Thief: How were you able to get your stats so high as a level one character? Red Mage: Oh, it's quite simple, really. I took a variety of low impact flaws to add points to my character point pool. Thus, I maximize my powers and minimize my disadvantages. Fighter: Gee, I just put everything into my "Use Swords To Kill Stuff" skill. — 8-Bit Theater
Whoring is a widely-used catch-all term that describes the process or act of focusing all effort or resources into only one or a couple aspects of a game's mechanics with the intent of drawing massive profit or advantages from it. This can be extremely effective. So effective, in fact, that people will consider it cheating, or at least a good way to spoil other people's fun.
Whoring undermines the strategic aspects of the game as originally envisioned by the developers, and often completely changes the way a game is played. A player who whores a certain trick can become unbeatable to anyone who doesn't do the same thing. This can be particularly vexing to people who've invested their efforts in learning every part of the game mechanics, since it obsoletes or invalidates many of them (a sort of player-induced Antidote Effect).
General examples of whoring:
Using a game element that is considered a Game Breaker.
In a fighting game, using only one character or using the character's most powerful or difficult-to-dodge attack over and over ("spamming").
In a first person shooter, using only the most powerful gun, usually one with an explosion effect and a massive blast radius (such as the BFG).
In a strategy game, creating massive armies of a single type of unit ("Zerg Rush").
"Camping", or staying in a tactical place for extended periods of time in order to pick off other players, block a passageway, or collect a reappearing special item. This is justified if playing defensively accomplishes an objective. For example, campers keep the team's flag from being taken in Capture the Flag while their more offensively-minded teammates try to take the enemy team's flag.
In a MMORPG, Level Grinding to inhuman levels or earning inhuman amounts of money or another item.
In any game, repeatedly using a verified glitch to your advantage.
In any game, building up massive amounts of defense for a character or perhaps a base, so that any enemy attack will deal very little damage. This is often referred to as "turtling".
The existence of Whoring is a testament to how difficult it is to balance a game. For good or bad, expect your game to be played in ways you never imagined. Even with an army of testers, you are very likely to miss that one crucial flaw in your carefully balanced strategic house of cards. There is no way to make a game whore-proof, except perhaps by making the gameplay so diverse that there's always room for new strategies (and hence a chance to finally beat the trick). Even so, once you ship the game, balance is ultimately in the hands of your players.
The designers may or may not choose to Nerf a strategy that's just a little too successful, because it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" proposition. One particular trick might be defeated, but everyone who relied on it will protest, and there's no guarantee that some even more horrible trick isn't lurking just around the corner (bonus points if the original trick being removed was consistently able to beat its replacement — that is, the original exploit was keeping an even worse exploit in check). That said, if even the professional player base doesn't manage to develop new strategies in response to whoring, a tweak might be necessary just to keep the game interesting at all.
Those who whore may prefer the term "playing to win" instead, and they'll disdainfully call the players who refuse to whore Scrubs. This reflects a fundamental divide in opinion on what makes a game fun to play, and players from either side usually do well to avoid the other side like the plague.
See Min-Maxing for the Tabletop Games equivalent trope. Very common among "Stop Having Fun" Guys, and even more common among God Modders. Not to be confused with what the Hooker with a Heart of Gold does. Crosses over with Complacent Gaming Syndrome, where people will abuse moves, characters, or strategies over and over again for the sake of winning the easy way. Often the reason for Diminishing Returns For Balance.
NOT about The Oldest Profession in any way, shape, or form (except perhaps by analogy).
Examples
Spider-Man's medium punch in the arcade Marvel Super Heroes could juggle an opponent; repeat punch until opponent died or delivered real-life punch to the cheeser using that particular trick.
If you really want to annoy someone during a Doom deathmatch, spam a narrow corridor by with the plasma gun, or even rockets, as rockets in Doom are fired much more rapidly than in most other games. The best tactic is to strafe from side to side to create unavoidable curtains of fire.
Half of the characters in Ehrgeiz have a very cheap and exploitable leg sweep attack. In order to win a fight, all you have to do is tap "X" repeatedly until the fight is over. You don't even need to use the d-pad, since the characters automatically gravitate towards each other. To prove this point to its extremes, the Necro Critic pulled out a turbo controller, locked the "X" button, and left to use the bathroom. By the time he got back, he was at the final opponent with all perfect victories.
StarCraftcoined the famous phrase "Zerg Rush", which has expanded to mean the use of a massive army of weak units to overrun the enemy base, often at an unexpectedly early point in the match. The original "Zerg Rush" was built upon the fact that, with the right build order, a Zerg player could produce 6 Zerglings in the time it took other players to produce 1 or 2 of their basic units. The tactic cripples your Resource Gathering, but can score you an early victory against anyone who isn't VERY experienced at dealing with it.
