General Discussion - lets discuss - "exploit early, exploit often" is new legit meta? or its become new rule? - Forum - Path of Exile (2024)

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feike wrote:

This wave of sudden ethic on this notoriouly "every soul for itself" community is amusing

The elitist community of poe is always ranting about how the game is about maximizing what the game offers to you. Well, the bug WAS offered to players. It was not something only some people could do. Anyone before the patch could do it, using it was another knowledge check that the poe community so love, you knew how to use the bug, then the option was open, hardly any different of how it is for farming strats

For the view of a casual, the massive gap in profit you can create at the cost of curralying yourself into a specific way of playing the game is more toxic than the bug ever was. Much easier to stomach too, as the bug was bound to be removed while things like the busted profitability of T17 might be here to stay

Is the issue about its obviously not intended? If thats the chase, then the fault is on the people who bought those items and on GGG for allowing the oversight to slip past test stage
Bugs and exploits are a natural part of a videogame, especially for one that changes as constantly as poe does. If you think parts of a game that are not functioning as intended means they shoudnt be used at all, thats YOUR vision, the general public disagrees, just look at how speedrunners even gets sponsored to play games and most of theyr playtroughs are exploitfiestas where using bugs to things like literally sink tro the ground and bypass whole bosses are normal ocurrences. And people PAY them to do it

Not to mention, this call for ban on the exploiters is badly targeted. If anyone is at fault for the 6-link aegis aurora being so profitable, its the buyers who are willing to pay for the busted items. And there are plenty of people willing to buy those, because, again, its the normal to accept anything the game offers as fair game, even if its an obvious exploit

The elitists love to call FOMO on everything, i gotta call it right here, people are just mad salty that they didnt got to know how to produce those expensive stuff before the exploit window closed

I'm certainly not mad that I didn't use some exploit hehe

I will take a break from poe for half a year

There's not much to do anyway

The game of finding exploits is not for me

It's "elitist" now to play a game for yourself? A primarily single player game? Where your only in-game goal is to make your character as strong and as rich as possible?

Do some people play this game to....not do that?

I know the post was primarily in support of this "elitist" view, but that is a completely ridiculous concept to me. Is it "elitist" to want to win a sporting event? "Elitist" to want to win a chess match? "Elitist" to want to finish reading a book? And TBH, the term was used in the post to describe both sides of the coin so I'm a little confused...

The only person you DO play a game for is yourself! Even if it were a coop, team-heavy game, you are STILL playing primarily for yourself. For your own enjoyment, fun, profit, whatever.

Personally, I wouldn't call those who are suddenly morally superior to exploiting the foibles in GGG programming "elitist". I would call them hypocrites. It takes a special kind of person to completely ignore just how much of "regular" PoE involves finding, using, and abusing exploits. We know they are exploits generally because they are NEW each league, and are quickly nerfed either mid-league or at the start of the next league. This is basic PoE at its core since around the 3.0 era and even somewhat earlier than that.

"The game of finding exploits is not for me": not a chance....that is a total joke and insincere comment. Finding exploits is basically 90% of the game: be it through op skills, op farming strategies, or op trade techniques. It is ALL exploitative, just in varying degrees. I can't imagine a player doing ONLY the exact same thing league after league after league. No, players chase the flavor of the month which is generally an EXPLOIT.

You might not chase BUGS, but you certainly chase exploits.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

It's "elitist" now to play a game for yourself? A primarily single player game? Where your only in-game goal is to make your character as strong and as rich as possible?

"If you are less experienced than me, you are a noob. If you are better than me, you are an elitist and don't matter."

It's a way of not having to engage with arguments. Ad hominem all the way!

^yep....its terrible. Its why every argument devolves into nothing

For my own sake: I would only consider someone a "noob" if it is their very first league. Or maybe sub-5th fully fleshed out character.

If someone plays through the story with perhaps 5 different character types, they cease being a noob and get upgraded to "inexperienced"

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but you certainly chase exploits.

So playing a standard TR Pathfinder or BS Jugg is exploiting in your book?

Quite the projection you have there.

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ExsiliumUltra wrote:

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but you certainly chase exploits.

So playing a standard TR Pathfinder or BS Jugg is exploiting in your book?

Quite the projection you have there.

