lets discuss - "exploit early, exploit often" is new legit meta? or its become new rule?

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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"

"

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:

"

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:

"

ExsiliumUltra wrote:

"

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.

"

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

Why are people trying to conflate using a strong skill with taking advantage of some sort of exploit? People want to play melee, so they pick BS and so now they're engaging in exploitative behaviour? Absurd. Especially something so broadly established as the skill to probably play if you're playing melee, especially league-start melee.

Look at the context and stop engaging in phallic, semantic jousting. This isn't a business setting where you're exploit an opportunity; and even then, it's to someone else's detriment. Who in their right mind thinks using a skill with better scaling is the same as using a bug or cheating? Nobody other than those hyperventilating in a forum.

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hmcg020 wrote:

Why are people trying to conflate using a strong skill with taking advantage of some sort of exploit?

Because “exploit” in this context is a poorly defined term.