I know that the Devs will likely implement some form of anti exploit coding...
I'm asking them to not go overboard with that sort of thing. I've played quite a few MMOs recently where the paranoia about getting rid of any and all exploits often had detrimental effects on what would otherwise have been a fun game.
I'm talking about mobs becoming invulnerable to harm because the code mistakenly 'thinks' you are doing something you shouldn't be able to do. The mob can hit you just fine, but you are powerless to touch them.
Please be sparing with this kind of thing, if you add it at all. I, for one, don't care if someone can drag a pack of mobs to a nearby wall and kill them without fear of dying. If they want to waste their game time doing that, more power to them. I'll be busy doing storyline.
If you do add anti exploit code, please be mindful of how silly that sort of thing can actually get.
A suggestion from me would be: If the mob can hit the player, then the mob should not be invulnerable.
Players are creative, and they will always find a way to 'loop' the system. There will always be that one player that took the insane amount of effort to find the one spot on the map where he can kill with impunity, and the mobs just run back and forth with pathing errors.
Please don't let these few ruin otherwise marvelous moments for others ingame. There's nothing quite as frustrating as having mobs suddenly become invulnerable to any and all attacks due to some code that gave a false positive >.<
Shazam!
Just wondering, but what games are you referring to here. Only asking, because generally speaking, those situations are not "anti exploit" mechanisms. More often than not, when I have had this happen to me (and it HAS happened to me in CoX) is due to clipping problems, where I have had my attacks blocked because I dont have "line of sight" to the mob (as the server see's it) and yet the mob *does* have LOS to me.
Giving examples for this would be handy (because if anything, then we can see it happening ourselves).
Infact, I have *yet* to see an actual "Anti exploit" mechanism kick in for myself.
I've had it happen in Guild Wars 2. The mob runs towards me, then suddenly runs back to his starting spot, evading like a martial artist savant, only to start all over again because the damn thing still has agro on me. This was done to prevent "kiting" if I'm not mistaken.
Star Wars: The Old Republic is horrible for anti exploit coding ruining a great instance. Mobs in places where the LOS is broken.. or one way.
But to answer your question.. if you ever had a mob you're shooting at have "invulnerable" or "resists" or "evades" constantly float above their heads.. you are likely seeing the anti exploit code at work. Not to be mistaken for mob in the wall shooting you, but you can't shoot back scenario.
Shazam!
Well even though CoH supposedly had some "damage throttling" code to regulate excessively overpowered characters the thresholds where these controls kicked in were so relatively high and/or only applied so rarely that I'm not even sure in my 8.5 years of playing the game that I can actually recall seeing it ever affect me. I'm sure that other ex-CoHers could chime in here and tell you they did in fact see some of it happen to them, but I'd still have to say that it was never a topic that was regularly talked about as being "too harsh or excessive".
I'd have to presume that the same non-intrusive nature of the "throttling" code will continue to apply in CoT.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I'm not talking about code that keeps players from doing too much damage due to poor planning with the enhancement thing.. I'm talking about code that checks to see if the mob can target you and do damage. If the mob cannot, then the code kicks in and renders the mob invulnerable to player damage. This keeps would be exploiters from pulling mobs to a wall or fence or some such, getting on top of said wall, and killing the pack of mobs with little or no threat to themselves.
These 'exploits' of the game's faults sometimes are handled in different ways, and some games go to excessive lengths to make sure you cannot, in any fashion, use an exploit. Play Star Wars: The Old Republic for a time.. you'll see excessive at work soon enough lol
Shazam!
Actually, that was a rather common sight in CoH when NPCs popped powers like Elude that gave them baseline 90% defense/evasion against attacks. It was also not a rare sight in certain TFs if an AV had a particularly annoying special buff to remove before normal damage can be done.
None of these were anti-exploit mechanics. Minute of Glory Paragon Protectors were just annoying.