ABSOLUTELY. Using a clearly unbalanced skill specifically BECAUSE it is unbalanced is exploiting the game. But your examples are pretty darn poor....TR isn't really all that OP in the grand scheme of the game. In order to actually push the upper limits of the game, it requires considerable investment. But still, you are EXPLOITING the fact that the skill requires very little low-end investment to be good. Pretty much any league-starter build is exploiting the game in some way, which is WHY they are considered league starters.

Exploit: make full use and derive benefit from something to gain an advantage, generally something flawed

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jsuslak313 wrote:

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ExsiliumUltra wrote:

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but you certainly chase exploits.

So playing a standard TR Pathfinder or BS Jugg is exploiting in your book?

Quite the projection you have there.

ABSOLUTELY. Using a clearly unbalanced skill specifically BECAUSE it is unbalanced is exploiting the game. But your examples are pretty darn poor....TR isn't really all that OP in the grand scheme of the game. In order to actually push the upper limits of the game, it requires considerable investment. But still, you are EXPLOITING the fact that the skill requires very little low-end investment to be good. Pretty much any league-starter build is exploiting the game in some way, which is WHY they are considered league starters.

Exploit: make full use and derive benefit from something to gain an advantage, generally something flawed

I see where you are coming from, but I disagree on the premise. An exploit in my books is unintentional, and while those skills are strong, they have been for a good while which means they are as GGG intends them to be. Thus, not an exploit

Now, if you want to call using those skills meta gaming or power gaming I'm on board, but let's leave exploits to actual game breaking stuff.

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ArtCrusade wrote:

An exploit in my books is unintentional,

Impossible.....exploiting by its very definition is an intentional act. It has nothing to do with the DEVELOPER'S side of the equation at all. You can't exploit unintentionally, you can only merely be unaware that you are exploiting.

Regardless of whether the design is intentional or not from GGG, the behavior of CHOOSING a particular path because of its power or imbalance is exploitative. But this is also rather subjective: one person's reasons for choosing to play TR are not the same as another person who chooses to play TR. Therein lies the difficulty around talking about this kind of thing.

One may simply choose to run abysses (in affliction) because they always run abyss and like running abysses (not exploitative behavior), OR one can run abysses because they are so absurdly rewarding (exploitative behavior). In either scenario, there is nothing wrong with doing that....it is completely normal gameplay.

But that is my main point: you don't see this as exploitative because it is ALSO normal gameplay. That doesn't mean it ISN'T exploiting the game, it simply means it is an exploit AND normal.

I almost always league-start with a poison skill, or SRS (perhaps not anymore), or another skill BECAUSE these particular skills excel at clearing the game with minimal investment. I am exploiting the fact that these skills are imbalanced in that particular regard. When I hit maps, I run the "most profitable" strategy of the day, exploiting the new flavor-of-the-month imbalanced drop rates.

There is simply NO WAY that this isn't true of 99.9% of people playing this game....

To exploit is to understand and recognize a weakness in game balance and use it to your advantage. Whether or not the developers intentionally or unintentionally leave these weaknesses/strengths in the game is irrelevant. And with more experience ALWAYS comes more exploitative behavior, unless you are deliberately going AGAINST the powerful mechanics you have learned about which many veterans choose to do.

No, you got it twisted. By unintentional I mean unintended by the devs, not the player. Of course the player intentionally chooses the skills they're playing, this isn't russian roulette (altho some would want you to believe that). You could have saved yourself some paragraphs in writing there, I'm afraid

The distinction should be between skills that are intentionally strong such as the mentioned TR or Boneshatter, and skills that were busted beyond what GGG could have predicted (i.e. Penance Brand of Dissipation) which got huge nerfs to compensate. Or when Syndicate Operative spectres were busted. Those are examples of exploiting.

Let's take your Abyss example: in Affliction, a LOT of people ran Abyss because it was so rewarding. Exploits happened in private leagues because they have a custom modifier that allows you to add +2 extra projectiles which makes the Abyss Spires absurd. The latter was fixed because it was not intended to work like that, hence exploitative behaviour; the first is meta gaming.

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mentos1308 wrote:

I'm certainly not mad that I didn't use some exploit hehe

I will take a break from poe for half a year

There's not much to do anyway

The game of finding exploits is not for me

SADLY GGG make more and more clear that finding exploits = game goal and they make it more and more clear to ever1

i rly miss old GGG where economy and balance was not just useless trash words with no real means at all

now economy and balance NON EXISTED from VERY VERY start and just useless words