You're banning people for this? [ at least 1 dev read please ]

Preface this: I do not know anyone that did this "exploit" including myself (I'm not even into maps but I did see a video on how it was done) I also want to add deleting the items gained from this or at least minimizing their impact on the economy by making them untradeable or something similar I 100% agree with.

I do not agree with the bans and I'll explain.

This decision to ban people for an "exploit" that GGG guided players towards changes my opinion about GGG as a team. I'm losing respect for them on like a mental acuity level. It's been my belief up to this point that the team at GGG are pretty dang clever. After all, this is the team that designed Path of Exile- one of the most complex games of all time, a game that's crafting system requires 3 years of college or more just to understand on a basic level. Throughout my time as a gamer I have seen many exploits and had many a dev team describe how they penalize people for exploits because sometimes the lines can be pretty blurry.

When you make a decision on whether to ban people for an exploit there are certain factors you are supposed to take into account:

1) How difficult was it to cause the exploit?
2) How obvious is it that this was not intended?
3) How game-breaking was it?
4) Was there Malicious intent or 3rd party software involved in making it happen which leads into
5) How difficult is it to reproduce?
6) How many times was the exploit used?
7) Could one assume from previous exploits that this would be actionable?
8) (perhaps the most important one) How far out of the way did you have to go to cause this "exploit"
9) Was this in early access, PTR, or Beta and did you try to hide this to exploit it further?

Then there are things that game developers have decided recently to start adding

Did it point out a mistake that we made that was obvious ergo making us look bad?

Now let's go over how this was done real quick. It involved a unique tablet that allows as many rerolls on a ritual as you could afford. Personally I think limiting it to 5-10 would've been a decent starting off point depending how hard this unique is to obtain.

So once you obtain the tablet you have other ritual tablets that allow you to reduce the cost of rerolling rituals. Here's my main gripe with the bans The Unique item in itself beckons the player to find a way to reduce the cost of rerolls. Let me repeat that GGG designed an item that gives unlimited rerolls, so naturally you get more rerolls the lower the cost of rerolling, correct?

Now GGG should have probably realized themselves that 100% reduction was possible with 3 towers near each other. Whoever designed this unique I assume knew that there's a passive in the Ritual Atlas Tree that gives 50% off rerolling and that if someone were able to reroll forever then they would theoretically be able to choose what drops they want (that'd be pretty broken if you had the patience to keep doing it forever eventually you could roll a Mirror Of Kalandra) By the way rerolling costing nothing could have been easily avoided by doing a formula like diminishing returns in other games have - every individual % takes off the % of the remaining (multiplicative not additive) [two 50%'s would give 50% then a total of 75% (50% of the remaining 50%)]

So lets go over the checklist that teams tend to use when making actions on accounts for violations:

1) Was it difficult to cause this exploit - not at all it is only logical you would try to maximize the amount of rerolls possible by lowering your cost as much as possible.

2) How obvious is it that this was not intended - This could arguably be one of the points GGG would feel like obviously Ritual just generates random loot so having unlimited rolls means you can just do this forever until you get exactly what you want. That would never be part of our vision. Here I would argue though the Unique is intended to be used by the player to maximize the amount of rolls possible that is undeniable. Even if you cannot roll forever the benefits of having 80 or 90% off the cost would allow for several times as many chances for incredible loot. If you're the teacher and you hand me a coke in class and I start drinking the cola it would certainly be weird for you to say 'hey you're suspended for drinking soda in class' you handed it to me

3) How game-breaking was it- Undeniably game-breaking absolutely thrashes the economy but where's the cut off if someone had 98% reduced cost and they were able to do it 100x but not 10000x isn't that also damaging to the economy? I think here I will have to tie this into #9) This is in early access and there were several people that came forward with this oversight. In reality that's what this was it wasn't as much of an exploit as it was an oversight by GGG team.

4) Not malicious or 3rd party/no hacking

5) How difficult was it to reproduce - not at all and you're leading them to do it by the Unique items functionality.

