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[Dismissed] On Community Responsibility for Bugs and Coding Oversights.


Kaed

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I have noticed in the last year or so several instances where new features were added in that had problems, usually related to being able to produce excessive amounts or resources. These sort of things tend to happen, especially in an opensource code format with minimal testing and oversight (I mean, it's there, but playtesting is largely done by the maker and after it's merged).

 

The problem, however, is the communities loose stance on these problems. Three incidents come to mind for me

 

-Being able to spawn infinite plastic by building and disassembling tables made of metal (not sure if this is fixed yet). I saw people doing this a lot when they wanted plastic back in the day.

-Finding out that pizza boxes were cheap and could be infinitely spawned, someone decided to buy hundreds of them with mining points and tile the entire cargo department with stacks of pizza

-Realizing that they could get exorbitant amounts of cash for minor tasks via the new bounty system, some cargo techs traded a hot dog and bottle of thermite for a whopping 20000 credits to pay off a raider bounty, derailing an entire round's progression by basically pulling an impossible sum out their ass.

 

These last two times, I reported them and suggested they be fixed in a suggestion, but the bigger problem for me here is that I and the occasional other person who bothers to type up a suggestion thread about fixing a feature rather than adding one, are the only ones that seem to care. Even the suggestion threads take days or weeks for anything to happen, and in the meantime, people are just free to abuse these features as much as they like.

 

People have no incentive to care about unbalancing or nonsensical features. In both of these situations, I have been told multiple times 'it's a game feature, so it's okay to use'. Many times, I have seen games punish people for exploiting bugs or oversights, but here, the outlook just seems to be 'it's not an exploit if someone merged it lol'.

 

So why is this allowed here? Why is no one taken to task for doing stupid shit when they are fully aware what they are doing is unbalancing the game or round progression? Even if we do not punish people for using it, why do we never set temporary rules against abusing them before they are fixed? Is it my responsibility to have to go in character every round I am and try to stop them from creating mountains of pizza/plastic/cash/whatever the fuck comes up next? Do I have to be the IC fun police to try and curtail abuse of new features?

 

It should be everyone's responsibility to not abuse things like these, not just a few people who give a fuck.

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-Being able to spawn infinite plastic by building and disassembling tables made of metal (not sure if this is fixed yet). I saw people doing this a lot when they wanted plastic back in the day.

 

It's fixed.

 

-Finding out that pizza boxes were cheap and could be infinitely spawned, someone decided to buy hundreds of them with mining points and tile the entire cargo department with stacks of pizza

 

Also fixed.

 

-Realizing that they could get exorbitant amounts of cash for minor tasks via the new bounty system, some cargo techs traded a hot dog and bottle of thermite for a whopping 20000 credits to pay off a raider bounty, derailing an entire round's progression by basically pulling an impossible sum out their ass.

 

Has yet to be fixed.


Wouldn't have happened if it wasn't initially coded that way. The problem would not even exist if a hotdog was only worth 20 credits. This thread would not even be written by you right now. Consider that, and consider why it's still important for the community to report bugs however they can.


Just because a hotdog is worth way more than it should be, though, does not mean it's equivalent to abusing a mechanic that you OOCly know exists but ICly shouldn't know exists. But since the information is displayed to you in an IC manner, it's not bug abuse in the metagaming way. Therefore it makes it way harder to enforce the rule against bug/unintended feature abuse.


Administrators rarely go ahead and enforce rules for grey area cases where they don't have precedent to take immediate action for. It's very difficult to conjure up enough confidence to improvise and risk getting a judgement wrong. It's difficult to be moderation staff, and not every situation they deal with is as clear-cut as the rules are, which is why they are so cautious to enforce them. They don't want to mess up or get anything wrong, they're just here to ensure people get along, they aren't present to play Fun Police.


It's the community's responsibility to argue a good case for why they think a ruling should be made over a grey-area case.


But also keep in mind that reporting bugs along the lines of being needlessly hostile and obviously frustrated at a mechanic that doesn't make a lot of sense - doesn't get the feature fixed faster. It only kills the morale of the developers by acting like this.

 

These last two times, I reported them and suggested they be fixed in a suggestion, but the bigger problem for me here is that I and the occasional other person who bothers to type up a suggestion thread about fixing a feature rather than adding one, are the only ones that seem to care. Even the suggestion threads take days or weeks for anything to happen, and in the meantime, people are just free to abuse these features as much as they like.

 

You really shouldn't be using the suggestions forum to report bugs. The github issues section exists for this reason. Politely DM a dev to check in on the issue through discord once you put it up for them to take a look at it and judge how important it is to fix.


