Must be Monday. New podcast! Just click on the fancy logo below.
SubpagesMain
|
Not The Intended Use is subversion of the control the developers have on the players. Basically, the player finds ways to play the game that the developers and designers did not intend. Usually a Game Breaker, it often leads to Gameplay Derailment. (When an element is intentionally fudged in the player's favor, it's an Anti-Frustration Feature.)
In Tabletop Games, the discovery of a Game Breaker via Not The Intended Use usually leads to the Obvious Rule Patch, especially in tournament-level play.
Often used by Speed Runners and other Challenge Gamers. When it's an actual software glitch that's exploited, it belongs under Good Bad Bugs.
Contrast Useless Useful Spell and Mundane Utility. Also contrast Fake Difficulty, caused by control or other design problems.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Card Games
- Dominion has the Chapel card; intended to get rid of hurtful curse cards, people realized it could be used to streamline your deck by trashing the low-value cards you start with.
- Not the Intended Use...Where would Magic: The Gathering be without you?
- Unsummon to save your own creatures.
- Unstable Mutation to wipe out your opponent's creatures. Or Immolation. Or Bloodlust.
- Countering your own spells...just to reduce the number of cards in your hand (because of Black Vise).
- Using Arcane Denial
 to counter your own spell to draw three extra cards.
- The Millstone/Visions combo. And to a lesser extent the Fireball/Reverse Damage combo.
- Cards that require you pay life...just so you'll get your Avatar of Hope in play.
- Using Swords to Plowshares on your Killer Bees or Carrion Ants to gain a lot of life.
- Ornithopter/aura combos in general.
- Tearing up Chaos Orb in order to destroy the enemy's permanents. This even sparked the creation of a "Chaos Confetti" card.
- Magic doesn't really have "intended use". It just has obvious use.
- The Yu-Gi-Oh! card game has more than a few instances of this too:
- Barrel Behind the Door was initially meant to bounce back damage done to you by effects. It works just as well bouncing non-cost damage from your cards to your opponent.
- Using Armageddon Knight's ability to negate your own effect, which destroys him... so you can summon a quite powerful Meklord Emperor.
- Munchkin allows you to use "Go Up A Level" cards on your opponent in order to force them to fight/run away from a monster that would ignore them if they were just one level lower.
- The creators of the game were asked if the cards could be used that way—while that hadn't been the intent, the creators responded it was such a Munchkinly thing to do, they just couldn't say no.
- In the Pokémon Trading Card Game, Claydol's "Cosmic Power" is meant to draw cards from the deck, but its secondary effect, putting 2 cards back to the bottom of the deck, can also be used to prevent a player from running out of cards in one's deck and thus avert a loss by decking out.
Literature
- P.J. O'Rourke's The Bachelor Home Companion has a lengthy list of alternative uses for household utensils. (For instance, did you know that an upended steam iron can be used as a hotplate? Also, while a regular screwdriver makes a good tool for spreading putty, a Philips head screwdriver would be useless for that purpose: it should be used to punch holes in cans of beer when the pop top has broken off.)
- A non-game example exists in a Light Novel (and Anime, by extension) Sword Art Online. One of characters, Kirito, has a unique skill <<Dual Blades>> from the game Sword Art Online. When he got out of the game and started playing another game called Alfheim Online, he lost the skill but managed to use it by chaining one-handed abilities with each of his hand, controlling both of his hands separately by using muscle memory and calculating his skill use timing with the skill cooldowns. It was not supposed to happen at all, but he does have the excuse of having the best reflexes in Sword Art Online (which is why he got the aforementioned unique ability) and had to learn how to fight efficiently due to being a solo player.
- Another example is him using the blade his character got during its creation in Gun Gale Online (another thing that was not supposed to happen) to deflect bullets shot by other characters with help of their own targeting markers. After returning to Alfheim Online, he started using his blades to deflect spells as well.
- A different non-game example exists in a Light Novel (and Anime/Manga as well) Accel World and is called <<Incarnate System>>. It is part of the system itself, but not part of the game but rather something placed in the layer above it; using it allows the one who learned it to move faster, make themselves impervious to damage done without using <<Incarnate System>>, dealing damage that can only be stopped with <<Incarnate System>>, and augmenting their various abilities beyond their usual limits, all of it without any in-game cost. It is however considered a Dangerous Forbidden Technique (because overusing it changes players' characters noticeably) and thus only known by a handful of players because it is unlikely for any player to learn to use it on his own and those who know it don't want others to use it unless it's strictly necessary.
