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#527. Even if the rules allow it, I cannot spend $64,000 to get the vorpal option for a forklift.
Games, of various types, are about rules. They may have intricate backstories, multi-layered plots and other such. But in the end, they're about rules. Rules define what are legal moves and what aren't (Even Calvinball, which just doesn't have the same rules all the time). Rules create fun.
But sometimes, rules can interact in ways that developers didn't intend. Sometimes this makes the game more fun, but more often than not, it leads to Gameplay Derailment.
So, you're a game developer, and it's two weeks from shipping your next great game. Then one of your testers comes to you with a horrifically game-breaking scenario, a way for a player to game the rules so that their powers spiral out of control and automatically win without a fight. And the rule interaction is very complicated; you can't just tweak a few things to bring this back into balance. In order to truly fix the problem, you would need to rebuild a number of rules, test those rules and so forth... and miss your ship deadline. What do you do?
Or maybe your game is out there already. Thousands, maybe millions of people are playing and enjoying it. Then some Power Gamer figures out how to game the system and auto-win with some horrific combination of moves. You certainly can't "uncreate" the game once its out there, nor can you radically modify the rules so that particular combo doesn't work, because that would fundamentally change the game and honk off millions of customers. What do you do?
Make an Obvious Rule Patch. That is, create a completely arbitrary rule that forcibly prevents the particular interaction from happening, while having as little effect on other rules as possible.
Note that issuing an Obvious Rule Patch for a competitive multiplayer game too soon can damage the evolving Metagame, which can often bring potential Game Breakers back into balance.
Compare and contrast Nerf.
Examples
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Board Games
- The "ko" rule in Go exists purely to prevent infinite loops.
- Additionally, in Chinese Go, the "superko" rule is there to prevent the rare triple ko, an infinite loop that can still occur in Japanese Go. Nobody's tried to "patch" Eternal Life, an infinite loop that's so rare it's not worth considering.
- Examples in Chess:
- The most recent major rule change in chess was allowing a pawn to move two squares on its first move. It was soon noticed that this allowed a pawn to "slip past" an enemy pawn which would otherwise have been able to capture it. Since the two-square rule was only meant to make the game faster and not to alter strategy, the en passant rule was introduced to patch the hole: if a pawn slips past another like this, the opposing pawn gets one chance to capture it anyway. (The option must be exercised immediately or lost.) Unavoidably, the two-square rule has changed chess, but en passant has helped to limit this.
- The funny thing is that anyone strategically-minded enough to be changing the rules of chess should have noticed right away that this allowed a pawn to move such that adjacent pawns have no possibility of capturing them.
- Chess does not out-and-out ban infinite loops like Go, but does declare the game a draw if the same position occurs three times. More complex loops are prevented by the 50-move rule: a game is drawn if 50 moves pass without a pawn being moved or a piece captured (these, being irreversible, are the key signs of progress in a game). "Perpetual check", where a stubborn player exploits the priority of defending one's king to delay the game indefinitely, is also a draw.
- The 50 move rule was once subjected to a really obvious rule patch. It was discovered that certain positions can be won but require more than fifty moves (without captures or pawn moves) to do so. To take care of this, the rules were changed to list these positions and specifically exclude them from the 50 move rule, allowing players to win the game in such positions instead of drawing. This was abolished in 1992, because it was found that there were far too many of such positions to continue patching the rules like this.
- Note that the game isn't automatically drawn due to threefold repetition or the fifty-move rule; a player must claim the draw.
- Chinese chess, Xiangqi, is less forgiving of perpetual checks. If you check five turns in a row without pause, you lose the game. However, in Xiangqi, the general's movement is limited to a small area called the palace, so if you really can't figure out how to checkmate him, you deserve the loss.
- The castling rules in chess also have an Obvious Rule Patch requiring the king and the rook to be on the same rank, to prevent the one-in-a-million scenario of a never-moved king using vertical castling along the e-file with a pawn promoted to rook.
- Surely, such a promoted pawn, having moved, would not be eligible for castling. Honestly, that sounds like something that would come up in Code Geass, and not in a good way.
- It has never moved... as a rook. It's easier just to say "in the same rank" rather than risk something coming up from adding the rule that promoted pawns have already moved.
- And speaking of pawn promotion, that's another rule which is now specified very carefully to avoid certain abuses — such as remaining a pawn or promoting to an enemy piece. Yes, there are positions where those options are good, although it's vanishingly unlikely that they'd ever occur. See here
 for an example of when promoting to an enemy piece is more beneficial.