At some early point, it was possible to build literally hundreds of photon cannons, slowly taking up the map, while an air power only ally would protect your cannon construction from long-range artillery. It worked.
This is the reason why many online matches are played with House Rules that prevent rushing, such as "nobody attacks for the first 5 minutes". Rise of Nations actually took notice of these rules and implemented them as user-selectable "custom rules" in the game.
The first WarCraft let you make Elementals invisible, and unlike all of the subsequent games, attacking didn't break invisibility. It was literally impossible to defend against.
While the so-called "Grunt Rushing" was something of a problem in its predecessor, WarCraft 2, another notable problem was the dominating effect of Ogre Magi while under the influence of their Bloodlust spell.
Nevermind the rampant use of 'Mass Spellcasters' in the early days of Warcraft 3 (before the Nerf), Blizzard somehow missed the fact that these "support" units dealt more damage and had more hit points per resources spent than any other ranged unit. Oh, and they had SPELLS too. It got to the point where you knew you were playing against newbies when they actually built basic infantry, or anything other than spell casters and heroes for that matter.
Roll Canceling in Capcom vs. SNK 2 is hard to get around, even if you've seen it before.
The Super Smash Bros.. series is somewhat prone to the "spam one attack" strategy. It is not terribly effective in many situations, but fighting a Pikachu who just keeps using down-B is definitely irritating.
Characters with projectiles are very likely to be spammed by the players, such as Link, Pit, Fox, Lucas, etc.
In the Classic 1P mode in Melee, there is a penalty for whoring out moves: "Stale Moves" in Melee (-2,000 points).
In the games, there are also Diminishing Returns. Short story: The more you use an attack, the less damage and knockback it deals. Spam your kill moves and you'll have problems killing things. Interestingly enough, this is circumvented by spamming projectiles or certain combo parts.
Depending on who's playing, a fight of original Smash Bros could easily boil down to everyone rolling around trying to throw each other (and the occasional sword swirl for Link players / lightning for Pikachu players).
In the game Metroid Prime Hunters, overuse of the character Trace with his sniper weapon and invisibility powers is considered by many to be unfair in matches. Also from the same game, "Alt Spamming", or overuse of your secondary form, is also frequently considered unfair.
Samus herself is guilty of being a whore. Her Missiles can seek out other players, so most people who use her spam those damn Missiles.
Let us not forget those whores who abused the wall glitches, and Nox's "Shadow Freeze" glitch.
In Mario Kart DS, a trick known as "snaking" allows players to race at incredible speeds by gaining boosts down straightaways, whereas (arguably) this trick was only meant to be performed around corners.
Snaking was also controversial in the earlier F-Zero GX.
Snaking in Mario Kart DS was quite easy to do online, due to all races being locked in 100cc speeds (allowing players more time to snake as much as possible), a good portion of the tracks allowed for online were easy for snaking due to having wide roads or gentle turns, there were only 4 players max, and the items given out were mostly red shells, green shells, banana peels, and mushrooms, which made it very hard to physically stop snakers.
Mario Kart Wii ups the ante by changing the mini turbo mechanic so snaking was near impossible to do thanks to it being nerfed. However, everyone online now uses bikes only and wheelies almost everywhere to gain a boost. This overpowers karts completely (especially in tracks with lots of straight roads), and it shows in the time trial records where all the top record holders are bikers.
Changed again in Mario Kart 7 where the aforementioned bikes were removed, leaving only the karts with the same mini-turbo mechanic as on the Wii.
For clarification: Snaking, or dakou, in F-Zero GX involves a glitch in the physics engine which gives cars a boost as they come out of a banked turn. In order to employ it, you have to bank back and forth, alternating between the L & R shoulder buttons and left & right on the D-stick, several times a second. It's very hard to drive a straight line while doing so, using it for even a couple of minutes will make your hands cramp, and, since GX wasn't precisely popular, you can generally outrace your friends by just driving conventionally. (Snaking wouldn't be necessary at all if GX's Story Mode wasn't an unholy combination of Nintendo Hard and The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard.)
In Final Fantasy I and III, the player could give all four characters the job of fighters (and later, knights) and play the game without using any other class - calling them Killbots. In Final Fantasy II, acting like a killbot (not using magic) would eventually turn those characters into them.
Street Fighter in general has many examples, from turtling to overuse of Chun-Li's Lightning Kick to parrying in Street Fighter III. One particularly infamous video shows a player parrying all thirty hits of Chun-Li's best super in Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike (See Crowning Moment of Awesome: Street Fighter), although it should be noted that this requires an almost inhuman level of timing, and also was in a match between two of the best players of the game.
