Time for a poll. (The subject is abuse)

[triqui]

Foodstamp said:
So let me get this straight. You guys are roleplayers because you don't play to win, and people who play to win are not roleplayers?

Roleplaying has nothing to do with playing to win or not. You can play to win and roleplay/play thematic, and you can play thematic/roleplay and be a complete moron strategically.

The two camps are not roleplayers vs non-roleplayers. The 2 factions are min-maxers vs non-minmaxers. A mix-maxer is happy to play with Mists of Deceipt, for example, even if he knows it is bugged and broken, just becouse it is a good adventage. A non-mixmaxer is not willing to do so, and preffer that spell to be fixed, or removing it from game. A min-maxer ussually acept that everything that is in the game, is allowed (like MoD, or copying Bogus orders, or moving 3 provinces with move+patrol), and that the game is balanced becouse everybody can (or should) know what those bugs (or features) are, so everybody can use them. Those who dont know that twiceborn on a demon will grant them inmortality are not of their business.

The guys who carry that a step further are cheaters. Which mean they hack the 2h file and whatever (things that are not inside the game, intended or not). I havent read no one here saying that part is right. Although i beleieve that some people would consider it "fun", just that they wont admit they'll do. Heck, there are THOUSANDS of people who use aim-bots in counterstrike and what not... cheating is part of the nature of the gaming community.

[kasnavada]

What I meant with a little more text :

The last problem is the bug list : for some, it's to show that it's not to be exploited, and others, it's a tool that is used to show what combos should be abused before the next patch comes. Again, the same communities clash : it's not about min-maxer, not roleplaying. It's about what you believe is the limit of what should be used in a game. Some believe that everything that currently is in the game is 'fair game', and the other one believes that everything on the bug list should be treated as if it were already out of the game. You can still be a min-maxer or a roleplayer in either case. The problem, and the clash comes when the first community uses one thing on the bug list on a player from the second community, because it gives him an advantage that he cannot countered.

EDIT :
The reason I'm from the second community is :
A game is not my game. It's something that comes out of the imagination of someone or a group of people, and that they decide to put at our disposal to let us have fun (and for them to make money). I therefore think it is a show of respect for them to play the game as they intend it to be. Some of what min-maxing finds out may not have been predicted, that's the reason people should ask devs whether a "feature" that seems unintended is a bug or not.

Once the decision is made (there goes definition of a bug again), if it is decided to be a bug, I will therefore not use it I know of it, to respect the game creator's wish about the game until it's corrected.

[Kristoffer O]

Hadrian_II said:
So the only solution is the devs either fixing the bugs, or declare them as features.

I think the easiest solution is the hosts declaring what is ok, perhaps based on what we have said, but still a matter of host policy. If a host would like MoD to be usable in its current form in one of his games (perhaps with Caelum set up as central player and defender of a large empire) it would be silly if players joined and later complained because of something I have said. Each setup game should be the property of the host and the players involved.

[Foodstamp]

triqui said:

Roleplaying has nothing to do with playing to win or not. You can play to win and roleplay/play thematic, and you can play thematic/roleplay and be a complete moron strategically.

The two camps are not roleplayers vs non-roleplayers. The 2 factions are min-maxers vs non-minmaxers. A mix-maxer is happy to play with Mists of Deceipt, for example, even if he knows it is bugged and broken, just becouse it is a good adventage. A non-mixmaxer is not willing to do so, and preffer that spell to be fixed, or removing it from game. A min-maxer ussually acept that everything that is in the game, is allowed (like MoD, or copying Bogus orders, or moving 3 provinces with move+patrol), and that the game is balanced becouse everybody can (or should) know what those bugs (or features) are, so everybody can use them. Those who dont know that twiceborn on a demon will grant them inmortality are not of their business.

The guys who carry that a step further are cheaters. Which mean they hack the 2h file and whatever (things that are not inside the game, intended or not). I havent read no one here saying that part is right. Although i beleieve that some people would consider it "fun", just that they wont admit they'll do. Heck, there are THOUSANDS of people who use aim-bots in counterstrike and what not... cheating is part of the nature of the gaming community.

So you are not roleplayers?

I don't know what to say. It sounds like you guys have created your own rules for the game, and you expect other people to have the manners to play by those rules, even if it means losing. I am guessing you guys would eat a loss or quit a game if it came down to doing that or finding a counter to something that is not a part of your personal ruleset.

[Sombre]

There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't.

You can find a counter to just about anything. For example the counter to Norfleet was having score graphs turned on.

[Edi]

Foodstamp, it's time for you to quit baiting the newer people, because that's mainly what your last few posts have been. Or it at least looks that way at a casual glance.

This whole RP/non-RP division is completely ridiculous and a red herring for the purposes of this discussion and making unsupported claims and statements about people being such, therefore having to conform to some sort of arbitrary ruleset or whatever is pure bull droppings.

From where I stand, both the "anything but hacking 2h files goes" crowd and the "house rules" side have points in their favor with regard to specific arguments, but neither side can claim being 100% correct.

Most of the stuff in the buglist is not something that can be turned around and used to wring an unintended advantage. Some things can be and those can be divided into categories according to just how they act.