- In Japanese Mahjong, players need at least 1 yaku to win a hand. The Tanyao yaku is particularly easy to get with open (containing called discards from other players) hands. This has caused many players to call tiles left and right when they have a dora or two, in order to finish their hand with Tanyao as their only yaku and claim the points for their dora tiles. This has led to a controversial House Rule known as "kuitan nashi" which only allows Tanyao on closed hands.
Card Games
- One of the most obvious examples is Collectible Card Games and their restricted/banned lists.
- Lists in Yu Gi Oh! Duel Monsters started as just the Limited List: normally, you can have up to three of any one card in a deck, but for game balance reasons the Limited List mandates that only one (Limited) or two (Semi-Limited) copies of certain cards can be included in a deck. Before long, players were discovering interesting ways to break the game using card combos the game designers hadn't foreseen, resulting in absurdly powerful decks that could force a win in a single turn (or even the first turn). Thus the Limited List was expanded to include Forbidden Cards, which cannot be included in a deck at all. The list is changed roughly every six months, with cards being both added to and sometimes removed from it.
- In an interesting take on this, the formerly-Limited card "Twin-Headed Behemoth" (or "Dol Dora" in the OCG) was recently knocked down to 3 because of a ruling change: Its effect (which lets it revive itself from the Graveyard at the end of the turn it's destroyed from the field with 1000 ATK and DEF) specifically states it can only be activated "once per duel". It was put at 1 after it was pointed out that multiple copies of the card would make it impossible to keep track of which copy had used its effect and which haven't, meaning anyone could abuse the confusion and reuse the card's effect illegally. Now, though, the card's ruling has changed so that only 1 copy of it owned by a player can activate its effect that turn, period. The rule change was completely arbitrary, only allowing the card to become unlimited without interfering with the reasons it was limited in the first place.
- The worst examples of this in Yu-Gi-Oh are Yata-Garasu and the two Envoys. All of the other cards on the Forbidden list are pivotal in combos; these three cards were banned just because they were that broken. Not helping the Envoys' case is a rule known as priority, which allows the player to activate their effects (which can normally only be activated at times when the player could activate a Normal Spell) immediately when they're Summoned, before the opponent has the chance to activate cards that would destroy them.
- The DCI banned / restricted lists from Magic The Gathering. The Urza Block is particularly infamous for producing massively overpowered cards and card combinations, to the point that one card Memory Jar was banned before it was even released, after it was realized just what could be done with it. Other cards used to often be the subject of errata which prevent them operating the way the card text might imply them to, sometimes again even before the card is released, although this has been phased out over time.
- An even clearer example would be the times MTG has had to give cards errata; it is currently not their policy to reword a card for simply being too powerful, but there are quite a few cards that have different wordings due to rules changes, or interactions that literally break the game (as in, "create impossible situations or infinite loops under the rules"). This was exacerbated with two major rules changes ('96 and '09), the second of which involved renaming several zones of play and thus changing the wording on, say, half of all cards ever.
- Lampshaded in the series' own Unglued and Unhinged expansions, with cards like Look At Me, I'm The DCI!, which featured current Head Designer Mark Rosewater's stick-figure drawing of a blindfolded figure picking what to ban by throwing darts at cards pinned to a dartboard. Other Unglued cards have 'errata' printed on the card.
- One card, Time Vault, has been completely errata'd a few times to make it impossible to just do "Tap, take a turn, use X to Untap Time Vault" to create infinite turns. This isn't just a straight rewording errata, this is "you can scratch off the rules of your $40 card, because that's just as accurate as to what it really does as what is written on the card." Time Vault, thus, has the infamy of being the most heavily errata'd card ever.
- Animate Dead has always worked (generally) functionally as it was originally intended: it enchants a creature and brings it back from the dead, but the creature dies if the Enchantment does (just like the various Necromancy spells from Dungeons And Dragons). However, the exact mechanics of this process, if and how a creature that would otherwise be immune to a Black Enchantment can be affected and targeted by this, etc., have caused Animate Dead to be another nightmare of errata. There's a reason only 2 other cards like Animate Dead have ever been made, and every other Reanimation spell thereafter are Instants and Sorceries. Damn!
- In fact, the standard Constructed Deck construction rules of today can be considered a major rules patch introduced via years of tournament practice before they ever became part of the basic game in their own right. Originally, a valid Magic deck just needed to contain at least 40 cards (rather than 60) and there was no four-of-a-card limit, theoretically allowing for decks that could win on the first turn nearly 100% of the time (assuming somebody willing to hunt down the requisite number of specific and usually-expensive cards to make them work). Today the old way of deckbuilding survives only in limited play, where by definition you have to make do with a small and random card pool rather than being able to throw the weight of your entire collection into your deck. Banned and restricted list were likewise introduced soon after the first tournament experiences, long before Urza's Saga came around.