This gets even worse in the Marvel vs. Capcom series, where several characters have complex and extremely damaging combos, making the pool of fighters used in high level tourneys relatively limited. Other fighters, for example Sentinel, have moves with an invincible start-up which are impossible to counter. It's also possible through some team combinations to lock your opponent into a position where it is impossible for them to stop blocking without taking damage and are forced to sit quietly while they are 'chipped' to death with block damage.
Captain Commando has Captain Fire, which is a projectile that crosses the screen nigh-instantly, and the Captain Collider, which was the same, except going vertically up instantly. In short, you have a nearly unstoppable means of fending off most enemies... and that's before you get enough supers for Captain Sword (Which starts off like Captain Collider, then slams to the ground, taking you with it).
Cable is another example, with his above average stats. His fireball move has next to no launch or recovery time, is near instantaneous, covers a wide spread above and below the average fireballs range, and does multiple hits. The end result is that you can easily spam this move over and over again, and chip the enemy to death.
Don't forget his Wave Motion Gun super, which if done a certain way does ungodly chip damage and is difficult to block effectively. And he can loop this up to three, sometimes four times. There's a reason he's the pointman of Team Scrub. Basically, any truly tournament viable character in MvC2 would cause a Scrub from other games to spontaneously combust. Despite that, Dat Mahvel is still one of the most popular fighting games ever made.
In Mass Effect 3, buying every possible upgrade to the Viper sniper rifle the instant you get it and putting every skill point you have into the Infiltrator class talent and the Assassination Cloak skill allows you (on Veteran difficulty) to kill pretty much any enemy that isn't a boss with one or two shots from a semi-automatic sniper rifle with six-shot clips and a reserve capacity of 60 shots. You will never lack for ammo ever again.
The so called "3 Minute Mage" in World of Warcraft can output enough damage to easily kill a player in a very short amount of time by using all of their powerful, high-downtime spells at once. It can only be performed once every 3 minutes (hence the name) but it is extremely difficult to counter and takes almost no skill to perform.
Every now and then one of these will pop up due to some unforeseen design quirk in the talent trees. For example, the Diseaseless Blood Death Knight build from early Wrath of the Lich King, which ignored diseases -intended to be a major part of the Death Knight's playstyle- in favor of spamming attack skills for high damage. Blizzard is usually pretty good about fixing them when they occur.
"Pures" in Runescape, are players that maximize one of their combat skills, while leaving the defense and prayer skill at minimum. This gives them very high fighting strength at very low levels, making it impossible for a normal leveled player of their same level to beat them.
Another one is the Dragon Dagger Special and Dragon Claw Special. Both have multi-hit special attacks that boost power and accuracy. Combined with their innate high attack speeds, they can both deal potentially massive amounts of damage in a matter of seconds. Should you be injured after another fight, or fail to put up your protection prayers quickly enough, there is a high chance you'll be respawning soon.
Not to mention that there's now a ring that reduces the cost of these special attacks...
Space Marine Dreadnoughts in Dawn of War were fairly tough, fought in close combat against infantry (which combined with the fact that they were invincible when doing their Finishing Moves), hit really hard in close combat (which meant that, against most infantry, they did their Finishing Moves quite often. Against Imperial Guard, for instance, they basically picked a guy up, killed him, then grabbed another and did the same until the whole squad was dead), were fairly cheap, and didn't count much against the Vehicle Cap. What this usually meant was that against a Space Marine player (and there were a lot of them), you eventually ended up with ten or twenty Dreadnoughts stomping towards your base...
Accompanied by what must have been the entire Chapter's complement of Assault Terminators, who, while expensive, were tough, hit really hard in close combat, and could stun their target with their basic attacks.
With the implementation of Arbitrary Headcount LimitCaps in Dark Crusade, whoring non-basic units without game-altering mods is no longer possible. Of course, this makes some veteran players nostalgic, making them bust out their old copies of vanilla and Winter Assault or going for mods that remove the limits. Because really, when it's your dreadnoughts and assault terminators stomping all over the enemy base? Funny.
Dawn of War 2 has had some problems with this also - Tactical Marines, when upgraded with plasma guns or missle launchers, became all a player would ever need, having superior anti-vehicle damage, ranged anti-infantry damage, and tons of Hitpoints. A player could just attack-move around the map in a large blob and beat any opposition - if they were lured into a situation that they might lose, a player could just retreat them and gets only a few losses due to many Hitpoints.
Tyranids Warriors ranged synapse used to make units that were affected by it knock their enemies down on every attack. Get a bunch of ranged Termagaunt units, and they will be able to make infantry against them helpless to even retreat. The upgrade that provided the synapse was also effective against vehicles, allowing players to make two units and kill everything.
Melee synapse wasn't much better, as the weapon was also good against everything and the effect on units made them jump on everything, disallowing them to retreat effectively.
