Alzir

Well I was really hoping this wouldn’t become a debate (because my views on these things have been hard to keep to myself over the years), but why not…

A point xfactor makes in his video, and in others, is that game companies should recruit pro players in their beta’s to basically find the flaws in the game. The reasoning here is that pro’s find anything in a game which will give them an advantage, however slim, and will go to great lengths to find them. Eventually other’s pick up on it, and those who didn’t work as hard in their research of the game engine, can now level the playing field, which is normally too little too late. This raise an question; when does something become an exploit?.

Is it when you suddenly learn the method? This example is replicable via randomly hitting keys, and while the 3 key combo makes it unlikely to find, do we consider the below as an exploit?

[youtube:29x9ao32]qPQm23j08x8[/youtube:29x9ao32]

That’s another example of “cheating” animation, however it’s much more common to see because it happens accidentally all the time. The question is whether the game is coded with an unnecessary animation, or has the coding not been correctly synced with the graphic? Who are we to answer that – and why do you want to?

Now of course there are extreme exploits, like hacking, holes in maps, which are all obviously beyond the reach of an argument, but when you look at something like the example in this thread, it does present a dilemma of where you draw the line.

In my mind it’s simple. A game is what it is, a pile of code, and if the code accepts your commands, it’s legit, unless a map glitch (and I’m assuming hacking is external code, though fuck knows how it works). The other side of this is how on earth do you admin what he shows? How can you ever be sure someone just pulled the move off on you? When the lines become that blurry, it’s time to accept it as a game feature. Finally, as I already mentioned, it’s not that easy to pull off, as to die by it, you need a player with game knowledge to pull of a timed 3 key combo, survive a 1 second delay or so, and shoot you accurately (notice the size of the reticule in the video for hip fire accuracy, and to ADS requires another 200 ms penalty).

The knowledge is now out there, the developers have the opportunity to “fix” it, but will they fuck; it took them 3 months to fix the Mass for example, demonstrating their focus is on DLC and the money from it.

It’s your choice whether to take a moral stand on stuff like this, but if you do, you’re a fool. You’re playing a game to win, and you win nothing for interpreting the game to a set of morals that in reality don’t apply to computer games. Play with what you’ve got out of the box and put in front of you, learn it, and stop worrying. RPG on infantry, deal with it, bunny hopping (complete non issue), deal with it; this?

I think there’s a trend in XDC to impose what we believe is the game on those around us, which started with base camping in BF42, but has reached ludicrous levels these days, demonstrated by our failure to reach consensus on several issues affecting our server when it was popular. The example of base camping is something we could admin, but the example in this thread is not, it’s impossible, and that’s where we should draw the line. It’s the developer who should pass judgement on the likes of this, not us, and until such a time that it’s patched out, use it, or have it used on you.

As far as in game performance I don’t think the ssd has improved anything like fps however the load times for anything installed on the drive have been hugely improved. Admittedly my pc was in dire need of a reformat, but even at it’s previous peak, I would normally load into bf3 and be lucky to catch the end of the round timer. Lately the load times were sufficient for a smoke break and i’d start a round with all the flags already capped. Now levels load in less than a minute, maybe as short as 30 secs. Windows is also performing much better and loads in a flash (34 seconds when I timed it, from pressing the on button). I think the pc spends more time on the initial bios type screens showing system info on a reboot, than it does loading windows itself. I stand by my previous comments that a ssd is an unnecessary toy, but i’m not sorry I got it. I suppose also that there may be another improvement, in that I can fraps bf3 now without dropping below 60 frames in game, which may be from some improvement affecting windows.

Yea, you put a lot of cash into that beast sprog, and believe it or not you’re missed in squad.

Also line, did you get bf3?

Cool thanks beer, and ben too who reassured me at work today. I’ll stick the ram in and see how it goes.

I’ll soon be racing you for that first tank max 🙂

Bit of a nightmare evening for me today installing all the new kit I got yesterday, but holy fuck is windows loading fast now! – although my last build was really struggling for a few months so my perspective’s a little skewed.

Can’t wait to see how bf performs, but sadly there’s another damn 3 gb of data to download right after origin tells me BF3 is complete, so that’ll have to wait until tomorrow. New HD as well as the SSD, so the whole build is pretty clean atm, but I got some RAM as well, which I’m scared to install it atm, as I think I’m going to fuck up the overclock settings on this board by doing it.

I have an i5 which was from overclockers, and it was bought with them having oc’d it, but with the warning that installing extra ram will affect those settings. If anyone happens to know what I should be doing before installing it, please let me know, or at least let me know what the consequences might be of me doubling the ram while keeping the previous oc settings. I suppose what I’m scared off is burning something out.