Just another example of how they didn't think out and just plain rushed out content. Free companies were given so much praise while they were telling us how awesome ARR was going to be, but all they come down to is linkshells that share a few extra inventory slots and minimal buffs. I highly doubt the promoting over your own rank was planned, my opinion it was just an oversight, if it was planned, then wow someone really screwed the pooch there. Expecting people on the internet to always be civil and honest means they have no clue who their customers are, content needs to be planned and implemented with the intention that people will try to break and take advantage of everything they can, if it's not, then they aren't doing their jobs as developers. Some games use test servers for this, maybe if this game did, it wouldn't have such blatant exploits, or maybe it wouldn't take 5-10 hours of emergency maintenance to fix their hotfix to their latest patch.