- As for the example (that used to be) in the trope description, the card is Time Walk, which happens to be massively overpowered even without forcing the opponent to lose. Before it was released, it was phrased "Target opponent loses next turn", which itself needed to be rewritten after people started misinterpreting it as "Game Over, You Suck". Cards that actually do force the opponent to lose the game still exist, but they are Awesome But Impractical.
- Such as The Cheese Stands Alone, which, despite being Unglued and therefore tournament-illegal by definition, are still allowed in some unofficial tournaments, strictly for the lulz that would result if someone actually made it work. A less extreme but still near-impossible example is Coalition Victory, which isn't banned in any format (except, obviously, tournaments that use a different block). Oddly enough, The Cheese Stands Alone did get a legal copy in the form of Barren Glory.
- The Cheese Stands Alone/Barren Glory? Child's play. Mycosynth Lattice, Nevinyrral's Disk, tap out, activate Disk, play Cheese, play Temporal Cascade, first effect.
- If you're using Barren Glory (which is worded differently than Cheese) and the opponent can keep a way of making you draw a card in play (say, by removing it from the game until end of turn,) this trick is spoiled.
- THAT IS EXTREMELY SPECIFIC GOOD SIR.
- Speaking of Magic, eight powerful creatures (Serra Avatar, Darksteel Colossus, Purity, Dread, Guile, Vigor, Hostility and Progenitus) have an ability that prevents them from going to the graveyard, shuffling them back into the deck instead. While this is an advantage, that just hides a darker motive: it prevents players from discarding the creature cards on purpose so that they can revive them using way-cheaper Animate Dead spells. (This is not an idle concern, as entire decks are built around this very tactic.)
- Note that only the Colossus and Proggy actually avoid hitting the graveyard; the other 6 simply don't stay there for very long, meaning that aforementioned shenanigans are still possible, albeit a bit more difficult.
- Taking this even further, the card Phage the Untouchable has an ability that causes you to Game Over if you play her any way other than "hard-casting". Like the above examples, this is done to prevent "reanimation" exploits. (It should be noted that Phage's other ability is to cause the opponent to Game Over if she manages to lay a finger on him, so ensuring the "Impractical" part of Awesome But Impractical was kind of necessary in her case.)
- At one point, the Comprehensive Rules contained a line which read "Ignore this rule."
- The introduction of a new "Planeswalker" card type, almost fifteen years after the game's inception, necessitated such a patch; Planeswalkers could be dealt damage, but since they hadn't existed previously, all existing cards that dealt direct damage could only deal it to creatures and/or players, of which planeswalkers were neither. So a special patch rule was added that allowed such cards to redirect their damage from a player to their planeswalker. If Planeswalkers had been present from the beginning, such a thing would never have been necessary.
- At least by the Special Edition expansion pack, the Star Wars Customizable Card Game came with a separate glossary three times the size of the (already dense) basic rulebook, which was about 50% "errata" fixing Game Breakers. The other half...well, let's just say this was a very involved game.
- At one point, it was possible to bid to take 14 tricks in Bridge, despite there only being 13 in a hand, if you felt that you would lose less points by failing such a contract than if the opponents won a bid for 13. After the first time that happened in a major competition, the rules were changed almost immediately.
- World Of Warcraft TCG's rulebook should be called exceptionbook, really.
Non-gaming examples
- The International Obfuscated C Code Contest added a rule in 1995 that required all submissions to have source code at least one byte in length. Why? In 1994, "the world's smallest self-replicating program" won an award for "Worst Abuse of the Rules" by being zero bytes in size.
- Several ad hoc laws arguably fall under this trope. Especially those which are quickly struck down by the country's respective supreme court.
- Even science and math have been known at various times to have Obvious Rule Patches. A couple of the famous ones:
- Euclid's Elements, which was the geometry textbook for 2000 years, begins by assuming some axioms and postulates that are obvious enough to make a solid foundation — with one exception. Euclid's fifth postulate is clumsy and not at all self-evident. Countless mathematicians over the years tried to derive the "parallel postulate" from the others instead of assuming it. But the old Greek's intuition was right. The postulate can't be proven or disproven that way; if you choose a contradictory postulate, you get a "non-Euclidean" geometry that's perfectly consistent.
