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1

I do make many, many Bug reports ingame and one thing that really really is bugging me out, is I will never get a feedback if it is an acknowledged Bug, me misunderstanding the function, or anything else.

I have to research the web and or discord, ask around if anybody is aware of the problem, if its a problem after all and so on. Is it planned, to give players a feedback at any point?
I dont know how hard it would be to implement smth like that, but for the one who checks the report a clickbox: acknowledged Bug/works as intended/under review and to get that information as player would be awesome.
I rly love LE and try to be as helpfull as a player can be. I try to find use for nearly all items and stuff and combos, just to check it how and understand how it works. So it often happens nobody seems to have the same issue, since its a very very unpopular build or combo.

I even tried to standarize my reports like:
Issue:
Items:
Affix:
Skills:
Skillnodes:
Passive nodes (if needed):

What i expect:

What is actually happening:

putting that time and effort in every Report and having absolutly no feedback is hard.
Posting everything a second time on the forum - after searching if there is an other bug report with same issue and if there is alrdy an answer or not, what was the discussion there, is it rly the same problem, etc… to avoid unnessecary Threads and even then not to get any answer is hard to take.

So maybe there would ne an option with a reported bug log and the clickbox answer of the reviewer. Just to know if its a real bug, me misunderstanding the function or even “we dont know, have to check carefully” (under review) would soothe my soul

6 Likes
2

Good thoughts, but some bugs shouldn’t be public.
Like duping

3

I disagree. Bugs should be public and duping bugs even more so. It should made public if they react fast or if bugs that stay for a far to long time.

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4

Yes

And that’s a massive no.
Not even a discussion.

You acknowledge that something is going on, but you never, ever write down even remotely what the bug does until it is fixed. You provide the issue post-mortem for that one.

Even acknowledging it at all is risky for that. What do you think happens when it is acknowledged? Heaven for anyone which wants to exploit that. ‘Hey, I hear there is something existing… let’s check the internet out to find what exactly it is and do it too!’

That’s a fundamental rule that you are very careful in regards to exploits and dupes with providing info to your customers, if you don’t you’ll swiftly have a major issue likely killing your product.

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5

Gameplay bugs should be public. Exploit bugs shouldn’t. Every time they’re revealed they only hurt the game. And this is not just for LE.

Exploit bugs are almost always already known by the devs. Almost always they’re already working on fixing them, since they’re priority issues.
If you think the devs aren’t aware of it, then you should contact them privately (or use the bug report tool)

Making an exploit/dupe known will only lead to a lot of people that weren’t aware of it going out of their way to try it out and try to benefit from it, further crashing your economy.

EDIT: As an example to maybe get my point across better:
Imagine a self checkout machine in the supermarket. It has a vulnerability where if you flash your phone light on the scanner it will scan all items at 0.01c rather than their price.
The ones in charge detect this issue and it will require 2 days to fix.

If you don’t say anything, maybe you’ll get 2-3 people using it, most of the time by mistake. You’ll be monitoring the situation and you can easily identify it.
If you announce that there’s a vulnerability, more people will be trying to find out what it is and more will stumble upon it by trial and error and sometimes by word of mouth.
If you announce that there’s a vulnerability and exactly what it is, you’ll get thousands of people abusing it in the couple days until it’s fixed. And there’s no way to properly track it anymore as well.

Especially because, unlike what you said, making it public won’t make the devs work on it faster. They’re already working on it as fast as they can. It will still take 2 days to fix. That hasn’t changed. What changed is how many people will be exploiting it and how much it will affect the economy.

So exploits/dupes should always be handled as discreetlly as possible and should only be made public after they’ve been fixed, if at all.

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6

If there is a duping or currency bug it should be tackeled instantly. I remember playing WoW one day and doing a quest and I was happy because there was enough respawn at once. The ntthey wanted to ban me because they thought i abused a bug when i was only happy to do a quest in a sane time because the mobs respawned in a fast enough rate so 10 people were able to do it without stealing kills.

If the spawn was disabled there would’ve been no issue outside of waiting for a day tops untill it’s fixed. Devs solve issues but most devs only patch if they have xyz done and don’t treat economy bugs and exploits as severly as you do. If bugs are out in the open they can punish everyone using it and avoid false positives when someone is simply doing a quest for 5 minutes vs people who kill enemys 24/7 for a week and accumulate a ton of wealth while the devs sit on their hands.

As I said above. Everything that makes Devs move instantly and don’t wait arround is a good thing. Noone can say “I don’t know!” if it is public.