- In the Star Trek novel The Kobayashi Maru, a young Scotty faces the famous "unbeatable" simulation and uses a trick like this to do much better than he should. He employs a battle tactic*
the Perera Field Theory, if you're curious which mathematically should work, but doesn't in practice (as Scotty knows full well since he was the one who tested it). The admiral in charge of the test, not amused by this cheeky solution, boots Scotty out of the command stream... and into pure engineering, which they both know is what he really wants anyway.
Live Action TV
Music
- Scratching records in hip-hop.
- In a similar vein, overdriving a guitar amp to distort the sound.
- The Roland TB-303 was supposed to just play a preprogrammed repeating bass line. Then someone noticed what happened when you tweaked the filter knobs while it's playing, and the genre of Acid House was born.
Sports
- Time outs in several sports:
- For instance, Basketball and Lacrosse. Intended to allow teams to meet and plan strategy. Can be used tactically to prevent a player from losing possession and restart play in a controlled manner. Only possible in "American" basketball. Other countries (under FIBA rules) will only allow a time out when the time is already stopped.
- American Football:
- The most common use for a timeout is to stop the clock, and the second most common is to avoid a penalty for delay of game or too many men. It's far rarer for a timeout to be called to talk strategy on a critical play.
- Somewhat less common is the use of a timeout to "freeze the kicker". If your opponent is about to kick a field goal, calling a time out just before the play starts will often mess up a kicker's timing enough to cause him to miss the field goal when he does eventually kick it. This is only done occasionally, however, because in most circumstances time outs are much more valuable for the above-mentioned unintended uses than for this one.
- Modern flat track Roller Derby, depending on whether or not the Head Referee lets you get away with it. Calling a time out when there is less than 30 seconds left on the period clock can allow you to sneak in one last final jam when the time out ends, which must then be played to its natural conclusion (up to two minutes) even if the period clock runs out.
- Olympic fencing's flicks and whip-overs. Fencing weapons are nowhere near as stiff as swords for obvious reasons, so fencers have used these properties to deliver non-standard attacks that count in the rules of electric fencing but would make no sense if the weapons were real swords. Generally fencing can be viewed from both a traditionalist and competitive point of view, so the same fencer who flicks in a tournament might not in a casual bout. The sport's governing body, the FIE, has put a serious Nerf on flicks, but they remain viable.
Video Games
- General examples:
- Twinking (exploiting the help of a higher-level character) in MMORPGs is the very essence of this.
- In plenty of platform games, it's possible to gain two or more extra lives in a single level, commit suicide, restart the level, gain 2-3 more lives, commit suicide again... to gain as many lives as you want.
- Exploiting Mercy Invincibility to use Spikes of Doom as a platform, especially if if leads to a shortcut or normally inaccessible area.
- Scrolling enemies off the screen to make them disappear. One example is Hard Man's stage in Mega Man 3: scrolling the bees offscreen is such a time-honoured trick that the hint mode in later releases*
Rockman Complete Works (Japan-only) and the Anniversary Collection actually suggests it to you.
- Final Fantasy:
- Using the Swap spell to turn you into a statistical Physical God in Final Fantasy II. Its intended use was likely for emergency HP/MP refill purposes.
- In Final Fantasy IV, in the DS version, the Adrenaline augment doubles the damage a character inflicts when he or she is at critical health. Casting Tornado on a character with Adrenaline is an easy way to satisfy this condition. This is particularly useful on Rydia who can barely take hits anyway.
- Final Fantasy VI had Vanish, which makes you immune to physical attacks, at the cost of making you unable to avoid magical attacks. Due to a glitch, bosses which were normally immune to instant kill attacks became vulnerable to them when under the effect of Vanish, making it possible to bypass most bosses easily. This was fixed in the GBA version and subsequent versions.