All of these were nerfed, and the anti-vehicle weapons became indirectly less effective as vehicle pathfinding was later improved to allow them to get away from opposition easily.
An later problem was melee spam against Space Marines - as no other unit could reliably beat any melee units of other factions one-on-one and their own melee unit would only be available much later due to high cost, Space Marine needed lots of Scouts with shotguns to beat them back.
In Super Mario World', there's a "Secret Area" that allows you to get any power up, as well as Yoshi. By constantly entering with Yoshi, a person could get any number of lives he or she wishes.
Of course, this is just a easier way to stock up on lives than playing the first level over and over again.
Easier still is playing Forest of Illusion 1 again and again from the half way point. You hit the changing powerup block, grab a star, then rush through the rest of the level, bearing in mind that after you kill about 7 enemies, each one gets you a 1up. The caterpillars are worth 2, so you can pick up like 30 in one run. Then you quit the level before you get to the finish so you can start from the halfway point again.
Or go to Vanilla Dome Secret 2 (starting at the midpoint), hit the P-switch just after the midpoint, and then run back to the left. All the enemies will have turned into gray coins. Collect them all for about 50 lives.
Even more so when you figure out that P-Switches can be restored by having Yoshi eat it before it completely disappears (you have about a half second to do so). Right before the charge runs out, spit it out, crush it, then eat it again for even more lives.
Still in Vanilla Secret 2, but on the Game Boy Advance version, there is a vertical line of parakoopas right before the goal. If you place mario ridiculously close to the edge before them and spin around like the drugged out plumber you are, you can bounce a shell off the nearby pipe repeatedly, getting a ludicrous amount of lives.
Or better yet go to the underwater star world map with the blue yoshi, instead of feeding the yoshi the star pick the star up yourself, use the young yoshi to propel yourself along speedily and hit as many fish as possible. With a little practice you can get 10-15 lives each time you go on the map.
Or just keep the blue yoshi and you can fly over virtually any level with a koopa shell in it he can hold.
And now we get New Super Mario Bros Wii ... which lets you do the same thing on cleared stages. As long as you have Worlds 1-1 (propeller hat), 1-2 (ice flower), and 3-1 (penguin suit) cleared, you can show up for any other world with whatever powerup you'd like. There's another world that gives out fire flowers, but it never was too important..
Even the future of Battlefield 2142, Russian firearms are still superior to what NATO will ever have. Enter the Voss-L-AR. This 40 round assault rifle will win you fights against other folks with almost 100% efficiency. However one of the most griping weapons is the PK-Assault Rockets dubbed the pocket rocket by some players. Almost every Assault you kill will have a loadout of the Voss, Pocket Rocket and a defiberator.
BattlefieldBad Company 2 has rocket whores. The engineer package is the anti-vehicle pack as well as being the repair guy. They have rocket launchers that do a lot of damage and splash, the Gustav the one best for anti-infantry purposes. Players run around the map with the Gustav, choosing the Improved Demolitions specialization (increases explosives damage) and extra explosives specialization. With the range, explosion radius and damage of rockets, these players can kill many others before being taken down, usually by someone else using the same tactic. It turns what is supposed to be a tactical shooter into an inane attempt at Quake.
Helicopter whoring is possible in every Battlefield game that features them. While they do take some skill to maneuver effectively, helicopters can unleash a barrage of rockets at a base, fly away so far that no weapon can take them down, then repeat. Done right, this can effectively deny a team any chances of respawning without dying near- instantly, which allows the enemy team to waltz in to their base and utterly destroy it.
GunZ The Duel. The third-person shooter was designed for creative play, with characters having Matrix-style movement and packing everything from pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns, rocket launchers, sub-machine guns, katanas, kodachis (two swords), fully decked out machine guns... players learned how to cancel the delay of the weapons. Rocket launchers = 50 damage per face. Shotguns = 200 damage up close. This made most automatic weapons near-useless. To cancel the delay between katana swings (which was designed as a high damage per slash weapon), players used block. Cue the creation of "Butterfly", where the user can move forward quickly, jump, slash, and block all within the space of a single second. Oh, and the Instafall was invented, giving players the ability to almost instantly put on opponent helpless on the floor for the whole of about three seconds. Remember those fully automatic 200-damage per faceshot shotguns? Yes...
Hell, the entire style known as K-Style is this. The entire thing consists of pure cancelling moves, from the aforementioned butterfly to the shotgun flash (shotgun, swap, shotgun, swap, until either clip runs out - swapping eliminates cooldown, yet another bug).
Ask an Achaea player about the tactics of a character class he regularly finds himself fighting. The suffix "-whoring" (as in axe-whoring, choke-whoring...) will come up within the first five words.
