What is an Exploit? A general discussion

Alex Brentnall

Alex Brentnall
My rule is to break out what you are doing in to simple sentences with no big words. Say it out loud, if it feels wrong then it's an exploit.

For example:
I login and logout many times to stack missions.
I complete these missions by killing ships where 1 kill counts as many because it applies to all missions

Sounds fishy.


On the other hand from the thread I think you are referring to:
I take many many passenger missions from the mission board. These are very well paid for what they are and I login/logout to get many to the same destination.
Then I fly and complete these missions.


Aside from the logout/login this sounds fairly straight-forwards. As others have said the login/logout to refresh the boards has been the grey area for a long time, last I heard FDev said they aren't happy but won't stop people doing so.



In the end what we think is irrelevant as others have said, I know people that think things I'd consider ok are an exploit and I know people that think billions of credits per hour is fine. Personally I find those with a decent moral compass will be fairly close to the mark. I've seen some with compasses (compai?) so broken they claim "Anything that is in the game it's ok no matter how it's achieved".
 

WR3ND

WR3ND
Some people have significant conflicts of interest and biases. No real surprise there.

Sometimes other people call them out on it. No real surprise there either.

Normally I'd say that people are robbing themselves of the potential of the game by using exploits, but it's come to my attention that there is a difference between immersion gamers and meta gamers and how people approach game-play in general.
 
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Lightspeed

Lightspeed
metatheurgist said:
If it feels wrong when you're doing it and you know it's wrong, it's an exploit. If you're a psychopath, enjoy your very successful career in business or politics. :D
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LOL. Sad, but true what you say there !

Jayridium said:
I don't ency designers the task of trying to keep the game accessible to those new players coming into the game today trying to play / compete with established players, while not making the rich richer and widening the gap. There are things that could be done under the hood and be invisible to players, such as mission rewards/npc bounties etc could scale down as a players total assets increases, CG's could also specifically reward players who make the most runs to a CG system rather than only those with the most tonnes. IE: New CMDR does 50 runs in a cobra totalling 2000T has put in a lot more effort than me doing 2160T over three runs in my cutter and deserves a notable mention/special reward.
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This has real merit ! A CG that counts number of visits to the station (assuming at least 10 tons carried, say) would be a great idea.
 

Lightspeed

Lightspeed
Sgt Pepper said:
Which makes recent comments from Ed Lewis about being "mindful and considerate" when it comes to possible inflated mission payouts hard to gauge, especially when devs have said before they consider that there will be gold rushes from time to time in the game.



This makes a good flow of credits more vital in my opinion. With the game having been out three years soon enough, players will already have big ships to make CGs harder for those still with smaller ships. Being able to make credits easier allows people to catch up and, if they want to do CGs, give them the ability to compete.
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What you have said makes good sense [yesnod]
 

WR3ND

WR3ND
On the other hand, after two and a half years of fairly actively playing this game and only losing 5 ships total and within the first year, I only have around 300 million credits in total assets, and I get along just fine. Granted, I'm not really into the meta PVP/PVE elements of the game.

A fully loaded Python is good enough for me and beyond maybe messing around with the Engineers more when I can be bothered to, I don't want or need anything else in the game. I was actually pretty well set when I could get and outfit a Cobra Mk. III two years ago. Everything since then has more or less been icing on the cake, playing the game as a survivalist as I do.

I don't even feel compelled to take advantage of unofficially sanctioned "exploits" (as it were) – the gem drops after the Dangerous Games comes to mind. I'd rather just enjoy immersing myself in the game universe in ways that I find compelling and interesting.
 
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Lightspeed

Lightspeed
Quince is frequently referred to as an exploit, although many argue it is only permitted game play. It's been running a long time (!) but it seems that FD have finally declared it as an exploit in the sense that it is "definitely undesirable" and are closing it, or limiting it ..... Thargoid invasion ? :D

This from Dominic:

Hi there,

I am aware of quince and yes it is definitely undesired...

I've taken another look today and have commited changes which mean we should be able to say "Good night, sweet Quince" pretty soon...

Thanks,
Dom
 

Alex Brentnall

Alex Brentnall
Lightspeed said:
Quince is frequently referred to as an exploit, although many argue it is only permitted game play. It's been running a long time (!) but it seems that FD have finally declared it as an exploit in the sense that it is "definitely undesirable" and are closing it, or limiting it ..... Thargoid invasion ? :D

This from Dominic:

Hi there,

I am aware of quince and yes it is definitely undesired...

I've taken another look today and have commited changes which mean we should be able to say "Good night, sweet Quince" pretty soon...