- Betrand Russell essentially broke set theory with his paradox: does "the set of all sets that don't contain themselves" contain itself? To escape this paradox, mathematicians had to put restrictions on what constituted a set. The current system basically says no set can contain itself — anything big enough to do that is too big to be a set, and has to be a "class" or some such. Some mathematicians find this unsatisfying, and the debate over whether there's a better solution continues.
- The underlying nature of Russell's paradox unfortunately indicates that any better solution will also need to be logically "patched".
- Gödel's incompleteness theorem proves that any consistent formal system complex enough to accommodate basic arithmetic will contain things like the parallel postulate: claims that cannot be proven true or proven false.
- In the webcomic Chasing The Sunset, the rules are automatically patched.
- On the first season of the syndicated version of Jeopardy, contestants were allowed to ring the moment the clue was revealed. Even after ringing in, they would not have to answer until Trebek finished reciting the answer, which lead to contestants ringing in within the first couple seconds to win priority for answering. This was changed in the second season to not allowing the contestants to ring in until Alex finished reciting the answer.
Sports
- The baseball rules committee instituted the Infield Fly Rule in 1895 to block a specific Game Breaker in which an infielder would let a fly ball drop and go for the easy double play instead of just getting the one out that would normally result. Which makes this Older Than Radio.
- Currently there's a minor league pitcher who can pitch with both arms. Which causes problems when he's facing a switch hitter, because switch hitters hit from different sides of the plate depending on which arm the pitcher throws with and this pitcher pitches based upon which side of the plate the hitter hits from. So minor league umpires have been forced to create a brand new rule forcing both the hitter and pitcher to declare before the at-bat, and only allowing one change of side for each player. An interesting case, since rather than this patch being the result of one game breaker, it's the combination of two slight advantage-gaining tactics that independently would work just fine, combining to break the game.
- The England cricket team of the 1930s discovered "Bodyline" - a tactic where instead of aiming for the stumps, the bowler just pitched lots of very fast, painful balls at the batter's body, forcing him to move out of the way or deflect the ball towards nearby fielders. As a result several new rules were brought in, restricting the number of aggressive balls allowed per over and the positioning of fielders.
- Not to mention, the 'underarm incident'. In order to deny the opposition the remotest chance of a drawn match (which would have required a six - difficult even without the pressure), the bowler rolled the ball at the batsman instead of the usual overarm bowling action. The rule disallowing underarm bowling had been omitted from the Australian verion of the rules for some reason... the rule was quickly instigated following this.
- Numerous sports - among them football, hockey, American football and rugby - have hastily added and often infamously complex offside rules, to prevent the various Game Breaker tactics employed that allowed the ball to be passed straight to the goal, circumventing the defence.
- Common patch rules have been to force both teams to attempt to score rather than just stall. Football's downs system dates from the 1880s or so (look up the "block game"), pro basketball got the shot clock in the 50s after an infamously stalled game (19-18 final score). No one's been able to think of one for soccer.
- There's the back-pass rule. FIFA introduced it in 1992 to keep players from passing the ball back to their goalkeeper and grabbing the ball to waste time. It was supposedly put in place because the 1990 World Cup was full of boring time-wasting.
- Ice hockey has an example of a rule change that corrected a problem resulting from a previous rule change. The two line-pass rule (a pass couldn't cross a team's blue line and the center line) was instituted to prevent quick passes to players hovering behind the other team's players for a clear breakaway. Teams eventually developed the "neutral zone trap" where defending players would check any player in position to receive a legal pass, forcing a player with the puck to either make an illegal pass (which would be whistled down and brought back) or carry it out himself. This slowed the game so much that in some leagues the rule was eliminated.
- Similarly, the "Icing" rule (teams cannot shoot the puck from their side of the ice to the other end, unless it's on goal) was added after teams would just get a lead and then keep slapping the puck down the ice to make the other team fetch. It remains valid, though, when your team is shorthanded from a penalty.
- The icing rule was again modified in the NHL in 2005. Prior to that, teams who needed to change players but couldn't (usually because they were being pressured in their own end) would intentionally ice the puck to stop play and switch lines. The new rule prevents the offending team from making any changes until after the faceoff.
- Auto racing has a long history of these. In 1957 the fuel-injected Chevys won so many NASCAR races that the body banned all fuel-injection systems, a rule which still stands and looks more anachronistic with each passing year.
- Another example from auto racing was during the 1960s when turbine-powered cars came onto the field and handed everyone else their asses on a silver platter. Needless to say, spurious safety complaints and absurd intake valve regulations forced them off the streets and away from the tracks.