It's arguable, but the "N00b Combo" is a good example of FPS whoring. Halo 2 introduced dual-wielded weapons. It was quickly discovered that firing a charged blast from the plasma pistol (an otherwise worthless weapon) completely destroys an opponents shield. Pretty useful, but if one wields the magnum semi-automatic pistol as well, whose shots seem to produce the same damage as a battle rifle's three-shot bursts, a head shot or a few rounds to the body will kill the opponent pretty effectively. Combine with the plasma pistol's post fire tracking ability, and it led to an obnoxiously potent combo, as the derisive name suggests. Halo 3 seems to have eliminated the effectiveness of the combo, though these days the Needler seems to produce far more damage than previously, leading to a lot of kill after the fact due to the explosive nature of the barbs, and it's not uncommon for a lot of "cheap kill" flaming from its victims.
The Star Pitches/Swings in Mario Super Sluggers. Once you get a healthy amount of Star Power (usually around 5 units), it's too easy to simply spam your power over and over again to prevent your opponent from gaining the upper hand. Made even worse if the spammer is the one whose team is losing since the losing team gains more Star Power. If the losing team is behind 3 points or more, they can almost gain one unit of Star Power per turn, thus they can continue spamming their powers.
MAJORLY averted in Guild Wars. The dev team constantly adjusts skills to balance out gameplay nerf anything halfway advantageous. Also, every single build has a counter-build. It's frantic. You think you can just sin your way through in PvP? Down you go once you fight someone with Empathy. Think going Domination Mesmer will keep others from attacking your allies? EVERYONE picks off the Mesmer first, so you damn well better have a way to defend yourself as well. Curses can be removed, Enchantments can be removed, Damage can be negated, amplified, and elementally changed to something more convenient for yourself.
Of course, despite the skill-split, the Dev Team's insistance on "balancing" PvE as well ends up being more antagonistic to players than helpful, and only increases the hostility between the PvE and PvP players.
Ursan Blessing was a whored skill for a year or two following its release, to the point where it was nigh impossible to get into any high-end PvE groups unless you had the most powerful version of UB; something that took a considerable amount of grind to achieve. This was eventually nerfed, however, and groups today tend to be more balanced and variable, though there are still a handful of abused builds in the elite areas.
In Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance, Quan Chi has a metric fuckton of knockdown moves - his grab attack (jumping on his enemy's chest and pounding them) and pretty much everything he can do with weapons. Combine this with the long reach of his broadswords, and the difficulty of blocking in the instant after being knocked over, you have a whoring Game Breaker par excellence.
Sword Of Mana kinda wonked out on this one. Levelling up allowed you to boost stats consistent with a particular job type (thief, knight, wizard etc.); pouring all your effort into one job offered up a bonus accessory specific to the job once it hit level 40.
Early fighter game The Way Of The Exploding Fist was legendarily broken in this regard - it was possible to make it all the way up to 10th dan by spamming nothing other than the sweep kick, making this Older Than the NES.
Gears of War 2 online is apparently dominated by people who use a punch/shotgun combo. Known as a "two-piece" to hardcore players (named for the 2 hit insta-kill), it's hard to tell which is harder: a two-piece combo or someone using the chainsaw abilities that were upped from its predecessor to cut everything in sight in half.
The two-piece was Nerfed by Epic. The stun delay from being clubbed is slightly shorter than the delay between clubbing and firing. A skilled/lucky player can dodge or shoot back (usually 1 hit killing the aggressor) a reasonable amount of times. Further, they added a slowdown effect to the machine guns to prevent people charging through a hail of bullets to deliver the club.
The Hammerburst has obsoleted the Lancer completely because of its sheer power. Not to mention it's incredibly accurate, has a zoom function, and, with an active, that pesky recoil goes away completely. Of course the Lancer is still considered the cheap weapon because of the chainsaw (which hardly ever works anymore).
Also, in the first Gears of War, a large percentage of players used nothing but the shotgun (and did not tolerate the use of any other weapon by anyone). The Lancer had to receive a damage boost to stop people from tanking through the stream of bullets and killing you in one shot.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind has a particularly Game Breaking feature of its Alchemy ability. You can create potions which raise your Intelligence, which in turn boosts your Alchemy ability, which allows you to make better "Fortify Intelligence" potions, which boost your Alchemy ability even further...and so forth. Intelligence could be raised to 500,000 without penalty, granting the power to make new godlike potions with near-infinite durations. The gamer term for this in Morrowind was "Alchemy Abuse."
Some of these potions had built-in lethal flaws, such as "Fortify Health" lowering your health by an equal amount when the potion expired (and a + 5,000 Fortify Health potion would be lethal to anyone), but Restore Health had no lethal flaw, allowing Magic characters to become Nigh Invulnerable at a very low level. Fortify Intelligence and Fortify Willpower had no lethal flaws, meaning that spellcasters could cast impossibly powerful spells (such as "use fire damage to paralyze, kill, and trap the souls of everything in 100 feet").