6) How many times was it used (I'll add and did they flood the market with the items and currency gained) This is a very big deal considering you lead people to the conclusion that you want the cost of rerolling to be as low as possible. It is entirely possible that many people individually realized this oversight and did so slowly with no intent to exploit. Then only when they saw that you could actually lower this to 0% and reroll forever did they realize.. Well this is too overpowered it makes playing the game pointless. Now if you have people that invested all their time into exploiting this and did as much market manipulation as possible this would be the only arguable justification for a suspension in my eyes.

7) I saw the forum post about this exploit before it was taken down. One person had said they would be banned, several people including myself thought this couldn't possibly be actionable because it is so obviously GGG's fault that even the motivation to find the exploit was there in the first place.**

8) I think it is very important to recognize here this did not require finding ways to break the game, this was not a complicated or arduous process compared to some of the currency maximizing metas in Path of Exile in the leagues that I have played. Again if you have an item that gives you unlimited spins at the slot machine except for a cost and you have the ability to lower that cost naturally that would become to goal because it allows you more spins.

In my experience most development teams will not ban a player for breaking any one of these individually unless its egregious (or involves some type of modification/hacking) obviously this isn't a formula with one outcome it needs to be looked at objectively. The problem is, as I have seen a lot of recently from other Dev teams, when you embarrass a dev team by pointing out an obvious mistake and make them look bad they will sometimes ban you even if that was not your intent.

[I'll cite some examples I can remember to give precedence since I feel like the length of this has turned it into a court preceding]

Blizzard Entertainment Diablo III team:

In Diablo III Public Test Realm my clanmate Eggman, a streamer known by Blizzard at the time, found an exploit that was easily reproducible, wrote about it in the bug reports forum immediately, made videos about it trying to get it fixed prior to their season launch, and then the Diablo III team perma-banned him for spreading the exploit around even though his intent was to get it fixed, and the general sentiment was they took this extremely harsh measure (most exploits would get a couple days suspension at most) because they were embarrassed if they had paid any attention to their playerbase they would've seen this obvious exploit well before season start.

Amazon Gaming Studio:

New World is a game wrought with exploits. In fact that is what it is famous for. Now because AGS knows this game has a ton of bugs in it they have always been pretty soft on exploits as far as punishments. Yet during a maintenance update the tag on a character being part of the seasonal realm that had unique items to that realm was reverted and players were allowed to transfer to and from older legacy servers and the seasonal server with gear that is not supposed to be on legacy servers and flooding gold into the new seasonal server.

Now it is entirely reasonable for people that knowingly transferred characters from a legacy server to a fresh seasonal server to be banned but AGS was so embarrassed about this mistake that they banned people that just happened to create a new character during that time, they banned people that traded with people who did the transfer whether or not they knew the character was a legacy character and reportedly they banned people who bought things off the Trading Post that were posted from people they could not have known were not supposed to be on the server because it does not even tell you who is selling the items on the Trading Post. This is an obvious overreach due to being embarrassed about their own mistake.



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Summary/Closing

GGG -

I'm not a lawyer in fact I'm currently unemployed which might help explain why I took the time. I do not know if entrapment is part of the legal system in the wild streets of New Zealand but if this was a court case here I believe it would constitute entrapment. Most of the people who will be banned would never have been exploiters (it was never their intent to cheat) if it weren't for your direct guidance to lower the cost of their rerolls in Ritual league. I imagine it would be very hard to determine players who stumbled upon this in a sincere manner versus those who saw the video about this "game breaking mechanic" and then used it to their advantage. I wholly agree with minimizing its damage to the economy by erasing the items obtained this way, but punishing players for an oversight you made when you designed a Unique item that would only lead a player to naturally run into this exploit is unjustified and frankly makes me think you are punishing them because it was kind of a sloppy thing to miss on your end and you feel embarrassed about that. Everyone makes mistakes, but why are the people who did what they thought they should be doing by the mechanics you gave them being punished?