According to Brules chat log, Derrick stated that this was not an exploit at all. Which I'll try to politely counter now. Any feature of the game exists either intentionally or unintentionally and those are the only two possibilities. Exploits are both unintentional and violate the rules of the game. To claim that this LOS issue was intentional is ludicrous. Now you can find a way to use game features in an inventive and unforeseen way without it being an exploit but not if it violates the accepted rules of the game. Even fantasy worlds operate within their own set of logical rules. In Superman's world some of the rules are he can fly, he's nearly 100% invulnerable, and green kryptonite makes him weak. So if a story was written where he ate green kryptonite cereal or had his heart carved out with a plastic knife, someone really messed up the entire structure of things. Harry Potter isn't realistic but if he sawed off his own head with a knife and lived in the movies everyone would have ridiculed it because it would have violated the rules of that world. Since the beginning of Ultima Online it has been understood and meant to be the case that house walls stopped solid objects like players, monsters, or potions, and blocked every spell except for Earthquake. Knowing that this LOS issue was unintentional and with fifteen years of gameplay behind us I think we can say that those are accepted rules of the game. Now some house walls do and some don't. This abrogates fifteen years of experience and knowledge and is an unintended feature, which is exactly what exploit means.Faust wrote:Derrick has stated mechanical accuracy is the basis of the shard but that does not include game breaking exploits. He deems what is considered game breaking and duping fell under that category.
Please explain to us why the LOS exploit should be considered game breaking?
You started by saying that you don't decide what is game breaking and ended by saying that something is definitely not game breaking. I don't want to sound rude but it should work both ways. Also, this game breaking point is so subjective that it's almost silly to even use it as an argument. For example, how many people need to quit the server before you'd consider it game breaking? There is no good answer to that. Trammel itself wasn't game breaking for OSI but it sure broke the game for a lot of people here. People without affected housing or who rarely play or talk at banks all the time probably couldn't care less about this but that doesn't make the complaints of affected or sympathetic people invalid. The only thing that you could get every player to agree was game breaking would be complete server death. By that definition it isn't game breaking. But for people who define game breaking as radically changing and ruining the game experience for a statistically significant number of players, this LOS bug fits the bill.Faust wrote:I don't decide what is game breaking on this shard and that was my personal view on the subject matter. Game breaking is something that should be something that ruins the shard in general. Duping gold would absolutely ruin the shard and there is no questioning that notion. However, being able to kill a character macroing afk in a tower, keep, or castle only is definitely not even remotely close to being something that would ruin the shard in general.
Don't misunderstand me: I am fully aware that this is Derrick's game and he can do whatever he wants with it. But none of these justifications hold water.
