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but the potential exploitation has already turned farming into a harmful habit.
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Again, fix most of the exploits, you fix the situation.
This will take time. This will not be simple, straightforward, or pretty.
And this is something that can ONLY be worked out in the live environment. Simply because the test environment simply CAN'T accommodate the number of people required to vet it pre-live.
Anyone who thought any differently (or still does) is simply naive. At best.
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As a good example, in World War II online, a buddy who played it told me they used to load up a troop transport truck, then go crash it into a bush (infinitely hard), which (thanks to well-done physics, actually) the truck would flip, spilling the players (good) but they'd aim it so they were flung over the back fence of the Nazi base, thus getting in a way "you weren't supposed to".
So ya, no matter how hard you think, you may very well miss something.
EverQuest, like most games, required you to do a 20-30s "camp" when logging out to prevent misuse by people pulling the plug when they were gonna lose a fight.
The game would take over your char on network disconnect and fight on for you until the time ran out.
But...some dungeons had locked doors which the party needed to get a key for. Of course, the local monsters could open the door. So people would run at a locked door, disconnect their network cable, and the server would take over, converting you to NPC status, where you'd open the door and go through. You then plug back in before you're timed out and poof! You're on the other side of the locked door.
Also in EQ, the big boats to travel to other continents were actually built as NPCs. They were given a magic, invisible, heavy "weapon" to weigh them down, which allowed the devs to control their speed. Well, fighters got an ability called "disarm", so they'd target the boat and...well, you do the math. Wheeee! I'm king of the world!
"Hey! You knocked generic cola all over your precious D20 books!"
ED: Now I know how Nancy Kerrigan felt: "Why...?!? Why...?!?"
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EverQuest, like most games, required you to do a 20-30s "camp" when logging out to prevent misuse by people pulling the plug when they were gonna lose a fight.
The game would take over your char on network disconnect and fight on for you until the time ran out.
But...some dungeons had locked doors which the party needed to get a key for. Of course, the local monsters could open the door. So people would run at a locked door, disconnect their network cable, and the server would take over, converting you to NPC status, where you'd open the door and go through. You then plug back in before you're timed out and poof! You're on the other side of the locked door.
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That is pure awesome.
And for a while things were cold,
They were scared down in their holes
The forest that once was green
Was colored black by those killing machines
LOL! Excellent examples.
Now I have two images in my head.
A slow-mo front-on image of soldiers flying over the wall of a nazi stronghold with an exploding truck in the background and a "YEEE-HAAAA" on their lips.
A big transport ship skipping across the water like jet-powered speedboat.
Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.
One of the best EQ exploits was actually originally a "works as intended".
Of the three pet classes, mage (elementals), enchanger (magically floating sword and shield) and necro (skellies ftw!), the skeleton could be equipped with a shield and a weapon. Or dual-wielded weapons.
The skelly would adopt the speed of the weapons without changing it's punching damage. This derived from them being NPCs, and they didn't want people giving, say, guards lame weapons to turn them into wiffle guards. (Giving them weapons to hold was actually a pretty cool wow factor thing.)
The pets incinerate and take the weapons with them when they die or you zone, btw.
So necros got the cool feature they could improve their pets by giving them weapons that were faster than their punching rate. So far so good. Pretty cool wow factor.
But that didn't just extend to, say, a short sword. But also you could give 'em a rusty dagger, a truly crappy weapon that is nevertheless very fast, and very cheap.
Suddenly your pet was running around doing DPS at a rate inversly proportional to the lame rates of melee tanks.
Still, this was OK up until...the day.
They finally implemented the level 50 pet, which was not out at release. And someone gave it fine steel daggers, which, while expensive at about 4-8 plat sold to a vendor, was worth it to stock for the traveling necro.
So they had a PvP dual (typical ask-and-agree dual in the real world) where a 50 tank went against a 50 necro pet.
And it wasn't even close. The pet could lay waste to a level 50 tank. The necro's pet was tougher than an entire other melee class.
In fact, the mage's fire elemental pet could do a better job than the tank, but it still lost. This was primarily due to the fire shield on the elemental, and the fast skelly almost beat itself to death with reflected fire damage.
So two things happened:
1. They lowered the actual level of the 50 pet by, I forget, 3-6 levels or so, though it still conned as "50".
That still wasn't good enough, so:
2. They got rid of the pet adopting the speed of the weapons it was given. They changed the pets to be PC-based rather than NPC-based. So you could give 'em weapons, but they'd adopt the damage of the weapon rather than the speed.
And as far as I know, no weapon even to this day approaches the damage of a skelly's punch, at least not at punch speed.