And should be permabanned for it :man_shrugging:

I understand your point i just ahve a completely different view on it and I think devs of games should be held accountable if they leave bugs in the open or take their sweet time fixing things. There are plenty of ways to get stuff done fast and to implement a solution untill stuff can finaly be fixed.

7

Just a spawn. Not so severe if switched off. My recent dupe bug report was on a much more important mechanic. And I’m not gonna tell you :zipper_mouth_face:where and how

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8

They generally do, but it takes time for devs to become aware of an issue, work out how it’s happening, work out how to fix it without breaking something else & then make sure that their proposed fix functions as intended.

So you want the devs to have to punish more people?

Kneejerk reactions aren’t a good thing from devs or players.

Which would be a much wider group of people if you had your way & exploits were widely known.

And they generally wind up creating more work than the time they “save”.

9

Sure. But until then all the bot accounts that weren’t aware of it become aware of it and exploit it hard, crashing the economy even further. And they don’t care if they get perma banned because that is already their fate, it’s just a matter of how much profit they can squeeze out before that.
Which, in this case, would be a lot more than usual.

But the issue is that almost always the devs are already working on a fix for it. It becoming public won’t make them fix it faster. Programming isn’t a miracle solution where you look at your bug and it magically disappears instantly.

It often requires several changes and testing those changes before it can be released.
If there is a bandaid solution to be applied they already did it. But even that bandaid solution requires time to implement.

If you place a pizza in the oven for 30 minutes it will be ready to eat. There isn’t a magical solution that will make the pizza be ready in 1 minute. If you simply try to turn the heat what you end up with is a charred mess, which is the perfect analogy of what happens when exploits/dupes are publicly shared.

10

Absolutely, and while I usually am in the group of ‘Developers, tell is everything going on at all times!’ this is one of the major exeptions.

Tackle it but go ahead and even delete the posts related to it in the second they come up. Inform the people that it’s been known and acknowledged and worked on when they provide the information… but don’t ever let the information leak out and hinder the speed of leaking to the utmost of your ability.

It’s not only one game which got killed by bad management of that aspect, it’s really really dangerous and good games have broken entirely because of it.

So a bug-report on the bug-report section should get someone permabanned?

You cannot have it both ways… you either have a information embargo about the topic and hence remove it whenever visible with no mention at all (action or not is a separate topic) or you make it visible to everyone. There is no reliable in-between.

And that’s the proper action! Kudos.
Only the devs should know about it, but reporting and making it publicly visible by a customer should never lead to negative consequences. Remove post, acknowledge per PM, praise for providing information and then get the issue fixed. But never leave it visible.

Exactly. If they need to pay access and get 10€ more out then the license price is then they’ve already won. You can after all run 10 or 20 per machine at once, multi-clienting is really hard to tackle as so many options exist which aren’t visible to devs and even shouldn’t be visible to them at times.

11

And that’s completely up to you. Just to amuse me. How long did it take to be removed?

And still there are games that leave such bugs in their games for days, weeks and even months given my experience on the topic. Not only are devs slow to handle this kind of stuff from my experience but they only tap ppl on the wrist about it. In my WoW example somone made millions with the bug and got a 24h ban and that was it. Not even the money was removed.

If said persons are bug abusesers? Yes.

What still leaves people who play legit or who are so smart they are never cought.I rather have a smaller playerbase of genuine players then a snakepit that jumps on every opportunity there is to use punishable means to get things.

And it’s not about saving time it’s about saving fairness and the ingame community. The integrety of the whole product so to speak. Yes this takes time and effort but it should be done if it helps to keep stuff in line.

Depends on the reactionspeed. On top of this I know someone in an extended friendgroup how programmed bots for a living while he was student. The whole cheating and botting community works openly togheter and much faster and more efficent then ordinary users. There are vulanrability spread cheats for all kind of engines and what worked in the past and what might possibly work after certain changes. it’s crazy to me.

The ammount of stuff they got and money they made was sad but they were always ahead. So will there be more real harm done if bugs are out in the open or if they are hidden and devs can take their time instead of taking some more options to stop the problem? Haven’t there been games were P2P trade was disabled just to stop some shady stuff? Just to throw an example in here.

Not from my experience no. There is even a game where a dupe was reported to the devs in a beta. They didn#t reacted to it, it was made public in the beta so they need to adress it. Guess what? it was useable for 3 seasons in that game and people did so.
Other games had more holes in it then swiss cheese and had to disable family share on steam for example ebcause people cheated with this option however they did it. Don’t know don’t care.

wtf? If a Pizza needs 30 Minutes in the oven and it is ready after 30 minutes then it’s working like intended. What kind of an example is this? If I drop a stone it falls to the erath! Do you want to come up with an even more binary example that isn’t exploitable to make a point?