A trick well-known to the Xbox players of Morrowind but still possible in the PC version is the Target-Glitch. By making a custom spell or enchantment of "on Self" or "on Touch" variety (with an AoE for the latter), it can be made permanent by the addition of a secondary "on Target" effect (usually Light due to its cheapness) of minimal time and casting it at the ground. Unlike usual spell effects, the permanent effects of Target-Glitch spells stack, making it possible to Fortify Attributes (or Skills, if you have the Tribunal add-on or GOTY) infinitely high or Summon entire armies of Daedra rather than just one. As an added bonus, any creatures perma-Summoned in this way leave a corpse and CAN be stripped of any weapons they might have, making it simple to farm Daedric weapons from summoned Dremora. Damaging and restoration spells can't be made permanent this way, but coupling Damage effects with Weakness effects on enchanted weapons makes for unexpected boosts in the damage exacted.
Another trick, much more mild than the above but still interesting, allows you to raise a skill to 100 by about 500 gold from any trainer that can train that skill. First step is to find a skill that will drain a skill. Then you create a custom spell that drains the skill you want to train by 100 for 2 seconds. Find a trainer who trains the skill, cast the spell, then talk to them. Because your skill is 0, it will cost 1 gold to train. When the effect wears off, you still have the + 1 from talking to the trainer. You can also use this trick to get training all the way up to Master without having to find the master trainers. Oblivion partly averts this by only allowing you to train 5 times per level increase, among other things.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion put special limits on Alchemy to prevent this.
Although alchemy is still overpowered. Its possible to create poisons strong enough to kill the palace guards in one strike and grab the Elder Scroll, thus triggering the final thieves guild quest and thus breaking your game.
Adding to this a glitch in the spell-crafting system of Morrowind. One could create fortify skill spells that lasted forever by combining them with a Soul Trap target, and aiming at their "feet" (the lowest pitch the camera can go). Skills could conceivably be raised to the tens of thousands, although with catastrophic side effects. Having too high of a strength skill meant that weapons would break in a single hit, and too high of a speed skill meant that the character would literally fly across the map. This typically resulted in either death from flying off of a mountain far in the distance, or the game itself crashing from being unable to render the landscape quickly enough.
Daggerfall, the second Elder Scrolls game, had a particularly bad magnet for whoring during character creation. Adding Advantages or Disadvantages to a custom class would mean levelling up was harder or easier, respectively. However, disadvantages that should have been mutually exclusive were not (although you couldn't take related advantages) and some really weren't in any way disadvantageous. Forbid your class from using weapons and armour that you wouldn't use anyway, for instance. Or, to be particularly broken, take General Immunity to EVERYTHING, then stock up on the disadvantages Lower Magic in Daylight / Darkness, Inability to use magic in Daylight / Darkness (already mutually exclusive) and the inability to regenerate spellpoints. You may not be able to use magic, but you are completely immune to it and STILL level up reasonably quickly.
Spamming your melee attack in Left 4 Dead. It's highly effective since it shoves enemies away from you and it keeps off Hunters who try to pounce you. This has become a problem in VS mode since people who were playing as a Hunter had an extremely hard time pouncing survivors who kept spamming their melee attacks. A patch rectified the problem.
Fallout 3 has a particularly egregious one; build a character with 9 Intelligence, then swim down to Rivet City and get the Intelligence bobblehead. Result; 20 skill points per level. You can start maxing out skills by level 4 - when you can add the Educated perk and it's 23 per level. The Comprehension perk makes all books give two skill points instead of one - and there are over three hundred in the game. It is entirely possible to max out every skill.
If you want to "skill whore" (not that anybody would call it that, but this is the whoring page and it is about maxing your skills) it is entirely possible to get max in all skills with an intelligence of 3; wasting your early points on intelligence is a bad idea because it has limited use for anything else.
Not to mention the "almost perfect" perk added by the Broken Steel downloadable content, which raises all attributes to 9, combined with the addition from bobbleheads to max out the attributes.
The Golden Sun games have an easily manipulated Random Number God that can be exploited to get all of the best "random" drops—if you're willing to save and hard reset after just about every Random Encounter until you've got everything you want.
Medal of Honor Allied Assault suffered from three types of whores: the shotgun, rocket, and grenade kinds. All three weapons were incredibly easy to use and could kill another player in a single shot. The problem eventually got so bad that some servers implemented their own rules or mods to try and restrict or ban the use of such weapons altogether.
