devtrackers.gg
Hey folks - I understand the frustration here and appreciate the desire to see something done.
On the other hand, this sub is currently skating over witch-hunting territory, so I do want to point out that such topics need to be dealt with carefully and with consideration.
While I will take the time to look into this, I won't be putting anyone on public trial. Especially considering that I count at least one outraged person (not an ambassador in this thread who is equally guilty of using "unorthodox" methods to get ahead in the game.)
I will be discussing the matter with Laserbolt as well as checking internal tools to understand what, if any, inappropriate conduct has gone on.
I handed the ambassador group back to our content creator manager team a while ago, so I don't normally deal with issues such as membership or applications myself, though I do offer input and recommendations where required. This will likely be one of those times again.
First things first. There are of course a bunch of big no-no's including but not limited to:
With that aside, there is a philosophical question to consider regarding acceptable conduct for an ambassador.
Definition of "Exploit" to base the following discussion on: Anything that requires you to end a play session, such as returning to lobby, changing characters or closing your game, to achieve a specific result. Anything that requires you to manually tune a setting external to the game is also an exploit. Anything where you are forcing the game-state into a certain behaviour that you know is not intended.
Let's say for the sake of argument, that Laserbolt acquired items such as this particular Torment & Agony through in-game exploits that he was aware of. That no- third party tools were used, but this Torment and Agony is the result of a whole bunch of manually crashing/force-closing the game at awkward moments to end up with something unusual. Sounds familiar...
How does that change the general opinion? Would it suddenly be okay? Or would it still be unacceptable in your eyes?
Before you answer, consider every single content creator that has ever posted a video that contains any of these phrases "DO THIS BEFORE IT'S PATCHED" "CRAZY FAST ??? GLITCH" "GET ALL GEAR ITEMS IN AN HOUR".
Most, if not all, of those videos will be highlighting an exploit and explaining how to take advantage of it. And each time, the content creator full well knows that what they are advertising is an exploit, but they choose to publish the content anyway.
Off the top of my head, here is a list of known exploits that were promoted by multiple creators or ambassadors, including those of good standing:
Such exploits all have the same effect - they allow players to skip content. This is done by either skipping levels or cutting short time, such as by almost instantly providing players with items/content that would otherwise only be available through a longer RNG Grind.
How do we as SE and PCF feel about such videos? ~~Annoyed AF We're of course not happy about them and we aim to address the root cause of an exploit when possible, should closing the exploit not unnecessarily punish legit players.
However, it is an unfortunate fact that such exploits exist. It's also a fact that someone will create guides and content to showcase those exploits.
So, if we were to actively forced all existing ambassadors to refrain from posting about such content, we would be punishing their content-pipeline and they might even end up being disadvantaged because of their ambassador-status.
In short:
Does the above mean that we just shrug our shoulders and ignore ambassadors posting exploits? Not at all.
Truthfully, I make mental notes of which ambassadors show a certain strength of character to build the bulk of their videos or streams around legit content compared to which creators tend to flock all too quickly to the latest exploit. Such behaviour trends are then also weighed up not just against a content creators standing in the community, but also what kind of insights and value they can offer us.
For example, certain Ambassadors provided very constructive feedback during the Worldslayer Beta's and ALOT of that feedback worked its way into the launch day build, and I would be happy to get such players back into early access content in future.
All this is to say that while there is a broad group of content creators in the Ambassador Group, we do still choose who to continue to engage with and who may get first dibs on opportunities. I also personally choose which content creators to spend more or less time chatting with and listening to based on the above judgements.
Where creators consistently fail to live up to conduct expectations, we do also consider removing them from the program, but we have to be fair and equal with such decisions.
Wrapping up (thanks for reading this far!), I'll be working with the Content Creator team as well as our analytics team to investigate the matter raised in this thread. The outcome of that investigation is something we'll be carefully considering, but the results of it will likely be mainly conveyed privately to individuals involved and the wider ambassador group may also receive a clarification of expectations if required.
PS: Thanks for the extra tag to ensure my awareness /u/NiceguyLucifer.
PSS: Saints alive this became overly long. Sorry for the waffle, I blame my brain, which is currently melting in today's heat.
Your definition of an "exploit" is ... interesting. Returning to lobby is in the same list as using external cheat-tools? Well, I should just give up and directly use trainers and stuff. Would not change anything as nearly all of us are already cheaters (anyone here, who never returned to lobby in the trials?).
But besides that: What about fixing your terrible design decisions (like loot-tables resulting in 99,9% of the loot being crap, terrible drop-rates of APOC gear, the most terrible and pointless grind in the newer gaming history or frustrating "targeted loot" areas (like one single item from the targeted loot in (purple) APOC quality as "reward")? I guess the amount of "cheaters" would drop drastically. And by the way: Fix the static, repetitive trials by adding some randomness in the mobs spawns or else. Thanks.
Returning to lobby is in the same list as using external cheat-tools?
Not at all. Nowhere did I equate those two. None of the exploits I mentioned require external tools. They can all be done within the game or on your PC/Console without third-party tools.
If you're confused about this part of the definition...
Anything that requires you to manually tune a setting external to the game is also an exploit.
That refers to this exploit:
Reset your PC clock to refresh Vendor's Special Offer Exploit
Resetting your PC Clock is as simple as changing the time on your PC. No third party tool required.