Though...that does remind me of a VERY necessary suggestion.
The original Lady of Ysgard. -Virtue
[img]http://fc04.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2010/203/c/5/Updated_Homage_by_Voldine.jpg[/img]
And I'm not talking about some power that rendered a mob untouchable... that is meant to happen, and is part of the mob.
I seem to recall, at some point, in CoH, the devs took steps to prevent players from using Hover as a means to wipe the floor with mobs that couldn't attack back. This was done by giving every single mob some form of ranged attack. This is an example of "anti exploit coding", and a tame one at that. Ninjas had shurikins.. gangsters and such all had that beloved .38 special, and other mobs had their own version.
But there are other anti exploit codes in MMOs that are very very irritating and harsh. An example (made up for this purpose) would be if the devs had decided that if you were using Hover, and spraying a crowd of Hellions that couldn't hit you, period, then those Hellions would all become invulnerable to harm for a length of time, they would run back to their spawn point, and reset.... hard. Any and all damage you did healed up in seconds...
This scenario can also work for buildings with ledges the mobs can't get to, etc.
It gets worse if the coding gets a "false positive"... You can attack, they can attack, but because the server decided "They can't attack", the mobs ran back to start.. reset.
It gets really bad if the coding somehow hiccups, and only part of the anti exploit gets in, and for mobs that don't need it. Imagine fighting Circle of Thorns, and the code said "They can't attack!"... They CAN attack, but the code overwrites and so the mobs become invulnerable to player damage.. but they are STILL attacking you!
I've seen this happen in MMOs. All I'm asking is if they DO put in anti exploit code, that they tone it down, or carefully consider if it is really REALLY needed... o.o
Shazam!
I think the reason the people responding to you on this (including me) are having a hard time answering your concern is that CoH (and again presumably CoT) never really had any incredibly arbitrary/silly controls that you seemed to be worried about here.
For instance you mentioned things like "giving all MOBs ranged attacks to discourage Hovering". While the MOBs having ranged attacks thing is true for the most part it also never kept my Hovering characters from still being very effective for years. Another example was that there was code which prevented MOBs from being able to be dragged too far away from their spawn points. But the range on that was something like several hundred yards so I don't really recall that ever being a major headache in any way.
Basically CoH never really did much of anything remotely annoying or excessive along the lines of what you're mentioning here. You may have had bad experiences in other MMOs but CoH never did anything remotely like switching MOBs into "anti-exploit invulnerable mode" or the like. *shrugs*
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I know that CoH never had it really bad.. it had it, but not as bad as some MMOs.. All I'm trying to do is remind the devs. This is not going to be City of Heroes. It may wind up being so different that some of the original City of Heroes fans dislike it BECAUSE it's not City of Heroes *shrugs*.
As a new game, I'm just sort of putting it out there not to do the extreme anti exploit clampdown seen in other MMOs. If they hold to what CoH did right, then I have no worries. But right now, I don't know what the Devs are thinking really, so I want to put it out there...
I guess the reason I'm suddenly fretting over it is because right now I'm playing other MMOs until this one is live.. and those MMOs have those horrible, aweful, nasty anti exploit nightmare codes >.< lol
Shazam!
You're right that as a "new" MMO this game could really go in all sorts of directions good or bad.
But I have a reasonable amount of faith that the Devs of this game are going to be mindful of those kinds of annoyances and won't automatically jump towards screwing us like that if they can help it. I'm sure they'll have to set up some controls in certain places, but again I'll give them the benefit of the doubt before I assume the worst.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Ok, I can see where you are coming from, but this isn't anti exploit (par se)... because you can still kite (i do it all the time myself). It is to prevent you from doing the "kite trains" that used to crop up in other MMO's (notably Everquest) where you could train a mob forever (right up to the zone border) and have that mob kill *everything* lower level than it. The only "anti exploit" part of it that I would say is such, is being able to kill it safely when it is "returning home" and not able to attack. In this case, the developers seem to have had the idea that if a mob is returning home, it *cannot* other mobs until it resets, and so you shouldn't be able to do the same either.
