Hot on the heels of a Goonswarm Avatar reportedly being lost due to the exploit in question, CCP Falcon released a statement regarding the “ECM Burst un-tether exploit” in a post on the Eve community page this morning.
We have recently been made aware of an unintended use of game mechanics that is being used to kill tethered ships by flagging them with a PVP timer using an ECM Burst.
From the date and time of this message, using an ECM Burst to PVP flag a ship that is tethered to a citadel for the purposes of giving additional time to bump it out of tether range for destruction is considered an exploit, and will be dealt with as such.
This issue will be fixed with the 118.7 release on Tuesday, August 9th, 2016, however in the meantime it will remain an exploit to use the combination of ECM Bursts, bumping and the PVP timer in this manner.
As is usually the case when a controversial exploit is directly addressed, the Eve Subreddit is already buzzing about the upcoming fix and there are unconfirmed reports that the Avatar in question has already been restored.
Additionally, CCP Falcon also responded to reddit questions about how CCP games handles these kind of exploits, why they often don’t respond to individual exploit-related tickets, and about the process of messaging the community once a fix has been decided upon.
We actually have an internal procedure for dealing with exploits.
Those who file a ticket get a simple standard response that we’re looking into it, from there we actually verify it, discuss whether it’s intended or not, and then look to see how quick we can fix it.
From there, the first thing we do is release news declaring it an exploit, then we look at messaging people individually, and cleaning up any mess left by it. The whole point of global messaging rather than speaking to people individually is so that we have a solid, single time where the declaration of an exploit has occurred.
Just because we don’t give individual, tailored responses to support tickets about exploits, it doesn’t mean we’re not working on them behind the scenes to reproduce and resolve.
Ironically, it’s attitudes like the one you’ve just exhibited that generally mean we don’t reply directly to support tickets related to exploits, and don’t post here regarding exploits until a consensus is reached, so that we can give clear and concise global messaging rather than “a gm said this to me, a gm said that to me, ccp posted this on reddit at this time” that only leads to more confusion when people start badposting 🙂
Generally turnaround on exploits is 2-3 days max unless they’re critical, and we prefer to message everyone at the same time, so that we don’t get “but but, these guys are using it and you told me, specifically, in a support ticket that it was an exploit”.
Holding off then messaging globally gives us a solid date and time from when something is declared an exploit, rather than five different times in five different support tickets. It makes reprimanding for abuse easier to enforce, and gives us a solid line of communication.
At the moment, this exploit can still be used in game, as it will be fixed in the August 9th patch, but CCP is quite clear that this “is considered an exploit, and will be dealt with as such” should players continue to abuse it.
In the end, this change makes the citadel tether an even more powerful feature, and the ramifications of this change will surely be hotly debated for some time.
Fly Safe, friends.