- The Throw Stone ability in Final Fantasy Tactics lets you build up Job Points. Otherwise, it's just useless damage at long range; ditto with Accumulate/Build Power. The +1 to physical attack is meaningless unless you do it a lot, and most enemies really won't let you do it a lot. But leave one enemy alive, and send all your units running around the battlefield spamming the ability, and hello job points! In fact, there's a lot of abilities that might be useful, but are much better at building job points. Throw Stone also has a very high chance of knockback, leading to a situational use where you can use it to shove your own allies out of harm's way from a distance.
- Final Fantasy Tactics has the AI's reaction to confused enemies. Basically, the AI will never attack a confused character if they cannot kill that character in one or two hits. Under normal circumstances, this is a good idea. However, in the Self Imposed Challenges allowing only one character (out of the usual five), this can be a fatal flaw. Basically a single character has no allies to accidently attack, and if they have enough health, they will never be attacked in retaliation. Oh, and did we mention that most of the hardest bosses in the game can cause confusion?
- Any limit break in Final Fantasy VIII could be accessed by keeping your HP low and repeatedly hitting the O button though this may have been intentional. What's clearly not intentional is abusing this with Selphie's limit break then opening up the cover of the Playstation which causes the game to go into a pause like loop where you continued to scroll through her normally random skills until you got one you wanted. Considering 'The End' even worked on bosses it made the entire game pointlessly easy.
- A particularly well-known example in Quake and many other FPS games is provided by the rocket launcher. Its intended use is of course to make Ludicrous Gibs of groups of enemies. Many players instead choose to use it to make massive Sequence Breaking leaps. Rocket jumping became an Ascended Glitch for the FPS genre - the Soldier in Team Fortress 2 is designed for just that.
- In Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker, the Sling Post's intended and primary use is as a key component to the Human Slingshot (hence the name). However, the players can also use it in single player mode to knock the enemy senseless. Miller even Lamp Shades the trope by calling the player when doing this and saying "That's not what its used for!"
- League Of Legends has numerous examples of people finding alternative uses and build paths for different champions.
- The Innervating Locket item restored some of your mana and caused a minor self-targeted aoe heal whenever you used one of your abilities. Originally it was thought of as a powerup for healers. Then people realized you could use it on Udyr (a melee fighter who uses his abilities in quick succession). The Locket/Udyr build was so powerful that it forced Riot to remove the locket from the game.
- The Tear of the Goddess. This item gave you a very large mana pool over time. It was originally thought of as a caster item. Then people started to use goddess tear on other characters. Riot took note of this and made the Manamune, which is an item for DPS characters that builds from Tear of the Goddess.
- While radically different uses for champions are occasionally found, the champion Gragas stands out for the alternate having massively surpassed the original. He was intended as a tanky melee fighter, using his abilities mostly for utility to debuff, disrupt, and initiate. He is basically never used this way, instead functioning as a burst mage who relies on his tank origins to make him tougher than most mages. For a long time the Riot Games recommended items focused on completely different attributes than most player recommended builds, until they eventually gave in and completely overhauled them.
- Sion, a giant berserker zombie with a massive axe, was obviously intended to function as a beefy melee DPS, using his Death's Caress (an exploding shield) for protection in fights and his Cryptic Gaze (a ranged damage spell with a lengthy stun) to catch enemies for him to whale on. While he is often used like this, people noticed that both of those skills had high base damage numbers and perfect 1-1 ability power scaling ratios and he became one of the most powerful burst mages in the game. The scaling was later decreased to decrease make this less prominent.
- The AP builds for melee DPS champions Master Yi and Tryndamere are considered some of the worst abuses of an alternate build by the developers themselves. Yi has an multi-targeting dash that makes him completely unhittable for a second, Tryndamere has an spin attack that scales with AP, and both have powerful heals that can bring them from almost no health back to fully healed in just a few seconds.
- Champions classified as supports are generally the ones with teammate-helping abilities, like aura buffs, shields, and heals, that could help the team's carry get lots of gold for their items. However, players eventually realized that there was another way to get their carry gold: get them kills. This is why you so often see champions with strong initiation and crowd-control abilities played in the support role, in what are commonly known as "kill lanes."
- The Elder Scrolls:
- The Elder Scrolls III Morrowind featured Alchemy, allowing you to craft potions. The intended use was to craft potions that would improve your skills in combat and dialogue... but it was discovered that by making and drinking an Intelligence potion, you could make better Intelligence potions which you could then drink. After a few iterations, you could easily make potions that made you a Physical God.