And I’m fine with it. I’m in the group of “Devs have chosen to put their game and themselfs out into the open and should be held accountable for what they do or don’t.”. They are no charity case we need to prop up or children who didn’t knew better. It was their choice and they take money for it so get your stuff done. From my personal experince LE devs are in the “faster responce” bracked but there is still room to get better at it.

This would be a thing but mostly you’ll hear something like “This is an ongoing prcess and we always work on improving our product.” kind of politician talk. I need to go through stuff maybe I cann find the google doc of that game I can’t remember the name of that had a spread sheet of known bugs, prioritys and what was done. This was transparent and people were able to visit the sheet and search for bugs and if they were already reported. Good times.

There are some steps to this. Finding a bug? No problem. Testing arround to reproduce it? No problem. Use it again and agian and again. Big problem. So obviously noone is punished for reporting bugs and I don’t know why you are doing mentaly gymnastics to make a “Bug abusers should be punished” into this “But what about…?” section.

As I said somewhere above. I’m for transperency and everything that makes devs work faster on important stuff. I’m for clear boundry people can be pointed at and be told “Play stupid games, win stupid prices. You are banned.”.
I get everyones point who says that this “gamebreaking” stuff should be handled with secrecy so itwon’t spread but again, from my experience the devs and tester and players can’t keep up with the people who made exploiting systems their living.

From my point of view it’s fair game if everything is out in the open and punished if bugs are knowingly abused. People who want to mess arround and cheat and whatnot have an offline mode to have fun with and that’s completely fine.

12

PoE had the server reset dupe for years. It was public knowledge and everyone did it.
They didn’t fix it because most likely they didn’t know how to fix it. So you ended up with a bug that would have had very minimal impact in the game because barely anyone would even know it was there.
But it became public knowledge, so everyone did it. It didn’t make GGG fix it faster, because they didn’t know how to fix it at that point. It just made everyone exploit the bug instead.

Plenty of other examples exist where it’s actually detrimental to publicly announce them.

What if said persons weren’t bug abusers but simply stumbled upon the bug/exploit by mistake? If it wasn’t publicly available, they’d be one of half a dozen doing it, so their case might be reviewed more objectively and no ban is applied.
But if they stumble upon it by mistake after it’s been made public, then they’re just a “bug abuser” among a thousand and they’ll get banned along with everyone else.

It’s actually harmful to the ingame community. Let’s say you have a dupe. Half a dozen people have exploited it. A couple days later, the devs fixed it, deleted most of the duped stuff and banned the exploiters. The community has no idea anything went on, everything goes on as normal.

Now let’s say there was a dupe. Half a dozen people have exploited it. Then it becomes public. A few hundred more people are now exploiting it. A couple days later the issue is fixed, most of the duped stuff is deleted and abusers are banned.
However, now the community is in a panic because the market is “filled with dupes” even if it isn’t anymore. Economy crashes and no one can trade properly anymore. So they leave instead.
We actually see this happen every season with all the dupe threads going on, even when there’s no dupe.

So yes, publicly announcing dupes/exploits can actually be very harmful for the ingame community.
Nor is it fair. Because when something like this happens, the top 1% players are the ones least impacted by it.

Like I said above, this is an example of a dev that doesn’t know how to fix it. So instead of having a very obscure issue that affects very few people while they try to figure out how to solve this, you have a widespread issue that everyone is abusing (it’s a feature at that point).

And it didn’t make the dev fix it any faster. It just ruined the game for all the “legit” players that weren’t abusing things.

I don’t think you read what I wrote properly.

If only a dozen people are abusing it, you can definitely analyze each case and be fair about it.
If a few hundred (or thousand) are abusing it, then you either ban everyone indiscriminately or you ban no one at all, because you definitely won’t have time to review them individually and fairly.

The key point here is it being fair is they are knowingly abused and how do you make a distinction between those and the exploiters when you now have hundreds of cases to analyze, rather than half a dozen.

What usually happens is that nothing happens. Bug gets fixed, no one gets banned. We see this all the time in PoE. It even led to the motto between streamers of “Exploit hard, exploit fast”.
Do you think that’s fair?

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13

Yes, and that’s the crux of the issue.

You can only provide the information when the solution is around the corner. You cannot do it beforehand or this exact situation happens.

