Manipulating bugs in the game - ethical or not [poll]

[TheFeniX]

Ghetto edit: I'd like to add, I'm not phrasing the insults I was whispered in STO that way on a whim. Variations of that particular slur were thrown at me in probably 90% of the PMs I got in game, not all relating to that particular bug. I haven't been called that so much for PvPing in a game since my days playing CoD on Xbox. That shit was really rife in STO, moreso than another other MMO (or game really, aside from a few exceptions) I've played. Pretty awkward considering the the Star Trek basis. That and the racism: STO had a really shitty PvP community. I wonder if they ever cleaned it up.

[Terralthra]

The JA dual-saber-style special move bug was also pretty ridiculous.

[TheFeniX]

The JA dual-saber-style special move bug was also pretty ridiculous.

You talking about where you jack your turn-speed up to like 5,000,000 (or just do the same with your mouse sensitivity) and hold A or D after activating it? I saved that only for people who spammed DFA (the Heavy stance leap attack) just for kicks. That game and it's predecessor had all kinds of weird bugs.

The "spin-wheel of death" in Jedi-Outcast was a big problem in... 1.2 with the same Heavy DFA attack. You could spin after landing and clear out a whole room. Then there was the 1.3 backstab spin which ruined any kind of competitive dueling. I could reliably dodge it considering my ping of ~30 and keyboard mashing skills, even when they preceeded it with a kick-knockdown, which was also buggy because someone with lower ping then you could literally kick you to death and there was nothing you could do about it. They fixed all that in 1.4 (mostly by just nerfing backstab into the ground and removing the damage from kick).

Then they released Jedi-Academy and spent their patch rotation fixing the same bugs because they just used the vanilla game for JA with a few new models and animations. But none of that compares to the W+Special of the double-bladed lightsaber. The animation had 2 (I think) very small windows where you could damage the user without getting yourself instagibbed, but even then: it was spammable. They never did fix that, but it wasn't even a bug: just shitty design.

Fucking Lucasarts.

[Terralthra]

The JA dual-saber-style special move bug was also pretty ridiculous.

You talking about where you jack your turn-speed up to like 5,000,000 (or just do the same with your mouse sensitivity) and hold A or D after activating it? I saved that only for people who spammed DFA (the Heavy stance leap attack) just for kicks. That game and it's predecessor had all kinds of weird bugs.

Yup, that's the one. Ridiculous turn rate, lightsabres bound to orientation from you, meant anyone within the glowstick rave party radius just straight up died. Throwing a sabre in to try and kill the dual-wielder would almost always result in a deactivate-drop for the thrower, while the pinwheeler takes no damage at all. Ridiculous. You could do the same with the light/dual backstab moves up until patch 1.3 or so, but it at least didn't cover a 5m radius in all directions.

The "spin-wheel of death" in Jedi-Outcast was a big problem in... 1.2 with the same Heavy DFA attack. You could spin after landing and clear out a whole room. Then there was the 1.3 backstab spin which ruined any kind of competitive dueling. I could reliably dodge it considering my ping of ~30 and keyboard mashing skills, even when they preceeded it with a kick-knockdown, which was also buggy because someone with lower ping then you could literally kick you to death and there was nothing you could do about it. They fixed all that in 1.4 (mostly by just nerfing backstab into the ground and removing the damage from kick).

Yeah, the jump-kick was spammable, safe, and uncounterable unless you had a better ping.

Then they released Jedi-Academy and spent their patch rotation fixing the same bugs because they just used the vanilla game for JA with a few new models and animations. But none of that compares to the W+Special of the double-bladed lightsaber. The animation had 2 (I think) very small windows where you could damage the user without getting yourself instagibbed, but even then: it was spammable. They never did fix that, but it wasn't even a bug: just shitty design.

Fucking Lucasarts.

W+special...that was the jumping heavy overhead slash? Yeah, that shit was ridiculous.

[TheFeniX]

Yup, that's the one. Ridiculous turn rate, lightsabres bound to orientation from you, meant anyone within the glowstick rave party radius just straight up died. Throwing a sabre in to try and kill the dual-wielder would almost always result in a deactivate-drop for the thrower, while the pinwheeler takes no damage at all. Ridiculous. You could do the same with the light/dual backstab moves up until patch 1.3 or so, but it at least didn't cover a 5m radius in all directions.