- The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim tried to fix the positive feedback loop of making potions that made you better at making potions from previous games by making you unable to craft potions that help with Alchemy or enchant gear with effects that boost Enchanting... but you can still enchant gear to help you make better potions, and also brew potions that boosts enchanting. Along with Smithing, the road to epic level is thus paved by crafting blank equipment, enchanting it with alchemy-increasing stats, crafting potions that boost Smithing and Enchanting... rinse and repeat. The bug that made Fortify Restoration (improve healing magic) potions raise all your stats even quicker was just icing, really.
- Oh, Dwarf Fortress, only you can take a bridge and turn it into an atom smasher. Only you can get infinity from minecarts. Only you can turn ordinary soldiers into unstoppable superwarriors with a set of spikes and a lever...the list goes on. You name it, someone has tried to weaponize it. This includes dropping goblins into pits of bees and players deliberately killing their own dwarves in an attempt to weaponize their ghosts.
- In the online game Bearbarians, starring feuding tribes of furries, Capture the Flag probably isn't supposed to be any more time-consuming than Team Survival, Team Deathmatch or Capture and Control. However, the usual effect that limits shenanigans - your teammates completing the objectives - is bugged so that they keep walking nearly to the drop-off and then turning around, meaning that they only actually score a point when knocked into it by an opponent attacking them. Given that everyone in CTF has infinite lives, and having a time limit is optional, you can thus spend any time period you like Level Grinding in a way that missions that are actually about murdering people simply do not offer, so long as you remember to prioritise the guy who just picked up your flag. This will also make you a fat pot of money, since killing 180 opponents in a game where 50 kills is an impressive streak tends to lead to quite large payouts in addition to the level-up that will unlock new things for you to spend it on. It seems very unlikely that any of this was part of the original mission layout.
- In Psi Ops The Mindgate Conspiracy, one of your more basic psychic skills is levitating something you're standing on and using it to fly around. The developers originally didn't intend for this to be possible, but once they learned of it, they restructured their levels to accommodate for it.
- Parodied in 3D Dot Game Heroes' Spelunker mode. Dashing into a wall results in a fake death....and deliberately exploitable invincibility frames.
- In Shank, when using the dual pistols, you can block to reset the pistol firing animation, allowing you to skip the time-consuming reloading animation.
- Street Fighter IV has Zangief's Tornado Piledriver, a powerful, high-priority move that had previously been offset by the difficulty of using it, due to its 'full circle' command - but now, easily mapped to a shoulder-button. Thus, the hard boss and harder challenges were easily overcome by continuously Piledrivering with Zangief.
- Secret missions in Devil May Cry series are usually crafted for testing a certain skill, like jumping, precise aiming or avoiding damage. However, many of them can be easily passed by using some legitimate ability that was not indented to be used in that mission. Examples include:
- Using a certain weapon's special ability to fly over a timed Temporary Platform path.
- In a mission that requires you to kill a group of Puppeteer Parasites before they can take over a regular foe, you can grab the escorted creature and carry it to a place the enemies can't reach.
- DMC3 and DMC4 also have the infamous "Jump-Canceling" technique For more skilled players which involves pulling off air and ground combos, jumping off of the enemy (Therefore reseting the combo) and rinsing and repeating the technique allowing you to keep the Style Counter and combo going without immediately dropping.
- "Spawn Trapping" in competitive shooters. By exploiting bad level design, one team can win by preventing the other from ever advancing out of their spawn area. This is very noticeable in places like Call of Duty: Black Ops's Demolition mode (where both teams have two fixed spawn points and is the source of the infamous 500+ kills video) and Battlfield: Bad Company 2 (which makes the area around the other team's spawn point a soft-kill zone, but there are often terrain features that allow restricted lines of fire and blind corners ripe for camping).
- Team Fortress 2 ingeniously implemented counters to this strategy, such as Spies (Who can leave the spawn unnoticed and take down the campers) and Ubercharges (which let the "besieged" take the enemy down while invulnerable).
- Ratchet And Clank Future Tools Of Destruction. Hoo, boy. Combining Jump Physics, Good Bad Bugs, and a little Dungeon Bypass know-how, the Razor Claws allow a player to not only climb walls, but essentially FLY IN MIDAIR by boost jumping with the heli-pak. The details are a bit much to explain, but the tricks are easy enough to pull off to keep this out of the Alternative Skill range, as all a player needs to do is know how a level is shaped/designed (which you probably do know, unless you plan on doing this the first time you ever play through the game), climb over a wall, and glide to the end, or walk over the entire level's ceiling.