And especially given the reaction time of EHG… we would see weeks if not months of a mess rather then a immediate one-hour hotfix which at least disables the respective mechanic for a few days until it’s solved.

Our experiences seem to differ vastly there at least :stuck_out_tongue:

Yes, and that’s the crap which nobody wants.
‘There has been a dupe found, we know it exists and we’re working on fixing it. Currently it’s very limited in use-case but if we see it going up we’ll disable the mechanic. We’re working on providing a solution at the earliest possible time, this is our number one priority’ ← And that’s how the action behind the scenes should look like, aligning with something like that. I’m fully on your side with that.

Yep, and that’s sadly the biggest issue.
You either get potentially reputation damage for banning people which haven’t deserved it… plus having to revisit all those cases individually which all comes down to a massive extra workload and wasted resources… or you do nothing and it can cause severe damage to the product as people quit earlier, wrong information goes out, the market breaks apart because of rampant duping.

Both are awful situations for a company to happen, hence you try to avoid them in the first place. Not always is speaking up the best option, as little as we as customers like that, it’s a sort of ‘white lie’ to protect the integrity overall though and support the fairness for the community. Situations sadly aren’t all black&white always and sacrifices at very specific situations in very specific ways need to be taken as we simply have no better alternative available.

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Once? Twice in wonder what happend? A third or a forth time to reproduce it an report it? Throw away everything got this way and play normaly? No issues at all. You need to abuse something to abuse something… at least last time I heared.

Then the community will be in panic because the devs stay quiet. If they say “Well rip there was a bug and we clean the mess up. No worrys people who didn’t abuse the bugs will have no issues.” noone would be panic. Transperency helps you know.

Yeah and if it is possible to track everyone down who is using it it’s a win in my book. Just take the trash out.

Then you do something wrong. If you are in a place where you can’t handle the workload you need to hire. is there any reason why you make excuses for devs? To me it’s simple. If they can’t handle theh eat they should step out of the kitchen.
Right now mostly professionals have all the cards in their hands and bugabuse and dupe to their hearts content. Not every dupe is some obscure myth that is hard to solve, while some are for sure, but that’s no excuse either in my book. You created the problem, solve it.
For many people trading and economy is a big part why they play games and from my point of view it’s treated wrong. Then again I don’t say I’m right I just say I want more trasnperncy. I’m almost certain this will never happen because IF there was transperency devs could be hold accountable. Non the less it’s my view on the matter.

Case by case.

What exactly? to exploit hard and fast? Yeah exploiting is pretty fair if it isn’t bug abusing, aumotaion or whatever is prohbited by the ToS.

Yeah but that’s the crux to me. Not the error that was made or the oversight that lead to a bug. The period it stays in and the big fat nothing that happens after.

When it comes to dupes and realy bad issues they are rather fast. As I said I know games where nothing changed for seasons untill somone made issues public and after some backlash things were changed in a few days.

Why? That’s a self made problem. Let’s make a hypothetical example. LE devs mess up, there is a game breaking exploit and everyone and their grandma is using it. The problem was created by the LE devs and they are responsible to solve them fair and square.
It’s not a players problem if they have to little stuff because money is tight or if there are to little people for a task.
On top of it why are we talking about wasted ressources? There should be people for this, like people who take care about appeals and whatnot. Devs should work on the product and not on ban cases. If devs work on ban cases then this is a complete new can of worms.

So before we beat the dead horse even more. I get the viewpoints of everyone who want to be hush hush about bugs that are in the dupe or eceonomy breaking section… I REALY do. It’s just not my point of view because I like transperency so I can see if what I’m intrested in is worth my time or if I’m getting the minimal viable product.

15

That’s pretty much what happened in the 1.0 dupe and MG still crashed. Mike even said that people wildly overestimated the amount of duped gold still around and yet the market still responded with panic and it crashed.

Not everything is easily solvable and some things aren’t even solvable without a very drastic re-write of a lot of code.

It’s not making excuses for the devs, it’s knowing how programming works. Just because you have a bug doesn’t mean you immediately know how to solve it. Nor does it mean that said solution will be done in a small amount of time.

So when you have a situation where there’s a dupe/exploit and it can’t be fixed in an hour, what you want to do is minimize the damage that can have on the game. And making it public is the opposite of that.

It’s like having your car lock broken but you can’t fix it now because you have to take your kids to school and then you can’t skip work. You’ll only have time to have it fixed in the weekend.
If you stay quiet, most likely no one will even notice and you’ll be fine.
If you announce that your lock is broken and will be fixed in the weekend, so please no one rob you, most likely you won’t even have a car by then because someone stole it.

