New posts on the CCP Games' blog and forum detail the situation surrounding the recent economic exploit allowing players to collect unearned currency, as well as the company's reasons for canceling the Linux client.  The blog post offers a detailedexamination of the exploit, its impact on the economy, and the steps CCP has taken to resolve the problem. Posts on the blog and forum announce the cancellation of the Linux client due to low user participation, and assure Mac owners there are no plans to cancel their client.

EVE Economic Exploit:

First of all, we know how many reactors were in the bugged state and how much they were producing at the time the exploit was uncovered. We also know when these reactors were put online. Since the amount produced from each reaction is homogenous we can deduct from this information the maximum possible amount that was produced using this exploit. So during the first phase we can find out how much currently operating POSes have been producing. The next step was to calculate the total value of the exploited material. Multiplying total volume produced through exploits and multiplying that by the average price of each material, and then subtracting the cost of operating the POS, resulted in an estimated total figure of 6.7 trillion ISK. That is a lot of ISK'ies for sure. WOW Gold Kaufen  But putting that into some kind of perspective is necessary. On a daily basis the total trade on the EVE market (not counting contracts or direct trade) in 2008 was between 2.5 and 3.0 trillion ISK. That gives us an annual trade worth more than 964 trillions in 2008 alone. So the maximum value of the exploit in 2008 is only about 0.7% of the total trade in one year. But of course having capital helps in making even more capital, and that is indeed what they did. Using the profit from the exploit, the exploiters purchased high-end items and traded in high-end minerals in order to hide their tracks. Hence, though the impact was not big on the global market of EVE, it was surely felt locally and for some specific items. We can safely say that the size of the EVE economy saved the day here since even free stuff in big quantities can¡ät destroy the main markets of EVE.

Linux Client Cancellation:
This project went live in late 2007, and in that time we have seen the same slow, steady growth in the numbers of users of the Mac client that has characterized the growth of EVE Online throughout its history. However we have not seen any similar growth in the numbers using our Linux client.It is for this reason that I am sorry to have to announce that from the 10th of March onwards CCP will no longer be officially supporting the Linux operating system. The low amount of users of the Linux client did not justify the degree of additional complexity that maintaining three operating systems imposed on our development and release schedules. There is the matter of maintaining the hardware infrastructure to facilitate the development work, spending man-hours on testing and diagnosing faults in the client as well as regression testing. While we did embark on this project with the aim of being one of the few MMOG¡¯s on the market offering a game client for all of the major operating system architectures, WOW Gold Kaufen we feel that the time and resources that were being spent on the Linux client would be better utilized in areas where more players would benefit from them.There are currently no plans to drop the Mac client. There is a large and growing Mac user base and we hope to get more Mac users from the launch of Apocrypha and Premium graphics.