- Jet Set Willy had a sequence break available with a trip to the game's version of Minus World; if you travel out of a room in a way the game hadn't anticipated (e.g. right through an impassable wall, or up through an unreachable ceiling, etc), it warps you straight to Room 0 in the room table, "The Off Licence". Given the difficulty of traversing "The Bridge", "The Drive" and "At the Foot of the MegaTree", compared with the ease of reaching the ceilings in "The Watch Tower" and "Rescue Esmerelda", this is by far the easiest way to get there.
- DJMAX Technika's way of handling chain notes and tap notes is very loose.
- Each point of a chain note is counted as a separate note, and you're only scored for how well you time each segment. As such, you can actually tap individual points of chain notes instead of dragging them. This normally qualifies as an Alternative Skill, although there are some segments where tapping can be easier (and less blister-inducing) than dragging the notes, such the zigzag chain notes in charts like Fury (Hard) and A.I. (Hard).
- The game does not distinguish between tapping a note to trigger it and dragging your finger from some other lane onto the note to do so. As such, you can drag individual tap notes as long as they are not on the same lane, which makes charts like Voyage (Normal), Airwave (Hard), and Thor (Hard) easier.
- Touhou:
- Marisa B's Illusion Laser Glitch on Mountain of Faith. The only thing you had to do to pull it off is to have Marisa's Illusion Laser formation in a power level between 3 and 3.95 and play unfocused. In exchange, you could practically skip all spell cards that were not survival-oriented. Then again, Imperishable Night granted us Malice Cannon, which consisted on just tapping the focus button to alternate between Alice and Marisa, yet it dealt devastating damage to anything it touched.
- Several patterns have safe spots where you can sit without fear of getting hit. Safe spots that are generally barely larger than your hitbox and entirely unmarked.
- Forgiveness "Honest Man's Death" can be cleared in one of two different ways. The relatively simple method involving minimal movement to avoid a simple laser, or nausea inducing circle around the boss that, technically speaking, bypasses most of the difficulty.
- Exploiting the Wreaking Havok physics in Banjo-Kazooie Nuts And Bolts to fly. To do this, find one vehicle parts crate, put it on your trolley, then pick up the trolley with your wrench. The player can lift himself up by his bootstraps and get a lot of rare parts early.
- Using the 2 Player B mode trick in Double Dragon 2, though only to an extent. It only gives you a few extra lives and you get attacked by more enemies throughout as a result of having picked one of the two-player modes.
- There are a number of examples in the Metroid games (some covered under Sequence Breaking). One of the best is the dash-jump in Metroid Prime; intended for dodging, it turned out to be incredibly useful for platforming. Its most dramatic use was in getting the Space Jump immediately after landing on Tallon IV, which breaks the game wide open. The rereleases made this trick harder (though not quite impossible), and the dash was Nerfed somewhat in the sequels.
- Snaking in Mario Kart DS. It does give you an advantage, but most of the time, it's easier to memorize the circuit than learn to snake. Most people snaked in the game when it came to online so you had to do it as well if you wanted to have a shot at winning.
- It should be noted, however, that snaking was a feature deliberately implemented into MKDS (and before that, F-Zero GX) by the developers with the intention of having players "discover" this technique (by no means an easy feat), so make of that what you will.
- Similarly in Mario Kart Wii, popping a wheelie with bikes. The mechanic of the wheelie is you get more speed while being hit slows you down greatly as a trade off. The mechanic was intended to be used on long and straight roads, but people started to pop wheelies anywhere as long as they weren't turning a corner. This resulted in everyone flocking towards bikes and abusing the wheelie mechanic, which put karts in the dust since their mini turbos weren't powerful enough to keep up with bikers that popped wheelies everywhere. This is probably the reason why bikes were not included for Mario Kart 7.
