It’s been a while since EVE Online released its Project Discovery minigame that rewards players for participating in real-world scientific research into cell biology. The project organisers at the Human Protein Atlas have been taking player feedback on board and have released an update designed to combat abuse of the system. The update is a response to the discovery that players could advance in rank and farm rewards from the project by rapidly selecting responses even if they weren’t correct.
To reduce the exploitability of the mini-game, developers have increased the number of training images with known results that are displayed to users and will calculate the player’s accuracy rating on only these images. Players have pointed out that these changes may not be enough to prevent the system from being exploited, as the training images are usually very obvious and can be predicted from the sample’s ID. Developers promise that the sample ID will be hidden from users in a future update, and further changes may be made based on feedback.
