What is the typical life cycle of a gaming exploit?

Dashel

Dashel

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Specifically, in your experience, once an exploit is addressed by the developers what exactly happens to people who have used it?

From what I've seen it's something like this:

Small group of people seek and find an exploit. Or maybe stumble upon it inadvertently.

Over time more people learn of it. Usually the top of the curve players. Developer may or may not be aware of it. If it's severe enough they crack down. Say duping items or infinite gold/currency. If it's some kind of power leveling, depends on how big a deal it is. Maybe they leave it in or nerf it to a manageable level if it's not too powerful.

Eventually there is a tipping point: Details are posted on a popular forum or a video is leaked. Tons of people rush to exploit or are at least aware of it.

Developer eventually fixes problem. Exploit is removed.

But what is the punishment? Do people get banned, rolled back, accounts suspended? Depends on the game?
 
Xarpolis

Xarpolis

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Really depends on the game. Some games it doesn't really matter if you exploit things. They're meaningless. In other games, where there's a ranking system or whatever, they might suspend/ban the user, but usually will just strip everything you gained by using the exploit in the first place.

It's on a developer to developer basis.
 
K

Kedwyn

Silver Squire
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Depends on the game, what the exploit is and how easy it is to detect catalogue and react to.
 
Dashel

Dashel

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Yeah I guess in the meaning I am thinking of this would be similar to exploiting level or ranking.
 
Szlia

Szlia

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Another thing is that what is or isn't an exploit can be a very grey area. I mean in EQ it was considered legitimate to warp stuff through walls and in early WoW we got some warnings and suspensions, because we used a run speed split to pull Golemagg and his dogs in Garr's room... a pretty wtf moment.
 
Arbitrary

Arbitrary

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Warhammer Online was slow as fuck to fix sploits. I was bored of the game before they ever fixed all the non-aggressive quest mobs you could kill if you hopped to the enemy side of the map.
 
spronk

spronk

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a company sets a "tone" and people generally edge up to the line for that company. some examples:

blizzard: zero tolerance on hacking/cheating, they've probably banned more people than other MMOs have subscribers, total. However in game exploits generally are more lenient, ie if you can buy and sell an item thousands per day and make money they may roll back your money or just do nothing after they hotfix it. They are pretty fast at fixing stuff.

Valve: dunno, dont play dota but my experiences in TF2/CS suggest they are pretty strict and ban hackers?

Rockstar: very lenient, will sometimes mass rollback online cheaters (they dont give a fuck about SP games) but generally thats the worst, they rarely ban anyone

Bungie (Destiny): super lenient, leave exploits up for weeks and months and never rollback anything or ban anyone

Battlefield/Call of Duty: ban on exploits, have huge systems in place (Punkbuster, Fair fight). Interestingly they don't really do much software detection anymore, instead they just monitor your stats: if you kill a lot of people and never die, you are gonna get examined

Titanfall: if you get caught cheating (hacking) you dont get banned, you get put into a special class of user and you can only play multiplayer against other cheaters. LOL!
 
sukik

sukik

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spronk_sl said:
Titanfall: if you get caught cheating (hacking) you dont get banned, you get put into a special class of user and you can only play multiplayer against other cheaters. LOL!
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Loved it when I first heard this. And I think its probably one of the better ways to handle cheaters.
 
Tuco

Tuco

I got Tuco'd!
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In GW2 5 days after release there was a cheap vendor item you could pay way for way below its value. A small, small group of people abused it and got some nice rewards. It was fixed the next day. Then the community at large found out about it when people started talking. Much crying ensued, largely people being jealous that they didn't get theirs.

Soon later another cheap vendor item was found. This time you had to individually buy many very cheap items, then use some forge thing to combine them and have a chance to get a good item. So it was much more involved and time consuming but generally cheaper than the first one. This became extremely widespread very quickly, partially because everyone was on edge from the last exploit. ArenaNet (owners of GW2) cracked down on this by not only removing the items, but also enacting a ban on everyone who purchased more than a few of them. They then posted about it on reddit and the thread was full of people claiming, "I only bought a couple..." to which arenanet would respond, "You bought 1067 of them bro.".

After a couple days of gnashing of teeth (some of the well known guilds had a good chunk of their players banned because of it), they said they'd unban you if you wrote a letter of apology and promised to never do it again. haha.


It wasn't fair to ban people for buying stuff off a vendor, but the whole ordeal made people think twice about exploiting in the future. Sometimes the most effective way to policy is to inspire fear from being perceived as irrational.
 
Vitality

Vitality

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GW2 lost a big chunk of free marketing on Twitch with that ban wave as well. Most of the high profile streamers were caught up in it in some form.
 
iannis

iannis

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sukik_sl said:
Loved it when I first heard this. And I think its probably one of the better ways to handle cheaters.
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Yeah, it really is. Just run an alternate ruleset server.

Hell, the haxors can even refine your game and make it better if you're MAN ENOUGH.

A lot of the exploiters that I've known were just good players who were bored and had more fun trying to break shit. Because games are supposed to be fun and stuff and the "ApprovedT" way is repetitive.
 
j00t

j00t

Silver Baronet of the Realm
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Eh, that mentality seems harmless when you think of it that way, except it's pretty blatant antisocial behavior. Those types of personalities are great for game testing, but they can be very problematic for live games
 
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