- The NFL. Ye gods, the NFL. A committee meets every year to implement new Obvious Rule Patches to react to the previous year. Over the years, the game has accreted a whole section to patch specific actions of individual players.
- Roller derby's WFTDA rules, being less than ten years old, are constantly coming out with new rule sets featuring these. One recent example: roller derby is played in a racing-style ring, and it's a penalty to cut the track then re-enter play in front of other players. A common strategy used to be hitting opponents at the curve, forcing them to cut the corner before they could stop. A patched rule made it so you could avoid the penalty by simply falling over before skidding back into the track.
Tabletop Games
- Pretty much all of the spell entries more complicated than "You do X damage to Y targets at Z range" in the 3.5 edition rules of Dungeons And Dragons consist of long strings of Obvious Rule Patches. There are spells like Polymorph that are one paragraph of explaining what the spell does, and roughly eleven paragraphs of explaining what the spell arbitrarily cannot do.
- Particularly when it comes to material components/focuses, which in many cases have the descriptor "worth at least x gp". While it makes a certain amount of sense when the component is diamonds or incense (or at least, can be justified as just an easy way to specify the amount you need), in other cases it's fairly ridiculous. Yes, you can set a spell to activate under certain conditions (via "Contingency")... but you need a small statue of yourself as a focus. And the statue must be worth at least 1500 gp. The magic knows how much you paid for it. If there's a reason for this besides making these spells arbitrarily more difficult, I'd like to hear it.
- One possible justification could be that the statue would need to be extraordinarily well crafted and detailed enough that it looks exactly like you, and such handiwork would be extremely expensive. Besides, it just has to be worth that much; you can obtain it for less if you try other tactics (haggling, stealing, etc). The value reflects how well-made it is, not how much you happened to pay for it.
- Although the Order Of The Stick universe apparently takes "worth at least x gp" literally.
- That just makes it more confusing!
- Even more egregious is the gp cost for things like golemcraft. It has to be spent, but nowhere does it say on what (since it's additional to the cost of the golem's body ... it would be within the spirit of the rules for the PC to pile up the cash and watch it vanish as the spell is cast.
- One of the most basic Obvious Rule Patch is the rule that bonuses of the same types don't stack - only the largest one takes effect (with the exception of dodge bonuses to AC in third edition). This has led to many rule patching to give untyped bonuses types so they couldn't be so easily stacked.
- That got an entire sidebar dedicated to explaining it in the Dungeon Master's Guide, and it makes quite a bit of sense if you think about it. The reasoning is basically that your multiple bonuses will end up redundant, as (for protection, let's say) anything that can get through the biggest one will get through all the others. If you're wearing a suit of armour, some padding underneath will be of very little use.
- An Obvious Rule Patch is the "Can't Miss" property of some traps and spells, such as the Crushing Walls trap, since you obviously can't "dodge" a wall that's currently flattening the room you're in or somehow make a nuke-level spell "miss".
- One of the most broken items in 3rd Edition was the Thought Bottle. One possible use for it was to "store" your experience total (and consequently your character level) in the bottle, so that it could be restored later. The intention was most likely to protect against level drain or lost levels due to resurrection, but it could also be used to offset the experience point cost of spellcasting and item creation. It was subsequently reworded in errata with the intention of making that impossible, but it's been argued that the experience spent on spellcasting or crafting can still be restored if you also get some levels drained legitimately.
- 3.0 spellcasters had a bad habit of using summoning heavy creatures in midair, causing them to deal obscene damage as falling objects when they hit opponents. Wizards amended the summon spells in 3.5 to prevent creatures from being summoned into an environment that can't support them (i.e., no flying whales).
- The ability-boosting spells in 3.0 (Cat's Grace, etc) used to last for hours, making them perfectly acceptable replacements for costly ability-boosting items. In 3.5, the duration was reduced to minutes, making them far less appreciated.
- Additionally, 3.0 ability-boosting spells had variable effectiveness, which allowed clever casters to enhance them with the Empower Spell feat. This gave them much larger bonuses in some cases than originally intended. In 3.5, ability score bonuses would have fixed gains.
- Also, the book Complete Psionics nerfed the Astral Construct power (a psionic counterpart to Summon Monster) while in the same edition with the rule "can only have one construct at a time". The rule change has reportedly made little children cry.
- Especially crazy because the Summon Monster spell has the built in ability to summon up to five monsters at the same time.
- In an early version of Neverwinter Nights, a loophole in the rules was found that let monks wear a shield in their offhand, making them virtually unhittable for no real downside. In the very next patch, monks were made unable to wear shields and retain monk dodge / attack bonuses at the same time.