There was 1 counter: level 2 Saber Throw. Level 3 auto-tracked onto your opponent's torso, making it useless. But level 2 was directly controllable, if not a lot slower. If your aim was perfect, you could throw it right between their feet and the floor and land a hit. But I think it only did like 30 damage.

If you were badass and extremely lucky, you could also use the Yellow single-saber stance attack where you jump up, spin upside-down, and slash downward. It had more than a few invulnerability frames IIRC and did a shit load of damage. However, if it didn't kill them, or your timing was off, you were basically landing inside an active garbage disposal... with the expected results.

Saber Throw had it's own issues as any server with Neutral only powers would lead to lightsaber duels of players staying out of range and tossing lightsabers, then using force-pull to break the default block animation of the player and ensuring damage. Boring as Hell.

W+special...that was the jumping heavy overhead slash? Yeah, that shit was ridiculous.

That was single-saber: red stance. This was double-bladed Forward+M1+M2. It's the one shown here about 9 seconds in. Even during parts of the animation where the saber isn't doing frontal damage (and no, it doesn't track with the location of the lightsaber and seems to be heavily influenced by latency either way), it's near impossible to get a hit in and get out before it's doing nuclear levels of damage again.

The game was fun as all Hell, but balance was a joke. Raven had plans to fix it, but Lucasarts wouldn't let them release anymore patches. Damn there needs to be another Jedi-Knight game.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Terribly off-topic, but yes. I'd love to see a properly modernized Jedi Knight, with an Arkham-style combat system to replace the well-intentioned, but as has been pointed, god-awfully flawed saber controls. Maybe I've just been playing too much Shadow of Mordor, but that game with lightsabers and stormtroopers instead of elvish blades and orcs would be pretty great, as long as it came with a good platform for multiplayer.

[Covenant]

Back to the original commentary, I think no. It is not "ethical" to use a bug to win, because it breaks the agreed-upon rules to the game. I would not consider it a major ethics violation because without people testing the limits of the game and reporting bugs you would never be able to fix them. You are strongly obligated to report these bugs, of course.

Most of the time, I feel like the burden is on the developers to address problems, not on the players to avoid exploiting them. Players naturally will hate someone using an exploit--it will look like a cheat, and that is toxic to a game community, so there's a degree of self-regulation. But really, the devs have to go in there and pull some gears out to get it to stop, or else people like Purple will take it as tacit approval and the game will become ridiculous, annoying, and stupid.

Nobody picks up a military shooter to do bunnyhopping, insta-scoping, dolphin diving and so on. That's not what they think of when they buy it. If it is then... then that's just really sad for them. In any case, because it's against what the game is trying to do (and will continue trying to do every patch and game iteration after people find these "unintended features") I would consider it unethical to ruin other people's day because of it. If it's a bug and your opponents don't know it then you're using hidden information to win, which isn't fair. If you assume they've got to know it too then just WAIT until someone else uses it, then have at it. If you are documenting and reporting the bug on forums and to the devs and not trying to be disruptive then that's basically all you can do.

[bilateralrope]

How do the ethics change when benefiting from the bug is unavoidable ?

For example in the first Red Faction game your client decides if you got hit by another player. Which means that the latency between you and the guy your shooting affected how much you needed to lead where they would appear to be in order for your weapons to hit. I live in New Zealand, was using dailup at the time, and often played against people in the US. So I learned to take latency into account, while my opponents often didn't. So the lag protected me from my opponents more than it protected them from me.

There was nothing I could do to prevent this advantage except stop playing multiplayer.

[Covenant]

If there's nothing you can do about it or the bug doesn't really meaningfully effect play then it's not unethical to play with it.

The only "bad" aspect to playing with bugs and game quirks is when you use them to frustrate another player who believes themselves to be playing with the total ruleset. Someone who is confident that they know the rules, the minor quirks ("I can pop my scope for a half second and shoot accurately across the map--this is silly, but I understand it exists!") and the relative eccentricities will not feel amused when their legitimate play is sidelined by someone hiding in boxes and shooting through walls or something.