Keep in mind that developers will only have so much motivation to do things regardless of whether it's their supposed responsibility to fix bugs or not. Bug-fixing is very tedious work at times, and developing this codebase for no other gain than simply contributing to the community is a very generous use of someone's time for our own enjoyment. Developing for this server and contributing is on a basis of "When I'm able and wanting to do so."


Want these problems to be fixed? Be part of the solution. Learn how to code and contribute to the server if you want these bugs to be fixed so badly.

 

It should be everyone's responsibility to not abuse things like these, not just a few people who give a fuck.

 

It is also the community's responsibilities to address issues in their proper place. You can't expect a developer to give a fuck if you report bugs in the myriad of suggestion threads that dot the respective subforum, which they likely don't have time in their day to read every single one of them.

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Stuff

 

I'm using bug and exploit as general terms, but neither the pizza nor the bounties thing qualifies as 'bugs'. They are just unmoderated values that are abusable, so they would fall under 'exploits'


You have also missed the point almost entirely in your lecture. The purpose of this thread was not to actually address those three things, it was to address the attitude we have towards using exploits.


You say it's hard to address these issues in character. It's not, I've already made plans to shut down bounties from being turned into play money in every round I'm HoP in.


But even without that. Then address them OOCly. Ask people not to abuse them while they are being reworked, something, anything that tells the players 'yeah we know this exploitative, pls stop we fixing it'.


It is unfathomable to me that whoever traded in a hot dog for 8000 credits never once had an inkling that maybe they were exploiting an oversight. They just didn't care, either because they thought it was hilarious, or because they wanted to look like the cool guy hero for paying a ransom. And they will continue to not care until we start setting boundaries.

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It is a never-ending debate to qualify what counts as an exploit. Using a regular game mechanic in a regular fashion in a totally justifiable way can be argued as 'exploiting' game mechanics if someone is salty enough.

 

You have also missed the point almost entirely in your lecture. The purpose of this thread was not to actually address those three things, it was to address the attitude we have towards using exploits.

 

Argue your case to an administrator if you have a problem. Their opinion matters more than mine and they can judge a case much better than I can. That's all I can tell you.

 

You say it's hard to address these issues in character. It's not, I've already made plans to shut down bounties from being turned into play money in every round I'm HoP in.

 

Good luck with that. Kinda bold to shut down interaction stemming from a mechanic to get cargo more involved and doing things in a round that benefit their department just because it isn't balanced according to your perception to how things should go.

 

But even without that. Then address them OOCly. Ask people not to abuse them while they are being reworked, something, anything that tells the players 'yeah we know this exploitative, pls stop we fixing it'.

 

Did you speak to an admin about this before making this post? Because they can probably offer better perspective than what anyone who replies here can do for you.

 

It is unfathomable to me that whoever traded in a hot dog for 8000 credits never once had an inkling that maybe they were exploiting an oversight. They just didn't care, either because they thought it was hilarious, or because they wanted to look like the cool guy hero for paying a random. And they will continue to not care until we start setting boundaries.

 

There is no 'we'. There is the staff who decide what is a rule-break or not.

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Potential reasons why developers don't fix balance issues/exploits:

1. They don't think it's an issue.

2. They don't think it's their responsibility.

3. They're unaware of the issue.

4. They don't have time to fix the issue.

5. They don't know how to fix the issue.

6. They don't have the motivation to fix the issue.


2 is the most common. 6 is the second most common. 1 is the third most common. When someone complains about a balance issue to me, I don't do anything about it because of 1, 2 and 6.


Aurorastation has a ton of balance issues and exploits. An absolute ton. They don't get fixed because it means having to deal with unconstructive player feedback for a handful of people they're tired of hearing from. People are quite keen to result to "you're just salty" when someone exploits a mechanic to your detriment so it's not something I desire touching that much. There is no person in charge of balance, it's basically a community decision which is probably why Aurorastation balance is such a fucking mess.

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  • 4 months later...

The abuse of bugs is already punishable according to our rules:

Quote

Abuse of bugs, regardless of intent, is a punishable offence. All bugs should be reported on GitHub. If they are immediately gamebreaking, please contact server staff via adminhelp, in an attempt to find a temporary resolution.

 

For something to be deemed a bug there need to be two things:

  • It has been reported on Github.
  • It has been deemed a bug by the developers.

As it is quite possible that a certain mechanic is a feature and not a bug.

If that has happened and you notice someone abusing this bug ingame, then it is upon you to report it to the administration.

 

As there is nothing new in this suggestion, I am voting for dismissal.

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  • 1 month later...
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