MOHAA also had a trick called sharking. It involved jumping on a ladder, jumping off, and crouching. You character could get jammed underneath the floor, with your body crumpled so that only a small portion of you and your gun were visible. There was also other glitches to get underneath the ground/behind walls and since the engine only registered bullet collision from the "outside", you could still shoot the attacker through the floor. The third and final whoring was people preferred the sniper rifle so much that they released many, MANY, sniper-only mods.
As for the campaign, mooks in later levels tend to randomly spam grenades like a Mad Bomber.
In games with voice commands or voice chat, there will be people who will spam it over and over again, trying to be funny or to undermine and annoy the players. People who spam voice are met with being muted, being booted from the game, or being attacked by their own team and then booted.
This is a terrible, crippling flaw in my strategy, but over my years of RTS, TBS and even FPS playing, I've discovered it usually pays to have a terrible, crippling flaw in your strategy. It lets you focus your resources on other areas to a degree that no-one seems to anticipate; they assume on some level that a portion of your funds will be reserved for such sanities as defending yourself in any way at all.
A legitimate strategy in Fight Night Round 4 is to go your entire career while only training one arm, and then just jabbing your way to victory repeatedly, never once throwing power shots.
Done whenever Achievements linked to class unlocks are released in Team Fortress 2. There are maps and servers dedicated to doing this to the point where it's disturbingly well organized. However, these maps never have separate spawns for either team, making them a griefer's paradise.
Achivements aside however, Team Fortress 2 does a very good job of subverting this trope. There are items and strategies out there that may seem like gamebreakers at first, but take skill to execute and can be countered. For instance;
The Dead Ringer is a pocket watch that allows the Spy to feign death to fool foes into a false sense of security, but can be countered by regular spy checking with the Pyro.
The Axtinguisher is an axe that will perform critical hits with a 100% success rate if the enemy is on fire. And it's wielded by the Pyro, the only class with a Flamethrower. However, getting foes to melee range can be a challenge, and if the enemy can gain enough distance, they will likely just shoot you to death as you chase after them.
A Heavy and a Medic is a simple but powerful combo, as the Heavy's minigun can easily mow down foes in the open, and the Medic can heal any wounds the Heavy takes. The Medic can even use Ubercharge to turn the Heavy invincible to damage for a certain duration. However, a well placed Sticky bomb by the Demoman, or a well aimed Compression Blast by the Pyro can separate the Medic from his charge, leaving both of them vulnerable.
Prince of Persia: Sands of Time has a ridiculously easy to perform move where the Prince vaults over an enemy and slashes them twice, instantly knocking them to the ground. A variant allows the Prince to finish with a dagger stab instead, earning an instant kill. With the exception of about three enemies, the first version will work on pretty much anything. The second a few more enemies will block. Using just these two moves, a player can run through pretty much the entire game with almost no effort. Even on the enemies that can block it, a similar trick that involves bouncing off the wall can be performed. It's a lot harder to time, but works just as well. They nerfed it in the subsequent games.
Funnily enough, this can backfire. As the first enemies have no defence at all against the vaulting attack and you're invulnerable while doing it, a first-time player may tend to rely on it and not train using the other attacks. He'll then be in for a rude awakening upon first meeting the blue guards which answer every vault with an instant knock-down.
The combat system is tricky enough that it's easier to try and do the more tricky wall jump method with an 33% success rate than anything else.
Gundam Vs has 2 things used by Scrubs or some inexperienced players, Insurance and Lai Da. Insurance is when a pilot in a losing battle is supported by a friend who enters before his friend dies as when a new challenger enters, the game won't be counted except in Gundam Vs Gundam where if you can kill your foe before his friend comes in. The guy is going to walk into a fresh slate game without his friend. Then there is Lai Da, where one fires at his foe in retreat in an attempt to get away from them. Hoping at least one attack hits. This was really annoying for melee players especially Epyon which have little to no way to close the gap.
As vocalized by this Penny Arcade strip, Modern Warfare 2 has developed two rather egregious examples. The first is the "Witchblade"; a character using a pistol with the Tactical Knife attachment (increases knife speed and reduces cooldown), the Marathon perk (infinite sprint), the Lightweight perk (increased walk/run speed) and the Commando perk (increased range for melee attack). These all combine together to make a character that can endlessly run around the map far faster than anyone else and kill anyone within a 10-foot radius. The second is the "Double Shotgun Dude"; a character using two of the best, and arguably broken, shotguns in the game. Perks be damned, this is a shotgun with better range, damage and accuracy than any of the other shotguns without sacrificing clip size or reload speed. Having two of them ensures that the player can even get quick kills at a distance beyond the normal range for shotguns; as long as the target is close enough to take any significant damage, both shotguns can be used in tandem to kill within moments. While neither load out is completely gamebreaking (since spotting and firing at the offending player from a significant distance is enough to take them out), good luck trying to beat them in maps with a lot of close quarters.