To them it feels like a cheat because it is hidden knowledge and it's not THEIR responsibility to independently find an undocumented bug and exploit it to re-level the intentionally level playing field.

But just because it makes you a dickbag to do this stuff doesn't mean it won't turn into a core element of strategy if left alone, and then held up as good. The problem is that it WILL so unless the bug is something cool it'll end up swallowing up the rest of gameplay. Smash Brothers Competitive Players turned what was essentially a number of strange and unexpected behaviors and built a new game out of it.

[TheFeniX]

How do the ethics change when benefiting from the bug is unavoidable ?

For example in the first Red Faction game your client decides if you got hit by another player. Which means that the latency between you and the guy your shooting affected how much you needed to lead where they would appear to be in order for your weapons to hit. I live in New Zealand, was using dailup at the time, and often played against people in the US. So I learned to take latency into account, while my opponents often didn't. So the lag protected me from my opponents more than it protected them from me.

There was nothing I could do to prevent this advantage except stop playing multiplayer.

Well, since in many shooters, lower latency gives you an advantage, it's hard to say you're doing anything wrong. Same with having a computer than can run the game at a higher resolution and Framerate. Intentionally injecting latency, choke, or loss into your connection in another story, but it's up to the developer to try and make the game as fair on all types of connections. BF2 had to completely remove the projectile weapons and make everything hitscan due to IIRC issues with latency and some servers choking trying to handle the calculations.

For a more "active" example: I used to leave my net_stat up in Counter-Strike: Source. If I was running low or no choke/loss, my weapon loadout would be completely different than if I was suffering from large amounts of choke/loss. If it was high, I could run something like a TMP SMG and begin firing as a rounded corners, leading to a much better chance at killing someone if they were around said corners. Conversely, low ping combined with no choke/loss meant more accurate weapons/firing would do better as I would have a split-second or two jump on anyone I encountered.

Is that exploitation? Probably. Justifying it is a lot harder. But anyone can do it and it takes next to no information outside a single console command to do. I even did it in CoD:MW because many servers were garbage, but I instead had to rely on experience to determine how good/bad my connection was due to no netstat command.

If you get down to it: just understanding the map is exploitative. It gives you a huge advantage over newer and even better players. There's only so many places a person can setup, only so many entrances and exits to an area. Without proper map-design, it gets even worse. Try and find a few old Halo competitive matches. The entire thing was about getting your team into position to watch every entrance and spawn point before the other team could. Once you accomplished this, only a stroke of insane luck could lose you the game at that point.

On this note: there's a reason spawn-camping is generally frowned upon and it's not just because you can learn spawn points. In a lot of games, Natural Selection being one of them: your character model spawns before you are given control over it. So, no matter how fast your reaction time is, you physically cannot do anything while the enemy shoots you for the second or two your model isn't controllable. Spawn camping was considered "low" in NS by the general community.

Meanwhile, it's just kind of frowned upon in Team Fortress because you have protected spawns. valve could have made it a non-issue by making more maps with multiple spawn-room exits. But for those devs who won't fix it: a lot of server will ban spawncamping.

[Terralthra]

In practice, Valve does make it a non-issue by having spawns have protected rooms where medics can build up über and use it to break out of spawn (in addition to most maps having multiple exits). There are still maps where it's more of an issue, but given the number of breakout tools, I think of camping the spawn as part of the game, in both ways. Blu has to break out at the beginning, but by the same token, if Red gets pushed back into spawn, Blu wins easily. If Red setting up to camp the spawn exits wasn't supposed to happen, why would there be a full minute of setup time?

[TheFeniX]

Yea, I had to have more than a few dust-ups with the GM at my gaming community about why we allowed spawn-camping on the TF2 servers. He was a Battlefield guy and to him spawncamping was a no-no. But in TF2, as long as your team had a purpose for camping a spawn (to prevent reinforcements while capturing a point or to allow time for the flag-carrier to get away), I allowed it. However, just camping the spawn to whore kills got you booted. Man, I do not miss server adminning. BF2 ruined that community.