You can analyze case by case when you have half a dozen people doing it because it’s not known.
You can’t analyze it case by case when it’s thousands doing it because the information on how to do it is now public.

If you have thousands of cases of people doing it, you either ban everyone (even the ones that just did that by mistake once) or you don’t ban anyone (which is what always ends up happening).

All exploits are bug abuse. That’s why they’re exploits, otherwise they’re just strategies.

Farming beacons in crowded layouts and leaving before the objective is finished so you can farm the same echo over and over again and maximize your favour gain is a farming strategy.

Farming a chest in group play by opening it, leaving the area while your teammates stay there, then going back and it’s closed again so you open it again, that’s clearly a bug and therefore an exploit.

The term “exploit hard, exploit fast” doesn’t relate to efficient farming strategies. It relates to bugs in the game and abusing them before they get fixed.

And it came about because if hundreds or thousands of people do it, then it’s not possible to review cases individually. So the only real way to deal with that is fix the bug, try to delete exploited stuff and then do absolutely nothing to those that exploited it.

Because case reviewing takes time. You can only review so many cases in a single day, especially with sensitive issues like this.
And this is on top of all the other regular cases they already have to review daily.

So mass cases like this will always get treated with a “Everyone gets banned even if they didn’t abuse it” or with a “Noone gets banned”. Almost always the latter.
Which then leads to impunity in abusing exploits. A new one shows up and everyone abuses it because they know they won’t have any consequences. At most they’ll get some items deleted.

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Yeah what was said wasn’t reassuring at all. I was happy playing CoF because it looked like a complete shitshow on every end.

Why? I know games where P2P trade was deactivated because of a bug. Took them 1h to diasable a core function of the game. So either they had a clean well worked out code and it was easy to code, verify and upload or they were… lucky? Or whatever?

I know there are for example bugs in certain games you can run into if you use a mouse and a controller but I don’t go into further detail. Took them 1 month to solve because there was an oversight they missed. So looks like bad code to me and bad handeling of a bad situation.

Non the less they made their bed and they have to lay in it.

If there was a company selling protextion oftware but there was faulty code that make it vulnerable what do you think happens if found out? Only the gaming industry is getting away with half meassures and stuff that look like incompetence looking at it from the outside.

If I buy a car and It don’t start they can keep their junk and give me my money back. If something isn’t working it’s not a customers fault it’s the fault of the people who made the item. Sure you can use a fork as a hammer and tell people the fork is faulty because you can hammer in nails with it but that’s on you.

I announced once that my bike lock was broken and someone helped me out with a spare lock. As I said earlier. We can come up with silly examples all day long if it makes you feel better.

You can. I had a job where I went through hundreds of thousands of files while I had to collect all available informations in the files. It was realy boring and every file (case) had different informations on it. This was done by hand without any technical help, without boundrys, some was handwritten, some faded away typewriter ink, some were in the wrong place or put behind shelfs because it was written in the old letters of my language what was hell to read for me. The job was done case by case.

tbf i don’t know how much informations EHG for example is collecting in a session but they should easiely see if items duplicate or gold jumps from 123 to 123000000. If they are unable to track this then again it’s their bed, they made it and they have to lay in it.

Nah. We had some interactions in skill and they didn’t work as intended and they were left ingame and you were free to use them. People exploited stuff that was kept ingame knowing how shit it is looking at it from a balancing perspective.

Same goes for Ward for example. Ward was strong and everyone and their grandma exploited Ward builds. Still Ward wasn’t bugged.

You get something wrong here. Exploiting a weekness or an oversight is something different to something that is faulty or completely not intended. If a skill gives you 10x more ward as intended the skill still works as intended only the value is wrong. If a skill should give you 100 ward ward and you crash to dektop using it again and again something is buggy. Using a skill that offers 10x the reward is an exploit. Using a skill that that should give you 100 ward but instead gives you 100 gold is a bug. When you press said skill again and again you exploit a bug. If you press the skill once and think “WTF why do I get 100 gold instead of 100 Ward?” and you report it and don’t use the skill anymore you exploit nothing.

It’s a bug and it’s exploited in that example. Politicans exploit a lot of stuff all day long but this isn’t making their behaviour a bug.