• One example being the reverse communion issue, which acts like a feature and gives more options for all players who can access it (meaning anyone with astral magic).
• Another one is the army movement bug set, where stratmove 1 units can be made to march 10 provinces in one turn with the right commander (e.g. a horror) or more commonly 2 or 3. This is not intended and never has been or else the units would have greater stratmove. The sneaking out of siege bug is another one where Johan has gone on record saying it is a bug that should not be there.
• Then there's the Mists of Deception + BF Enchantment combo, which again has been confirmed to not work as it should.
• Demons with Twiceborn is another unintended consequence of something in the code, something that should work differently than it currently does

Out of that above list of examples, the first one is an equal opportunity exploit that does not give any kind of overwhelming instakill advantage and is widely available to various nations. The last one is basically specific to Lanka and can be used on a few unique blood summons and some Mictlan specific summons, so while it's still playing a crooked game to avoid losing units that would otherwise die (at least the second time around), but has its drawbacks and is limited.

MoD+DBFE is an instakill advantage when used by defender and should not work as it does, which at least in my mind places it in the category of being a dishonest tactic and playing a crooked game, therefore cheating. The same can be said of the movement bugs and I suppose on some level that I should have just sent those reports to Johan by PM and just put them in the list as "Movement 1 and Movement 2, reported by PM". Doesn't matter that the movement bugs are available to everyone equally, using them is playing a dishonest, crooked game in my book at least. I'd qualify that as cheating straight out, despite some of the rather torturous and hairsplitting definitions of cheating I've seen in this thread.

With that said, if somebody wants to play a game with house rules, fine, put as much restrictions as you like and use an honor system. Fine. If you enter a general game with few (if any) house rules, it's generally pointless to whine about some tactic being used (like he Wrathful Skies/AQ combo mentioned earlier) and in such games the only such complaints I'd take seriously are the MoD+DBFE and movement bug issues for the reasons given above.

It also seems that most MP games can eliminate at least one of these points of contention by just using a mod that removes Mists of Deception from the game entirely. That'll leave only its abusers as the complainers.

[Edratman]

silhouette said:

Well, don't forget it may happen via collusion of more than one opponent as well. For example, if the leader of an MP game puts up the Forge global, and nobody is in a position to Dispel it, I would completely try to make an alliance of the other players who would each send a dozen items. It's a way to deny the one player use of forging, and it seems like a useful and valid tactic to me. And it is sort of self-balancing: if it's a one on one situation, you would have to commit X% of your lab/forging to deny the opponent the same percent of his capability.

Sill

The collusion angle of lab filling does present a whole new aspect to the ploy. I followed the thread (and many others) under the basic assumption that (occasionally) there are players who utilize tactics that the vast majority of players do not consider valid or in the spirit the developers intended because of various reasons. There is general, but not universal, consensus on almost all of these actions.


But when I read that two or more players may unite to fill an opponents lab presents a whole new perspective.

To be honest, I cannot even decide if it makes the ploy more valid or less valid. Previously I thought it would require a significent effort from a single player to forge adequate number of slave collars to effectively fill an opponents lab and block new forgings. But to learn that 2, 3 or 4 players would think that this is a good move and thus each would contribute an easily manageable quantity of items to fill one players lab is entirely different.

[vfb]

I wouldn't want to play in a game where lab-filling is considered a valid tactic.

I mean, what the heck is that? How does it possibly make sense in the reality of the game? Your lab is a fixed size which can only handle so many items, and you've got morons working on your docks, who clutter up your lab with so much junk that when your mage steps in to craft an item, he trips over them and drops all his gems and they spill down the drain some other moron installed in the floor?

It's just abuse of the mechanics of the game's interface, in this case the fact that there's no interface implemented so nations can refuse 'gifts' of items from other nations. It's got nothing to do with mages and spells and forging and research or any kind of fun stuff like that.

Please don't go and assume I'm in the 'Wrathful Skies + SR100% is an exploit' crowd though (though I think that crowd is pretty small). I just want stuff to make sense in the context of the game. I don't think I'm in a minority in that respect either.

[triqui]

Foodstamp said:
you expect other people to have the manners

Yep, bassically is that. I expect other people to have manners.

And yes, i would rather quit the game than needing to resort to move 3 province my heavy infantry through a bug or whatever any other thing that it is not working as intended.

In case you didnt notice, i already said that my grief with VotD has completelly dissappeared since Jonathan O has said that it is working as intended. I no longer see it as exploiting something that is buggy (becouse it is not, it works as the devs want it to work), therefore i dont care if you min-max it and use 20x per turn. I would not play with you if you keep using strat move 3 through move+patrol or Mist of Deception or any other of the tactics that do not work as intended.

[Foodstamp]

I no longer see it as exploiting

See, I can pull things out of context too.

I apologize if it seemed like baiting. But I wanted to make a point that "roleplayer" is not a synonym for someone who does not min/max.

With their replies they have agreed that playing by house rules does not make someone a roleplayer.

That's all I am going to add to this, and with a little bit of reading, you will see the baiting went both ways.