the in-game map. This means that it will soon be possible to see the areas of Eve that were used the most for this exploit.

You might think that this upset game balance tremendously, but really it just enabled players to experience the more enjoyable parts of the game sooner, rather than having to grind for untold hours in order to afford that new armor. Eventually the devs “fixed” the profit margin to a point where ammo was so expensive to make or buy that gun wielding classes had been completely nerfed and the characters we had all worked so hard on were rendered unplayable. Ryzom is now defunct. I think if you come down too hard on people who are just trying to use what you’ve given them to their advantage, you’re going to fix your game into the ground.

You’re assuming that the “dupes” were sole proprietors of these starbases. That’s not likely the case.

I spent about a year as, roughly speaking, second or third in command of a hundred-pilot corporation in a couple of major alliances, and I can tell you that it would have been easy for me to cover up something like this.

All you do is, you tell someone “Yeah, the starbase needs fuel. I put the fuel in the corp hangar at the outpost, can you take it over to the starbase, and while you’re there, grab the ferrogel from the array and bring it back? You’ll need to start another batch of ferrogel too, but the materials are already in the array, we carrier-jumped them straight there.”

See, he doesn’t know whether the materials are there because they got carrier-jumped in, or there because they were never used up because of this exploit.

This is also a pretty typical scenario. When we ran manufacturing starbases, we usually had one group of pilots responsible for fueling the starbase itself, a different group bringing in the minerals to build the ships, and a third group that ran the build jobs and moved the finished product to market. Each of those activities has certain requirements in terms of time, organization, and logistics, and so while a few people were involved in all aspects, most just helped out with one or two things.

Very nice. I’m glad he got his.

Impossible to get into? No, in fact they’ve made it far easier to ‘get into’ as the years have gone by, with a much nicer tutorial and more stuff to do in Empire space.

Not for everybody? Yeah, it’s still not going to be pulling anybody away from raiding anytime soon.

My guess is 10-15 of these people are actually responsible and the rest are mere workers maintaining a poss, again, speculation.

Thanks for the report Jim, I was wondering if you would do this at some point.

Discussions within the game suggested that quite a few of them didn’t even realise that what they were doing shouldn’t have been possible in the game. Eve’s starbases are fairly complicated anyway, and it would have taken careful attention to realise they weren’t working as intended.

You’d have to be pretty thick to not realize that something that’s supposed to take expensive stuffs A+B to turn them into even more expensive stuff C without using up A+B is NOT intended gameplay mechanic, tbh.
Not noticing doesn’t count as you have to fuel the POS and empty the output silos, so no “I’ve not looked at it for a month and then all the stuff was here”.

If any of the banned folks actually believed that, EVE’s IQ has gone up quite a bit thanks to the bans.