Ok everyday when I am online people accuse blue of exploiting/cheating at almost everything. I am actually getting very tired of hearing it. I would like an explenation (yes I know its been said b4 but I could not find the thread) of what exploiting is.

And for the player that I will not mention. Killing all the defbots is not exploiting as far as I know. Take a ship, fly in and kill them, nothing really exploity there.

To the devs: its actually much much easier to solo cap now, however its not so easy if even 1 person defends. So I think its actually good atm, if you don't want to be capped have defenders online.

And capping with 0 defenders on is not a crime its called tactical advantage! Many players seem to think they flag should disappear when there are less then 5 people from the team on.

Now I know this will get flamed most likely but pls keep the flaming down to at least a cival level.

I was told that capping the flag in general is exploiting. Happened to be by a ramming tri-flare, when there were four defenders and three attackers. I thought that was pretty cute.

From dictionary.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------

exploit



<security> A security hole or an instance of taking advantage
of a security hole.

"[...] hackers say exploit. sysadmins say hole"
-- Mike Emke (http://emke.com/).

Emke reports that the stress is on the second syllable. If
this is true, this may be a case of hackerly zero-deriving
verbs (especially instantials) from nouns, akin to "write" as
a noun to describe an instance of a disk drive writing to a
disk.

(2001-11-24)

Source: The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, © 1993-2003 Denis Howe

exploit

n. [originally cracker slang] 1. A vulnerability in
software that can be used for breaking security or otherwise
attacking an Internet host over the network. The Ping O' Death is
a famous exploit. 2. More grammatically, a program that exploits an
exploit in sense 1,

Source: Jargon File 4.2.0
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Basically, it's taking advantage of a bug. For example, picking up cargo from the DEF bots that were issuing in 1 is technically an exploit...

Issuing defbots isn't a bug. It's just the fact that the bots are retarded. A flaw in their AI.

Spacing bots is also not an exploit, nor is capping with no defenders, station mining, station nuking, rocket ramming, seeker spamming, or instanuking. They're all very cheap tactics, but they are all examples of the code working exactly as it should. Some of them were oversights, but that doesn't make it an exploit. Explots would be deliberately lagging yourself to make yourself harder to hit, lag mining, lag swarming, the old money bugs, running through a racetrack, reaching the checkpoint and taking advantage of a clipping error to go through the wall and get to the finish line in an impossibly quick time. . . Things like that.

Magus: well said

Ahhhh!
So when most ppl say exploiter, they should say cheap ass bozo.

Works for me:)

Excellent post, Magus.

Small note: Someone who's lagging is not necessarily more difficult to hit. Its just annoying. Consider, a lagger with 500+ ping actaully stays at the same postion half a second at a time, enough to take several tachyon hits before he has a chance to respond. Experienced players and defbots have no problem using this to their advantage.

Some players deliberately lag themselves just a tad bit, not much. What it does is fool the aimbot by making it so that their position is always slightly different from the position the server has for them. Essentially you'll be shooting at a ghost the whole time.

Are you telling me my lag is an advantage???

I can't hit the broad side of a barn thanks to it.

I don't know about you guys, but reading what Magus said, then reading the definition of exploiting, sounds like issuing bots and spacing them IS exploiting. You are exploiting a flaw in their AI, as Magus said (without using the word exploiting of course). Anyways, just my 2 cents.

-Professor Penguin

Prof Penguin, there's a difference between a bug and code that produces the expected results even if that code may be on the to-replace list.

For example, it's not exploiting to trade, but the trade system isn't anything like what it will be, so one could say you're abusing the fact that this isn't a finished game yet and you might be making more money than you should be able to (yes I know that most likely in the final game money will be easier to get than it is atm, but that's only our guess we could all be cheating the system and the devs might decide that money should be even harder to get in the future).

Now I don't think we're going to go around calling anyone who buys or sells cargo an exploiter are we?

"Are you telling me my lag is an advantage???

I can't hit the broad side of a barn thanks to it."

