Raiding exploits is a topic that’s been getting a bit of attention on the official forums recently. There has even been some moderator and developer response to some of this discussion, which is somewhat unusual and (in the latter case) encouraging. The discussion has been sparked by the fact that there are are a number of very serious bugs in the current end game raids, including bugs which allow you to:

  • “Tank” Draigoch without taking any damage whatsoever
  • Bypass the adaptation crowd-control mechanic in the Tower of Orthanc (ToO)
  • End the Sauraman fight in phase 3 (of a 5 phase fight)
  • Get credit for completing some of the T2 ToO challenges without meeting the challenge condition

Just to get something out of the way right up front – this article will not be discussing what these bugs are and if anyone explicitly or implicitly outlines what they are in comments then those comments will not be posted. Also, while I personally know what’s involved in the first of these I don’t exactly know what’s involved in the other three (though I have a good idea with the second), so don’t bother trying to ask me how they work or anything because not only won’t I tell you but I can’t.

This article seeks to cover the basics of exploiting the game – what it is, why you shouldn’t do it and the occasionally grey line between “exploit” and “smart play”.

What is an exploit?

The definitily of exploit is pretty clearly outlined in the LOTRO Code of Conduct (which is binding on you if you play the game):

    17. You will not exploit, distribute or publicly communicate any Game error, miscue or bug which gives an unintended advantage within the Game world.

So if you take advantage of a bug or error in the game to gain an unintended advantage, such as finishing a fight much more easily or quickly than you otherwise could have, or to get loot multiple times within a lock period, then you are breaking the game’s code of conduct and are at risk of getting banned. From what I understand, while Codemasters used to be reasonably tight in having GMs police exploiting, Turbine has in general been fairly relaxed in enforcing this with only one high profle incident apparently resulting in a significant number of bannings (where a bunch of people got banned for exploiting faulty locks on the turtle when it was first released to get multiple first age LIs right after it was launched). However, just because exploiting has (apparently) been fairly lightly policed by Turbine in the past doesn’t mean that they don’t have the power to ban people for taking advantage of bugs, nor does it make it any less a breach of the game’s code of conduct.

The concept of exploits is pretty well established in MMOs. For example, many of the top WoW guilds were banned for exploiting a lock bug to get extra loot in the most recent WoW raid and the guild which got the world first kill of the Lich King in that game was stripped of their title and banned for taking advantage of a bug in that fight. The fact of the matter is that MMOs are complicated pieces of software so bugs will creep in and, unlike single player games, MMO companies feel that due to the social and subscription nature of their game, people exploiting bugs to finish content that they otherwise couldn’t have finished, or to gain loot quicker than intended is unacceptable.

The excuses

Whenever the topic of exploits come up, people who are exploiting them come up with vaious excuses. None of these really hold water imo, but I’ll go through them.

It’s Turbine’s fault for releasing buggy software

I absolutely agree that Turbine needs to do better with its QA and bug fixing (particularly the speed of bug fixing). The number of bugs and broken stuff in the RoI instances is disgraceful and the fact that there are so many wide ranging possible exploits is an indictment on their quality control, testing procedures and development resources. But at the end of the day, we play the game as we get it. Sometimes that game has bugs in it. Taking advantage of those bugs is exploting, period. Just because Turbine is rushing unfinished and buggy content out doesn’t make it any less of an exploit, and it doesn’t make it right.

Everyone’s doing it

This barely warrants a response, cause it’s the worst excuse in the book. But clearly it isn’t a valid response, nor is the suggestion that just because people aren’t getting banned for it means it’s not an exploit. Unfortunately sometimes behaviour such as exploiting the Sambrog challenge (after they tried to fix it) becomes so common that it’s hard to find a group that isn’t exploiting it, but that still doesn’t make it right and you should do what you can to get your group to do it the proper way.

It’s not an exploit, it’s just smart play

This is the only excuse which has some merit to it. Turbine may have designed a particular fight thinking that it would be done in a certain way. But the community is clever and crafty and comes up with an unexpected and unintended way of doing the fight which makes it much easier to complete. Doing the fight in the “unintended” way is not exploiting it, it’s just smart gameplay. An example would be the original Watcher fight where groups quickly realised that range tanking made the fight much easier by drastically reducing incoming damage and effectively neutralising the AOE mechanic. That this was an unintended outcome by Turbine is pretty clearly shown by the fact that they subsequently introduced a non-removable range damage corruption mechanism which nullified this strategy, but that doesn’t mean that range tanking the watcher was an exploit.

Sometimes it’s difficult to tell if a particular strategy is taking advantage of “bad code” for an unintended advantage (and is thus an exploit) or just a smart way of doing a particular fight. To this day I’m not sure if the strategy of standing in the safe spot near the pillar in the lightning boss in Sammath Gul is exploiting the fight. There’s some indication that Turbine wanted people to run around and try to learn the patterns and dodge them, because the first safe spot that people learned (where the group can just stand still and DPS at range) had an invisible barrier placed on it in one of the post-F2P patches. But even after that patch there was a new safe spot. So I don’t know whether figuring out the pattern and standing in the spot that didn’t get hit was exploiting or just smart gameplay. There can at times be a genuine grey area here.

Another situation can arise where a fight literally can’t be completed without “taking advantage” of a bug. For instance the ToO acid wing before the recent patch was bugged such that the acid in the boss fight didn’t do any damage (you just got a bunch of “absorbs” pop up above your head by standing in it). No one would suggest that completing the boss fight at that time was “exploiting”, because you’re not doing anything active to gain the benefit of the bug, it’s just that the fight is easier than was intended.

But sometimes it’s pretty clear that you’re taking advantage of an actual game bug. One indication might be that the mob you’re attacking is getting hurt but you’ve done something which means that it is doing no damage to you (outside of a kiting situation; kiting is clearly not exploiting). That’s the case with Draigoch at the moment using a certain strategy. And the fact that this strategy is an exploit has been pretty conclusively shown by the fact that Turbine has deleted videos off its forums explaining how to do the fight this way.

Another indication might be that what you’re doing is obviously a bug, eg because a skill works in a different way when you use it out of combat compared to when you use it in combat (if a skill was intended to have a certain effect then it would work both in and out of combat). This is the case with the second bug on the list I posted at the start. And there’s been an official statement by the raid’s Dev that this is a bug:

    On the subject of adaptation:

    Are the character skills being used currently working as intended, yes.

    Is adaptation currently working as intended in how it responds to them, no.

    Will we be tweaking the implementation of adaptation, yes. In update 6 adaptation will not clear until the pull the monster is attached to leaves combat.

He goes on to say that he personally doesn’t consider it an exploit – and I can see his point, for groups finding out about this the first time (which is entirely possible). But if you know about this bug – and it’s clearly a bug as outlined above – and you continue to use the strategy then that very clearly falls within the definition of exploit in the code of conduct.

And as for the third and fourth of the exploits outlined at the start, I don’t know the details of these but they’re unarguably exploits. You shouldn’t be able to finish a 5 phase fight in 3 phases, or get credit for something you didn’t do or meet a challenge condition that you actually failed.

At the end of the day, whether you and your group exploits fights is up to your attitude to the game and morality. Given how scarce Turbine’s active policing of game exploits seems to be, you’ll quite possibly get away with it if you do (don’t blame me if you get banned though!) but you should at least admit that what you’re doing is against the game’s code of conduct and a dirty way to win a fight.

 

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