[Grumman]

For a more "active" example: I used to leave my net_stat up in Counter-Strike: Source. If I was running low or no choke/loss, my weapon loadout would be completely different than if I was suffering from large amounts of choke/loss. If it was high, I could run something like a TMP SMG and begin firing as a rounded corners, leading to a much better chance at killing someone if they were around said corners. Conversely, low ping combined with no choke/loss meant more accurate weapons/firing would do better as I would have a split-second or two jump on anyone I encountered.

Is that exploitation? Probably. Justifying it is a lot harder. But anyone can do it and it takes next to no information outside a single console command to do. I even did it in CoD:MW because many servers were garbage, but I instead had to rely on experience to determine how good/bad my connection was due to no netstat command.

That does not sound like exploiting a bug, as it's the same choice any player makes based on their skill level. A skilled player will choose to use a weapon that allows him to make use of his skill, while an unskilled player will use a fast firing or an AoE weapon so that weight of fire can compensate for his lack of accuracy.

[Phillip Hone]

I don't know, that sounds like a bit of a grey area to me, incorporating knowledge about a defect (lag) into your strategy ... I mean it's not as blatant as bunny hopping but I'm not certain it's so entirely different.

It's not like any game sells in a box that with a bullet point that says "outsmart your enemies by making tactical weapon choices based on lag!"

[Grumman]

I don't know, that sounds like a bit of a grey area to me, incorporating knowledge about a defect (lag) into your strategy ... I mean it's not as blatant as bunny hopping but I'm not certain it's so entirely different.

It's not like any game sells in a box that with a bullet point that says "outsmart your enemies by making tactical weapon choices based on lag!"

It is entirely different. If a person with good internet can use shotguns or sniper rifles effectively while a person with bad internet can't hit anything with a sniper rifle, you are not getting any kind of unfair advantage by merely not playing to your weaknesses and taking the shotgun instead.

[Phillip Hone]

I don't know, that sounds like a bit of a grey area to me, incorporating knowledge about a defect (lag) into your strategy ... I mean it's not as blatant as bunny hopping but I'm not certain it's so entirely different.

It's not like any game sells in a box that with a bullet point that says "outsmart your enemies by making tactical weapon choices based on lag!"

It is entirely different. If a person with good internet can use shotguns or sniper rifles effectively while a person with bad internet can't hit anything with a sniper rifle, you are not getting any kind of unfair advantage by merely not playing to your weaknesses and taking the shotgun instead.

But isn't playing to your strengths according to defects in the game the definition of exploitation? Unless the difference here is that the defect is on the user side of things, specifically, internet speed.

[Grumman]

But isn't playing to your strengths according to defects in the game the definition of exploitation?

No. If a laggy player with a shotgun has no advantage over a normal player with a shotgun, you cannot reasonably claim that the laggy player is taking advantage of the lag.

[Lord Revan]

But isn't playing to your strengths according to defects in the game the definition of exploitation?

No. If a laggy player with a shotgun has no advantage over a normal player with a shotgun, you cannot reasonably claim that the laggy player is taking advantage of the lag.

and even if there's was a slight "advantage" when using certain loadouts while having lag, if that advantange was so minor that you'd need look at the Records of thousands of matches to see any noticible pattern rather just the random variables, I wouldn't call that really an exploitation as the gain you'd get would minimal at best. Now on the other hand if the gain was so great that it would be noticeble within a few matches then it would be a different thing.

[Phillip Hone]

But isn't playing to your strengths according to defects in the game the definition of exploitation?

No. If a laggy player with a shotgun has no advantage over a normal player with a shotgun, you cannot reasonably claim that the laggy player is taking advantage of the lag.

Yes, but a laggy player who uses a console command to check the lag and then switches away from the shotgun has an advantage over a player who doesn't take notice of the lag and keeps using the shotgun.

Look, basically I agree with you guys, I'm just pointing out there are grey areas.

I don't know if any of you play CoH2, but that game has plenty of them. It's a WW2 RTS game where one of the factions has these trucks that are just supposed to setup bases, but if you use them right, the trucks can knock over ambient buildings and push infantry out of cover. It's called "truck pushing." There's no penalty to losing the first truck so there's basically no reason to not do it, and it changes the early game very significantly. The developers noticed the problem and adjusted the truck's stats so it could no longer go on a killing spree and run over models, but truck pushing remains very effective and completely goofy, where you'll see an infantry attack supported by a truck madly swerving around and chasing infantry.