- In the most recent version of the Tomb Of Horrors, the scepter and crown of disintegration (put the crown on your head, touch one end of the scepter to it, you disintegrate) cannot be removed from the room their in by any means (the description goes to great lengths to cover any eventuality). Earlier versions of the Tomb had no such rule at all. The reason eventually emerged during a conversation on a message board: One of the artists working on an earlier copy of the module was invited to a session of the Tomb D Med by none other than Gary Gygax himself. The artist took the scepter and crown from the room, then eventually placed the crown on the fake skull of Acererak and touched the scepter to it, disintegrating the lich instantly. Gygax was stunned, as the eventuality had never occurred to him. The artist, on the other hand, thought that's what they were there for. The artist was quite surprised when he was later informed of the rule change.
- Fourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons errata has had some obvious rule patches: The Ranger ability that let you make continual attacks until you miss was errated to have a 5 attack limit as it was possible to make a build which had an almost zero chance of ever missing, even against the strongest monster in the Monster Manual. Also, the entire rules on Stealth were replaced because as written, the Stealth rules could both be interpreted as being able to be continually in stealth regardless of attacks, or never in stealth at all.
- 4E's Weapon Expertise. Weapon Focus did the same thing in just about every d20 product until 4E: a +1 to attack rolls with a certain weapon or weapon group. 4E came along and decided that bonus was too good under the new rules, and Weapon Focus was changed to a bonus on damage rolls. Then the Internets mathematically proved that players actually lag behind in attack bonus as levels go higher, and Players Handbook II included a feat called Weapon Expertise that, at 1st level, grants... yup, a +1 bonus to attack rolls.
- The wording for Temporary HP was changed, as the old one would allow certain characters to form unending buffers of THP making them damn near immortal.
- Construction rules in Battletech often have restrictions that often seem arbitrary. For example, Protomechs (not-so Humongous Mecha) cannot mount Plasma Cannons. This seems to make no sense, as, being only three tons, they seem like perfect weapons to mount on one. Then you think about just how badly five Plasma Cannons would roast any given Battlemech in a single turn.
Video Games
- The first patch to Battlefield Vietnam altered the machine guns to be less accurate and swapped the kits around. This is because the original release allowed a U.S. soldier to have a kit that gave him an M60 [which might as well have been a laser, considering how accurate it was] and a LAW. This meant that U.S. teams were entirely composed of Rambo until the patch came out.
- Battlefield2 had quite a few issues. Some absolute gems included:
- Transport helicopters had side-mounted machine guns that were almost perfectly accurate. Cue teams of nothing but transport choppers dropping hordes of soldiers onto capture points while their machine-gunners effortlessly destroyed anything on the ground short of a tank. Machine gun accuracy and transport chopper armor were promptly nerfed.
- The ability to airdrop vehicles (Usually jeeps) for your team to use was added. Jeeps could be dropped with pinpoint accuracy. Jeeps explode when destroyed. Cue "Cartillary", where a commander would drop a jeep onto a heavily fortified enemy position. Ground troops would shoot the jeep, causing it to explode and kill the defenders. It was promply nerfed so jeep explosions were smaller and vehicle drops aren't pinpoint accurate anymore.
- Battlefield 2142 patches are a litany of attempts to fix level geometry to stop people glitching their way inside Titans. A particularly stupid example is that in early releases of the game it was entirely possible for two soldiers with nothing better to do to destroy their own Titan (and thus force their team to lose the round) by forcing a transport through the floor of the hangar bay and into the Core.
- Another one was using drop pods (From either Titans or AP Cs) to land on top of vehicles. The vehicle would instantly explode, killing everyone inside and around it...and drop-pod pilot would be fine. It made it not only possible, but entirely LIKELY for a lightly-armed APC to take down 2-4 Mechs/Battletanks by itself! Nerfed so that landing on top of a vehicle only does minor damage to the vehicle.
- Battlefield 1942 apparently was not programmed to have realistic gravity parameters, as one this troper clearly remembers jumping in a plane, having one friendly soldier kneeling on each wing with sniper rifles, and then watching as they had no problems sniping during extreme banking maneuvers.