*shrugs*
I had this happen to me. At least when I tried it... it worked for me as it worked for them. Not "anti exploit"... its bad geometry/modelling.
But to answer your question.. if you ever had a mob you're shooting at have "invulnerable" or "resists" or "evades" constantly float above their heads.. you are likely seeing the anti exploit code at work. Not to be mistaken for mob in the wall shooting you, but you can't shoot back scenario.[/quote]
But not always. Sometimes it is because you are "out of the game world" and a mob cannot be killed by something that is outside the "game world".
I can see where you are coming from though. I reported a LOT of locations in TR where you could giltch under the control point towers and attack mobs safely... but they couldn't attack you.
Like how people could break their own personal TP beacons in Tabula Rasa. They only worked if you could place them in a place where you could walk to. So if you got them on top of the lamp posts/places via glitches, they *wouldn't* necessarily always work. I remember one of the developers mentioning this to me (or over a global chat once... something like that). It was just to limit *where* you could place them. I am not sure how they mapped this out, maybe with a very quick pathing check... but does this mean that a "legality check" is "anti exploit"?
You should *never* tell people how something "anti exploit" works.
Security through obscurity is fragile. It just takes one Mirror Universe Arcanaville to ruin it all.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
True, but it is a circular fight then.
You tell people how it works, people will go around it.
You tell them how it works *now*. People will go around it.
People will use whatever information that they can to get an advantage. You personally might not.. but the playerbase in general *will*.
If someone breaks it *without* you revealing how it works, then you can patch it without making a large announcement.
I can see both sides of the argument though (and to be fair, if you get a bunch of them onboard at the start to try to break it, and keep those people on your side to help "break" the anti exploit stuff, then the better overall it can be).
I know that in Eve Online, if they do the an announcement of "how something works" and someone does it, they get banned.
It doesn't matter if you haven't seen the website, it was made publicly available.
Side note: Here are a couple of cases of what I could call exploits more so than just the "invulnerable" status.
[url=http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/how-a-clever-player-with-a-useless-item-almost-took-down-eve-onlines-entire]Penny arcade on how a 1isk item almost broke the economy[/url]
[url=http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/war-makes-thieves-and-peace-hangs-them/]How the POS dupe system was found[/url]
It is worth noting that the CCP developers are NOT always this honest about how an exploit works, but if they do announce it this way, and you still do it... you had better be prepared to lose your account.
Guild Wars 2 had a similar problem early in its game life when something was mispriced... of course, there were players who took *serious* advantage of that and instead of doing it once or twice, did it 200-400 times (if not more)...
Needless to say, they were banned.
This is where if you knowingly exploit a system, you *should* be banned.
In my mind, the cases that the OP listed were NOT "anti exploit" code in action in the slightest.
Champions Online has anti-exploit coding along these lines. If you retreat too far from an injured mob they instantly regain all their hit points and return to their spawn location. The same thing happens in many cases if everyone on your team is killed, or if you turn on stealth, even briefly. It's especially irritating when you're fighting a big boss, you get him down to 10% hits and you accidentally turn on a stealth power.
These kinds of gimmicks are totally artificial and violate the basic rules of the game. They are put in place to prevent players from "cheating," but a player fleeing from a mob in that fashion is gaining no real advantage. It will take a long time for the player to defeat the mob in this fashion, so it's not really an exploit in the sense that it allows the player to gain experience too quickly. It's really just a gotcha from a vindictive dev who didn't like players running away.
I'm all for making the mobs behave more intelligently and realistically, but the devs shouldn't cheat either: the mobs should play by the same rules as players.
The most important thing is to build in an XP throttle from the very beginning. I have no doubt that there will always be bugs, and players will always be able to take advantage of them. The trick is to prevent cheaters from gaining an unfair advantage, which means preventing them from rewards too fast by taking advantage of a bug.