Anything that requires a third party tool, such as a trainer, is very obviously a cheat, not an exploit.
Great post, well written, but also fundamentally wrong on one important point.
There is a world of different between an exploit (an unintended result from pre-existing ingame interactions) and an external modification.
Exploits are essentially things the Dev and QA team missed, and thats not intended as an insult. Corner cases exist in every implementation.
Third part tools modifying game code are a whole other ballgame because there is no world in which a dev or QA team could have caught that.
Philosophically it would serve the PCF team well to make that distinction and treat exploits vs third party modifications as different things.
I.e.: fix your end game loop instead of placing 50%+ of your playerbase who reset the final boss fight in TG into the same basket as someone who externally modified game files. If I wasn't the type to try to give someone the benefit of the doubt I would be rather offended by the implication you just made.
I've cleared up confusion regarding the definition here.
We have never planned to actively punish people who use exploits. As you say, they are things we missed rather than malicious changes to the game code.
We may choose to address exploits since they are unintended, but people who take advantage of them have never been punished.
There are multiple examples of us acting in this matter over the game's lifecycle.
Addressing an Exploit and Punishing people for using it are not the same thing.
Thanks for the update.
Those are all great reasonable points , but ...
There is a huge difference between getting loot, XP , progress in game because parts of the game are broken , and getting them with a 3rd party tool while creating content claiming they never used 3rd party tools.
Also , there is a huge difference between random players using any kind of cheats/exploits and even creating content around it, and an official Ambasador doing the same thing.
I've cleared up confusion regarding the definition here.
No where did I equate Exploits to Third-party Tools.
I even specifically called out Third party tools separately to make that distinction clear.
There are of course a bunch of big no-no's including but not limited to:
Anyone caught using third-party programs (Cheats) will be expelled from the ambassador group (as has happened in the past).
Off the top of my head, here is a list of known exploits that were promoted by multiple creators or ambassadors, including those of good standing:
Reset your PC clock to refresh Vendor's Special Offer Exploit
Force-Close Game to Refresh Quest Rewards Exploit
Earthborn Gear God-roll Exploit
Force-Close on Crafting Exploit
Skip a new character to Endgame & Tiago to exploit resource scaling
Apocalypse Tiers Leveling Exploit
Final Arbiter Retries Exploit (yes, it's an exploit)
Boulderdash Exploit
There's one underlying thing with most of these as well, changes can be made in terms of mechanics to prevent them from happening, which has been done in some cases. Not saying that it's all "preventable" for lack of better terms, but adjustments can be made to fix them, or at the very least, reward the intended behavior. Granted, I'm not a developer, so I wouldn't know how feasible these would be, but these are just overarching thoughts.
I'd also like to further stress that this is not in any way intended as an insult towards the team. I'm sure y'all have a better idea of how to fix these things anyways.
Anything related to Force-closing, is due to those items not being considered as part of your inventory before hitting confirm. They could be considered as in the inventory prior to that point and would fix most of them. Pick-A-Reward are still a question mark there for sure, unless they want to temporarily be considered as part of the inventory, which in turn would need its own "fix".
Clock based things are a weird one. Could be as simple as making a check on launch or when interacting with a vendor to see if there's a time mismatch or the sort. There has to be some sort of way to track time already added in-game, since there's timer that count down to store refreshes.
Passing down items for resources to another character is considered an exploit? That seems like perfectly logical and assumed behavior tbh. Wouldn't most people do that in an RPG game that's gear intensive? I know I do it in Path of Exile, Diablo, basically any game with a shared stash of any kind. Is it not just the same concept?
The Apoc Tiers and BD things I'm not touching. Those both are the result of weird bugs, and likely already have fixes in the works.
Final Arbiter though, here's a couple thoughts:
- Final rewards scale to remaining retries, completed Rooms, AND consecutive completions (streak)
- Reduces incentive to reset, as rewards aren't as boosted up since starting at checkpoint removes a retry, would consider all previous rooms not completed, and resets any existing streak.
- Starting at that checkpoint from the lobby sets you to Last Attempt.
- This allows people who legitimate need to stop at that encounter for life reasons to still attempt it for rewards, but minimizes repeat encounters/farming. It sucks for it to be a punishment in those cases, but it's among the best options for fairness imo.
- People still exploiting the infinite checkpoint would have to constantly reset, as they'd have to do the steps for every attempt instead of every 4. This makes it more tedious to do the boring thing, which would be more of a deterrent, though still not perfect.
Passing down items for resources to another character is considered an exploit?
The exploit referred to here is not the passing of resources from one character to another to share resources around and help the lower level character get ahead.
The exploit in question allows anyone to unlock ALL MODS, including Worldslayer mods within an hour for all characters, including high-level characters.
We've created a hundred new mods for Worldslayer. By using the above mentioned exploit, high-level players were able to unlock all mods by taking advantage of low-level character resource costs, within a very short time.
It essentially broke the entire "search for mods" gameplay aspect.
That's an exploit, not intended gameplay.
In terms of the other exploits I mentioned, many of them have already been addressed, or we have chosen to not address them.
For example, the clock-reset exploit was closed by us changing the clock from looking at the PC clock to looking at the Server clock instead. That was done during the demo last year.