This solved the problems of tanks being chewtoys for a pet, but still had two funny results:
1. You could give low level pets expensive weapons, and they'd be a little more powerful than they normally are. This isn't done much because A. They're expensive and go poof, and B. It only works for the first few levels anyway. High level pets still outstrip the weapons.
Except for...the Weighte Axe. See, the pets would also do the cool thing of single-weilding dual-wield weapons, so you could have them run around with 2 rusty 2-handers or scyths (which really looked cool for a pet.)
Damage-wise, this did nothing as just one 2-hander converted the single-hand punch to the 2-hander's damage, so the second one bought nothing. And it only mattered at low levels where the 2-hander's damage outstripped the punch.
...except for the Weighted Axe.
It was sort of a joke, monster-alpha strike weapon that had a tremendous damage but a hellaciously slow 7.5s swing rate.
But was there anything in the world that ignored the weapon's swing rate but took its damage?
Why yes. Yes I believe indeed there was.
Unfortunately they thought of that, because giving a skelly a weighted axe just had the axe disappear. Sad. Would have even benefitted a 50 pet IIRC.
Needless to say this was long ago, now that they're up to level 80 or 120 or wth ever by now as cap.
Then there was the evening that someone figured out the latest update removed the limit on casters having only one pet at a time.
I missed that evening, and only a few hours later they ripped the servers down for an emergency fix, but, in the words of Klingon leader Kor from the Trek Organians episode, "Pity. It would have been...glorious."
"Hey! You knocked generic cola all over your precious D20 books!"
ED: Now I know how Nancy Kerrigan felt: "Why...?!? Why...?!?"
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Needless to say this was long ago, now that they're up to level 80 or 120 or wth ever by now as cap.
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85
And perhaps you had stopped playing but another really big gray area/exploit was pet pulling. Summon a low level pet (green con to the mob in question), have it aggro a named surrounded by other mobs/guards and the named would come single. The named wouldn't do its normal "call for help" (which would aggro the guards/mobs close to it) because the pet was so low level, it wasn't considered a real threat. With melee mobs, you only had to get it outside of its friends' assist radius. With casters, you only had to make sure the target mob didn't have line of sight to the pet's master. Only hard part about pet pulling was keeping the pet alive long enough to accomplish the task at hand. But that was just another situation where having a pocket cleric was very handy (buff the bejeezus out of the pet).
But on topic, I'm always amazed by the folks who think a 20 person (if that) QA department is as efficient at finding possible bugs or exploits as a 150,000 person playerbase. I'd think that all the people who think they'd be the picture of perfection at it would start a consulting company and hire out to MMO developers. It'd be win/win. That person's perfection would earn them millions and we'd all have less buggy and exploitable games.
@Remianen / @Remianen Too
Sig by RPVisions
*Keeps farming until everything in the game gets nerfed for non farmers*
The nerfs don't affect me. I'm still having fun. 
And yes, I don't give a damn. It's a game. If this were real life, then yes, I would have "morality" play into this. But this is a game. I will play how I want to.
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I posted this on the Technical pages a few minutes ago...
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Ok, the Server Status page says the Servers ar UP.
Still unable to log-in. Says the log-in server may be down....don't know, it's a secret apparently.
So they take the servers down on Non-Normal Maintanence days to fix AE farming abuses....so how does PLing/Farming not affect me again...oh right I can't play.
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I don't care if people PL, I don't care if the Farm...it's thier $15/month...
But it has been affecting the rest of the communtity due to forced patches...
Sigh.
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I am sure you arent 1/2 as pissed as I was the other day when they did the same thing to fix something for the handful of users who bought that crappy science booster pack.
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About the only redeeming feature it has right now is pointing out what needs to be nerfed until someone can put it back later in a non-exploitable form.
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Yes, because essentially, this is how the exploiters put in the effort to help beta-test stuff
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Paraphrased: DR-on rewards for clicking of the same type of glowie for X hours.
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*
Unfortunately this sorta ALSO can penalize someone who is using the MA legitimately. So I'd vote "no" on it.
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I agree, but unfortunately this isn't up to a vote if the Devs truly decide this is how things should be. I didn't offer this as a suggestion to fix things mind you, I just pointed out that the option exists.
Worse yet, this DR concept could be adopted to handle NPC-defeats as well, which would discourage farming them, and encourage people to move from arc to arc (either AE or normal game content) to maximize profit.
If the farming exploits are too unpalatable for the Devs, I wouldn't be surprised to log in one day and see a DR system like this was implemented. I just hope that at the very least, a lot more content would be added to the game so that finishing different arcs one after the other becomes the new farming rather than grinding the same mission again and again.
Save Ms. Liberty (#5349) � Augmenting Peacebringers � The Umbra Illuminati