Just to be clear, I'm not talking about cheats or playing by different rules. I mostly referencing innovative game mechanics that have come about while we've played here that were not widely used on live and thus considered by many to be exploits. The type of things I'm talking about would be sneak/hide invising, warping eyes, bard bind sight pulling (which I'm pretty sure they fixed), charming isle 1 mobs in sky (was not allowed), charming Sirran in sky (is still allowed), usiny ivanydr's hoops, using DA idols, invis pulling, sneak pulling, etc... the list goes on. None of these are cases of black and white cheating, or one group of people playing by another set of rules than another, they are simply ways people have found to utilize game mechanics to beat encounters in a manner that wasn't intended. I'd argue shamans using puppet strings to solo group level encounters is more overpowered and trivializing than many of the things I listed, but we're all fine with that tactic being used on a large scale for whatever reason (maybe because we don't have 500+ post threads of people complaining, idk). I don't think it is really right to punish people who used these sort of tricks because one GM told one guild leader that they were punishable offenses 6 months ago, that doesn't seem fair (obviously not the case with all of them, but things like that could easily happen). Some things should be fixed, and some people should be punished, but we need to be more open minded about what is/isn't an exploit and more discriminating when we punish players for using game mechanics in an unconventional manner.
We're too quick to call things exploits because they trivialize the game, but for a game 14 years old, everything is essentially trivial. I'm simply suggesting that instead of constantly trying to adapt the game to how we think it should be played, maybe in some of these cases we should instead be adapting to the game and embracing new ways to play it.
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