-You're lag is major, your ping is in the hundreds. I'm talking about the people who lag on demand and only slightly so that it isn't noticable.

Hi im Zeplin, and Im a bot Spacer, And every blue moon I Cap, While on a Dialup. *AA*
I spend a lot of time playing with the 350+ bots, working out movement, and strange occourances.
Ive been asked to leave home sectors so oftern it isnt funny.
However, I follow some simple rules, Dont fire on anyone you arnt forced to fight, Try to move in groups to prevent being griefed.
And try to home in a Sector with Mainly my own team present.

To all those users who think that I carnt cap with defenders on, There are been defenders on all bar 1 successful cap ive done personally.
Im sick of people complaining about my lag, yes im laggy, yes im on a dialup, yes my Dialup is a million miles away in Australia.
Can I change this? No.
This is why I play with the bots, Humans bitch and moan to much.
My timezone must be the complete oposite of a guides, as some of the choice words that are said, would have the user at the very least, told to leave it, Experianced or otherwise.

Call me an exploiter all you like, It wont change anything. Infact you will just be another user added to my growing ignore list.

So let me throw this out there: (Got into a bit of an argument earlier today)

Is taking advantage of the whole stockpile -> sell thing an exploit? (Even though it doesn't technically meet the definition of a code exploit)

I would say yes, simply because in the spirit of a real economy selling things real fast isn't going to magically keep them from deprecating in value. I was able to make around 100-110k in less than a half hour by finding a short trade run and stockpiling. I was using a Valk, btw, because pirate activity was high and there were no good pilots to protect me. So is making 100k in less than 30minutes with a Valk an exploit?

Ok, since starfisher brought this to the boards, i'll reply with my take on it, (from the discussion online)

I don't feel that it is an exploit. the code is doing exactly what it is meant to do. it is not a security hole. The devs have the refresh rate on the economy set fairly low IMO, (it updates what.. every minute or minute and a half?) presumably so there are fewer cycles per hour for them to trace in balancing/debugging. In the future it could be altered so that you only get top price for the stations "needs" and the cargo thats left sells at steadily lowering prices, but it is not an exploit, merely the code doing what it is designed to do.

"and the cargo thats left sells at steadily lowering prices"

This doesn't make a lot of sense imo. It's not as if the widgets in your inventory are being consumed, why would they lower the sell price? If anything they would increase the sell price because there are that many fewer widgets in circulation.

Or did you mean that the station would calculate the new sell price after every widget sold?

Im gonna bump my other thread on dymanic economies up (on Suggestions) it pertains to this...

phaser in a real economy if i need 100 reams of copy paper, and you are asking say $10 a ream for them, and you want to sell me 1000, i'll buy 100 at a price that reflects the demand (say the $10), but i'm not going to buy the entire 1000 of them at that price i don't need them.. i might offer you $0.50 apiece for the rest of them to get you to go away, but i certantly am not gonna buy 900 extra reams at $10 a ream just to get the 100 i need.

A station should be no different. They need a certain number of wigits to function.. once they have the wigits they need.. the price begins to drop.

basically i forsee any truly dynamic economy having to take that into account. I would like to see the prices get refreshed every 1 - 2 seconds.

spellcast seems right, the only problem with constantly updating prices would be the server processes required... meaning a heavier load on the server.. creating lag.. how about a simple formula: each sector requires so many of a specific item per half hour and when the item has reached that limit it depreciates on a per item sold basis. maybe thats how it works already... but here's an example

sector 7 uses 30 blue widgets a half hour, if they begin to surplus the selling price depreciates at price - (surplus/100) so it is an itemized depreciation rather than updating due to time...

We chose to write the code that way for a reason. It isn't hard to make it update prices for every batch of widgets you sell, but this way stockpiling is a viable option (plus it won't let you sell above 16 at a time). You're still taking a risk someone else isn't doing the same thing with your same route before you. So it can't possibly be an "exploit", it's doing what we intended.

The station might lose out in the short term, but it still drives the price of widgets down the same amount a minute later. I'd argue that it offers an extra incentive to keep the station "stocked up".