CCP Sreegs made a vague and ominous post warning that people were abusing deadspace complexes and that it was now a bannable offense.

Predictably, players overheated their drama engines and a threadnaught developed.

Turns out it was all because of one guy on Failheap:

It’s me

I broke EvE

Here’s the deal:

There’s a COSMOS complex in the Aphi system called “The Labyrinth”. It is a maze of 9 rooms. In each room, there are four gates, and a special battleship and cruiser that spawn over and over relatively rapidly.

You can sit there and manually farm them, but this ISK is pretty bad. Works out to about 5 mil ISK/hour for each room. At first glance, the rooms do not seem AFK farm-able via sentry drones

[snip]

However, if these problems could be solved, I realized that farming the rooms 23/7 with a fleet of AFK dominixes could yield about 24 billion ISK per month, without breaking the EULA. (24 billion AFTER paying to PLEX the necessary accounts).

~5 mil ISK/hour * 9 rooms * 23 hours * 28 days = ~29 bil/month

I decided this was something I wanted to try. I quickly solved the problems I mentioned earlier via trial-and-error.

With these problems solved, I started farming a few rooms with a few accounts. The ISK was great. However, after a few weeks, I got really sick of flying the ships into place every morning (I always get up around the end of downtime), even though I was making bank.

[…] I decided that rather than farm the rooms myself, I would recruit other people to farm and I would be the overlord of the operation. With a combination of suicide ganking and denial tactics, I would push out the competition. I would use these same tactics to keep my farmers from rebelling against me. […] Each room generated about 3.2 bil/month. I would take a 33% cut.

Within a month, I had either driven off or recruited all the competition into my organization. I had farmers in all 9 rooms farming 23/7. Each one paid me a 33% tax rate. For the next year, I collected about 9.6 bil/month and did virtually nothing other than suicide gank a few people and settle occasional disputes between my farmers. […]

TL;DR:

I got rich and forced CCP to change their bad game design