Acceptable use for acquiring items

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?

Comments

DaMunk

Stop comparing the two.smh...sometimes it's better to be quite.

DarthPhal

I think Visa and MasterCard are the preferred methods.

Atticus9090

Rotelly wrote: »

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?

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.

Raganator

Let it go already.

Mr_Platypus

Would be nice to have some clarification (seeing as you’ve given none) on what are acceptable methods for farming resources.
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?

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DrZola

Hard to tell at this point. There was actually a set of questions that were pretty on point that were asked in the thread that has now been closed instead of responding to some of the questions raised.

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

LeNoirFaineant

@DrZola easier to close the thread and pretend that we were upset with the decision to change the quest rather than then @Kabam Miike 's passive aggressive accusation that players were cheating or @Kabam Zibiit 's description of the revive farming as a "clear exploit." It's as arbitrary and capricious as it seems.

DNA3000

Frankly, I'm not sure if this is a question of semantics or not. In other games, I could state with significant clarity what the intent of the developers was, but I'm not sure in this case.

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.

LoPresti

It's simple. It's an exploit when Kabam says it's an exploit. When it's an unintended error that players can abuse to gain an unfair advantage. Only Kabam knows what's intended or not.

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.

nope

It's the perfect example of how to completely mis-manage a situation. And it's unbelievable enough to show up in one of those awful training videos for new hires.

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nope

In the real world, no.

In the battlerealm, literally no one knows until you see a really angry sticky post about it.

phillgreen

Can someone please tell me if these alleged exploits are posted on another forum or otherwise?

I hate that I miss out on these almost every time.

Plantesan

There was a merger thread earlier @phillgreen that got shut down shortly afterward.

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DTMelodicMetal

Plantesan

Not surprised it happened, but disappointed it always ends with the empty-vague “we let you vent, now silence and keep playing” message

God69

give us monthly poition making quest

ZzyzxGuy

Imagine if Blizzard was like, "We decided to not take action against players for farming lower level instances; however, in order to address this EXPLOIT, we are not letting higher level players into lower level instances."

Kabam has reached a new level of absurd.

mostlyharmlessn

DNA3000 wrote: »

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.

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.

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DTMelodicMetal

Plantesan wrote: »

Not surprised it happened, but disappointed it always ends with the empty-vague “we let you vent, now silence and keep playing” message

The term you're looking for is "planned ignoring". The technique is only effective if you stop using it when it makes things worse.

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DTMelodicMetal

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.

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

Dexman1349

It's in every players' best interest to maximize the rewards for their efforts. For example, it's only 13 energy to get through Act 1.1.5 and I was getting a lvl 1 revive and some ISO & gold. For that same 13 energy, I could replay RTTL to get some ISO and gold.

Which of those two options would any normal player take?

Cujo999

Rotelly wrote: »

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?

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.

DNA3000

mostlyharmlessn wrote: »

DNA3000 wrote: »

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.

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.

They seem to be saying in other posts that they didn't intend to imply that they thought about it and decided not to punish anyone, they simply stated as a matter of fact that no punishment was going to happen. They said in a post they received questions about it, and it is entirely possible that there were players that PMed the mods about this reward and straight up asked them if it was an exploit and if so would players farming them get punished. There was some chatter about it like that off the forums.

My problem is that any operator of a multiplayer game should know that "exploit" is a loaded word. Whether they meant to imply that any excessive farming could be punished at any time or not, that's the inference players would make, and this is something I would think all veteran game players and game developers would understand when crafting their messaging. We aren't talking about obscure meanings here, we're talking about what the vast majority of people in the video gaming community would believe was being implied when they said that. Open discussion could have clarified that, theoretically.

This is what I think smart (or at least less antagonistic) messaging would have looked like:

Summoners,

We have recently been made aware of the fact that a number of players have been excessively farming a reward in Act 1. Although the reward in question was intended to appear on that map and it was not originally intended to be restricted to a single award, we did not foresee the large amount of farming of this reward or the effects this would have on the difficulty of other higher level content.

As a result, we will be removing this item and replacing it with a different reward. This change will go live soon without the need for game clients to be updated. Although the effects of large scale farming of this reward were not intended by the designers, as there was no obvious prohibition on repeatedly running lower level maps for other purposes there will be no action taken against any Summoner who farmed this reward. However, in cases where the reward is obviously excessive, repeatable, and/or requires vastly lower effort than normal for those rewards, Kabam reserves the right to take actions we believe are required to address excessive farming or the use of exploits to gain in-game rewards in the future.