Why not? You know what you look for, this makes it far easier. If what you are looking for is done repeatedly you can handle according to it. The beauty is you don’t even have to look into it deeply when it showes something was obviously done.

it’s like… a peraon in WoW is selling one Lilen cloth for 200000000 gold. This should be an imidiate red flag.

if people can’t distinguish A from B the people at work are the problem. Back to your example. Are people in the zone where the bug with the chest is happening? Are people afk there? Are people revisiting said zone again and again? Do people increase loot gains and gold? There are a lot of data points that can be narrowed down if you want to. The problem is if there are no data points in the first place because then noone can verify anything and a lot of false positives may happen and a lot ov people who exploit a bug get away without notice.

The problem is if I take LE as an example again. if there is an exploit that could be able to ruin the economy for eexample. The should stop the ability to list new items in the market and P2P trade or gifting.
Then they should solve the results of the bug abuse and then go back to normal. Sitting in a dark chamber trying to force a solution in a short time while people exploit stuff isn’t helping anyone.

What again is letting down down customers by a company that should know better that avoids accountability and their inability to do their job.

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Shutting down a mechanic isn’t the same thing as fixing it. And public announcements of dupes/exploits will cause the first more often than the second.

Basically you have 2 scenarios. Let’s assume the more common issue of one in trade:
1- The dupe/exploit isn’t publicly known. The devs are aware of it (either because they detected it or because someone reported it privately) and are working on fixing it. For a few days the dupe is still active, but only a few people are abusing it and it’s being monitored.
When the bug is fixed, the respective abusers are punished and the exploit is gone. Impact to the game is minimal and most people aren’t even aware something was going on.
2- The dupe/exploit becomes publicly known. More people start abusing it. It becomes harder to monitor. As an extreme, devs shut down the mechanic. In an extreme, they can even shut down trading entirely until it’s fixed.
So now half the players can’t actually play because trade is disabled until it’s fixed. Which could mean a day or two, or a week or two.
Impact to the game is huge, unnecessarily.

So, to go back to the first point you made:

It was a complete shitshow because it was made public. If it wasn’t it would have been fixed, no one would have been aware of anything happening at all and the market wouldn’t have crashed. MG players could have kept playing as MG with minimal impact.

Every protection software in the market has had several vulnerabilities already. What happened is that they patched it and everything kept going as normal.

Every software ever has vulnerabilities. It will always have vulnerabilities. Even a simple calculator will have vulnerabilities. That’s just the reality of how programming works.
And the more complex the software, the more vulnerabilities it will have.
Bugs are just a part of programming. It’s impossible not to have them, even on simpler software. Which is why no software ever was released without them.

You seem to have lost the thread on this argument. You said:

You can’t have an exploit without a bug. If it’s not a bug, then it’s not an exploit, it’s a gameplay strategy. After all, if there isn’t a bug, then it’s working as intended.
That doesn’t mean all bugs are exploits. Just that all exploits are bug abusing.

So you can’t ever have a situation where an exploit isn’t bug abusing.

How would you know? Do you think data gets saved for every single action in the game? That would generate data logs in the petabyte region.
It’s highly unlikely that porting into a zone is being logged (especially when you’re always doing that normally playing in a group, where the leader goes in the zone and then you join).
It’s highly unlikely that every chest being opened is being logged. It happens way too many times to keep track of it.

What you do keep track of are gold amounts (they’re going up in regular increments, so no flags there), item pickups (again, going up in regular increments, so no flags there), etc.

So in the case of this exploit, there isn’t even a way to keep track of who is doing it, whether they are abusing it or they just stumbled upon it once by accident.

So if you make it public, rather than have half a dozen people exploiting it and have minimal impact on the game, you now have thousands doing it with a huge impact on the game and it can’t even be tracked. You can’t delete stuff once you fixed it nor can you know who was abusing it.

Because the bottom line is that you can’t log everything that happens in the game. There isn’t enough storage capacity for that. So many exploits aren’t even loggable.

This is what I disagree with. You say you only care about the state of the community. And yet you propose that half the playerbase can’t actually play the game anymore.

If you don’t announce the exploit, the impact to the community is minimal as the majority of players won’t even know that something was going on.
If you announce it, then either it gets exploited to all hell until it’s fixed or you disable a fundamental mechanic in the game for a few days. Either way, for MG players (in this case) the game becomes unplayable.

And that seems like a net positive to you?

This is also where we disagree. Exploits/dupes existing isn’t an inability of devs doing their job. It’s an inevitability of programming.
PoE still has exploits fairly regularly and they’ve been working on the game very competently for over 10 years now.

Every single game that is released has exploits. Games that have continuous development like live service games will always have exploits/bugs as a consequence. It’s inevitable.