On larger maps, it's normally preferable to use One Man Army with a grenade launcher, and to a lesser extent a grenade launcher and rocket launcher combined with Scavenger. OMA can be used to switch to any class, including the player's current class, refilling all their ammunition in the process. Scavenger allows for a player to grab ammunition off of fallen players, which just so happens to replenish grenade and rocket launchers as well. Not quite as bad as OMA, as you at least need to move around to scavenge, but it comes close. Of course, there's a very good reason why grenade launchers carry 2 shots and can't normally be reloaded.
In the original Modern Warfare, the favourite whoring setup was 3x frag, sonic boom and martyrdom. The goal was to throw all 3 grenades in the general direction of the enemy team as soon as possible after spawning, usually guaranteeing several kills on the smaller maps.
The Nippon Ichi tactical RPG game Phantom Brave introduced attacks based on attributes other than Strength and Intelligence. While the Defense and Resistance based attacks you could get from some items and classes weren't bad, the game also gave you attacks based on Speed — which also determined how many times per round you could act. A character who picked up a high-level mine trolley could clear the entire board of enemies before a single one could act.
The game also had a cheap and easy method of power-leveling using "Failure Dungeons" that made it possible to clear the game in only 4 hours, about 1/10th the time the game was meant to be played in.
Nippon Ichi games are pretty much designed to encourage players to find ways to exploit the rules
In the Hearts of Iron community, the term "IC Whoring" refers to focusing your nation's entire economy on expanding your industrial capacity (which in turn is necessary to create armies). With the game starting in 1936, you have plenty of time to do this until WW 2. Especially as nations that start strong (USA, USSR), IC Whoring leaves you able to create armies larger than every other army in the world. The exploit may leave you so powerful you can take over the entire planet without any worries.
This can actually be done in some Tabletop RP Gs - specifically those with systems for purchasing skill levels for points. In GURPS magical and fantasy games, this is sometimes called "Johnny One-Spell" - a character that buys only one spell (usually an offensive one like Lightning Bolt) but uses the number of points a normal wizard would use for an entire grimoire. The superhero equivalent is sometimes called a "biological artillery piece".
In early versions of Arx Fatalis, the fireball spell, obtained about five minutes in, scaled it's damage to your level and killed everything in two hits at most. However, whoring it too much led to a nasty subversion when the Final Boss turned out to be immune.
Contender, a boxing game for the PlayStation, had boxers that fell easily to mashing the O button for the more damaging head punches. Characters that hit fast and hard enough will find they can easily jump all the way up to champion as each of your opponents throw themselves against your fist repeatedly. In fact, you're safer mashing O than moving which leaves you open to enemy strikes. It's better to just change the channel during the fight and watch something else while hitting O repeatedly so you aren't scared/tempted into doing something stupid, like blocking.
In Dissidia: Final Fantasy you have EX Mode, available when your EX Gauge is full. You fill it by collecting EX Force that gets scattered around by attacks. The deal with EX Mode is that not only does it give you some potentially cool bonuses and health regeneration, you can activate it to break out of an attack, staggering the enemy in the process if it's a melee attack (which it often is). Now, the real stinger is that by executing an HP attack while in EX Mode, you can trigger an EX Burst which is basically free HP damage. Combined with an ability that made every BRV hit in EX Mode a Critical Hit (5x damage, ignores defence) you can do a lot of harm, so attacking an opponent who has a full EX Gauge isn't really something you want to do. Now the really disturbing part is that it's possible to make a build around it, by equipping the All Glories Must Fade equipment set (start with a full EX Gauge but halve EX Mode duration). With the right accessory build, it's possible to start the battle, wait to be attacked, counter with an EX Burst, scoop up the resulting EX Force and have a full EX Gauge again.
In the sequel Dissidia012 the EX Block feature was replaced by EX Revenge: you still break loose but instead of entering EX Mode, the enemy is slowed down and incapacitated, leaving you free to harass them as best as you can. Mighty Glacier Garland is able to exploit this in a unique fashion due to his extremely close, extremely swift, extremely high damage attack that sent the opponent flying straight down. This game also has abilities that add critical hits during EX Revenge, and despite the strength of criticals being severely toned down, they still make this strategy incredibly effective.
The Game Boy Advance version of River City Ransom has a bunch of unbeatable techniques and weapons that the player can use, but overusing them causes the game to increase the "Foul Play" stat and lower the character's Karma Meter. Challenging the same boss over and over is also bad.
Nearly any eastern RPG game has a huge variety of spells and abilities, but once the party reaches high levels, players generally find it faster to finish battles by spamming the Attack command instead of using anything else.
