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You remember that little post I made a few days back? here? Looks like the next stage of their "fix the error in the most explosive way possible" landed this morning. Once again early access to Sisi was critical in trying to avoid loosing billions.

Lets look at this in sequence shall we?

- First the PI stuff is deployed to Sisi and we get a look at the mechanics of how the raw materials go from useless to usable in 4 tiers (hereafter refered to as P0 - raw materials- through P4). This is all we can look at for the longest while and goes through a few iterations.

- At some point close to the 26th (what? 4, 3, or 2 weeks before - I forget), we finally see the use of these P4 items. They go to make Control Towers, Starbase modules, Sovereignty Structures and Outpost materials. Oh and there's a random BPO for Nanite Repair Paste. This is what is going to cause the PI stuff to be relevant to capsuleers.

- Testing continues, and although no one remarks on it publicly (or publicly enough) a few people say they spotted that things built with P4 materials were still flagged as re-processable. Due to the price of stuff on Sisi the impact of this was probably not immediately evident to most people. Those it was evident to probably simply kept quiet under the assumption that this would be a non-issue if either it was removed by patch day or if the npc goods sales orders were removed.

- Prior to the 26th the deployment plan was changed, throwing the probably carefully crafted deployment plan for this stuff into the wind.

- Parts of PI were seeded on the 26 - including the ability to reprocess existing POS structures. The npc goods sales orders were not removed.

- Rather quickly this was spotted. Various people jump buying cheap modules that have the right mix of P4 stuff to make more expensive products and the market goes berzerk.

- On the 28th Chronotis gives cryptic notification not to sink more isk into this error on CCPs parts.

- On the downtime of the 29th NPC sales order for reprocessable goods are removed. Temporarily.

- A patch is spotted on Sisi (Tyrannis 1.0.1). Broken P4 goods are spotted. Mass dumping and starting of manufacturing runs to dispose of the acquired P4 goods are done by those who put serious isk into trying to exploit the error.

- On the 2nd the patch goes thru and sure enough, all existing P4 goods on TQ are transformed into their broken equivalents and a bunch of NPC buy orders for broken P4 parts are setup (refines to 10k trit, buy orders for 25k isk).

- The only question is whether CCP will kill any and all existing production runs that were started using the P4 goods or whether they will let those fly (at this point). GMs can kill production runs.

Now the solution taken, while draconian, is well within the rights of CCP as far as I can tell. The problem is what about those who bought plexes in order to invest in this error? What about the people who payed cold hard cash to buy pos modules, reprocessed them (which was "legal" at the time) and then had CCP kill their value by fiat on the 2nd? I suspect we may see some real world legal action on this front. ESPECIALLY SINCE AT NO TIME DID CCP DECLARE THIS AN EXPLOIT.

Personally I'm not affected by this issue. For fun I melted a General Silo (what the heck is the use of those things? drug production?) that I had sitting around. So I have 2 broken P4 pieces now. I am worried about some of the more mulish pilots in my alliance who are going to get badly affected by this - especially if the manufacturing jobs also get destroyed by GMs.

From my point of view it looked like an exploit and should have been treated like an exploit WITH FORMAL NOTIFICATION THAT IT WAS CONSIDERED AN EXPLOIT. I don't have a personal problem with the solution taken. I do have a problem with CCP giving cryptic instead of clear warnings. I have a problem with not declaring the use of this as an exploit prior to treating it like an exploit.