- There's also a sort of meta-strategy that's used online to avoid the dreaded Blue Shells by abusing how the mechanics of that item works. They always target the player in first, so in games where you can check what items other players are carrying, players in first who see someone that has it will deliberately brake and let the player behind them pass and take the hit. If there's no one else nearby, then people will often choose to jump into a nearby pit instead, since you can at least get a quick speed boost after getting placed back on a track, but getting hit by a shell takes much longer to recover from. It's unlikely that the developers intended for the item to cause players to go to such lengths to avoid it.
- People who get the infamous item also began to use another trick with it by never using it at all. Since Mario Kart DS and 7 lets you see what item everyone is carrying, people will try to do everything they can to make sure they are not the target of the spiny shell. However, a player that holds onto the shell instead will have control over the race since he can use it at any time he wants and the others know of it, turning the entire pack into a game of cat and mouse.
- Skilled DOOM and DOOM 2 players used Strafe Running and Wall Strafe Running. The former allowed for a 44% increase in speed when running diagonally, the latter allowed for an over 300% boost if done just right along a wall.
- Using the infamous Prehistoric "Tower/Prophet" turtle in Empire Earth. For the most part, the strategy is perfectly legit, except for the fact that it exploits the finiteness of food in the prehistoric epoch and the fact that prophets start off already at pretty much full power in the prehistoric epoch, versus other units that start off weak.
- Using the checkpoint dash tactic in Mass Effect 2.
- The Infinity feature in some official Tetris games, which allows you to move or rotate a piece as many times as you want while it is on the stack or floor before locking it in place. Careful planning is still needed to be able to, for instance, max out the score, but Infinity gives you as much time as needed.
- Tetrisfriends.com uses the SRS rotation system, which allows the player to pull off T-Spins, which in turn are ways of filling a row with a T block that could not be slid in under normal circumstances. Tetrisfriends also implements a back-to-back bonus system (which rewards for pulling off Tetrises or T Spins the same maneuver twice in a row), as well as a combo system for clearing several lines one after the other with each tetromino that falls down. By planning out all moves carefully, one can reach ludicrous highscores in Marathon mode by manipulating these bonuses. As a result, the top twenty or so of the All Time Top 100 are playthroughs that used very few doubles/triples... and 0 Tetrises. In a game bearing the official logo of Tetris. (Explanation: A Tetris does score more points than a 4 line clear combo, but a tetris deducts 12 lines from the maximum lines you can score before clearing a Marathon. 4 lines in quick succession do not deduct bonus lines, and T-Spin Triples have a better score/line deduction ratio)
- Having trouble getting the right times in Left 4 Dead's Survival mode? As most of the survival maps are just portions of a campaign, and the devs were apparently too lazy to delete the rest of the map, it is entirely possible to get OUT of the survival area and hole up in a place where the zombies aren't coded to look for you. This can take many tries to get right, and frequently involves an understanding of how the physics engine works.
- Mortal Kombat 9 has the teleport-spam and projectile spam methods of beating Shao Kahn. However, they aren't 100% effective and one needs to watch for his super armor to activate, at which point one needs to evade him at a moment's notice.
- In Halo: Reach, it is possible to use the exit animation on the forklift to clip through certain walls, skipping difficult segments of the game.
- In the Starcraft Protoss Campaign mission 5, it's possible to win in under 5 minutes by using hallucinate to make illusion clones of a transport ship, load Tassadar and the two zealots into the real one, and then fly them straight to the Zerg base-defended beacon they're supposed to be unloaded at to win the mission.
- Similarily, in Starcraft Brood Wars, the Terran campaign mission 6, it's possible to win even without landing your buildings, by simply loading the siege tanks you're provided with at the beginning and flying them up to the corner of the map and let them rain destruction on the command center you're supposed to go through a base to destroy.
- This Warcraft III faq details a very advanced strategy to win the final mission of the base game's campaign. Normally, you have to survive the onslaught of the relatively overpowered enemy for 45 minutes while they attack and destroy you and your two allies bases in succession. This is completely feasible as you have plenty of resources available, some free mercenaries, and can of course construct your own defences inside their bases to turtle the 45 minutes out. The faq's strategy however, involves exploiting the fact that when the enemy razes one of the bases, it destroys its old one completely and replaces the razed base with a new one. This is done by knocking down the trees around the first base, hiding lots of siege weaponry and some flying units there, taking out the human main building thus triggering the base raze and replace, followed by knocking down the new buildings with the hidden units while using Crowd Control units to keep the superoverpowered enemy heroes from interfering. Once you've kept them from getting their new base up, the only way to lose is to destroy one of the remaining bases yourself.