Thanks,
Dom
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I'm still disapointed they didn't go with the nuclear option of having the Thargoids totally destroy Quince and Robigo/Soethis... Ah well, could still happen. I suppose it's better to fix the mission generator than just remove the problem systems. :p
 

WR3ND

WR3ND
Quince has been referred to as an exploit by at least some of the devs for a long time now, actually. Not that it really matters. I highly doubt they'd "correct" credit balances or the like after the game mechanics are fixed and working as intended.

I suspect Frontier as a whole have been kind of turning a blind eye to it until they could get around to fixing it and don't want to deal with the hassle and backlash from officially calling it an exploit and the ramifications that would entail.
 
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acg515

acg515
Back in the day there was a Supreme Court case in the US on pornography. Attempting to define it, one justice finally said "I know it when I see it." We can generally use common sense to tell there's an exploit when we see it. The thing is, it's hard to know what ED is going to penalize on us down the road and what they're not going to penalize. The scan mission stacking for instance, a lot of players abused that hard. I think that's an exploit but I think if ED leaves it open for months, then how much of an exploit is it?
 
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Calaban

Calaban
Like most ethical issues, exploiting game mechanics for unwarranted gain is a broad grey area... no two individuals will have the same place within that grey area of where the "unacceptable" line actually is.

I like to say "If you were sitting in front of Agent Smith [Matrix] who represented the games' interests and had his finger on the delete your account button... would you admit to him doing the things you did to get an Imperial Clipper at Expert pilot rating?" If there is a denial, or even a feeling of discomfort... then you already knew it was an exploit.
 

Morbad

Morbad
Lightspeed said:
But what about when it is not a bug?
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If it's actually working as intended it's not cheating via exploit, no matter how stupid or imbalanced it is.

Lightspeed said:
What if a player encounters a high reward situation and discovers he can repeat the process over and over, either in succession or in parallel (typical of mission stacking)? Is that player using an exploit?
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Is this the desired functionality of the mechanism in question and not an oversight? If it's an oversight and not the desired functionality, is it harmful, or beneficial, to the game as whole?

Many forms of mission stacking are clearly not intended gameplay and are clearly harmful to the game in several different ways (detracting from other content or undermining things that are working as intended, for example). Which is why many of them are exploits and not emergent content.

acg515 said:
Back in the day there was a Supreme Court case in the US on pornography. Attempting to define it, one justice finally said "I know it when I see it."
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I'm not sure of the veracity of this anecdote, but this line of thinking is precisely why there is so much disagreement.

Just as there is a huge spectrum of ages where someone could appear to be a child while actually being an adult and vice versa, there is a huge spectrum of game mechanisms that can seem intentional or benign to many players, while immediately striking others as being amiss. That most people don't know anything about anything just complicates things further.
 

sollisb

Banned
S
There is also the added confusion, that FDev rarely come out and say Hey You! Stop It! It's not working as intended...

Even now, with the passenger missions, they've said, yep, the quadrilion paying missions are a bug. What about the 22m paying missions?
 

Cmdr Lucca1985

Cmdr Lucca1985
I don't believe anyone should be punished for using exploits. They are current game mechanics however unintentional. Nerfing people or taking away their stuff shows a clear bias towards those who take it all a bit too seriously.
 

Bunkerkind Anni

Bunkerkind Anni
i know, this will probably get moderated...

but whenever i see those "what is an exploit" discussions,
i imagine the obviously broken mechanic as a "very young woman in revealing clothes"....

no matter how tempting it is... its a no-go!
 

through the hole backwards

T
Bunkerkind Anni said:
i know, this will probably get moderated...

but whenever i see those "what is an exploit" discussions,
i imagine the obviously broken mechanic as a "very young woman in revealing clothes"....

no matter how tempting it is... its a no-go!
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Did i just read this ? Seriously ? Equating paedophilia with earning a few extra credits in a computer game ? Perhaps not the best choice of analogy . People take this game and these forums far far too seriously.
 

babelfisch

babelfisch
Lightspeed said:
According to Wikipedia, "In video games, an exploit is the use of a bug or glitches, game system, rates, hit boxes, or speed, etc. by a player to their advantage in a manner not intended by the game's designers."

So in simple terms, we could clearly identify an exploit as cheating, where a player identifies a clear bug and uses it for his own advantage. But what about when it is not a bug?
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It would still be an advantage that was not intended by the game's designers. Do you even read your source?
/thread
 

Ninj

Ninj
Lightspeed said:
This has real merit ! A CG that counts number of visits to the station (assuming at least 10 tons carried, say) would be a great idea.
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In b4 exploit: the cutter leaves the station and re-enters, dropping off 10T of cargo each time. Still going to be doing it a lot quicker than the small ship..... ;)
 
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