Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-50.139.165.174-20131214201932/@comment-9890645-20131217223117

Ranoake wrote:

Actually no, you are making an arbitrary distinction between logging out and not logging out. One is an exploit, and one is not? If both take advantage of a bug, how is only one an exploit? An exploit does not require any fancy extra behavior, only the knowledge that you are gaining something unintended, even, or especially, if you are just doing the same thing as before. Both cases are, by definition, an exploit. In this case though, people can't claim they were just doing what they usually do, when did you ever get 100+ streaks with no cubes and no increase in difficulty? When someone can prove that then I can admit they did nothing different, not that that is an excuse even. Here's the thing.

Players were playing with the code Mobage distributed. Did they intend for the code to work that way? NO... But, as we've seen a million times before, these episodes are shipped out pretty much untested except for their most basic functions. And players can do nothing but play with the code Mobage has given them. As long as the player is not altering game files (as the cheaters I called for more punishment on were doing), he is playing with the code that he was given and should make no assumptions on whether or not something was intended.

If he tests the waters and tries to find their loophole, he can report it... But there's zero incentive to not use it, nor is there incentive to not share it. As the code fix may or may not come quickly - but most likely won't - there is no reason not to utilize any advantages in the code you were given while you can. Especially given that, most times, these bugs stymie players' ability to progress in the rankings, and those bugs are often the last ones fixed.

Consider the first PVP episode. For five days, the critical hits were brutal, and no one was sure it would be fixed, and a lot of players burned resources competing for tier 1 that players who conserved resources for the last day were able to massively capitalize on that. There's very little difference here, other than capitalizing here required an extra hurdle to jump through that may not have been apparent to all players. However, that's a perception and experimentation issue. Honestly, were I playing this episode, I would think that a "no opponents" message WAS the bug, and would explore all possible options at circumventing that which I saw as preventing my progress. If I find nothing, so be it. But if I can defeat that which I see as a bug in the episode at startup that hinders me - and, given TFL's past, is all too common and easy to assume - I sure as hell will, and I will make the most of it.

Why is that cheating? If anything, it's only cheating after the fix is in and the episode is working as intended... AND you have to alter code to accomplish it. Otherwise, it's another programmer error and not my, or any of our, responsibility.