Stow mechanic for faster reloading / switching- is this an exploit?

@d3adst1ck I guess what I'm referring to though is shortening the time to get to the "hammer pull" stage.

The fix you are referring to prevents situations where the gun looked reloaded but actually wasn't and the player must go through the entire reload again, but what I'm referring to is reducing the "recoil" stage, where after the shot is fired, the gun you can start reloading the gun sooner.

Looks to me like the same fix that they used on buckets and shovels would apply here without affecting the reload status of the gun when the hammer is pulled.

Video with demonstration:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BxmMpQYiCY&ab_channel=Hexternal

@d3adst1ck i guess the problem is that they should care about that 1/3 of a second because they cared about shovel canceling and because this is even more directly related to PVP.

Seems like a weak argument to say it shouldn't be fixed because it could cause problems. It's a problem now that it exists as it is widely used and is non-obvious & confers an advantage. I don't know exactly how they would fix it, and I don't think you do either, but I have confidence that if they can fix bucketing and shoveling they could fix this as well.

Just my 2 cents, but this exploit uses the exact mechanism as the others which were named as exploits and patched, so I find it hard to accept that anyone should defend it.

@d3adst1ck I guess I'm getting tripped up on what you mean by "animation prior to the action." Can you explain this better?

The way I'm seeing it is that the bucket and shovel exploits both employed the same technique. You cancel part of the animation after the action is taken.

I.e. you cancel when the shovel comes out the ground (after it's action is done) and when the water leaves the bucket (after its action is done) so you don't have to sit through the last half (i.e. reloading). I fail to see how they are fixing animation before the action, it is always after the action. You can say it is before the next, but there is no animation until you click.

When you fire a gun (i.e the unskippable action), there are two parts to the animation.

First: A small pause where you zoom back out, and get to marvel at the shots leaving your gun & see the fire

Second: The reload animation

The x cancelling interrupts these two parts by skipping part of #1 and jumping straight to #2.

The only difference is that the gun can exist in a state that is unusable (not loaded) whereas the shovel and bucket are always useable even if it means you throw water back onto your ship. So the animation cancel happens between two separate animations for guns, with the second animation only playing if you have ammo (i.e. behind a logic gate).

The problem is more complex because there are two steps to the gun animation, but that doesn't necessarily mean fixing it will cause problems.

If you look at how they fixed shovel digging, there is now a pause before you can do your next shovel dig equal to the time it would have taken for your shovel to reload. I don't call this fixing the animation before the action, but if that's what you are referring to, then they should just add a pause before the reload (step 2 of the gun animation) equal to that time if you animation cancel.

@d3adst1ck Okay, fine, the action has an animation of it's own but it's still two parts & you are cancelling between those two parts is all that matters.

You didn't answer my question about what you meant by "animation prior to action" so please elaborate before picking apart my wording.

Are you considering the reload an action? Because it isn't, there is no button to reload (besides going to an ammo chest and pressing which is separate), it just happens when you have ammo available. That makes it a stage of the initial action, and so any animation is therefore after not prior.

If you look at my amended post, I commented on how they fixed the shovel cancel. But I tried what you said, and if you swap to food you still can't get out of the new fix for the shovel cancel and are forced to wait. Try it for yourself, you can rapidly switch to a banana than back to shovel, and it isn't any faster.

It doesn't break the flow of the game the way they fixed it and so it shouldn't for guns either. Basically, they made it so it takes the same amount of time to go fully through an action + its animations until you can repeat it, regardless of whether you take out a banana in between.

This applies at least until the timer is up, so technically you can still save time by chowing down on a banana in between shots if your intention was to eat a banana right away, since you are still allowed to store your weapon whenever you like. But, forcing you to do something in between until the normal timer goes away prevents it from being used as an exploit, i.e. allowing higher dps than intended.

Same fix should be done for reloading, end thread.

@calicorsaircat in this case, what about doubleshots the doublegunners use?

Been killed a bunch of times with this type of stuff and it seems to work based on things you are talking about. In this case its about twice faster than normal fire speed

Example given below

[Mod Edit]

I guess this influences pvp way more than shovel, that did nothing wrong to balance

@scaryfawn235336 to my knowledge, the double shot has been fixed by the hard coded delay @d3adst1ck mentions, which is not the same as the animation cancelling I am referring to here.

Double gun is here to stay, but my post is less about the switching guns quickly (which I should have removed from the title), and more about the animation canceling to reduce reload time in general.

That means this benefits people running sword too, but because it is a non-obvious use of the mechanic and conveys an advantage, I believe it should be patched.

