Should exploits be punishable?
A similar issue has popped up in a game of Blizzards where players are getting experience from doing nothing (comparable to people in Last Stand sitting afk in spawn for massive amounts of points).
This was posted 3 hours ago for Overwatch from Blizzard.
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"I’ve seen some discussion in the community and in the press on this topic and sometimes it gets talked about as if it is a grey area. Is this wrong or is this ok? Well, let me take a grey area and make it starkly black and white for you. Abusing and exploiting Custom Game or any other game mode to earn experience in Overwatch while inactive is NOT ok. The reason I want to be absolutely clear about this is because we are going to start to take disciplinary action against people who partake in these activities. If you create a Custom Game that in any way encourages players to gain experience while inactive, you risk having your account banned. If you join any game mode – including Custom Games – with the intent of gaining experience while being inactive, you risk having your account banned. Also, do not name your Custom Game that in anyway even implies that gaining experience while inactive is OK – please do not even do this as a joke – because you are putting yourself at risk of having your account banned.
We are not naïve to player behavior and motivation. When we put this feature live, we had an internal escalation plan for how to combat this behavior. Today marks the first steps on that path. And in a lot of ways it really makes me sad. The feature is so much cooler and better for everyone if we do not have to put draconic restrictions on it. To fast forward a bit, the end of the escalation plan will result in experience gain being turned off in Custom Game. I really don’t want to see us getting to that point. So I am going to ask for some help from the vast majority of you who are simply playing the game and having fun and not abusing it: please report those who are creating Custom Games with the intention of gaining experience while remaining inactive. If you select someone’s Custom Game you get three options: Spectate, Join and Report. These options exist on all 3 platforms. Use the Report feature. It works."
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I really wish Ubisoft\Massive would finally get around to understanding that you can't sit around and "fix" exploits that pop up and nothing more. If you don't implement consequences to exploit abuse, then people will rush in to do it before it's fixed or they'll be "missing out". Take it from this experienced development and production team...you MUST cut exploit abuse in the bud! If you don't, legitimate players are the ones getting punished as they are losing out on the ill-gotten goods. If there's no consequences, those players either have to accept that they are getting left in the dust, or do ALSO hop onto the cheat train. As long as there's no consequences, you are actively encouraging your community to abuse exploits as much as possible before it is fixed. It's not a good way to handle games.
Numbers have dwindled, certainly. A statement about not allowing cheating should have been said during Falcon Lost's release. The longer you wait, the harder it is to implement such a statement, as we have had an entire year of exploiting being "okay to do".Originally Posted by Swfc4eva1 Go to original post
If they can't ban the points exploiters, they could at least do a database lookup of anyone who has gotten over 100k points in a match and reset their character to the day prior to their first 100k score. Again, though, the problem is they never made a statement that it's against the rules to exploit in the game. At some point, they NEED to.
Well, technically they actually DID say exploiting isn't allowed a long time ago, but they never backed that statement up with any action.
I think Blizzard is one of those companies that excels at maintaining game integrity. One of the core tactics that they use is being very public about their stance on exploits and cheating.
I've been through similar instances in an MMORPG that I use to play, where content was released and immediately glitched to bypass weeks of playtime in hours. I really think no matter what any developer says, about 'cheating' - it's up to a game community to push for a suitable reaction and punishment.
If 'honest' players don't show outrage on mass, any developer will always be reluctant to punish 'dishonesty' harshly.
I don't think that players should be banned for something like what is happening in last stand. I think that they should have their accounts reset to level 30. With all gear removed and ranks reset to 0,
Removing progress is a far harsher punishment than banning players.
And of course, players need to be made aware of the consequences of cheating as soon as an exploit is known to the dev team. The idea of hiding known exploits from the community is counter-productive. If their was an announcent on the character screen that described the LS exploit and stated that players caught doing it will have their account progress reset, it wouldn't be as big of a problem.
Some developers tent to treat these cheating issues on a case by case basis. They also tend to shy away from stating what the consequences will be. Players need to be more accepting of the idea that content can't always be 100% cheat proof. We can't get into blaming the Dev team, when cheating happens. Perhaps then they wouldn't feel the sheepishness about being more forthcoming with the playerbase.
Early on, I found it particularly telling about Massive and many, many TD players, when the BulletKing exploit became more of a joke than something to be treated with seriously consequences.
If players take a stake in having an 'honest game' they are far more likely to get one.
Creating boosting servers is not really the same thing going on here. Those are a cut and dry clear violation of the ToS.
The Last Stand boosters are just crappy players that are technically playing by the rules.
If we were able to set up our own servers for our own games and we started making "no kill" or "flag run" servers,we could be banned.
But playing a game mode within the rules with the tools provided is not bannable. Boosters are scummy players,especially in a PvP mode...but not breaking any clear rules.
I think boosters should be stat wiped and have their stash deleted. But not banned.
Most would quit in this case anyway.
You cant realy blame the players if they exploit a faulty game mecanics and to be fair blizzard are not realy a good exemple they were supposed to release PVP arena and 3 other expansion for diablo3 and many players me included feel like they were f***** by them.
In my opinion its on the developers hand to release a quick hotfix but i think they should ban people who use media youtube , twitch to promote the exploit.
I think the Developers should promote the exploit and disclose the punishment.Originally Posted by MaximeBizZ Go to original post
Players can decide if it's worth it.
Trying to blame the messenger isn't the way to go.
Ubisoft doesn't have the spine to ban it's dwindling population. The game would be dead if they banned the players that exploit.Originally Posted by RpTheHotrod Go to original post
Fair point. That's why you absolutely must nip exploiting in the bud as soon as possible. If you're telling your community that cheating is okay for a year (no consequences for cheating = promoting cheating), then you're going to have a game full of people cheating.Originally Posted by MDC_Postal Go to original post
Here we are now, a year later. If they make a statement now, then we can at least try to recover. If they do not, then it'll become nearly impossible later down the line...and THOSE exploits could very well affect the entire integrity of the game. At least THIS exploit isn't damaging integrity.