Acceptable use for acquiring items
Rotelly
Member Posts: 774 ★★★
Since the 1.1.5 was an exploit please clarify what methods of collecting items is acceptable.
Is it acceptable to farm ROL for health potions?
Is it acceptable to farm ROL for health potions?
6
Comments
Probably it is acceptable for ROL. They will hope that occasionally a player messes up their combo and KOes, therefore having to spend more units, and maybe more money to fund the game.
The thing your talking about was way to easy (no one would get KOed and spend units for free revives). So of course Kabam would like to cancel out that option in order to continue maintaining steady profit income for the game itself. My belief, as well as many others is that snitches get stitches. So I won't go on any further about this matter, for the sake of the everyday player.
Is checking each quest in act 1-2 until you find a revive on the map acceptable? After all as an advanced player I shouldn’t really be there?
Granted, some were facetious questions. But all weren’t. I think we could all benefit from a little clarification from our Kabam overlords as to what actually constitutes fair play and what doesn’t.
Or is it all as arbitrary and capricious as it often seems?
Dr. Zola
Here’s a small, simple breakdown.
Something intended by kabam that helps player= exploit
Something unintended by kabam that helps player= exploit
Something unintended by kabam that doesn’t help player=emergency maintenance
Something intended by kabam that doesn’t help player = autoblock parry
In other games, there's a difference between "exploits" and "Exploits." There is the colloquial "exploit" which basically means "leverage the opportunity." This isn't a negative thing intrinsically. I can exploit the fact that Thanos is not bleed immune, for example. Then there are "Exploits" as in "attempts to leverage clearly unintended game features for significant gain." These are negative in connotation, in the sense that the game operators must regulate, and in egregious cases take punitive action against.
There's lots of grey area between the two. I personally would describe the farming in 1.1.5 as an exploitable reward, but the players farming it as not exploiting the game in an actionable sense. In my opinion, this comes down to direct verses indirect intention. The reward is there because it was explicitly intended to be there. The reward is earnable because it was explicitly intended to be earnable. And the path is repeatable because the path was explicitly intended to be repeatable. I personally believe when every element of the act is directly explicitly intended, no game operator can fault the players for performing those actions, even if there are unintended *indirect* consequences.
What was unintended here was an indirect result: the game developers did not intend for players to repeatedly and overwhelmingly farm those revives as part of a mechanism to revive past content without significant cost. The value of the reward relative to the effort it takes to earn it is too high when repeated in that manner. It is entirely reasonable for the game developer to act when an element of the game implementation has unintended consequences. But I believe Kabam is doing a very poor job of explaining their position. By calling the reward an "exploit" and in the same passage implying that while punishment isn't planned it was a *possibility* at all, any reasonable player could reasonably infer that Kabam could decide to punish the farming of any repeatable reward in the game if they just felt like it.
If I have doubts, as someone who understands how this works in general, then the messaging for this change is in my opinion dangerously unclear. In every MMO I've ever played, farming alone has never been considered a punishable exploit. It can sometimes get out of hand and need to be regulated, but only in ridiculously extreme cases has it ever been actionable. I would continue to farm rewards that are intrinsically farmable in MCOC. But I am not absolutely 100% certain that is 100% safe in all cases where it would be safe in any other game. And in my opinion, that is a symptom of a general lack of transparency on Kabam's part. To be clear, I have no problem with altering the revive on that map. My problem is with how Kabam is communicating this change to the community, and instead of using this situation as an opportunity to open a dialog with the players and better communicate how the reward system is being managed, they are instead apparently doing the opposite: drawing a line in the sand and significantly curtailing discussion about the change.
Most exploits are a really gray area, but when you get 2000 5 star shards, t4b, t1a, and a bunch of other stuff just for 30 units to use on a refill, then it's pretty common sense it's not intended.
For the revive thing, it's a bit harder to say. I think that's why Kabam hasn't punished anyone for abusing this one.
In the battlerealm, literally no one knows until you see a really angry sticky post about it.
I hate that I miss out on these almost every time.
Kabam has reached a new level of absurd.
See this is where I take issue.
The implication that they could have, but decided not to punish anyone means they saw this as punishable offence. In other words as people cheating.
In a game like this farming items is a normal activity. It brings into question now if farming any items is now considered cheating and potentially punishable.
The term you're looking for is "planned ignoring". The technique is only effective if you stop using it when it makes things worse.
Considering big time spenders get a one month ban for committing felonies in the form of scamming Apple out of $100s-$10,000s+, it would be laughable if anyone received consequences for this topic
Which of those two options would any normal player take?
One of the mods stated in one of the closed threads that no items in the game are intended to be farmed. Ergo, farming RoL or any other content you've already completed to get more of the items from that quest would be considered an exploit.