With obvious exploits like #1 you listed, people should know the survey map goes away once you harvest the survey site. Trying it again to make sure of what happened is one thing, doing it over and over again to unfairly profit is another. But, this is an obvious exploit and should not be condoned, especially regarding the effect it can have on the economy.

With gear sets or game mechanics that give unintentional buffs far above what is expected, while it is cricket to not use the gear set to your advantage, I find these types of exploits less egregious. For one, not everyone has farmed the set of gear, and two, it might be counterable if someone has a chance to figure out how. This does not meant that ZOS should not hot fix it or address it in a patch, but I don't see it as some thing that warrants account action. Maybe a reduction of AP earned if there is evidence that someone used this to great advantage (went from 0 to the top of the leaderboards in a short period of time for example)

wayfarerx wrote: »

Nestor wrote: »

Trying it again to make sure of what happened is one thing, doing it over and over again to unfairly profit is another.

This pretty much sums up my thoughts on the issue. There are bugs, if you stumble across one and /bug it, no harm no foul. If you immediately use it to take over the vMA leaderboards or get Emperor you are an exploiter and deserve a ban.

Seems like it would be tough to give up this kind of power once you discovered it.

You're personally accountable for your own actions, whether there's a 5,000 page technical reference explaining everything or not. The comfortable anonymity of the Internet crosses over into the game, making people think they can get away with stuff when nobody's looking. But somebody's always watching. There's no way to clean up your data trail on the client side.

If it feels odd, manipulative, deceitful, dishonest, or just plain wrong, don't do it until you obtain an official statement on it. If a customer service representative tells you in an email that it's perfectly all right to gap close into keeps, at least you have a document to counter with when the ban hammer comes knocking.

I don't think you mean semantics at all. I think you mean euphemism. It's euphemism that turns a thief into a goods acquisition and redistribution specialist and a murderer into population control supervisor.

Traditionally using an "exploit" is pretty much a whole order below full on cheating...
usually involving a bug or an unexpected result & always with the possibility that the Devs will close the hole & your naughty fun will be over.

The cheat engine stuff is pure evil & sneaks behind the code to change your base stats, most noticeably to the rest of us on the generation of ultimate, & happily those caught using it will be Banned & ISP Murdered.

The leaping onto walls or dragging people down from them all depends on what is going on, in situations like you describe...
leaping up there to mix it up or get yourself killed whichever comes first, THAT is working as intended!
But when they are using that to ignore whole battle mechanics and steal keeps or scrolls, its the "using an exploit to CHEAT"

Thrird party programs and bots are obviously cheating. Using the game world you're provided to your advantage has a wide range of grey.

First you have bugs, something is broken and a fix is coming. Second you have bad coding. Gap closers allowing you to follow an enemy through a keep door, or that pig or resource node that respawns almost instantly. Or banking a survey with your personal banker. Last, we have poor design or game limitations. Things like troll camps, spies running a scroll to their friends in another alliance.

Some of these you can do by accident. You might not know a resorce spawning every minute should actually take two. Lets assume you know it's broken, what you can prove about another player's intention is a different discussion.

Suppose I find a quick way to get lots of upgrade mats, but only keep them for personal use? What if I sell them, but I only have 1 guild store and 30 slots I can check once a day? What if I belong to 5 trade guilds, but sell at market price, and never undercut? What if I do undercut? What if I stand in the center of the market in Rawl'ka and just give them out for free?

Where do I cross the line, and at what point do I harm the game? I guess by definition, anything you use to your advantage that you can reasonablely assume is not intended is exploiting. Players are always going to seek out the most efficient path, that's just nature. Some would be of the school of thought then that if it's in the game, it's fair to use. It's up to the devs to fix it if it's not intended. Personally, I think we the player have some responsibility, not all, to put limits on ourselves. Otherwise we can ruin the game for everyone. So maybe it's a matter of whose responsiblity it is. By my own criteria I myself have exploited, purifying projectiles. But purifying ritual was also a bread and butter skill for templars at the time, not really an option to unslot it. On the otherhand, why would I bank a survey once I find the spot? Stuff like this risks ruining things, either the economy or the drop rates when how surveys work get patched.

FortheloveofKrist wrote: »

So to play a little devil's advocate....

I've noticed that Char (district boss in IC) gets stuck in Temple district and he just sits there. One person (especially range) can solo him without ever getting hit and thereby pocket between 3-5k Tel Var as a result. I have done it several times.

It's a bug, a rather benign one, but a bug nonetheless. And players can gain more Tel Var than they would normally from soloing it.

Would that be considered exploitation? Considering most of the responses here, It seems like it would be considered an exploit. So should players just hold back and realize they should play with honor and leave Char be?

If you find the guy stuck and think "Hey, cool, I'm gonna take this guy out." and do so, once, I personally don't find that to be a big deal.

If you organize a nightly raid to bug this guy out and farm TV then you are an exploiter and deserve a ban.

Intent is a big factor in these kinds of things in addition to how it affects other players. While there is a big grey area in between my two examples I don't think it's too much to expect players to err on the side of decency.

Acrolas wrote: »

I don't think you mean semantics at all. I think you mean euphemism. It's euphemism that turns a thief into a goods acquisition and redistribution specialist and a murderer into population control supervisor.

I definitely mean semantics. It could be discussed as an issue of formal, conceptual, or even lexical semantics. Perhaps you are referring to semiotics.

Perhaps your definition of semantics is different than mine. But now we are talking semantics.

