> The idea of a free for all bug abusing server is pretty neat, a whole ‘nother level of the game.
Balance converging around bugs and exploits is pretty typical for all PvP sandbox games with cutthroat gameplay, even if not allowed by the server. ARK: Survival Evolved and Eve Online are infamous for having huge clans (thousands of players) willing to go extreme lengths at metagaming and bug exploitation. It isn't always that rosy, ARK had certain mechanisms to dox players and their multiple Steam accounts, which I believe led to a few spillovers of the ingame relations to the real life during the Great War. Sometimes it's very basic stuff though, like building a huge tower and breaking it upon being raided, DoSing the server and crashing it, after which it rolls back to a previous backup made 10-20 min ago, making your base very hard to raid if you have active players. (an ancient thing that was fixed many years ago)
Rust (the PvP game, not the language) also had the policy of encouraging players to spread and publish bugs and exploits on YouTube, but with the different aim - so that the devs would notice and patch those faster. This resulted in a pretty robust game that is extremely hard to exploit without resorting to actual external hacks.
This happened in PvE situations too -- Everquest always had people, especially guilds, running ShowEQ/MacroEQ to read mob locations off of the wire/from memory. Often could be used in non-unethical ways[1]
Sometimes you got funny situations like top guilds cheesing new raid content in their race to finish it first, leading the devs to go "cmon bro, you only played yourself" and then patching it immediately after, but almost never taking any loot away or banning anyone.
Also funny is the common situation where you don't want to _admit_ to everyone in your guild that you have at least one person running it, but you can kind of figure it out and it becomes an open secret.
1 - These are the days where you might have to clear down a dungeon 4 hours to see if a mob is up, or, even worse, to see if it's camped or not. Alternatively (or as a cover) people just parked alts but you get the idea.
Also, come to think of it, Diablo had this too with maphacks and grabit and such
the fun is no longer the game in an anarchy server. It's in beating other play's strategies - which actually makes it quite close to a real war in the physical world.
For example, the 2b2t minecraft wars between factions involve logistics, misinformation and intelligence (such as spies, fakes etc). It's no longer just minecraft. But that's what makes it fun and interesting.
Balance converging around bugs and exploits is pretty typical for all PvP sandbox games with cutthroat gameplay, even if not allowed by the server. ARK: Survival Evolved and Eve Online are infamous for having huge clans (thousands of players) willing to go extreme lengths at metagaming and bug exploitation. It isn't always that rosy, ARK had certain mechanisms to dox players and their multiple Steam accounts, which I believe led to a few spillovers of the ingame relations to the real life during the Great War. Sometimes it's very basic stuff though, like building a huge tower and breaking it upon being raided, DoSing the server and crashing it, after which it rolls back to a previous backup made 10-20 min ago, making your base very hard to raid if you have active players. (an ancient thing that was fixed many years ago)
Rust (the PvP game, not the language) also had the policy of encouraging players to spread and publish bugs and exploits on YouTube, but with the different aim - so that the devs would notice and patch those faster. This resulted in a pretty robust game that is extremely hard to exploit without resorting to actual external hacks.