The only way for a game to not have exploits is to test and fix them for years. Meaning that seasons would happen once every 2 years. For non-live service games, it means you would release them after 20 years instead.
And even then there would still be exploits, because players are better at breaking games than devs are at making them.

So LE will have more exploits in the future. As will PoE. And D4. And every other single game ever. It’s inevitable. All you can do is try to minimize their impact on the community. And announcing them publicly isn’t doing that.

18

Shutting down a part of the game that nullified all benefits from abusing a bug is a rather small thing to do. Reinstating it after the aftermath of the bug abuse was solved without doing real dmg is quite a nice move in my book.

We basicly have two opposit oppinions here. Again… I get your point of view and I understand it but I don’t follow it. I have a different oppinion. No matter how many times we repeat each other and sound like a broken record nothing will change here.

I realy think you understand my point of view as well because everything you wrote at the present and in the past was logical and well funded. We are simply not on the same page here because i want transparency you want secrency… that’s it :slight_smile: .

It was a shitshow because it wasn’t clearly worded and left people with more questions then anything else.

I found that one out when I droped one. On top of it I found out they weren’t cheap.

Dafuq? Balance changes can be exploited. if something is OP people will exploit the shit out of it. Something working as intended, aka as not buggy, that is exploited as much as possible is as old as gaming. I don’t know if you ever played Warhammer Online the MMO. At one point you had a Knight of the Blazing Sun that was completely overpowered but working as intended and people exploited the state of the class that was not bugged. Same for the Slayer… completely bonkers and even far better then the mirror class and people exploited the crap out of the OP state.
The balancing was ass but nothing bugged. So people exploited game mechanics that were not buged but simply unbalanced.

Yes you can because a lot of stuff can be exploited. You can exploit game mechanics that aren’t bugged.

How would I know? I don’t know what the basics are devs are saving. I don#t know what they log and how often. That’s most likely up to devs and noone but them can tell. So how would you know? As far as I can tell you have triggers that need to be met to do something and if said triggers repeate you can see a pattern. On top of it there are logs for a lot of stuff like chat and drops. it’s rather easy to read them out aren’t they?

There are tons of games that log item aquisition. For example last Season in hero Siege a level 3 char on normal difficulty found an angelic item. That is not possible by any means so it was unintended for whatever reason and the person was banned in a few minutes. I think we can’t tell what devs are monitoring and how but it looks like devs keep logs of very many things.

Everything isn’t needed to be logged but there are certain things you can log that makes your day easier. If such logs aren’t kept for X ammount of time there can’t be any follow up on bug usage.

And if EVERYONE had to vote on it if they want an exploited market that is flooded with items resulted from bug abuse what do you think people vote for? Do nothing or keep the market closed for a few days untill the problem is solved? Everyone I know would rather have their progressed stoped for a few hours then giving an inch to bug abuseres.

They upgrade the game again and again and again and everything you add has a chance to add something exploitable.
There are most likely single player games out there that still have bugs in it because people don’t care about fixing them or not having found out yet. If there is ongoing evolvement the probabilitys are high that there are problems. I think there are ways to minimize such problems and with enough work the problems can be minimized. Heck I’m pretty sure devs of smaller games, or enough devs on bigger games, can fix bugs in their games BUT I although think this is unreasonable because it takes a lot of effort to do so and getting everything fixed will most likely not be cost efficent when you have to meet monetary goals.

19

That is not an exploit. That is simply optimizing your strategy/gameplay.,
Is everyone playing a bear beastmaster an exploiter? Should they all be banned?
In any game, some options will be stronger/better than others. That is a balance issue and isn’t an exploit.

Hell, by that metric, simply using a build guide is an exploit.

An exploit is using something that isn’t intended to work that way for benefits that shouldn’t happen. Basically, an exploit is a “crime”. The two words have become synonyms in the gaming community.

Item aquisition, sure. But in the case we described there isn’t anything wrong with item aquisition. They opened a chest, picked up a couple of very regular items. Nothing to flag there.
The issue was going back and opening the chest again. And picking another 2 items. Again, nothing to flag there. The items themselves were perfectly valid items that could have dropped from any chest.

Ok, but you’re taking an assumption that there are only 2 options when there are 3:
-Option 1: Say nothing, fix it quietly and fast and there are only half a dozen abusing it, so you can remove it easily. Or even if you don’t remove, the impact on the economy is minimal.
-Option 2: Announce it publicly and leave the mechanic running. Economy is destroyed and MG players have their season ruined, most likely leaving until next season. Impact on economy is huge.
-Option 3: Announce it publicly and disable trade. Economy is at a standstill and MG players can’t effectively play until this is fixed. So they either leave until it’s fixed (or probably until next season) or switch to CoF, likely also until next season. Impact on economy is still big.