City of Heroes tried to add a rewards throttle near the end of its run, after literally dozens of exploits that caused extremely bitter player reaction every time the devs "nerfed" xp. If they had said up front, you'll never be able to get to level 50 in less than, say, 20 or 30 hours, and coded it that way, no one would be angered or feel cheated when XP exploits were shut down. When ugly exploits appeared, like those in AE, the devs would never have to rush out a fix without considering all the possible consequences and negative reactions, because the damage caused by the exploits would be inherently limited.
Finally, I'd like a new game to prevent the main exploit that was never addressed in CoH: doorsitting. That is, a bunch of lowbies would sit at the front door of a mission and stand there while a Brute or Tank ran solo through the mission. This is another feature that needs to be built into the game from the ground up to make sure it works properly. Players should have to play the game in order to gain experience for their characters, instead of going AFK and watching reruns of Cheers.
While in principle I'd agree that the Devs shouldn't "cheat" I think in practice it's always going to happen to some degree. Until MMOs can be controlled by real AIs which can intelligently think for the NPCs the same way humans think for PCs they'll always require some substitute for the lack of AI to make the game challenging. In effect NPCs usually need to be able to "bend" the rules at least little to remain a credible threat against human players who'll always be able to out-think them.
The trick to this lies in the ability of the Devs to manage these "rule bendings" without it becoming overt or excessive. It's when the Devs bend the rules TOO MUCH or when it's not necessary that it becomes a problem. The fact that they SOMETIMES bend the rules in the first place is not the issue here.
I thought CoH did have some code that would prevent players from earning XP if they were too far away from the "source" of the kill, thus making Door Sitting (at least for XP) relatively useless. I could be confusing that with the way Sidekicking worked, but either way an AFK character could always just put the Brute/Tank on Follow and be close-by to get the XP anyway.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
The two exploits Gangrel mentions remind me of the NW negative bids fiasco. NW were never totally honest about how this worked, but my suspicion is that it was due to the way signed and unsigned binary numbers are held, meaning that a bid of -1 can lead to this being interpreted as the largest possible positive integer. This caused a shutdown and then rollback of the AH and a load of bans.
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team and Forum Moderator[/color]
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As I recall from those olden days of yore, originally the sidekicking/XP system did not have a range, which lent itself to teams where some characters would go out into the zone and fight while the rest would stand at the tram and enjoy the flow of XP while AFK. The first mitigation of this was the introduction of the AFK auto-logout, which would log an AFK character off if they were in a non-instanced area. The second was the introduction of sidekick range limit, where you had to be within a certain distance of your mentor to remain sidekicked and get XP. Originally this was in both zone maps and instance maps, but later it was removed from instanced maps (too many sidekicks getting lost in the twists of Oranbega and being eaten by things). And at the ned, of course, the auto-sidekick-to-mission-holder code was in play, which simplified the sidekicking system immensely. I can still remember spending 10 minutes at the formation of a team balancing out all of the 'who is sidekicking whom' details so that everyone would be within the magic 5-level range necessary to get XP.
IIRC, the idlekick timeout came after the sidekick-range limit; which didn't fully address the problem, as the "most efficient" sidekick PLing came with the use of a 'bridge' -- a character of a level such that the character being PLed would be (at -1 to the mentor) at the bottom of the level range to get XP in the team, so that they would be (IIRC) -5 to everything that the grinder of the team defeated, maximizing their XP-per-mob rate. And with the bridge, you could (for example) go stand on the ferry in Peregrine Island while the Inv/SS Tanker doing the grinding sweeps up entire piers of mobs to defeat. The idlekick was added, IIRC, to check the ferrystanding form of PLing.
You may well be right, I remember how popular bridge PLing was, it just moved to instances once the idle-afk was added. The super-sidekicking finally killed it.