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The Shroud: Under Construction (Exploits!)
mindspat
Member Posts: 1,367
Are exploits part of the gameplay or should they be bannable offenses?
Let me summarize:
There's a raid in DDO known as "The Shroud" which has 5 parts. At the end of each part you get a few treasure chests and you get increasingly more powerful material componets used to make items as you progress. Upon Completion of this Raid, as with all raids in DDO, character's are placed on a 3 day timer.
In all regards if a party fails in any part of the Raid they are done, through, kaput and required to try again from the start. There's a spell which was allowing players to knowingly fail part 4 of this raid and go straight to part 5, which is not supposed to be possible. What this did is gave those players who exploited a bug the ability to gain the treasure chests, and materials, from the end boss fight as they would with a normal completion although due to purposely skipping the otherwise required part 4 the quest does not recognise it as a completion.
So,
The Raid has been temorarily closed and is under construction. This raid is viewed as being the most worthwhile one to run based on looting materials (what the explot expedited) used to make some great items. The crafting Altars that are purposely absent in part 4 requires players to defeat part 5 inorder to create the highest tier affect on thier special items.
If you were The division that delt with players who exploit, how would you view and address an issue like this?
Comments
That's a tough one because someone is going to claim "I didn't know".
I would take away the items and issue a warning.
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I would have disabled the spell - Death Pact - it's new anyway and it isn't even from a core rulebook.
I understand Turbine has to have downtimes to change the spell lists.. so and alternative would have been to nuke the special compoenent for that spell in inventories and remove it from vendors.. not sure if they are set up to do that on the fly either.
The first time they catch them they should issue warnings and remove any ill gotten loot if they can track it. If the same people do it again then it is time for the bans.
Basically whatever Turbine does they would be flamed for doing it.
Damn if you do, damn if you don't.
When you continually put in things that break other parts of the game you will get flamed. Turbine has a bad habit of closing the quests that are broken in favor of players and waiting as long as possible to fix the ones that are broken making them harder or impossible for players. If they reacted the same to all broken content they probably would not get flamed as bad as they do. It is the way they deal with things that earns them the players ire.
If it were me, and i told you once that it was an exploit, and you were caught doing it after that, i'd ban you and the person next to you.
That's just me, i've always been nasty when it comes to this kind of stuff, real world or no.
R
I accidently did this. Well not the whole exploit, but the dethpact part. I buffed myself and went into part 4. And died. To my surprise I was in Part five! THis was my third Shroud ever and I didn't know there was a penalty box. I raised myself and immediantly died.
Anyways, my teammates finished part 4 and we got completon without my accidental Death pact. I asked some friends a few days later and found out one was angry cuz someone did that and they didn't get completion (ie FO after the chests)
We wondered if it would work on the Reaver, So I tried that out. Yeah. It's an exploit, but not enought to be a problem in Reaver. You still have to finish the quest.
I would be angry if they removed the spell. Those spell components are expensive!! With 8 clerics...
Anyways, I reported it to Turbine. I didn't know it was so wide soread, and only had an inkling of the griefing. I put a sticky on my desk that said "NO DEATH PACT in Shroud or Reaver," and called it good. But I found (and accused) of taking the moral high ground. I didn't thingk they would close the Shroud over it.
I think we will find that Death Pact will not work in penatly box quests come next week.
Yes, I am a gamer girl.
Dungeons and Dragons Online: April 2006
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I also play Star Trek Online and LotRO, on occasion.
Can you name some of the historical additions that broke the game or allowed exploits?
I agree, there's an absence of percieved diligence when it comes down to certain "issues" with quests that seem nigh but impossible to complete. The only one I can give as an example is The Abbot although this is doable if you use certain unforseen tactics; ie, summon undead, break enchantment, flesh to stone.
Can you name some of the historical additions that broke the game or allowed exploits?
I agree, there's an absence of percieved diligence when it comes down to certain "issues" with quests that seem nigh but impossible to complete. The only one I can give as an example is The Abbot although this is doable if you use certain unforseen tactics; ie, summon undead, break enchantment, flesh to stone.
It has been so long I can not recall the quest name but I can recall the exploit. They had just added a quest that had you go in and kill Whisperdoom that included collecting a cup a banner and something else and they were turn ins for some top notch items. They had a couple of spawn points each and the banner was reachable sometimes without any fights just run in and run our. Of course that was closed once people figured it out.