Out of the 3 options, only one has the potential to have minimal impact on the players. And if everyone had to vote on them, I’d think most would actually pick option 1.

We actually see this in other games. When PoE has an exploit, they just fix it quick, remove stuff that was duped if possible and the only announcement you get is a patch note.

For most exploits the majority of players aren’t even aware it happened and they only find out it did when they read the patch notes. There is very low impact for the playerbase in these cases.

There are. Testing, basically. It’s probably why EHG is bringing CT back. The more you test, the more bugs you’ll catch before release.

But even then you’ll always have bugs/exploits. Just look at PoE. They have their own testers, and during the league you have a whole community playing the game normally. And yet a single person (jungroan) single handedly breaks the game several times every single league.

Since you don’t have time to test every single possible combination, you test for the most common ones. But he thinks of things and combinations that others would never consider, so it never gets tested.

Using the group play chest example, it’s highly unlikely it would have been detected during tests as well. And in this case it’s probably not even someone just thinking “what happens if I do this?”. It most likely happened by accident because someone went back to dump their inventory and went back and saw the chest was closed again.
These types of bugs will always happen, even with PTRs.

20

Yeah, but that’s more about ‘competence’ rather then lazyness here. Be it organisational or actively skill-wise.
EHG is reaction-wise as slow as a friggin turtle.
They have the curse of ‘big company’ by now and failed to traverse their methods over… heck… they weren’t quick when they were small either and it only got worse.

Yeah, but the issues are not carried by the company directly.
It ruins the experience of the players, not of the company. It ruins the company entirely with bad luck but it’s the players who suffer first and foremost.

It only sped up the happenings by a month or so, wasn’t even a serious issue.
It’s not the exploits and dupes, that’s the base setup of MG sadly.

But yeah, it had effects… will happen again as well, any miniscule issue breaks the already wobbly status there entirely.

Yeah, if the respective dev tools are available.

Which I very much doubt since if they had those in place properly then their development speed wouldn be magnitudes faster.

It’s not further aggravating the issue though.
Hence a viable first step.

Well, I played a grid-based game called ‘Tibia’ years ago. There was a time when you could train your ranged skill up by using snowballs… which were only available in winter and widely spread out. They had a decorative house sitting around though where there was a endless snowball pile… so you could go there, grab a bazillion snowballs and train your ranged skill for basically free as they weighted nigh nothing while all other options are either extremely heavy or one-time use and expensive.

That’s a exploit, but it’s not a bug.

Not for everything… but for most things there should be proper logs.

Zone usage, count of enemies per zone, min-max count, skill-usage of players, kill-counts… all such stuff should be fully available to the devs at all times.
Welcome to proper dev-tools, the more you have the more you can do and the cheaper it actually becomes when properly set up (hence those petabytes turning into gigabytes of readable outputs).

It is absolutely not.
Shutting down MG is for example a integral part of the game, it’s like saying to CoF ‘Yeah, now you got no extra loot drops, since we have a problem only base loot for you’.
How would that be?

Imagine a mechanic which resets when you exit the area. Now imagine that mechanic can still be stopped when it’s a moment before finishing, providing tons of loot on the way.
This is not a bug then, this is a oversight. Since it’s magnitudes and magnitudes beyond any reasonable scope of what is intended - oversight - it is hence a exploit very likely. Using the mechanic hence to reset it dozens of times just before finishing and getting 5-10 times as much loot as otherwise possible is in several games a banable offence.

PoE included by the way, just ask ‘Empyriangaming’, he and his team got banned twice by now for exploits based on mechanics as they’re intentionally using anything game-breaking.

A list of every item ID applied to the character. Hence suddenly a double ID shows up… since it’s dupes it should’ve the same, right?
If EHG hasn’t designed their ID system to attach a different ID to a normally duped item (like in LA) then they’re already beyond saving, that’s basics.
Whenever the system finds a duplicated ID it should at least notify immediately.

Yeah, how about a safety check for that mechanic then?
Ya know ‘got x openings, but now y happened which is larger… something’s off!’

Every mechanic should’ve such a thing implemented anyway for the devs, EHG runs a friggin live-service game and not a SP game where it’s unreasonable for sending information like that.

Proper automated background systems which don’t overreach but instead simply inform.

Would be a good start, take time to setup and has simply never been done in all their years.