Tuesday 8 September 2009

Ghost Market manipulation

Okay, I'm going to blog about something I've noticed which I think may be an exploit....

I believe that one of my corp members has quit playing. His account appears inactive as the API key says Account disabled due to account status. So this probably means his account has expired....

Interestingly none of his corporate sell orders have expired (don't know about his personal ones) and have been being actioned the past few days, still feeding money to the corp wallet.... So I present Ghost Market Manipulation. Is this an exploit? Do you think its worth a bug report?

If this is true, I wonder how much this has to do with the current huge falls in price of Tritanium and some market side effects - after all, isn't it almost 3 months since the ban-hammer fell on bot accounts - so some 90 day sell/buy orders will be expiring. I've noticed huge falls recently in the price of Trit and even Mex in the short term. I wonder just how much the bot-accounts had on the market when the ban-hammer fell - and whether the lack of bots will be felt more widely than first thought starting now?

What do you think, exploit, or by design? Should CCP fix - as with ghost training being eliminated, surely this is the same thing?

8 comments:

Kirith Kodachi said...

Since they are corporate orders and the ISK they generate goes into a corporate wallet and they can be managed by corporate members with appropriate roles, I don't think this is an exploit.

Now if they could manage the banned pilot's personal orders... that would be something different.

Myrhial Arkenath said...

Doesn't sound like an exploit to me, more an unlucky and unforseen side-effect. But it never hurts to report it if only to bring it to the attention of CCP. Because it could be exploited by doing this en masse to force orders to be bought out first before the price can rise higher.

I fail to see how this relates to a fall in mineral prices though? Shouldn't it merely prevent them from rising until the "ghost orders" are bought out?

jamenta said...

I'm curious, is it common for Corp's to ask for API keys from their members?

I was about to join a PvP Corp with one of my alts but decided against it due to request I send my smaller API key to them.

One I didn't want to do so because I wanted to keep my other alts private. But it also seemed to be a bit of an unreasonable request at the time.

Oh well.

Myrhial Arkenath said...

Yes, asking for API key is pretty common in a corp that takes their security seriously. Certainly if you are going to get certain benefits in return like hangar access. Not sure on your motivation to keep your alts secret, but to outsiders that might seem as an indicator of a corp spy. And it is a corporation's full right and responsibility to protect themselves against it.

DeafPlasma said...

Indeed, it is very common to ask for API keys to check on alt status's. It also allows checks on skilltree, so you can prove they are "as they say", as lie's up front at start indicate a bad member.

After all, only a foolish corp would accept an alt of say a well known pirate/scammer...

Dante Edmundo said...

Hm, thanks for responses. I guess I was a little to stiff on that one. Live and learn.

Tony "EVE's Weekend Warrior" said...

Interesting analysis.

I think I am going to try this out (to determine if it is an exploit or not) for the personal buy orders.

Should be interesting, and if it is what you suspected, then CCP has better fix it ASAP!

Casiella Truza said...

I don't think it's an exploit, per se. Unlike skill training (which, once set, neither requires nor permits any further administration), market orders generally need time, attention, and maintenance to make full use of them.

Besides, losing an hour or a day of skill training (due to an expired account) is far less significant in most cases than losing the fees paid for buy and sell orders, particularly where they affect corporation orders.