When using two weapons, the fire rate of using one after the other is not related to the x-cancelling exploit, but rather is inherent in how switching between items works in general (i.e. they wanted no delay). The video you linked is old and is now much slower I believe, but still very effective.

Personally, I think Rare is afraid to patch the exact same exploit being used for guns because of the backlash, but it would be hypocritical not to.

@calicorsaircat said in Stow mechanic for faster reloading / switching- is this an exploit?:

Given that animation canceling for shoveling and bucketing have now been patched out, and are referred to by Rare as exploits, I'd like to ask for what the official stance is on animation canceling in another specific case; reload canceling, something notoriously used for double gunning.

To clarify, this is the use of the stow button (x) on pc by default, to shortcut the animation, or sprint I've heard.

This is not a complaint about double gunning, or an attempt at fixing double gunning which has already been addressed. Rather, the time savings for reload uses the exact same mechanism as shovel cancelling which did get patched.

My own testing showed that with a sniper, the default reload takes about 3.13 seconds (timed by looking at # of seconds between consecutive shots), while with x canceling you can get that to 2.77seconds. This is 0.36 seconds faster or the equivalent of your opponent having 360ms higher ping.

Across a whole clip, that is a net savings of 1.44 seconds, and even more if you factor in the second gun.

It doesn't really matter much faster it really is, so long as it conveys an advantage, it should by definition, be considered an exploit as it is non-obvious.

Can anyone refer me to an official post by Rare on the subject or a forum where this has been discussed already. Apologies if this has already been brought up before.

Thank you.

Stowing your weapons to cancel the reload time is definitely an exploit because Rare didn’t design the game to give people an advantage. I can see the bucket trick giving PvP an advantage over other players but the shovel glitch does nothing but speed up the process. Either way, Rare has and will fix any exploits.

@calicorsaircat thanks for clarification, I hope they did fix it, last time I was killed this way was on arena a month ago
Still, If they fix bucket and shovel it is important to fix x canceling for weapons too

Fully agree with you!

If they fixed some animation cancelling I don't see why they shouldn't fix the rest. I think it'll get done eventually.

@jumli7 That would make the game feel really really terrible and clunky if you couldn't do any other interactions before the animation was completed. The timer that they used to resolve bucket cancelling is the correct solution.

The thing I wonder is whether fixing the stow animation will actually just make double gunning that much better.

I think fixes should be done regardless for consistency, and if double gun needs another nerf after that then so be it but here's a scenario:

Double gun player uses two weapons, right? Fires one, switches to the other (not using x cancelling but instead just switching directly between weapons), then fires the second after some hard-coded delay.

Now he has two guns which are unloaded. If the animation cancelling was patched, technically all he needs to do is reload the first shot gun first because the timer for that gun has now passed, whereas the second shot gun would have still be on the forced timer.

By the time this player gets to loading the second gun, the timer for this gun has also passed, so technically the player can still circumvent the load timer for each gun individually and benefit from the increased dps.

I don't double gun much but it seems like this would be easy enough to do with practice.

Contrast this with a gun and sword user. Technically this exploit might benefit them slightly more because they are only reloading one gun at at a time.

Like I said, it should be patched for consistency, but the repercussions won't affect double gun users quite as much using the exact same fix. To make it "fair" the delay might need to be tied to the weapon until reloaded again, regardless of how much time has passed, because as my scenario highlights, it seems like cycling between them is just better in multiple ways (higher dps & lower reloads) & would circumvent any patch.

Again the point is not to nerf double gunning, but to have everyone on an "even playing field." If Rare decides that swapping between guns to circumvent the timer is fair, then I'm okay with that, but right now there is no timer on reloading for us to even make fair comparisons.

Unsure if Rare has ever posted officially their stance on exploits, from what I've seen, they usually don't care if people do it, they just patch it out if they feel its necessary and move on. This can be seen by the fact that a lot of SoT Partnered streamers use exploits like animation cancelling, even x bucketing, which gives them significant advantages, yet they are still endorsed streamers by Rare. You'd assume if they disliked exploit users, they wouldn't promote someone who does it, as it shows a large amount of the playerbase the exploit. Its annoying but that seems to be the case, even for really annoying exploits like spinning your mouse underwater.
Personally I don't use many exploits intentionally, I do spin my mouse somewhat underwater in-between shots, but I don't change my sensitivity to do it, I just spin normally. If the game is so broken that I can't move my mouse around underwater in a game with 'Sea' in the Title, then its not something to be mad at the player for, instead be mad at Rare for not fixing it, same goes for Animation Cancelling and any other exploit.

