Burning Blade Exploit may have lasting effects on Season 13's Content

@greatfailure82

exploiting 100% is cheating. to even try to claim otherwise is wild to me. you can argue over the severity of the cheat or you could argue if there aware its even a cheat at all but its intellectually dishonest to say it isn't cheating

By cheating I mean hacking, as in use of external software or alteration of game files. Exploiting and hacking are not in the same ballpark. People usually refer to hacking as cheating as such I don't personally call exploits cheating simply to not further mesh Exploit and Hacking as the same thing, because they are not.

@itz-majman

Overall, they need to re-roll money or just remove every transaction in the game where people have gotten over 1M+ in a single sell since at that point it's clearly exploited. The fact they haven't talked about it or done anything at all is extremely concerning. Just the other day on Twitter they posted "How do you like Season 13?" like everything is fine. Crazy.

Returning the Burning Blade to make 1 Million Gold would be a 16 Streak. That's very possible and I even personally Know people who on Day 1 did over 16 streaks. This is why direct punishment is hard if there is not proper data infrastructure to directly figure out who exploited vs who just grinded normally. If you had 10 exploiters and 1 legit player, I'd rather punish nobody than punish all of them.

@greatfailure82

i know, doesn't mean its not cheating however unless they say thats how its intended to be used

Extended Sword Lunge was originally an exploit, as in it was an unintended feature that gave an advantage to use. They decided that they like how it works and have left it in game, that does not change the fact that its origins come from the exact same place as other exploits which have been removed and even had people punished for using. In your own words to use extended sword lunge is cheating, as was quickswapping, something everyone including SoT Partners used. Thats why its a tricky topic, because exploits are so prevalent in this game.

@frogfish12
You're probably right and you shouldn't admit it. I have to say, I didn't think it would “work” because we didn't know how to do it beforehand, it was more of an experiment. I'm more used to exploits being the kind of bugs that I don't even come across.
I usually just find holes in walls and accidentally buge under islands or lose my loot because it's stuck somewhere... the bugs you don't really want to have.
I know there are stronger exploits than this and I don't even want to know how people do it... what confuses me: Why didn't Rare close the servers on Friday morning when they realized what people were doing (for 2 days if necessary) and say: “Okay, hotfix, now” and if they had only patched in a level cap of 10 for the streak... you could at least make it harder. Every little noob will find this
Should Rare give out a Yellowbeard for using it.... well, I can't pretend that I haven't tested it, so I'd better say well and good: anyone can find this exploit. Really anyone. It's so simple, you don't even need any skills...

@greatfailure82

no extended sword lunging was cheating, the second they said its now an intended game mechanic it became fine. and no its not a tricky topic if something is clearly unintended to where you cant accidentally just happen to do it, e.g. rod launching your cheating. quick swapping could happen naturally without the person realizing.

You're saying extended sword lunge was wrong until Rare said its okay. As such you are calling out for people to be punishde for somthing that Rare could technically announce to be intentional. Its clearly not, but you are only making your opinion based on when rare gives answers, which they likely won't do. You don't unintentionally accidentally block before sword lunging and then jump last second in order to board a ship that is out of normal sword lunge range. You may accidentally perform it against like AI or something, but use on players is wholly intentional in all instances.

@itz-majman

Make it anyone over 20+ gets re-rolled. No point going over 8 (commendation wise) People are gonna get caught in the crossfire but it's such a small percent that got such a high streak the legit way.

Nah. You can't be okay with innocent players getting punished because they grinded the new content but other people are using an exploit. There is no such thing as a Gold economy. There is no player trading and with the exception of Captained Ships and Supplies, all gold is purely used to buy cosmetics. I could have 1 gold or 1 morbillion gold and it wouldn't make any difference. The only thing that matters if when Rare add more and more powercreep via stronger voyages, meaning the average gold you can make is higher, so they need to increase the price of new cosmetics to reflect it. If they actually get a grip and quickly remove exploits, the damage done is still relatively small.

@d3adst1ck

They can just remove the Burning Blade from the World Event rotation, which I'm pretty sure they can do without taking servers down, then you at least still have the camps active until you can fix the issues surrounding the BB.

They can remove the Burning Blade from the world event rotation, but that means essentially removing the S13 content. All we'd have left is Skelly Camps which are effectively incredibly barebones sea forts.

@greatfailure82

yes, ideally rare would come out and say whats fine and what isn't fine. but until they do anything thats unintended, that a player should reasonably know is unintended and then a player knowingly does should be punished if that action gives them a competitive advantage. i feel like thats basic rules that everyone lives by whether it be in real life or other games.

