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Unintentional game exploits


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Wanted to put this out there.  How much of a stickler will NQ be about exploits and changes?  For a sandbox voxel type building game, I can already foresee players building ships and other structures that will do things the devs never imagined for them to be able to do.  It will be inevitable.  Not only that it will be mostly unintentional.  How will the devs handle this as it props up?  Will it be a smack on the wrist with a stern "No, don't do that again or be banned?"  Or will they let it go and simply rebalance or rework it?  And I'm not referring to something like covering your ship in a particular element because they forgot to make it destructible.  I mean like, I combined two different voxel types and for some reason, enemy ships can no longer target me and I DON"T KNOW WHY.

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then you report a bug... end of story...

Not necessarily.  An unintended combination might be considered innovative and even and left in.  Take Starsiege Tribes for instance.  Skating across the ground with your jetpack, building up speed and inertia was an unintended effect of the game engine physics.  A "bug" so to speak.  It was considered so fun in testing that they reworked the game layouts and left it in place.  My point is we are going to see things that were never planned for and I wonder how NQ will handle it.  Even they have a vision for their game and therefore have a direction on how it should develop.

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Then it is not an exploit as exploit sugests cheating or other unfair advantage. Better designs or smarter codeing is not an exploit.

 

I realy do not understand "not planned" because the whole purpose of the game is complete freedom. Players most certainly are not expected to created things that are invisioned only, they are expected to do farr and beyond, to exitement, inovte and create. The sole purpose of creating something no one else has is to have advantage.

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The purpose of the game as stated by the devs is a sandbox with certain creative freedoms.  Big difference.  There will certainly be restrictions, and not enough information has been put out for anyone to have an inkling what ALL of those creative freedoms might be.  As for what is expected that players may be allowed create, envisioned or not, SledgeHammer what you wrote down is merely an assumption.

 

Exploitative does not necessarily suggest cheating.  Being able to repeatedly jump a wall to avoid an attack while an AI mob must find a path around is an exploit.  You are specifically exploiting a limit in the game design.  I might not be fighting the mob as intended but I'm certainly not cheating nor is it an unfair advantage if I was given the ability to jump walls in the first place.  Exploits can exist and not be cheating.  

 

So once again, what can we expect in these types of situations?  Will they change it if they feel it's unbalancing or let it play out as if it were some meta that might be countered by someone else's creation.  Will they ignore it because altering it would change the gameplay of other in-game systems and simply expect players not to do it again?  I have no idea.  That is why I created this thread and asked those questions.  Perhaps if I had been this detailed before you would have understood.  So If anyone has an idea what that might be, by all means, please add to the conversation.  If not please inform me if later you do have an idea about what that might be.

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The only exploits I can see really being a concern are anything that adversely affects the economy... A way to quickly gain ludicrous amounts of money for instance. 

 

Creative and anomalous building effects probably should be left alone... mostly.  I could see them adding ways to counter them rather than removing them.  Like your can't be targeted example... leave it in... Area of Effect weapons like missiles and mines don't need to target anything... just have to get close enough.

 

That said... if there was some physics glitch that you could manipulate to accelerate to impossible speeds and thus travel much further... in much shorter a time... than they can allow since they need populations to stay pretty concentrated...  That I could see being fixed as fast as they can.

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Then it is not an exploit as exploit sugests cheating or other unfair advantage. Better designs or smarter codeing is not an exploit.

 

I realy do not understand "not planned" because the whole purpose of the game is complete freedom. Players most certainly are not expected to created things that are invisioned only, they are expected to do farr and beyond, to exitement, inovte and create. The sole purpose of creating something no one else has is to have advantage.

 

 

Incase you still dont understand, heres an example of what he means, something that happened in Eve. The exact details are fuzzy because it happened when I was quitting the game. Some players found out if you dropped your signature strength low eneough, into the negative, it would roll over the address bytes assigned to that value on the server to a really high value, as it was never programmed to handle a negative number. This gave them an insanely high number for this stat, which allowed them to always track and hit any target.

 

It was an exploit that was quickly fixed, but I think Ward wants to know how will NQ handle the players that utilized this exploit. Eve had some bugs you were allowed to exploit and others you couldnt. Will NQ let it go until the fix it (if they decided to) or ban any player doing it? Some players may not have known. Personally I am for, fix the exploit but dont ban players that utilized an ingame feature. Hell even the Disband of Brothers happened because a game mechanic that was in place but never intended to be used in that way. 

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In my opinion players should never be punished for the Devs programing mistakes.

 

The devs should fix it and move on... in most cases.  If say it's a massive money maker... maybe take some back... but let them keep a fair amount.  Finding such an exploit deserves a finders fee.

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In the case of dual universe from what I understand the economy will be player based. So if someone finds a really cool way of producing a new item they could realisticaly make a ton of money from it before other's discover how. But by selling the item they will begin to lower it's value and everything will reach a new balance quickly. If it's something that actually completely 100% breaks the game, such as a ship that's impossible to see or target with the ingame weapon systems there's a decent chance they will simply fix the targetting system and move on.

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