Did the developers intend this to happen? Most certainly not. Is it way out of place given the general tone of the game? Yes. Is it kinda imbalanced? Yes. On the other hand, the developers have already addressed it through stat adjustments to the truck so it's hard to argue that it's an exploit... but I would still consider it a grey area.

[TheFeniX]

So, the question is: at what point does experience become exploitative, in any version of the word? And how much of an advantage is too much of an advantage? And this is exactly why this thread exists and why each set of gamers has their own set of rules: because opinions/taste/intent is a large part of a competitive game.

Like, playing Natural Selection, I know that the shotgun pellets always spread a certain way. So, by aiming a bit to the right (I think, it's been years), I could give myself an advantage over someone new to the game who shoots dead-on. If my choke is balls high, I can zig-zag back on forth to get my hitbox going all sorts of weird directions.

For a non-competitive example: Titan Extreme in FFXIV requires pin-point timing on movements to not get hit by Weight of the Land. Be even a split second slow, and you're getting hit for loads of damage, usually enough to kill you. If you wait for the visual effect and have any sort of latency, it's a rough fight. However, if you understand the rotation Titan uses and the timings, you can be ready to move before you can even see the ability.

None of this guarantees me a win. In fact, the advantages are minimal if I'm having an off-day.

[Covenant]

It's got to be a real bug (rather than just an oddball quirk like pellet spread, weapon pull, hitscan vs non hitscan weapons in lag) and it has to create a disjointed experience.

Like, the pellet spread thing is wacky but it's not unprecedented. You might notice strangeness and be confused why you're not hitting, but the shooting itself is ambiguous and with practice it'll become more clear. This is also information that is bound to be around by now, and it highly reproducible, so it's not much of a bug. The worst bugs are really niche cases that only happen with certain criteria. Knowing that your shotgun pulls may be unexpected but not jarring, and it's not like it kills instantly and unexpectedly when you shoot just to the left of someone.

Exploiting a bug is basically behaving in a strange manner in order to maximize the advantage provided by this bug--this is the problem with bunny hopping and dolphin diving and similar things. People start changing the way they play to get the most advantage out of an unintended, undocumented "feature." Developers will go a long way to tell you how they want you to play, so when you end up acting totally crazy (stacking up players to make a man-ladder to shove a player through otherwise unreachable level geometry and snipe from above the viewplane...) it subverts the game and that's bad for everyone.

The problem is a lot of bugs have no real counter, so it ends up being a bug v bug battle.

Look at the Loot Caves in Destiny. They're working as intended but the players are not behaving as EXPECTED. Instead of closing they're triggering a lazy AI loop that spawns new enemies forever. You can have a mechanic that works fine but is still exploited enough that it becomes ridiculous, and ridiculed, and hated, and abused ad-nauseum. Then the devs step in and stop it, and players go look for another one.

In DotA there are these things called couriers, which are little AI-controlled critters that ferry items to you. Killing the enemy courier gets everyone a big gold bonus, but it doesn't happen much when players play smart.

I once saw an enemy hero, a guy with stealth (bounty hunter) run in the early game into my team's side of the map and drop a courier box. Once you activate the box you get a courier. We laughed because the ONLY thing he could have been thinking was to grab a courier box, drop it in the woods for us to find, and hope one of us grab it, open it, and drop the courier right then. This would allow him to kill it and get a gold bonus. Is this an exploit? No, it was moronic. What an idiot.

But if there was a way to drop a courier box ON an enemy player to make them own it, and then kill it for a big gold bonus... or if there was a way to kill your own courier and get the gold from it, then yeah this would become ridiculous.

There was a "feature/bug/huh?" thing where the courier was basically an AI ally with an inventory like you. This let you put items on the courier (like the refillable bottle that healed you or the sword that gave passive damage in an area) and do weird shit with it. It also used to have a way to become temporarily invincible (presumably so you can stop someone from killing it too easily while it drops items off) so combined with these other things it got kinda silly. You couldn't do much with it, but you could do some things. Flying it into the wood to go blast someone while all your heroes are accounted for?