But the quest where you had to go and kill a few named and collect shards to eventually open a portal and kill a fire giant general was bugged for about a year and would sometimes become uncompletable due to a bug in the teleporter and the GMs would say sorry you have to try the quest again.
That is the Turbine way, when the bug helps the players close the quest. When the bug screws the players keep it open.
It has been this feeling of Devs VS Players instead of working together to make a better game that has kept me from ever going back to a game that really was a lot of fun.
I would handle it by getting rid of all raids and raid loot.
Its a frigging plague.
It has been so long I can not recall the quest name but I can recall the exploit. They had just added a quest that had you go in and kill Whisperdoom that included collecting a cup a banner and something else and they were turn ins for some top notch items. They had a couple of spawn points each and the banner was reachable sometimes without any fights just run in and run our. Of course that was closed once people figured it out.
But the quest where you had to go and kill a few named and collect shards to eventually open a portal and kill a fire giant general was bugged for about a year and would sometimes become uncompletable due to a bug in the teleporter and the GMs would say sorry you have to try the quest again.
I might not have been playing when those issues were present. I quit a month after the game launched (it's become good) and game back a week or two before Module 4 went live.
Only annoying thing I can think of that was troublesome and persisted a lot longer then it should have was Broken Ladders. Took them some time to get around to fix them and I can't recall the last time I had an issue with one. Wait, another issue is "Out of Range" when casting an AoE spell at your feet. This last one annoys the hell out of me more then anything else.
It has been so long I can not recall the quest name but I can recall the exploit. They had just added a quest that had you go in and kill Whisperdoom that included collecting a cup a banner and something else and they were turn ins for some top notch items. They had a couple of spawn points each and the banner was reachable sometimes without any fights just run in and run our. Of course that was closed once people figured it out.
But the quest where you had to go and kill a few named and collect shards to eventually open a portal and kill a fire giant general was bugged for about a year and would sometimes become uncompletable due to a bug in the teleporter and the GMs would say sorry you have to try the quest again.
I might not have been playing when those issues were present. I quit a month after the game launched (it's become good) and game back a week or two before Module 4 went live.
Only annoying thing I can think of that was troublesome and persisted a lot longer then it should have was Broken Ladders. Took them some time to get around to fix them and I can't recall the last time I had an issue with one. Wait, another issue is "Out of Range" when casting an AoE spell at your feet. This last one annoys the hell out of me more then anything else.
Yeah your time of not playing probably covered both of those issues. If I remember the time lines correctly.
Same quest with the fire giant general had other issues. There was a named minotaur (Helios I think) as one of the last guys you killed to get to a shard. You used to be able to get on a ledge and range him and he could not get there(bad AI). Instead of giving him a skill or the ability to get there they just removed the ledge. Sometimes it is ok to reward players for using terrain to their advantage and still give the MOB a way to get them. To me removing the ledge was the simple "how dare the players do this" response. My opinion is Turbine reacts to players out thinking them by removing what the players did instead of making the game better and giving MOBs a way to respond to such things.
Have you done the Titan? There was a time a group used grease to knock down the Titan. Turbine then made him immune to that. To me a big plodding machine like that should be able to be greased. It showed some players were using their brains and instead of celebrating it Turbine reacted with a bit of annoyance.
DDO would be so much better if the devs took these issues and learned to build a better game from them instead of reacting like they need to get the players back for these things.
Yeah, I hear you. Kind of the pits that the Dev's have a situation where they have to spend who knows how many hours to rewrite the AI or spend several minutes modifying the world assets. The obvious fault is why not add a ramp for the Mob to get to the players rather then take the ledge away all togther, but maybe the issue was much more of a time consuming rewrite that was needed to fix what was really happening. As players, we can only guess.
I think the Titan was already "fixed" when I first heard of it. There's a user on these forums who's been pretty upset over those changes in the past. Their main gripe was that his Trip Spec'd fighter was nerf'd when Turbine made the Titan immune to trips. How I see it - The Titan would squish anything under its feet and would have anti-slip-doohickies on it's boots.
Either way, I'm sure it was fun to grease and trip it while it lasted which is the point. It was fun for players and removing anything percieved as such, regardless of what's acceptable or not, is going to have a negative reaction.
I feel as if they're getting better, but they should really look at creating content which provides alternate features that actually facilitate these types of actions. Such as, why not make a quest where using deathpack actually places the party in a seperate Optional location of a quest, or buttons and levers could be used which would detract the Titans Anti Slip spikeydoohickies?