So it seems that the collusion between players of opposing factions is really what is exploitative about gap closing onto keeps.

Which is interesting, because I see players from opposing factions collude in all kinds of ways in IC. Why aren't these people banned or given a warning?

FortheloveofKrist wrote: »

Having played this game on PC and then console, both for embarrassing amounts of time, I would like to start and open discussion about the issue of exploitation and how it is (or should be) defined.

In my opinion, people who use Cheat Engine (and I'm not even exactly sure what it is) seem to be clearly cheating. However, recent issues--particularly the banker debacle, gap closing onto platforms, and the salvation set--seem to be blurring the definition of "exploitation."

Here is my starting point: I find it difficult to believe the definition of cheating and exploitation would include a player noticing an issue and then using the mistake to their advantage. I'll preface by saying I do not cheat. I'm either too stupid, too lazy, or both. BUT, I can also say that I could see myself using one of the above exploits without even considering it an exploit if I had discovered it on my own before the problem was fixed. Let's take each of the above examples:

1. Personal Banker/Writs: I could see someone discovering this and thinking, "Oh, wow. The writ didn't go away after I harvested... I wonder if I could use it again?" Let's use a hypothetical. What if you discovered that whenever you refined ore just after deconstructed something, you always received a gold temper (humor me on this one). It's just a programming bug and it is not intended to be that way. And after noticing it worked 95% of the time, you started doing this every time. Clearly you 1) know about it and 2) are using it to your advantage. But would this be considered exploitation? A mistake in the programming? And how many people would notice the correlation and then just say to themselves "No, that wasn't intended, I'm just going to go back to deconning the right way."
2. Salvation Set: Again, what person would not use this set if they saw the weapon damage buff? And how does that constitute "exploitation" when all you did was put on the set and think "Holy ****! I'm gonna clean up with this set!" Let use another hypothetical example: When if the Elegant set's 20% buff to light and heavy attacks was not supposed to apply to Overload (Sorc ultimate), but it mistakenly did. Would you be an exploiter if you purchased the set thinking it would be great to use with Overload? How would you reasonably assume it was unintended? And why are we, the players, being punished for not making that "reasonable" assumption?
3. Gap closing onto keeps: This is the one I really don't understand. And I know I could have used this without knowing it was an exploit, because one day (hold on to your pitchforks) I actually used leap to get to a guy on a keep wall. It was in a huge zerg battle, and I'm not very good, so I subsequently received a brutal ***-whooping once I got up there. But I thought of it on my own and even wondered if it would work. Unfortunately I spend too much time on the forums and saw the discussion about the "exploit" and realized it wasn't allowed. Granted, the people exploiting this mechanic were supposedly engaging in some very planned out schemes (friends helping and positioning, etc.). But the line seems a little grey, especially since I would have used that tactic again and again if I never found out it was considered a cheat. Not to mention, I use a Stamblade quite a bit in IC, and I have a hobby (obsession?) with climbing up high on structures and perching myself with a bow for passers by. Multiple times enemy players have used Leap or Crit Rush to jump up to my spot and ... you guessed it... whoop my ***. Now how is leaping onto a keep wall considered an exploit, while leaping up to my position on a random building is not?

It would be nice to see a civil discussion about what constitutes exploitation (above and beyond TESO's definition). And since these grey areas are popping up nearly every other time there is a patch, I'd ask that the mods keep this discussion separate from the cheating and exploits thread, which is too broad and convoluted to carry on a pointed discussion.

Thoughts?

The TOS that you, I, and every other person who plays this game signed is not NEARLY as "gray" as you make things out to be. This isn't your game or your rules. It's ZOS's, and they're quite clear about not exploiting bugs and broken game mechanics for personal gain and increased power within the game.

FortheloveofKrist wrote: »

So it seems that the collusion between players of opposing factions is really what is exploitative about gap closing onto keeps.

Which is interesting, because I see players from opposing factions collude in all kinds of ways in IC. Why aren't these people banned or given a warning?

No, no it is not. It's bypassing the game mechanics of taking down a wall. Stop trying to make this rather black and white issue "gray" to suit your own theories.

Bouldercleave wrote: »

FortheloveofKrist wrote: »

I find it difficult to believe the definition of cheating and exploitation would include a player noticing an issue and then using the mistake to their advantage.

Actually - it is the exact definition of exploitation...

"the use of a situation in a way that is wrong, in order to get some benefit for yourself" Straight out of the Dictionary.

You can spin it any way you want to justify the fact that you are cheating, but it doesn't change the one fact - YOU ARE CHEATING.

Pomaikai wrote: »

FortheloveofKrist wrote: »

So it seems that the collusion between players of opposing factions is really what is exploitative about gap closing onto keeps.

Which is interesting, because I see players from opposing factions collude in all kinds of ways in IC. Why aren't these people banned or given a warning?

No, no it is not. It's bypassing the game mechanics of taking down a wall. Stop trying to make this rather black and white issue "gray" to suit your own theories.

I'm sorry, but this is a discussion, not an indictment @Bouldercleave and @Pomaikai. So would you like to share with me exactly when I have ever cheated? Because I would be interested, since I never have.

The only person who seems to be breaking any rules here is you two: trying to derail a pertinent discussion by making antagonistic comments with no relevance to the actual discussion.

And to put the discourse back on track, the issue is a "gray" one, even given the rules spelled out in the TOS.

I'm going to assume neither of you actually read the entire OP, since there are examples clearly spelled out there.