- Master Of Orion 2 had a fun little gem. There was a beam weapon that was not 'quite' the most powerful beam weapon in the game, but had a very good weight/damage ratio. In this game you were allowed to outfit ships however you pleased, so long as you stayed under the maximum weight allowed for a given ship type. This particular weapon was perfectly balanced during the normal range of use. However, near the end of the game when the player had no more specific technologies to research the game allowed the player to put their research towards "Advanced" series in whatever field they wanted to. A Rank in Advanced basically gave a bonus to cost/benefit for everything in that category. The Game Breaker came about when a player rushed straight into beam technology and as far into weapons research as they could. The weapon in question became dirt cheap and very light. After that you simply load up your largest ship with a few thousand of these beams and nothing can withstand a direct hit. A patch was released that specifically upped the weight of the weapon and changed its bonus from advanced research.
- Eve Online has had several updates that were borderline Obvious Rule Patches. However, the patch that prevented carriers from transporting loaded cargo ships was a glaringly Obvious Rules Patch.
- A good example from World Of Warcraft would be wall walking. Originally, it let you walk up a cliff if you did it sideways at exactly the right angle in the right place, letting you get pretty much anywhere. They took this out. In Burning Crusade it was discovered that while you couldn't walk up slopes now, you could still jump up walls in a variant technique, which was used in arenas to climb pillars to annoying effect and bypass areas of some dungeons. Now that's gone too.
- A fairly obscure item called the Luffa would remove any bleed effect. A boss over 20 levels later would put a hefty bleed dot on raid members at fairly regular intervals. Everyone would equip their Luffa and make Moroes a total joke. The next patch put a spell level cap on the Luffa ie. you couldn't remove bleed effects over level 60 anymore.
- Then there's the infamous Corrupted Blood incident from the release of the Zul'Gurub dungeon, which gained enough notoriety to be mentioned in major news media as an example of how populations reacted to the spread of communicable disease. In a nutshell, an exploit of a boss encounter allowed a pet who acquired the debuff to be dismissed and then resummoned in a populated area, instantly spreading it to everyone in the vicinity and decimating entire cities as a result. It was patched several days later so the debuff could not exist outside of the dungeon.
- At one point, a new Paladin talent was added which would give its possessor an extra attack after suffering from a critical hit. The amount of extra attacks you could store wasn't limited, so a paladin went in a fight with a level 1 player and got 1816 extra attacks on himself before using them all on an outdoor raid boss, killing it instantly. The loophole was fixed within 12 hours. Video.
- More of an exploit removing update as opposed to an actual patch, but this practice is fairly common in World Of Warcraft. Recently a Mage player discovered, with a wacky talent build and clever use of invisibility potions and the "Spellsteal" spell, that he could solo an entire wing of the main 25-Player raid dungeon, Naxxaramas. Just like Paladin Reckoningbomb above, this was hotfixed very quickly when it became public knowledge. Video. The was also a situation where kissing a certain NPC outside of the Zul'Aman dungeon would grant you a small frog pet that was only supposed to be attained inside the dungeon itself. Again, fixed very quickly.
- In Defense Of The Ancients, the Batrider hero has a skill, "Sticky Napalm", that amplifies damage from the Batrider on its victims. Players took advantage of this by building the constant DPS aura item Radiance, which turned Batrider into a real damage-dealer. Apparently Icefrog disagreed, as he proceeded to change Sticky Napalm so that Radiance could not (normally) trigger the bonus damage any more.
- Starting in version 1.3, Iji tells you in some places (the arena for Asha's rematch comes to mind) that "there's no need to fire your Nanogun here". Sometimes it was literally true, but in many cases it was because firing your Nanogun there could bug out the game. Somehow...
- Iji has a few things like this in the later versions. When a true pacifist runthrough became possible, this necessitated the player not fighting one of the bosses, specifically the first one, because the only way to get by him is to kill him. The solution? Have a new character help you by one-shotting him. However, this would mean that a pacifist runthrough on the first couple of levels would be much faster than previous runthroughs, and the developer, Daniel Remar, wanted speedruns to be fair between versions. So 10 minutes are added to your overall time because Iji waits around for 10 minutes to give your helper a head start.
- Kingdom Of Loathing automatically ends combat with a special message after 30 rounds of combat (or 50 rounds for some bosses) have elapsed with no winner, with a net result equivalent to successfully running away on the 31st round. This was apparently done originally to prevent a possible near-infinite loop that would result if the player's Muscle was too low to hit the monster and his/her Moxie was too high for the monster to hit him/her, while his/her combat initiative was too low to run away. Newer mechanics make such a situation much less plausible, but the rule has remained and still serves to cap the potential effectiveness of any strategy that involves stalling and drawing out combat for per-round effects. For example:
- The Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot familiar used to randomly give Meat with a fixed chance of about 1 in 9 per round of combat. Since this made it advantageous to drag out combat to as close to 30 turns as possible without going over and thus using up much more server resources than normal, the NPZR now only gives Meat in the first 10 turns of combat.