So some of this got neutered in Dota2 and nobody really complains. It was annoying and it didn't make much sense, but it was also easy to understand. Furthermore some of these tricks are so niche that they are left in, and some are actually an important element of strategy now (like being able to send your bottle back on the courier to refill it and return it without having to do it yourself) that they became an accepted and non-disruptive element of strategy.

So it's always hard to tell. Basically, if the bug is consistent and non-disruptive to the "normal state of play" and easy to document then it will either get fixed or it will become an accepted element of strategy. Document it and use it, the devs will catch it eventually, or they'll sign off on it as clever.

But a bug that is hard to document, hard to repeat or practice for, and creates odd or disruptive play... then playing to intentionally exploit the power the bug gives you is bad. It's not super unethical, but it's cheating, basically. It's cheating in a game without a referee to stop you, but its still cheating.

[Lord Revan]

so in essence if it doesn't hurt gameplay (too much) it's ok, but if it reduces the gameplay to "who can cheat more/sooner" it's an exploit, did I understand you correctly there Covenant?

[TheFeniX]

One game I'm reminded of with considerable bugs was Left 4 Dead. Areas where smokers could pull you off a 10-foot drop that would insta-kill you the second you were released. Hunters meleeing dumpsters to block the survivors path. Corner humping which lead to valve having to add a melee cooldown to the game. Meleeing certain locked doors open. Just general shenanigans you'd have to agree before the game starts not to use.

Even in the non-competitive mode, a lot of the bugs made Expert runs trivial, which pissed us off because we legitimately beat all the campaigns on Expert without abusing the drop-in/drop-out bug nor those areas the AI considers outside the map. But try and tell anyone you beat in legit, they usually won't believe you.

In DotA there are these things called couriers, which are little AI-controlled critters that ferry items to you. Killing the enemy courier gets everyone a big gold bonus, but it doesn't happen much when players play smart.

Modern Warefare 2: I used to drop care-packages in odd spots and kill people who tried to "steal" them from me. Another funny one, that only worked once is I threw an empty rifle at a player who was using a pistol in Counter-Strike. This switched me to my pistol and I finished him off as he tried to reload his recently acquired rifle. By default, the UI will equip a recently picked-up weapon unless you've manually disabled it. A neat trick, that really doesn't change the game all that much. It's also annoying if you're just running and gunning and pick up a gun in the middle of it all.

[Covenant]

so in essence if it doesn't hurt gameplay (too much) it's ok, but if it reduces the gameplay to "who can cheat more/sooner" it's an exploit, did I understand you correctly there Covenant?

That's how I'd define it, from a rational competitive and non-competitive standpoint. The "exploit" comes from "exploiting" the bug. Let's not forget what the verb means. Exploiting means to "make full use of and derive benefit from (a resource)." In this case the resource is an undocumented and often unintuitive method of gaining an advantage. The harder this bug is to perform the harder it is to accidentally reproduce and the more effort it takes to master it. So, like the most complicated Street Fighter moves, it becomes a secret technique only "useful" to the people who take effort to make full advantage of it. So they're exploiting the bug. The exploit part isn't bad, persay. It's the fact that instead of just trying to play the game by the stated rules like (we must assume) every other player is... they're trying to win by taking advantage of an undocumented and probably incomprehensible advantage.

It is also deleterious to the community because a bug, before it is well known, approximates the same behavior of a cheat or a hack. You do not want players to think that "hacks" are commonplace in your game or it drives away legitimate gamers and opens the doors to the very odd communities of hacker gamers. Never made any sense to me but they totally are there in force when they can be. It can be very hard to clean up a community once it gets that way, and soon any behavior the player feels to be unusual (misattribution bias from the perception of the angry victim always makes that fun) is going to be called a hack or a cheat.

The harm (and the ethical snare) comes from how you are treating people, not from the bug itself. Bugs in games are fine--feel free to exploit a bug if you want, it's all about how much you enjoy the game. Exploiting a bug in a competitive game is not a criminal offense but its like spoiling a movie as soon as it starts in the theater, or talking over the dialogue or otherwise disrupting an event where the social contract is that everyone plays by the rules. If all games had ushers then bug exploiters would be politely asked to leave, but not jailed.