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

@itz-majman Your statement about something 1 million + being clearly exploited is problematic, and is probably why rare is so grey on the subject. On the first day my friends and I got a 1 mil+ stack legitimately... so that isn't the case. To make a rule such as that it would have to be 10 million at the very least if not higher due to streamers and no lifers.

@itz-majman

1million gold is not that much honestly, if you complete 8 camps (for the commendation) its already over 500k, and that takes only like an hour and half at most, maybe less if the wind is on your side. I even seen a post on X of one of the devs who did a 20 streak (which will be over a million gold)..

I absolutly agree with you, if I see someone exploiting the BB, I will record it and send it to rare, even if it doesn't get them banned. I will steal their cof but nothing else, I don't want to fight them even if i can sink them, I don't want to sell a dirty blade.

I do think short yellowbeards and gold-resets need to happen for this. No-one is doing it repeatedly by accident, and I'm sure Rare can indentify those doing it at large scale fairly easily.

By ignoring it and doing nothing, Rare basically is giving the green light to folk to search for and use exploits.

As for who it harms, ledgers would be the big one, I think. If even 100 people lose out on the rewards they legitimately earned because of this, I think that's a sad situation and it should not happen.

When it comes to how to patch it, I would imagine adding a hard limit of n+1 at any ritual with a 3 min cooldown until another can be added would do the trick. It's very unlikely you could sail to another camp in that time. And, as others said, hard limit it to 8 rituals before handing in.

Its funny to me people still regard any form of quickswaping cheating. Thats so cope, im sure 99% of playerbase couldnt tell the difference when they hear or see a delay swap and a normal swap :D. there is basically no difference.

I do think there is a clear difference between cheating/hacking and exploiting.

But yeah the BB exploit goes hard, it needs to be patched soon.

Im just curious what u guys think, if im on a server with an exploited burning blade on it. Am i ethicly fine to sink it and sell its sword to a trading company in order to get rep? I mean it could be legit right!? what do i know!? Its not like im doing an exploit in any shape or form. This might be a good time to bring all my Emi lvls to 500.

This is the kind of bug that games like WoW would do a full rollback on. I would be ok with it if they just rolled everything back to BB launch with the dupe fixed.

@twisp6753 sagte in Burning Blade Exploit may have lasting effects on Season 13's Content:

This is the kind of bug that games like WoW would do a full rollback on. I would be ok with it if they just rolled everything back to BB launch with the dupe fixed.

my mate almost lost it mentally this weekend after finally achieving golden bones. he will be devestated :D

Top ledger for Athena at this point with three days to go is 55 million. 1 through 10 all at least 32 million. Reapers is top is 325 million and 1 through 10 at least 200 million. Normal?

@greatfailure82

at no point did i say perma ban, infact i specifically said temp ban on more than one occasion, having a 24 hour timeout wouldn't hurt the playerbase at all

Perma ban or temp ban, or any form of punishment; it doesn't change the fact that they would have to equally punish their Partners as well as an insane amount of their playerbase. Not only would their partners be doing activates against the rules, but they are straight up showcasing these activities and encouraging viewers to do so, which would then get their viewers in trouble. Viewers who see a streamer with Rare's seal of approval do something so naturally think its okay.

@d3adst1ck

That's fine but we don't know if they can change game caps on the fly.

Even if they need to pull the servers to put the cap on, they could've done that 2 days ago and then work on the actual fix knowing people aren't exploiting it. The fact they have yet to do literally anything suggests they plan on doing nothing to mitigate and are just going to hold out until they can fix it. Fleet exploit took over a month to fix and just like this they gave 0 communication about it when it was discovered, while it was being used, or after the fix came out.

@wolfmanbush

That doesn't mean much. They really don't condone it they just don't say much about it in public (which is fair to criticize).
Partners are all over the place in personality and views and how they conduct themselves, that's on the individual. It's not like all partners are employees.
Imo it's pretty obvious where Rare stands, they don't like it, the maintenance of it just isn't very effective pretty regularly.

If Partners are blatantly advertising gold/rep exploits on their channels to their viewer-base then that viewer-base is going to think its okay because the channel has the rare seal of approval on it. The idea that Rare cannot control what partners do realistically just means Rare aren't paying attention to what their partners are doing which could be very bad if their partners are now starting to do things that are punishable. One could straight up start cheating and Rare wouldn't know unless the community blows it up. Outside of in-game actions we've seen that Rare won't even remove Happyfeetz from partner despite things he has on-stream admitted to performing criminal activity, and an incredibly disgusting one at that. You also have LDSylvr, a partner who has literally called people homophobic slurs in-game.

As you say, partners are not employees, but they are literally chosen to be community ambassadors, if those community ambassadors are literally showcasing things that can get their audience punished then Rare needs to step in and shut it down when it occurs. As you say the maintenance of it isn't very effective pretty regularly, and that is something that needs to change.

@itz-majman

How many people do you think stack well beyond 20 huh? barely anyone at all since there's NO POINT in it.