- In Diddy Kong Racing, the characters are balanced with high acceleration/maneuverability and low top speed on one extreme, and the polar opposite on the other. However, it turns out that tapping the accelerate button rapidly lets one ignore the top speed limitation, effectively turning the former types into masters of all three. It's a common strategy for beating the more difficult races without switching to an innately faster but harder to control character.
- By timing repeated jumps perfectly in Half-Life games, Gordon can accelerate to ridiculous speeds and leap hundreds of feet through the air. This physics-engine oddity is, of course, constantly exploited in Speed Runs.
- PAYDAY The Heist has a few strategies that the developers did not foresee players using:
- Being released from police custody puts you back in the game with full health and ammo (sometimes you come back with half of your max ammo instead). On Overkill1 145+ difficulty, players who are low on health and/or ammo may deliberately go down and be captured in order to be exchanged later on and get a free health and ammo refill, which saves the use of the limited ammo and doctor bags.
- The ARG event that went on for a short time forced players to play on Overkill 145+ and wait two hours to gain access to a secret vault. Rather than fight the cops normally, players chose to hide inside small alcoves within the walls, which caused the enemy AI to get confused and/or stuck, but still allowed a few cops to trickle in and attack. Since players had to send video footage of their attempt at the vault to the developers, the developers did take notice of the exploit and stated it was fair game since the players were still at risk of being attacked by the cops.
- In Prototype, the various Events, save the timed race ones, required you to kill a certain amount of enemies in a specific time period in order to achieve a better medal. The game advertises that you should target the ones marked on our minimap, but any member of the targeted faction (military or infected) is a valid target. As it is quite impossible to achieve gold and platinum without exploiting this, the claim is likely intentionally misleading to force the player to think outside the box. However, they probably didn't take into account that any tanks you've stolen still count as valid military targets even if no one is driving them, allowing you to park several in a row for military missions and artificially inflate your score a good fifty points, making the medals trivial to earn.
MMORP Gs
- The "Flee" ability in Warhammer Online is most of the time used to get from point A to point B faster.
- The "Charge" ability—and other similar ones—are often used to get around quicker in Guild Wars.
- Perfect World: the Cube of Fate can be entered via any major city, but when you exit it, you end up in Archosaur, no matter which city you entered from. As such, it is most often used as a free teleport to Archosaur.
- City of Heroes has Ouroboros, an Alternate Dimension zone that lets you use Time Travel to play lower-level content you may have missed. Ouroboros can be entered from anywhere, and has exits to some of the major zones, so it's used mainly as a method for rapid travel.
- Ultima Online has the gate travel spell. Opens a blue portal from where the caster is standing to wherever the caster chooses via previously marked rune. So far so standard, except players figured out that since the gate didn't appear directly where the player was standing but in a random spot next to the player they could open a gate that intersected the door of a player house, allowing people from the other end of the gate to come through into the house, looting all it's contents.
- Maple Story introduced characters with specific skills that let them warp to a special map. Presumably this was intended to make job advancement and storyline quests easier. However these special maps are always in either Victoria Island or Pantheon, and Victoria Island has a warp to Pantheon smack-dab in the middle. Pantheon has a warp to nearly every town in the game, so it's ridiculously easy for any player with one of these skills to never have need of a ship. Ever.
Tabletop Games
- Exalted: the Twilight Caste were originally conceived as The Smart Guy of the group, with their caste abilities inclining them toward sorcery, teaching, dealing with spirits and demons, solving crimes and building stuff. Due to their brokenly strong anima power, they became the preferred melee fighters of the Solar Exalted until they were hit by several consecutive rounds of errata aimed at putting the Dawn Caste back at the peak of warrior skill where they were originally supposed to be.
- Dungeons & Dragons and (to a lesser extent) Pathfinder players are notorious for exploiting these. Whole message boards are devoted to optimizing builds by using abilities in strange ways. Among the more egregious abuses include turning a spell called Locate City into a massive lethal explosion, doing infinite damage with a dagger much too small for a human to consider more than a toothpick, and turning cannon fodder monsters into lethal encounters for powerful players with devious traps.
|
|