The issue is that so many people use exploits. If you blanket ban for any and every exploit then that would ban practically all SoT Parnters for using Quickswap, it'd ban everyone who used extended sword lunge before it was decidedly okay, it'd ban everyone who uses any form of launching, any x cancelling, etc. I've literally fought Rare Crew using pvp exploits. So you would have to ban an absolutely Insane amount of your playerbase if you simply go with ''a player should reasonably know is unintended and then a player knowingly does should be punished if that action gives them a competitive advantage.''

This is why its more of a question of: How much exploiting is too far? not just if using it in general should be punishable.

Another thing with mass bans is when it comes to an exploit like this, its used to make insane gold and rep. as such its mostly being done by people on main accounts as why would you need to do it on an alt, you'd much rather be stealing it. This means that you'll be banning a lot of players that are in the-know of SoT Exploits, likely involved in the SoT community with a lot of playtime. There's a pretty good chance a lot of people you ban this way will return via alts and Cheat. A lot of Cheaters do it because they got banned on their main, often for reasons they personally believe to be unfair (regardless of if it actually was or not), so decide if I'm gonna alt back in I might as well just cheat. Mass Bans also mean that those players wont be buying from the Pirate Emporium. Banning Little Timmy who did the exploit once to hit 8 rituals and then lower means he's not here to buy the new emporium shipset. The exploiters that go insane with 100+ are often highly experienced players who realistically aren't even buying from the emporium and therefore aren't a customer anymore, but just a consumer. As such I think realistically they would only ban the insane ones and banning literally everyone is a terrible business decision.

@d3adst1ck

They are going to have to remove something if they want to stop the exploiting until they can fix it.

All I would do is cap Ritual streak at 6. that allows players to do a full loop of the server before handing in, and caps the Gold per Return at 375k. Still obviously a lot of money for a single camp via exploit, but its not the tens of millions they're getting currently. This would allow for the majority of players to experience S13 unchanged as not many will actually do more than 6 camps at once. It'll prevent anyone doing the 8 streak 10 times until the exploit is fixed, and everyone who would want to do more than 6 would hopefully understand the reason why it has to temporarily be capped, and wait until its removed to go higher than 6.

@wolfmanbush

Failure to nip wrong-doing in the bud only leads to more extreme wrong-doing. That can already be seen in SoT as the cheesing has amplified season after season. People think it's ok to exploit to extreme degrees and they think that they won't be banned, that's gonna lead to many people getting into trouble they could otherwise avoid.

they literally let their partners post videos showing off S11 voyage exploiting for maximum profit and nothing happens even after reporting these videos. SoT is and has always been completely riddled with exploits. In a game that tries to pretend its ''tools not rules'' it sure does have an absolute insane amount of ''no you are using that thing wrong''. The fact Systems like S13 get released and literally always have some form of gamebreaking exploit should be taken note of so they can prevent it constantly happening, because clearly whatever internal testing they're doing isn't catching enough. Likewise its clear they don't have the resources prepared to immediately fix issues that arise when a Season Drops. Its like they expect a Season to drop flawlessly every time and whenever something goes wrong it flips everything upside down, as if they have no pre-emptive plan for it.

Rare needs to jump on this ASAP
The longer this goes un-patched, the more widespread the damage

We tried sinking a Burning Blade ship that was clearly exploiting (we clipped a video showing them going from 24-62 after 1 camp).
We sailed over, and were greeted by players who could fly, were invisible, aimbot, and shot us from under the deck.
We couldn't fight back under those conditions, and just logged off. We submitted the clip however I don't think anything will be done.

@frogfish12

All I would do is cap Ritual streak at 6. that allows players to do a full loop of the server before handing in, and caps the Gold per Return at 375k. Still obviously a lot of money for a single camp via exploit, but its not the tens of millions they're getting currently. This would allow for the majority of players to experience S13 unchanged as not many will actually do more than 6 camps at once. It'll prevent anyone doing the 8 streak 10 times until the exploit is fixed, and everyone who would want to do more than 6 would hopefully understand the reason why it has to temporarily be capped, and wait until its removed to go higher than 6.

This sounds like the most sensible option, just put a cap on the streak.

Cap it at least until the exploit is fixed. Sensible temp fix

If possible, rollback any gold/reputation gains over a set (massive) value

I regularly see people over 100 streaks now. Mostly just a little over 200, But I saw 4 ships that were over 1000.

And they don't even fight. They just run to Reaper's Hideout and cash in.

Normally, I don't care about people doing exploits. They are ruining the experience for themselves. I had this exact mindset when LOTV duplications were a thing.

But this exploit is the SINGLE BIGGEST exploit this game ever had. It's actively ruining the best event in the game, because so many people who don't even want to engage with the event do it for the gold.

So now, the seas are full of exploiting Burning Blade's who don't even want to fight. My solo/duo sloop can only do so much if they just run to Reaper's and instantly cash out.