Like legit stack? Well you get 62.5k per Skeleton Camp at grade 5 (which you get after 4 camps) for literally just sailing island to island and completing a 1 minute puzzle. Even without exploits it is much stronger than FoTD stacking, and far less risky due to how OP the current Burning Blade is and its ability to ignore all damage/enemy ships and hand in to Reapers with very little counterplay. If you're gonna say ''its just gold that buys cosmetics'' well you can apply that to quite literally everything in the game, as such it doesn't work as a means to say there's no point in going over x amount of rituals.

Beyond its general strength, people just like going for big numbers, especially with new content. People want to see how far they can go with it. Season 13 is literally a Big ship that is designed to entice PvP, and the gold/rep is directly tied to if you can stay afloat rather than selling treasure. Its about defending your big payday. People absolutely do go higher than 8 (the highest a commendation requires) legit, I myself stacked to 10 on day1 just to get the do 10 camps commendation all at once.

Eh, I would say it's peaking right now. Everyone knows about it, even those that don't see someone with 500+ streak and check YouTube and learns about it. The longer they wait, the harder it will be to fix it. So many ways of going after these exploiters but my bet is that Rare won't do anything; which will just lower the morale for the company even more but I hope I'm wrong.

The only people affected by it directly are the people that did it, and the people that stole it. A more damaging issue would be like if just accidentally they added an extra 0 on the end of orb of Secrets price, making it 200k for everyone. That doesn't require an exploit (as you are not intentionally doing something to gain from it) and anyone who just wants to try out the new content will be getting increased unintended rewards. The fact you need to go out of your way to do the exploit means that everyone who chooses not to do it isn't affected much at all. The only effect on them is if they wish to steal legit swords, the amount of legit swords going around will be smaller than it would be because of the exploits. Another possible effect would be legit players hoping on exploiters getting banned/rolled back, and if that does not happen then legit players will feel robbed that they chose to do the right thing and are essentially punished for it.

@th3-tater

So just out of curiosity. To make this more annoying for those doing it...
If I interrupt a ritual at a camp, how long before the BB could do it, what's the cool down timer?
If I dive to a voyage, (not a raid. I did the small island single captain OoS) and end up at a Camp, does it mess with the orb like a raid dive does?
Hehe. Let's fight a little lol.

I believe the reset timer on Skeleton Camps is 15 minutes of nobody loading in the Island. The same as Sea Forts and Shrines.

I like where your head is at though lol. We did something similar yesterday preventing a crew getting their stack going. We ran down into the puzzle room doing it, my teammate did it while I defended him. Put a keg on the stairs to kill the first guy that came in. Its worth noting that if you are down there you respawn just outside the puzzle room, meaning once someone is down there, they're gonna keep spawning until they choose to leave. We then had to effectively tdm and consistently win while progressing the puzzle until we finally completed it and prevented them from doing the exploit.

If you do this, make sure you do NOT pick up the Orb. There is a commendation for Burning Blade crew selling a Stolen Orb, don't give that to the exploiters. Just stop the ritual to spawn the orb, but don't take it off the pedestal. That'll still prevent them doing the exploit but won't give their commendation.

@thorumsu

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.

This is also another huge issue I haven't spoken about here yet. Day 1 I found so many more AI controlled Burning Blades because not everyone was wanting to do it straight away and probably were going to wait a little bit. But once the second exploit became mainstream, I struggle to find hardly any AI controlled Burning Blades, I barely even find any regular world Events. All I find are people on the Burning Blade seeking to exploit, which prevents any more world events spawning.

I really wish once you sink a player controlled Burning Blade you would also have the option to crew it instead of sink it. The amount of Servers I've hopped and left seeing a player controlled one because I want to control it instead, and I cannot do that by battling a player. If you could crew player ones there would be so much more fighting over the ship, which would hopefully put a lot of strain on exploiters. Really wish Rare thought that part through, or hopefully make that change in the future.

So in the end. Players who do these exploits will also be the same players who complain

“We have nothing to do” because the cheesed everything for….gold and rep.

@keylessword4029

also oddly enough the only exploit i am aware they ever did bans for was burying an emissary flag would remove the "yours" tag so then you could sell it for full price which wasnt that much compared to todays loot standards. but i think more importantly to them it allowed you to complete commendations and earn titles meant to be earned via legitimate pvp.

They supposedly did ban people who abused the LoTV Glitch during I believe season 9?

For those that are unaware of how that worked, when you raised a LoTV you could get a Shipwreck Graveyard as your first map, there would only be one single location it could spawn depending on where you are when you vote it. When you vote to cancel it, the shipwreck despawns but the loot does not. We used to have a system called Captaincy Voyages (removed in season 11) that allowed you to hold up to 50 voyages of a single type, there was also an exploit to break the 50 cap and get as many as you want. People would then spam vote all of these voyages, which would have a 1/3 chance to spawn a Shipwrecked Graveyard and subsequently create all of its loot. After they do however many they want they would sail over to that location and find an absolute insane amount of Athena Items and Mermaid Gems. This at the time was the strongest exploit this game had ever seen (though no-where near anymore) but moreso than the issue of it being strong, due to all of that loot floating on the ocean with water physics, it would literally strain the server causing everyone to lag and could even crash the server.

