**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Comments
How would "exploit" infer a violation of the ToS? Video game exploits long predate things like mmo's and mobile games. Go watch any NES video game speedrun. You're likely to see numerous exploits of various flaws in game and level design.
An exploit is using anything in the game in a manner not intended by the developer. On things the devs haven't made a statement on, there can be a debate on whether it was intended by the devs or not, and therefore a debate on whether it's an exploit or not. If a game dev says something in their game is not being used as intended and is an exploit, then it's an exploit. End of story. Not sure why people get so hung up on that word.
I don’t think we are in disagreement, for the most part. And we may very well view the term “exploit” in the same way, especially if you agree that an exploit doesn’t always denote a violation of the TOS.
But I’m surprised people don't find it troubling that something people obviously disagree on (exploit or not, punishable exploit or not) can after the fact be deemed an exploit by developers that could/should result in punishment.
That’s where my earlier comment about it being “arbitrary and capricious” comes from—when devs create a situation, knowingly allow it to continue, then suddenly swoop in and declare it inappropriate, it’s hard to see it as legitimate.
Dr. Zola
How can you or I know kabam's intent, before they actually said their intent (and not after the fact)?
Anyone, after the fact, can say "it wasn't our intent" and then lay blame. Sheesh.
Would you say their intent is that people cannot farm any resources? If not, where do you see the line clearly laid out?
It isn't. So you are left with pondering their intent all along. There's a word for that.
So i give a new word to the discussion to balance the "disingenuous" statements. That word is "presumptuous!
Good point, makes you question what kind of logic/data is considered when the higher ups tell forum moderators how to communicate on these kinds of situations.
New word: Presumptuous. I'm not new to the game or the forums. Everyone, possibly you too, knows where to farm the stuff they need. I assume you go right to it too. It would be easy to prevent if it wasn't intended. So their intent, at best was to neglect it until they didn't like it any more.
On a side note, I wonder what the actual game code was? I'm guessing a programmer had code in the game that told the operation to drop a revive every time that path was explored. In a court, Kabam would lose this one I'm afraid as code does not write itself.
If I left my garage door open unattended with a sign that said "garage" sale then called the police when someone took something off the dollar table that i didn't intend to have there but then said "i'm not gonna prosecute the thief this time" we'd have this kind of situation I believe. Something's wrong with the responses and assumptions.
I’ve spent a lot of money on this game. A large dollop of that was spent to counter serious, ongoing and unaddressed game issues. Other parts were spent on stuff that’s blatantly broken, like masteries / champs that don’t work as advertised. Or ceased to be of any use.
To suggest customers are cheating by doing what the game allows and always has allowed - it’s even implicitly promoted, e.g. by events like Completion - is a horrendous approach to customer communications. That it’s phrased in that icky ‘the headmaster will spare you now, but may spank you later’ tone of voice, doesn’t help either.
We’re not a bunch of kids stealing candy from a jar. We’re the parents paying the bills that got the sweets in there.
Exploits don't necessarily denote a ToS violation. Kabam said that the Gwenpool Enervate/Heavy spam tactic was an exploit, but it in no way violated the ToS.
"At this time" is a common Kabamism. Like "We have no plans to nerf Blade at this time.". Basically, it just means that they aren't doing anything now, but reserve the right to in the future. Also keep in mind that Kabam has famously set a precedent for rolling related incidents together when applying discipline. If Kabam finds someone shared their account to run 1.1.5 a ton of times to farm 200 revives and Kabam cracks down on that person, you know they'll be bellyaching if they just said "We're not disciplining players for farming this item, period."
Most likely, Kabam had no idea it was going on until the forum post telling people to do it. They buried the post to cut down on the number of people taking advantage of the exploit until they could get a fix done.
This is perfectly explained. I agree that if the revive is there you cant say its only for beginners. That's like saying in ever video game there is that requires items or experience that you are not allowed to go back in the game. This is there fault. i could understand if a revive showed up in ROL on accident due to a bug and everyone knows it shouldn't be there because they have never seen one in ROL or the game allowing you to enter mad titan more than once in a day and getting duplicate rewards. We all know it is not supposed to work like that so its a bug. However, If you dont want to check your changes or upgrades and it happens and you realize it to late than you should not take rewards away or ban people. Cheaters are one thing.
