On Tuesday, December 10, CCP launched the HyperNet Relay as part of the Free Market release. The HyperNet immediately received attention due to some high-value raffles, such as bluemelon’s Raven State Issue raffle. However, the HyperNet Relay has also been plagued with some issues ever since it launched, having been taken offline during Tranquility server uptime three times in the single week the feature has been live.
One major flaw with the HyperNet system has been a series of disappearing items won through these raffles. Some players have seen dreadnoughts, supercapitals and ship modules disappear when they should have appeared in player hangars, and INN is aware of at least one Faction Fortizar that also went missing. Today (December 17), CCP deployed a fix to the HyperNet Relay aimed at addressing some known hiccups helped along by a huge effort from GMs to ensure that any players who lost items due to the buggy nature of the release did not lose out. Those efforts, though, ended up causing various items to be duped to buyers, sellers, and sometimes both.
This isn’t technically ‘duping’ as we know it – duping requires player intent and an exploitable mechanic to abuse, where in this case it was CCP handing out items to both raffle creators and winners of these buggy raffles via the redeem items function. It has had some fun impacts, though – one player has seen a single faction Fortizar turn into three, supercapitals have been redeemed into Jita and Perimeter, some unsuccessful raffle ticketholders found themselves with copies of the items they had bid on, and in at least one case, a dreadnought was redeemed directly into a Class 2 wormhole Astrahus.
A communication between a player and Senior GM Vertikal, posted to reddit, made it clear that the potential for duplicate items was anticipated by CCP. CCP Rise then commented to provide some more context; “We had a defect that caused some items to go missing on day one, and today we ran a script to reimburse folks that were affected. Unfortunately it was impractical to track 100% of the missing items so we erred on the side of generosity to ensure that anyone missing something would get it back. The downside is that there are some extra items, but rest assured the added faucet is a fraction of the ISK sink generated by the feature so the overall economic effect will be minimal.”
Rise added that CCP has had two senior engineers working on this for three days to make it as accurate as possible. “The integrity of the economy is super important, but getting it perfect would have been incredibly difficult and costly (like hundreds of hours of work). Thanks for understanding!”
This is a significant ongoing story, and INN will keep you informed of any updates.
