Well, I guess we will just have to disagree, which is fine.
Yea, but now you’re on the side of the bad guys.
Right, because playing the game as intended makes me a bad guy. What an idiotic thing to say.
Those aren’t the only two possible stances, but if pushed, I’d disagree with you and fall into the former category.
It’s not that I think exploiting a broken game mechanic isn’t “wrong”, but it’s wrong in a very vaguely defined sense of playing the game in a way it wasn’t intended. The problem is I don’t see a good way to establish a framework for responding to that in any way other than for devs to work to fix the exploit.
Actual data hacks or bots or whatever offer a clearer demarcation and as such you can both clearly prohibit them in advance of specific implementations (i.e. your TOS can forbid bots before someone actually creates them) and then punish more severely.
Finding ways the game is broken and taking advantage of them is too open ended to forbid and clearly establish consequences for in a fair way in advance, especially when the consequences are as severe as full permabans. How are you going to clearly draw a line everyone will agree on and be aware of when so many of these exploits are very natural reactions to the impulse to play more efficiently? It’s a motivation games encourage: get this loot/ability/whatever so you can X faster and better and get more loot. “Wait wait wait, you should’ve known we didn’t want you to try that hard to play smarter!”
There will inevitably be some severe exploits and it’s easy to take a very “I’ll know it when I see it” approach to deciding that someone is doing something so malicious that they clearly “deserve” a ban, but I think you still have to let that slide and that’s just the cost of providing this kind of GaaS. Those bugs should constitute an emergency for the developers—and certainly fair responses could be emergency measure in the game of disabling features or something until they can be fixed. The developers are under no obligation to allow exploits to continue, even if stopping them means reducing some other functionality in game or nerfing something. But they shouldn’t constitute grounds for severe punitive measures against the players.
Timex
2068
Ignoring the fact that they may add some kind of competition into the game in the future, which would make exploits a problem, there’s also the idea that they sell cosmetics and stuff. Those things can either be acquired by grinding, or purchasing premium currency.
If you exploit bugs to get loot, it may short circuit some of that.
I understand why that’s a strong motivation for devs or publishers to go after people exploiting bugs in the game, but I don’t think it’s a justification.
Well, I mean, if you want a technical reason, they are in violation of the EULA. That’s a justification. Not a great one, necessarily, but it is one. They don’t really need more than that.
I’m on my phone so forgive me being lazy but what’s the language like in a EULA that forbids this? My concern is that it’s not going to be clear and that it will basically be “if we say you’re cheating, you’re cheating”. Which could very well be I a EULA, but then it just means I think their incorrect approach to this situation has been codified as incorrect, so good for them.
Not sure Anthem has a specific Eula…can’t find one, but from EAs generic terms of service at a glance:
You are responsible for your UGC. [me: ugc is user-generated content]You may not upload UGC that infringes a third party’s intellectual property rights or that violates the law, this Agreement or a third party’s right of privacy or right of publicity.
- Use exploits, cheats, undocumented features, design errors or problems in an EA Service.
I mean, yeah, they could presumably use this as an excuse for damn near anything. Reminds me of when Blizzard banned someone for falling through the world and put up video of an area they weren’t supposed to be able to access (I THINK this was WoW…could be misremembering)
Everything is an undocumented feature in that game.
Exploits need to be quickly and publicly addressed and purposefully exploiting a bug must have consequences in a multiplayer game. It’s one thing if you do it a couple of times for yourself messing around, but exploiting for hours on end while streaming is particularly egregious.
Now whether permabanning effectively disincentivizes recidivism in a game with significant progression is another question. From Blizzard’s metrics, it doesn’t. That’s why they don’t permaban anymore.
rei
2076
Re: Anthem instability on PC, it’s weird. My freezing of the game only occurs in private expeditions. I tried experimenting with audio/graphic settings (fullscreen, windowed, borderless) and it happens regardless of what those were set at. But never in public expeditions. When it freezes I have to close it from the taskbar AND end the Anthem.exe process in Task Manager. One can tell if the process still hasn’t closed if the “play” button in Origin doesn’t become selectable again.
Also, half the time Anthem exits/quits it doesn’t close properly so I have to end the process as well. This seems to be reported by other people as well.
After I switched to Borderless I haven’t had any freezes. I’ve only played in private expeditions. I actively dislike the nagging the game has for setting expeditions to open, and that the game defaults to open. FFS, I know what I am doing – stop nagging me!
I got dropped to “desktop” (this is Xbox) earlier today, so I still run into bizarre bugs now and then. But that was at the end of nearly two hours of playing, so I probably needed to stop anyway. Thanks Obama!
rei
2080
In the same game session, it appears to not nag after the first ‘are you sure’ but every time you intentionally switch to public (to do a raid or whatever) and back, it will nag again on the next time you go private.
Ah, good. I’ve only played a single expedition at the time, and had to restart the expedition after it froze.
I would really love a “don’t show me this again” checkbox there.
The current public/private setting should be visible on the mission select screen and changeable with one click. And with no nag screen.