What is funny is that people farm winter soldier all the time in ROL (EASY PEZY fight and those items are in the store for 14 units. They are losing units that way. They could easily put a level cap on Act 1 and 2. If you are level 60 you cant go back and play it. Just like you cant play certain things if you are not above level 40 so you dont progress too fast.
If you have not completed ACT 1 or 2 by level 60 than you can pay units to re-enter. Yes i know people may not have done Story 100% but if you havent done Act 1 or 2 by Level 60 than its your own lose.
@Kabam Miike
If that’s your definition of “exploit,” then I’m mostly comfortable with it. An exploit then is basically finding an anomaly in the in-game economy and using it to save or obtain resources, whether real or virtual (like finding a way to buy a full T2a via shards with 300K less dust than the same full shard T2a could otherwise be bought for).
If you’re right that the game team knew about it when they took the May 20 post down (and they really should have known about it long before that if you believe Miike’s statement about it being there to help low level Summoners), then they waited 3 days to message about it...why? So more exploiting could happen? So they could catch more exploitative Summoners in a L1 revive sting? Because they didn’t know people post things in places other than the forums?
Not an attack—for the most part I think we agree. I’m
just surprised at how this whole thing has been messaged/managed.
Dr. Zola
I'm not sure if this is a matter of wording, but in my experience that isn't how most MMOs would define an "exploit." Exploits could have nothing directly to do with the game economy or even rewards. The Gwenpool cornering exploit wasn't strictly speaking an economical anomaly or imbalance. Generally speaking, there are two kinds of prohibited exploits. The first kind is when a set of in-game actions directly causes an obvious unintended result. For example, if you discover that entering a mission and then immediately exiting, then reentering with the same team causes you to instantly gain the full rewards of that mission, that's obviously a bug generating an unintended result. The second kind is when a set of in-game actions on their own doesn't cause an unintended result, but has unintended side effects or unintended indirect consequences. The Gwenpool cornering exploit was this kind of exploit: everything the player did generated the *intended* result, the exploit was due to the fact that the indirect result was one the developers failed to account for: effectively permanent power lock with no possibility of counterattack.
The *worst* kinds of exploits affect the game economy, progression, or resource management systems, because in a sense they have permanent side effects: players get a lot more stuff outside the normal boundaries of the game progression systems. But a lot of the discussion surrounds what is a *punishable* exploit. Once something becomes a genuine exploit, the devs generally have to take some action, and the obvious action is to remove the exploit from the game somehow. But whether players using the exploit should be punished, or have any gains from the use of the exploit revoked, generally revolve around the question of whether the exploit was obvious and egregious. Usually, exploits that generate *direct* results that are wildly out of bounds are considered more likely to be obvious than ones where the exploit generates *indirect* results that are out of bounds. In the case of the revives in 1.1.5, I would argue that the exploit generates indirect results that are out of bounds, not direct ones. You cannot argue that earning that revive is directly out of bounds, because *everyone* earns that revive in exactly the same way, and everyone cannot be executing an exploit just by entering that map. In the vast majority of cases, earning that revive was not in any way exploitive. The exploit was due to the repeatability of the reward, and more importantly in how the reward was subsequently used. Those are all indirect results, and thus I would argue you cannot consider those results "obviously exploitive." That's a matter of opinion. Here's a statement that is not an opinion: most MMOs I'm aware of would not consider that to be an obvious exploit.
When Kabam says this is "clearly exploitive" that's troubling to me. It is easy for players to post their opinion that this was obviously an exploit, because those are just words. But when a game developer calls something an obvious exploit, they are making a judgment that affects how an exploit should be managed in the game, and that leans towards considering all players that did it to be cheating the game. I've already stated I agree with removing the revive, but implying that players who farm resources in a game are cheating is something I'm extremely uncomfortable with. In fact, I wouldn't play any MMO that I believed would punish me for farming outside the use of what most games would consider exploitive.
The only point I take issue with is that my definition of "economy" is broader than just items you can get in game. I tend to include other inputs like player time/effort--which is a finite resource, is spendable and involves opportunity costs like other resources in game and otherwise. There simply isn't a clear cut way it gets quantified in-game, apart from crude measurements like log-ins or account advancement as a proxy for time/effort spent in-game.