@wolfmanbush Depending on your default sensitivity, you can actually cause the issue without changing your DPI. I play on relatively high sensitivity so any amount of fast movement in the water can cause my character to go crazy. But that's not to say its impossible to tell when people are doing it intentionally, but there would probably be a lot of false bans if they started punishing it. If they started punishing it, there's basically a 100% chance that eventually there will be a fight where my character jibs out, regardless of if it was intentional. If you start to punish that bug too harshly then it'll scare people from engaging in fights underwater, or at least scare them from moving around in the water, out of fear their character might jib out and get them reported.
Stuff like X bucketing can cause you to stay in a fight you otherwise would've lost, especially on the Brigantine, patched out, but was perfectly usable by SoT Partnered streamers without any punishment. Animation cancel on weapons may seem a small advantage in most fights, but high skill vs high skill player, being able to fire your gun faster, or your full clip faster, can also be the difference between a win and a loss.

I don't think you can pick and choose which exploits are punishable, you'd have to do all or none. And if there's exceptions, Rare would have to state so, but they don't seem to be great at communicating that, so i doubt's it'd happen. Plus a lot of the playerbase is casual, and aren't in the loop via Twitter/Discord/Forums/etc and won't be able to tell what is/isn't allowed unless its specified in game. If you're gonna specify it ingame, probably better to just fix it.

@xultanis-dragon I'm just talking about the fact that partnered streamers get away with it, which is literally showing off exploits to the wider community and making exploit-users more common to encounter.

@d3adst1ck Load timer refers to the potential fix that should be adopted as it was on the shovel and bucket, not the existing 1 second timer.

You still haven't answered my question about what you meant by "animation prior to action" so please elaborate.

I would like for this to be more of a discourse versus an interrogation, so I would appreciate if you could clarify if you still take issue with my description for the proposed fix and think that it is still not in line with all their previous fixes they have done for animation cancelling.

To your question:

There is a 1 second timer hard coded as you say, but this is only evoked when shooting two guns back to back. This is a balancing feature to using two guns, but doesn't actually seem to be evoked when both guns are unloaded. Again, I don't double gun much so if someone has more insight into how the mechanics work or if I'm mischaracterizing it, I'd like to hear that perspective.

From my own testing in the current build, it looks like you can swap freely between weapons that both need to be reloaded without any delay. The delay only seems to exist when switching to a loaded gun.

This enables a double gun user to reload the guns in whichever order makes sense to them assuming they can press the keys fast enough, which is inherently fine. However, this would enable a user to circumvent an exploit fix that enforces a timer on a reload on each gun individually.

Scenario 1:

Fire Gun 1
Fire Gun 2
Swap - no delay when swapping to an unloaded gun
Reload Gun 1 - no reload delay because the act of firing gun 2 has made the reload timer for gun 1 obsolete.
Reload Gun 2 - no delay because the time to reload gun 1 has made the reload timer for gun 2 obsolete.

In scenario 1 the "delay" in the reload timer never evokes so the patch technically doesn't do anything to slow down the double gun. That isn't the original intent, but just saying how it is.

vs.

Scenario 2:

Fire Gun 1
Fire Gun 2
Forced reload delay for gun 2 - because you are loading it after firing, a patch would force the full reload animation to patch the stowing exploit. This is the extra 0.3s.
Swap to gun 1 - no 1 second delay because gun 1 is unloaded
Reload gun 1 - no delay because proposed reload timer is obsolete after loading gun 2.

You can see that it is better to reload the guns in the order they were fired to get around the patch. Not necessarily a bad thing, but if you only had 1 gun, you would be forced to watch the reload animation if stowing is fixed or switch to a sword or something else for a short while, whereas double gunners don't need to and can continue to reload both in the same amount of time.

This is where I am critical of my own suggestion on how to fix, because the reality is that the fix might have to take into account both weapons depending on how Rare views the fairness between scenario 1 vs 2. Is it part of the learning curve or is it a kind of exploit on its own?

In summary, it doesn't look like the player would be affected by the one second timer until they are switching to a loaded gun, but they can still reap the benefits of fast swapping to circumvent any exploit fix to the "stow mechanic" that only fixes each gun individually.

@wolfmanbush I'm not saying give the SAME punishment for every exploit, but if rare doesn't want people playing a game in an unintended way via a bug, it should morally be punishable regardless of what you do. Yes some exploits are a lot worse than others.

