How Do You Define Exploit?

The Ultimatum exploit was discovered through party play. It allowed one to continually rack up kills.

Orb of Horizons on maps however, is a case of an item doing what it does.

"

Leizvenn wrote:

The Ultimatum exploit was discovered through party play. It allowed one to continually rack up kills.

Orb of Horizons on maps however, is a case of an item doing what it does.

Orb of Horizons on maps was a case of an item doing what it does. You are correct.

And Ultimatums infinitely spawning monsters was a case of Ultimatums doing what Ultimatums do.

In both cases they were unintended by the developers. In both cases players made large profits off of it. But only one case was considered an exploit. Why?

I think as long as we're trying to define exploit as "thing that makes currency" then this discussion will go nowhere.

Probably worth noting that not all obvious exploits have resulted in bans, so whatever this group did must have been very serious.

every ultimatum in every other encounter ends, this one can be endless but you might crash server, looks fishy to me

"

pipi101 wrote:

every ultimatum in every other encounter ends, this one can be endless but you might crash server, looks fishy to me

every other Harbinger never drops Mirror Shards in my whole life, these ones drop them by the dozens per day but freeze my game and might crash my PC, looks fishy to me

I think the delve level scaling bug from awhile back could be considered an exploit, because it bypasses a lot of expected behavior to be able to grief other players by killing them. Doing this gave no currency whatsoever.

Well that complicates things. Was it bad because it bypassed expected behaviour or was it bad because it involved maliciously harming other players? Or only because it did both simultaneously?

An exploit is taking a 'bug' in a game, and knowingly abusing it for a benefit.

And before any more explanation is needed, these types of things absolutely require discretion and nuance. Thus why GGG has the ability to choose when to ban and when not to.

If you just played normally and wasn't on the forums, you wouldn't have known that the T3 temple room from awhile back giving mirror shards was what some consider an 'exploit'. You were playing the game normally and maybe considered yourself lucky.

Again, even with the 'harvest exploit', if you were a normal player and didn't know any better, it would seem perfectly fine that you could craft on to an item to achieve the required number of prefixes or suffixes for a fracture. Makes sense even. And discovering upon removing the craft that the fracture jumps, it could be forgiven that you, again not a regular forum or reddit user, would assume that's normal behavior, and maybe do it again.

If you and your friends are using a new league mechanic and discover that under certain circumstances, you can nearly infinitely spawn monsters and gain nearly infinite loot, that's clearly a bug. If you continue to do it, now it's an exploit. Why? Unless your defense is this is the first video game you have ever played, it's plainly obvious that it isn't intended, and yet you chose to continue to do it, to the detriment of the rest of the playerbase.

So while any game developer has the last say, if you really want a simple explanation of when something is an exploit, it's when you knowingly abuse a system in a game in an unintended way.

"

CommAshen wrote:

Well that complicates things. Was it bad because it bypassed expected behaviour or was it bad because it involved maliciously harming other players? Or only because it did both simultaneously?

I think in this case intent is part of it because it could be something done by complete accident by normal players, which is probably why there was nobody banned over this as far as I'm aware (or at least the person that got ds_lily killed that one time wasn't banned). Definitely a potential exploit though.

Another thing, and I think this was debated as to whether it was an exploit or not, and the person that did this wasn't banned but said 'trick' was patched so GGG probably saw it as one, but there was also being able to use a PVP character to run a delve node which was done in hardcore to run past a node that autocompleted to avoid potentially killing off the main character.

I applaud you for being the first to give an actual definition:

"

Bleu42 wrote:

An exploit is taking a 'bug' in a game, and knowingly abusing it for a benefit.

By this definition of exploit, there was justifiable cause for me to have been banned last league (I wasn't of course). I believed that the number of Harbingers spawned by Diplomatic Escort was unintended - so many that it always froze and sometimes crashed my computer, and caused my experience to soar into the billions per hour, all for only two atlas passive pairs. Nevertheless, I continued to use it because it was fun and efficient.

And the fact this passive was completely reworked since then shows that it was very likely not working as intended. Yet no one was banned over it, "clearly" it was just an issue of game balance for which the developers are responsible.

But why are the developers not responsible for other things that the players do, which have unintended consequences?

"

Bleu42 wrote:

If you and your friends are using a new league mechanic and discover that under certain circumstances, you can nearly infinitely spawn monsters and gain nearly infinite loot, that's clearly a bug.

There's no such thing as infinite loot. You earn a finite amount of loot per unit time you play the game, and you have a finite amount of time to play the game. I think what you mean is that the rate of loot per unit time was very high. But if that's our criteria, then what about Alva + Elevated Nemesis Currency + 5 Delirium Nemesis double Beyond fractured "does not use sextant charges" maps that you can endlessly dupe with delve crafting? That drops so much loot you'll spend three times as much time looting as you spend playing, and that's with a reasonably strict loot filter.

So I'm not quite seeing where to draw the line.

To me, every league people find some absolutely outrageous ways to manipulate the game mechanics to farm way more efficiently than I would have thought possible, and in ways that I'm certain the game developers did not anticipate either. But most of these are not deemed exploits.

I would like to know concretely where the threshold lies between the two, so that I do not accidentally stumble into the realm of exploits, nor incorrectly believe I need to avoid a certain strategy while it is not actually an exploit.