The exploits you note above are in my view ways to obtain the same rewards in-game with reduced time/effort. What is anomalous about them is that I would expect the game architecture implicitly anticipates a value of resources (whether in game or real, whether effort or time or whatever else) to be used by most players in order to obtain them, but that the exploit (the "Gwenpool Heavy" in your example) allows players to obtain them with resources on the lower end or outside of that anticipated value. I'm not a coder and I tend to look at the game from a financial/economic perspective, however, so I defer to your expertise. It's nothing to get hung up on--just trying to describe how I view it in simple terms.
Ultimately, I'm not really worried about the item being removed--that's absolutely a game team decision. What troubles me, like you, is the spirit behind the messaging, which implies a fundamentally different position from other MMOs I've played. Given the fact that threads on this subject continue to exist, how hard is it to just put out a simple apology to the players, to ask for their help in identifying exploits like this in the future, and to clarify that farming basic quests is perfectly acceptable in the game?
Dr. Zola
Hmm. That's potentially confusing for anyone without that expansive of a definition of "resources" but I take your meaning. But if the in-game economy is defined to be all consumable or acquirable anythings, then I'm not sure how to define "anomaly" in a way that distinguishes exploitive play from efficient play. For example, is the best arena grinder in the game an anomaly, in the sense that he or she is by definition outside the boundaries of all other players' collective performance?
Consider the case of the player that demonstrated extremely efficient play for Magik verses the starburst node, in which they were able to use Limbo to continuously erase starburst damage in a way that allowed them to defeat a very strong enemy in the face of very high damage that is normally impossible to avoid. You could argue that's an anomaly in the effort required to defeat that node with that champion. What would distinguish extremely good play from unintended anomalies, if we define player effort as one of the resources that anomalous expenditure would constitute an exploit in general?
Seriously, there will always be outliers, just like there will always be players who attempt content and use outsized amounts of time and resources to complete. I like to use the constraint of something like a distribution curve to think about it, with the curve depicting all the different Summoner "costs" to clear content. If the curve is shifted too far in one direction (in this case, the less resource intensive direction), there's likely more than just efficient play going on.
But we've gotten way too theoretical...
Dr. Zola
The practical part is that the part of Kabam's statement that makes me most uncomfortable is that they say the reward was "clearly" exploitive, as if there should be no question about it. But I think the only way you could make the cause that the behavior's exploitive nature was obvious is to compare it to the average player: the average player doesn't farm a gazillion revives and use them against Thanos, so that's obviously an exploit. But I think that doesn't leave room for the players to differentiate themselves and try to excel at the game in unique ways.
Of course the definition of an exploit will have some grey area and some judgment, but there should be some guidance from Kabam as to what they think the obviously bad and obviously good conduct is, so we know where the boundaries are. I don't think those boundaries should be defined by what everyone else does. It can offer some guidance, but I don't think it should be definitive. Otherwise, people would be afraid to do anything except what everyone else does. That doesn't seem to be a good way to manage a game or a playerbase.
I feel like Kabam should hire you two for forum moderators. Compensated of course.
As for me, I know I would typically ignore where I could get revives or energy refills etc. until the challenge demanded them. They are off my radar until they need to be. Then a new challenge arises and I think, "what are all of my options for getting the resources I need to tackle this?" Units store, daily crystals, Act 4, Act 1, etc. Then make a game plan for the best way to accumulate them within a time frame in order to meet the challenge. This seems like normal non-cheating behavior but now it seems cloudy. They act like it should have been "clear" not to use the best way we could find an in-game resource. TBH, I didn't know about the "infinite" revives until all this came up but I have known typically where to go to get a good chance to get one on a path. I assumed that was normal.
To that end, you guys shed some good light on the subject and have asked some great questions in regards to this.
I hope Kabam takes note and maybe responds after careful consideration.
15 energy required
A little clarity on this would be nice. Is it wrong to redo completed content if you see it has an item you need? If so, then why are we able to redo quests after they have been 100%?
Well we know we won't really hear from Kabam. Their silence and warnings they have sent out on the forums speak volumes on the topic.