DEVs of games should use MOST of their PATCH effort and time to fix...

[SpookyFX]

The poll is asking something I think is obvious, the real purpose is to put a spot light on just how obvious. But hey I may be wrong, and the poll ends up showing that most players want the exploits fixed as much as bugs that interfere with gameplay.

I am wondering if there is a PROFESSIONAL game developer (CDPR person would be great but I mean any game DEV) that could explain why they would take time to remove such exploits instead of fix bugs?

Is there a real technical reason or is it simply a matter of pride (not in a bad way but rather being happy with your work).

Personally I wish they would leave harmless exploits alone. They are the only "game code cheats" (without 3rd party software) we seem to get to play with theses days in modern games.

 

[tru3story]

Yay, I love polls!

 

[BigWezz69]

I'd say focus on the bugs over anything else, especially since its just a single player game. If it was PVP then yes, exploits too as that can kill a game.

 

[Iferrebee]

Listen there is only so much you can do in 400 days

 

[cartlidge]

exploits often evolve from abusing bugs. A dupe hack might be causing perhaps a memory leak somewhere or causing peoples save files to become corrupted so as they fix the bug they remove the exploit.

unexpected behaviours, cause unexpected knock on effects beyond what you may see as a player

 

[SigilFey]

exploits often evolve from abusing bugs. A dupe hack might be causing perhaps a memory leak somewhere or causing peoples save files to become corrupted so as they fix the bug they remove the exploit.

unexpected behaviours, cause unexpected knock on effects beyond what you may see as a player

^ This. Plus, if such exploits exist, this can compound and complicate the hunt for actual bugs. Red herrings, so to speak. So any time an exploit is discovered, it will usually be removed if possible. In the end, it's making the game do something it was never intended to do. That will obviously create situations where things can and will break, even though the intended functionality has no issues.

 

[0Pepopowitz]

Does the NPC driving the van at the beginning of "Gimmie Danger" still run into the wall repeatedly?

 

[Spectral_Warrior]

The poll is asking something I think is obvious, the real purpose is to put a spot light on just how obvious. But hey I may be wrong, and the poll ends up showing that most players want the exploits fixed as much as bugs that interfere with gameplay.

I am wondering if there is a PROFESSIONAL game developer (CDPR person would be great but I mean any game DEV) that could explain why they would take time to remove such exploits instead of fix bugs?

Is there a real technical reason or is it simply a matter of pride (not in a bad way but rather being happy with your work).

Personally I wish they would leave harmless exploits alone. They are the only "game code cheats" (without 3rd party software) we seem to get to play with theses days in modern games.

In short, an exploit is basically an advantage a player can use which was not intended as such. potentially the exploit may even exist as result from a bug itself by all accounts, an exploit IS a bug, and therefore should be fixed with equal perseverence

 

[cartlidge]

I was thinking about this earlier, When you're tracking down bugs and how difficult they can be to fix. You don't know all the time of how your fix will fix things..

Software is often arranged in a layers architecture.. So, each layer passing messages to the other dipping down further.

For instance, a simple bug of an NPC standing a few feet in the air.

The Graphic layer whose function is to draw what you see, could be rendering it improperly because of an internal function error of some description, (for this you would expect to see many repetitions of the bug in this instance, but perhaps not, perhaps some stupid rounding error or incorrect variable type used (converting real to ints etc)

The graphic layer would ask the business logic layer (like the consistency of the world) for the information about the objects in the world. here perhaps it could be an internal check of the object means some rule is set where it's height could never fall below a certain amount, maybe that needs tweaking), maybe no one is allowed to stand too near to a barbecue and so there was a bug positioning it then, the barbecue rule could have been put in at a later date for some reason and the impact on this NPC was not noticed

Business logic asks the object broker which is normally where say all your SQL would go for chatting with the database, optimizations, functions with similar functionality pieced together, a change in consistency here could have a knock on effect somewhere else. Has the SQL code been altered or the function updated, maybe a sort order has messed up where the variables ended up and it's not passing them back or a function has been altered to add another piece of data and you're reading that data instead.

down to the database layer, are the right coords put in

It's really nice when it's a simple flat file mend and just the coords need altering but its usually not. but of course,.. what you just changed could have impacted something else. Just how rigorously can you test for every change that will be made.

Sure you test these things out individually but then you put all these changes in with all the other changes and just how long do you test before you release

*************************

I've been rambling. But the point is bugs and exploits are kinda the same and most times fixes aren't so simple and will impact multiple things (sometimes unintended)

I don't know if I have added to this conversation or not but this is some nice weed

 

[Didacgomez]

I've been rambling. But the point is bugs and exploits are kinda the same and most times fixes aren't so simple and will impact multiple things (sometimes unintended)

Quake strafe jumping is my favorite example in that topic. John Carmack hated it, he found it silly and he did write a fix for it but he found that since it was embedded in the engine (a bug) fixing it broke other stuff so he didn´t released it.

 

[SigilFey]

Quake strafe jumping is my favorite example in that topic. John Carmack hated it, he found it silly and he did write a fix for it but he found that since it was embedded in the engine (a bug) fixing it broke other stuff so he didn´t released it.

Conversely, other devs may adopt exploits as actual game mechanics. When Starsiege: Tribes released, it was discovered that players could mash the spacebar to turn the jetpack on/off very rapidly. This bugged out the physics engine, which would compound the velocity of the player more or less infinitely, allowing them to "ski" down slopes and do crazy jumps.

By Tribes 2, the mechanic was officially worked into the game design. What was meant to be another vehicle-based arena/tournament shooter was instead re-imagined with hyper-maneuverable infantry as the backbone, and the Tribes IP took off.

But, if the "exploit" was simply left in the game, it would have invariably created a mess that would need to be cleaned up, as it would still be something the game was not designed and coded to do. Or, another way to look at this is that the problem with exploits is not about the "what" or the "why" -- it's about the "how". If the "how" is messy or open to unintentional input, that will eventually cause or compound issues.

 

[Ydiss2077]

I'll just say this once because this does appear to be an abstract thread about why devs should or shouldn't fix exploits and not much else...

It's their game. If they want to remove an exploit, they can. And because it was an exploit, there's nothing we can legitimately say that can ever be taken seriously as a complaint. They fixed it because it's their game. Not for any other reason. And that's it. Deal with it. Because the alternative is to complain about it and complaining about having a cheat taken away is... well. I'll stop there.

The only time fixing exploits doesn't work is when the legitimate route to obtaining whatever you got from the exploit doesn't work. It's important the devs also fix that too. And they did do that in 1.5 with one thing that I can think of (removed an exploit but also fixed something so that it was easier to do normally). But this thread doesn't appear to be talking about anything in particular, just the abstract concept of "what devs shouldn't do". In that case, I refer you to my second paragraph above.