- Stasis, which involved buffing yourself with Jabanero Saucesphere (restores some MP when you are hit), reducing damage while still getting hit every round and using Saucy Salve, a combat heal. This generated rather obscene amounts of MP, even with the 30 round limit. It was eventually patched by making Jabanero Saucesphere not do that anymore.
- Another much-maligned Obvious Rule Patch came with NS13: Before NS13, players found that increasing monster level (which also increased XP gains) and increasing noncombat encounter chance were both extremely useful. So when NS13 rolled out, the devs added a rule that made increased monster level cancel out increased noncombat chance. Unfortunately, this had the side effect of making monster level increasers less than useless. Over a year and a half later, the devs realized that nobody liked this in the slightest and removed the rule.
- In the Programming Game RoboWar, allowing robots to teleport and fire weapons interchangeably in the same chronon let a robot with sufficient processor speed leap a considerable distance (depending on its current energy) to put a lethal contact shot into another robot, leaving it next to no time to defend or counterattack — and executing another move after the shot (the "jerker" strategy) made it harder to target for a counterattack. That the robot's energy would already go deeply negative in the middle of the chronon didn't matter much (so long as it didn't fall below -200), since it wouldn't become immobilized by having negative energy until the next chronon. This allowed the "dasher" strategy to achieve considerable dominance, and in time most top-placing robots in tournaments, dashers or not, had to use "anti-dasher" techniques. To rebalance the game, an Obvious Rule Patch was instated (amid much controversy) to prevent move/shoot in the same chronon.
- Flash Flash Revolution and surely many other web-games had a problem when they introduced a credit-gifting system in which you could gift the in-game credits to other people playing the game. The obvious rule patch? Don't allow negative numbers.
- In the MMORPG Lords of Legend, your level bonus is apparently capped at 5 times the number of troops. This troper remains convinced he is the only one to have ever been affected by it, because in order to get even close to the cap, you have to spend weeks doing the exact opposite of what you are supposed to.
- It is also played straight with the 'invisibility' strategy (You don't show up on attack pages you haven't won an attack yet), which has been severely nerfed with increasingly harsh and arbitrary restrictions on invisible players.
- The changelog for the online Flash game GemCraft has a lot of these. The final level ends with a huge explosion that instantly kills all on-screen monsters; these kills no longer count towards your score. In addition, the final level at one point had a cap of 50K XP, though this has since been removed with another update. Finally, in Endurance Mode only, Experience Shrines no longer give points for each on-screen monster. Seems the author(s) dislike anybody using strategies they didn't intend.
- They didn't make these patches to the original version, but Retro Studios, in their Player's Choice re-release of Metroid Prime, changed numerous aspects of the game to prevent the player from achieving certain game breaking achievements, like rearranging the layout of the room before the one with the Plasma Beam to ensure that the player cannot cheat their way to the top of the room and acquire the beam before they are meant to, or removing a glitch that allows the player to acquire the Space Jump Boots as soon as they arrive on Tallon IV (literally. They use a glitch jump to jump from Samus's ship to the ledge with the door that leads to the SJ Bs). This trick would lead to dozens of other tricks, such as acquiring the Morph Ball early and skipping the Hive Mecha.
- zOMG! has had quite a few:
- First, there's soulbinding, the most famous and controversial of the lot. In the first couple months of open beta, users were allowed to buy and sell their rings. This caused a few problems. The most obvious, of course, was that people could buy their way through the game, resulting in many CL 10s who had no idea what they were doing. Another effect was on the economy. Charge Orbs, the items that power up rings, were earned in-game, not bought. Higher-level rings are naturally more valued than weak ones, so people were charging up rings and then selling them, effectively creating expensive items with little to no cost to the users. This was quickly changed so that rings were "soulbound", meaning they could no longer be put on the marketplace.
- A bit later, CL caps were placed on boss lairs so that people couldn't recruit their CL 10 friends to help them beat the boss. Clever players soon found a way to circumvent this by wearing low-level rings when entering the boss area, then switching out to their stronger ones. The devs soon closed this loophole.
- When an entire crew was killed in a boss lair, all but one member of the group would awaken in the Null Chamber. The one person who stayed behind acted as a placeholder so that the crew wouldn't have to start over at the beginning of the encounter. Even though just about every crew did this and few to no players considered it to be a cheap tactic, the devs apparently thought it had to be changed. Now if your whole crew is killed by a boss, too bad. You're automatically warped away from the boss room.
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