(gotta go to Imgur, video won't play on forum)
You might get situations like this, I'm not even spinning fast, I'm doing it on my regular sensitivity, I'm just trying to dodge a gunshot. I can't tell for sure, but the guy saying ''my god'', might be because my character was jibbing out. If my character did do that, they would then be able to report me for DPI switching.
DPI switching literally means to use a switch/button on your mouse in order to quickly change your sensitivity, I'm not doing this. I'm sure I'm not the only one who would be scared of moving in the water due to the risk of getting false banned. If you can't simply turn hard angles in the water due to the game being broken, out of fear that you'd get banned for exploiting, then the solution isn't punish it and leave it in, its put all of your effort into delivering a patch as soon as possible.

@wolfmanbush Right, I know that there's a glitch with the game that causes fast movement in the water to break. And if its so broken to a point where you are scared of being punished for moving, then it needs to be fixed. If they don't fix it but just instead ban people for moving in the water, then that's actually pretty terrifying. A game with 'Sea' in the title should not be one you are scared to move in the water. Yes i was intentionally spinning, but I wasn't doing it intentionally to a point where i know my character is jibbing out, I'm trying to dodge bullets but also be slow enough that I don't jib out, but as i cant tell that in first person, its not something you can accurately judge every time. And if i can then be banned for doing it even in a fair way, I would just actively try to avoid any water combat I can.

''eh its playing with fire to me'', right, and what Rare should do is put the fire out, not just put a little sign saying 'please do not go near the fire'. If they fix the problem where your character jibs out when spinning, then I'd be free to move around normally without fear. It'd be better to remove exploits rather than just ban people that do them.

@d3adst1ck

Just don't bother participating then because if you can't clarify your own statements or admit if you mischaracterized something, then why should anyone trust what you say? Just lost a lot of respect for you as someone who knows their stuff, because I can see how much you post, but you just crumble under any pressure it seems to back up your statements. Please work on that.

Switching to an unloaded gun carries an additional penalty of waiting for it to reload before being able to fire it, which is going to be around 2.8s or more depending on the gun. Being able to switch to it immediately is irrelevant because you still need to load it which carries a longer penalty than the Loaded-to-Loaded swap making it automatically a lower DPS scenario.

You just described reloading a gun. Don't even understand what you are saying. Of course you have to reload before firing again, and of course it is worse having to reload than having bullets loaded.

So yes, double gun has a cyclical pattern to it, shoot both, reload both. And yes, the reloading takes longer than firing because that's how guns work.

If Rare wants to add an additional timer to prevent 0.3s from being shaved off of an almost 3 second reload time for a single gun, that's fine, but considering that the minimum acceptable time for fatal damage output between 2 weapons seems to be around 1 second given that this is what they have enforced as the swap time between two loaded guns I don't think cutting the post-fire animation short matters all that much.

Totally fine if you think it is negligible and isn't worth worrying about, but in alignment with their patching of shovel cancelling, they seem to think even small gains are worth pursuing.

You are excused as its obvious you are just throwing stuff against the wall now by describing why reloading is worse than shooting.

@xultanis-dragon A glitch that allowed a player to intentionally despawn an enemies ship would be removed immediately. They wouldn't make it bannable because they wouldn't focus on checking who's done it, they would put all the effort into removing it as fast as they can.

A glitch that allows you live underwater for 3 seconds longer would probably be patched out assuming that its easy to replicate and isn't situational. Ie if you had to push your pirate into a certain spot underneath your boat to get the extra water, its never going to be used. If its just a simple thing you can do anywhere with no downside, it'll probably get patched in the next monthly patch, but wouldn't be prioritised for a hotfix like the previous would.

Rare not paying attention to Partnered streamers streams or content is an issue in itself. If they partner someone and then the streamer just completely stops playing the game or starts to do some really bad stuff in the game, the only way devs will know is if people report it. A Toxic streamer generates a toxic playerbase, as such reports on it would be low and result in them staying partnered for longer.

Just to use an example, the streamer happyf33tz, they've always used exploits both PvE and PvP such as X shovel, X Bucket, Animation Cancelling, etc. There's even a clip where he used a spot launch on FoTD to launch himself onto an enemy moving galleon with a mega keg, which they then sunk due to this. Without exploiting a bug where you can slip your character into a corner that launches you, they wouldn't have gotten that sink. It makes for good content so the chat is just full of epic poggers and emotes, nobody cares that its done, rightfully so because that's how streams work. However its showing off a lot of exploits to players that they might not have known otherwise, and as such I personally believe streamers, especially partnered streamers, should be held to a standard that disallows exploiting, regardless of severity, meaning both PvE and PvP exploits.