The latter is likely why Rare decided to punish people that went overboard with the exploit due to it effecting the playability of the game. It is worth noting that the Fleet Exploit, all of the S11 Voyage exploits, and the Current Burning Blade Exploit do not cause Server Strain; so whether or not they ban for this is kind of up in the air at the moment.

@u-assassin

1million gold is not that much honestly, if you complete 8 camps (for the commendation) its already over 500k, and that takes only like an hour and half at most, maybe less if the wind is on your side. I even seen a post on X of one of the devs who did a 20 streak (which will be over a million gold)..

1 mill might not be much to you or me, but is a lot to like 85% of the playerbase. If a crablord with 28k to his name finds out there's an easy way to make millions, and he doesn't overly care about the game enough to think ''this will ruin the game for me'' or ''this may get me punished''; there's a good chance they'll do it. That's not me justifying it as correct, just explaining that is the mindset people are having, especially when they see so many other people doing it and think ''well surely if so many people are doing it, I can too?''.

@realstyli

By ignoring it and doing nothing, Rare basically is giving the green light to folk to search for and use exploits.

This is the issue with the past exploits which practically encourage people to do the current one.

Way back when, when the LoTV Exploit existed it was very quickly patched out by rare and they punished the big abusers. Which is great.

But with all the more recent exploits we've had, of which we have had a LOT. They take sooo long to patch it, if even at all, and everyone who used it gets to just go on and go find another one. That in turn means people that haven't made use of any prior exploits see all these people who did, not get punished and keep all their profit, and think well I might as well cash in when a new one is found.

@goodwatermb

@frogfish12 as I'm reading this I've been watching one go from 1 to 192 within 5 skeleton camps and wonder how in the hell rare did not think of putting a cap on it.
Do they not think about this stuff before hand? Like a cap of 10 woulda been more than generous, 1m boat turn in and a chest of fortune should be all you need as a incentive to try to get flamehearts boat to get people engaged.
But now people are getting 10m+ because rare just did not think of capping it?
I find it ridiculous no one at rare tough about this.

Putting a hard cap on the amount of rituals you can do would be a bad decision as it limits how much you can use the new content. However putting a temporary cap on Rituals until they can fix the exploit is the exact suggestion I have been giving wherever possible.

People aren't getting 10m+ because Rare didn't think to cap it, they're getting it because Rare didn't get enough internal testing, or didn't test in the right areas; and did not find the bug before release. Which I mean, bugs are bugs, all games have them. The real concern is that how long they take to fix them and the total lack of transparency with their community about current issues.

@super87ghost

The "that's why they are two different words" is a bit of a ridiculous argument, because then hacking wouldn't be cheating, because they are different words. Cheating is an umbrella term with the definition of "acting dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage", so ofcourse there are other words used to specify what kind of cheating it is, some noticable examples are hacking, aimbotting (or the use of any other third party software/scripts), exploiting and cheat codes.

Unless I'm mixing up two different replies in this thread; you cut out the part where I said I specifically refer to exploiting as exploiting, rather than cheating; as to not confuse it with hacking which is the primary thing people think of when they see the word cheating. If it is the case that that was from a different reply, then effectively I amended that statement to be a bit better because yea it didn't quite read like I wanted it to. Hacking and exploiting are not comparable, so I generally would not want them to be any more muddled up than they can be. One is looking at what is currently possible within the game and deciding to do something clearly unintentional but with a reasonable gain for doing, and the other is altering game files or using external software to acquire to achieve the same end goal. Its the difference walking through an unlocked door, and smashing the door down to get through, both are wrong, but one is worse.

@l0cke547

Its funny to me people still regard any form of quickswaping cheating. Thats so cope, im sure 99% of playerbase couldnt tell the difference when they hear or see a delay swap and a normal swap :D. there is basically no difference.
I do think there is a clear difference between cheating/hacking and exploiting.
But yeah the BB exploit goes hard, it needs to be patched soon.

Quickswapping was an exploit; it simply was. Exploiting is technically cheating, I simply do not refer to it as cheating as to not confuse it with hacking. Quickswapping allows you to bypass an intended animation in order to do something faster which can be the difference between killing the player or the player killing you, which can be the difference between you/them sinking or not. Usually the response to that is ''it barely gives a tiny advantage'' to which why take the time to learn it. I'll plainly admit that I did learn quickswapping in SoT and I know it gave me that advantage over players, as does things like reload cancelling. When it got removed a lot of quickswappers complained guns feel really clunky and slow (and I don't mean immediately when it got removed as I know there was a sprint bug, I mean once that got fixed). So either quickswapping did very little and when removed you should feel very little difference, or it did a lot and now it feels slow and clunky, you can't have it both ways. I used it while it existed, as did everyone, I was sad too see it go but I recognise why.