MOGS

Passive income exploit to be removed from EVE Online

There are a lot of different ways to make ISK in EVE Online, spanning from running missions, ratting, to market trading and research. Some methods, like mission running, are a very active process and the amount of ISK you make is directly proportional to the amount of time spent playing. Other methods, like trading or moon-mining, are pretty much passive and it’s something your pilot can do to make money even when he’s actually offline.

A remotely newer method that has been around since the tech 2 invention system was launched is datacore collection. Players with specific skills trained in the science field and high enough standings can sign up to do research with various Research and Development agents throughout EVE. These agent’s automatically grant pilot’s research points every day for free, that can be turned in later for datacores you can turn around and sell on EVE’s heavily player driven economy.

Datacore collection is a intended game mechanic, it’s completely acceptable to sell these on the market instead of using them yourself, and that’s not something that will be changing anytime soon. The current exploit comes into play when you take into account the fact that characters on expired accounts will continue to build up research points every day, subscription or not. By using this “ghost-research” loophole, a number of players have been setting up accounts with three research characters each, then letting those accounts expire.

Several months later, they will go in and re-activate these accounts for a single month, and go through harvesting all the datacore’s gained through the passive point buildup, gaining a significantly unfair advantage over active pilots. In a recent devlog ¹, CCP Soundwave explained that this issue came from a list of important player-voted issues that was presented to CCP by the Council of Stellar Management. This unintended loophole will be close in a hotfix coming in the near future.

1. source: CCP Devblog – the end to science from beyond the grave  ↩