Punishing Players for Exploits

[Soviet Heavy]

So Ubisoft is looking into ways to punish players who exploited a boss fight glitch in the Division, and I got wondering why the immediate reaction to someone taking advantage of a mistake the developers caused is grounds to punish them. I don't understand the reasoning to hit your players with a penalty and treat them as bad people because your game is broken.

When Portal Players discovered a way to easily bypass chamber 14, Valve didn't smack them with a banhammer, or even fix the problem. People were playing legitimately using the mechanics available to them in game.

Now, that isn't exactly the same as exploiting a fault in the game's coding so much as it is using the mechanics in unforseen ways, but it highlights the different attitudes between companies. Ubisoft wants players to play their game the way they intended, while Valve lets the free form experimentation gameplay go as it pleases. Now, if the exploit is being used to provide an unfair advantage against other players, by all means, patch it and roll back the bonuses the exploiters received. But don't go the next step and start smacking them for a problem you caused through negligence.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

To clarify for those that don't know of the exploit in the Divison:
By using a skill that deployed a piece of cover it was possible to "ghost" through certain solid objects in the game world, like gates, and thus end up outside the mission area. If you did this while a boss fight was underway and killed the boss from outside the game area, the game would spawn a new boss when you entered the area again, while leaving the loot dropped by the previous boss. This meant that people could get lots of High End gear (the best gear in the game) in a very short amount of time by killing the same boss over and over without ever finishing the mission.

Is it fair to punish these players? Yes, I think so. There is a PvP element in The Division in the Dark Zone and those that used the exploit could then go on to use their unfairly gotten advantage against other players, who would then get punished by not having a chance for playing the game the way it was meant to be played. Unlike Portal, where no one looses anything if I decide to glitch or exploit my way through the single player, a lot of players got killed in the DZ by players that had exploited their way to the best gear.

 

[Barbas]

Of course you shouldn't do that. You also shouldn't aggressively push DRM that hinders buyers and fails to effectively stop pirates, then claim it's "working as intended" when it's not, nor should you homogenize unique franchises into bland, buggy, drip-fed annual series that are cut up and sold piecemeal along with "season passes" which you advertise before the games are even out. You shouldn't hold anticipated games to ransom in a bid to try and sell more copies of a mediocre product.

This is Ubisoft you're talking about here. It's a company with a history of punishing players for its own mistakes. It should be relatively clear by now that the punishment starts when you purchase and try to play a depressing number of their games. This sad little incident is just another turd on the growing pile.

EDIT: Well, darn, I assumed this didn't affect other players. Is this a case of single-player shenanigans or are they actually getting an unfair advantage over other players in PvP? Because if what Gethsemani said is true and it's buggering about with other player's multi-player games, I think it would be appropriate for the people doing it to have their ill-gotten gains taken back.

Shame, I was looking forward to a nice rant. Now I just want some ice cream.

 

[Saelune]

Theres a difference between exploits in a game like Skyrim than a multiplayer game. People shouldn't be punished if they did it maybe once on accident or maybe even two or three times, but cheating is cheating. I wish cheaters were punished more often than they are.