Not The Intended Use / Video Games

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• Parodied in 3D Dot Game Heroes' Spelunker mode. Dashing into a wall results in a fake death... and deliberately exploitable invincibility frames.
• Advance Wars:
  • In the first game the enemy will always attack an APC first with absolutely no exceptions. They will march past the infantry halfway through capturing their HQ (instant loss if it succeeds) to blow away the APC who dropped him off. This makes them more useful for luring the enemy into traps or away from valuable units than their intended purpose of transporting infantry or resupplying units. Later games corrected this, but it's still a valid tactic since the APC remains high on the AI's attack priority.
  • Lash's Super Power Prime Tactics doubles the effects of terrain. She's supposed to use this for both offensive pushes (as her troops gain firepower for each terrain star they have) and defense, but if she starts capturing the enemy HQ and activates it, her capturing Infantry will gain Nigh-Invulnerability with 8 defense stars, practically guaranteeing her the win. This makes Lash almost as good at HQ capture victories as Sami, a commander entirely based around that playstyle.
  • Kanbei has a similar tactic as his Super Power Samurai Spirit boots attack and defense to a whopping 160%. Normally this is used for outright devastating offences, but a Kanbei unit on an HQ will have such an outright absurd defense they are essentially invincible. A Megatank won't be able to injure one of his infantry on an HQ, so if you skank onto their HQ, begin the capture, and pop Samurai Spirit, you have won. Period.
  • Thanks to the way Max's powers work, he is actually the best CO at naval combat, and even better than the resident naval expert Drake. His outright obscene power boosts, even after being nerfed in Black Hole Rising, gives him the ability to pull stunts like two-hit KO a cruiser using a battleship and a sub, One-Hit KO enemy subs with cruisers, and even with -10% attack and -1 range his battleships are even more lethal than most commanders since he can far more effectively protect them from enemy fire. All of this in spite of how Max actually laments that he is bad at naval combat if you choose him instead of Andy in Olaf's Sea Strike.
  • Fighters are seen as a very situational unit, as they can only target air units and are very expensive. However, they have a gigantic movement range of 9 with zero movement penalties, a massive supply of fuel, and can only be targeted by a very small minority of units. This makes them useful for blocking enemy units as they can be used to stop enemy units dead in their tracks at bridges and chokepoints, making them invest in expensive units of their own to counter it or contend with being picked off by indirect units. A great use for these things is to plop them down on enemy bases, airports, and ports which will prevent them from using said property until they manage to take this thing down: 20,000 money is a high investment, but well worth it even it only means preventing your opponent from deploying units for a couple of turns.
  • One of the best uses of the carrier on pre-deployed maps? Let it get sacked by the enemy. Not only will it keep an enemy battleship or submarine busy for a couple turns, letting your other units slip by unbothered, but when it's sunk you get a ludicrous amount of charge for your CO Power: often enough to activate it next turn.
• Age of Empires II
  • Siege Towers can garrison a number of units inside them, drive up to the enemy's walls and unload the troops straight onto the other side as a bypass. You can also, however, do this to your own walls as well, so if your city is under siege you can get troops out without risking opening the gates. Siege Towers also become faster the more troops you have garrisoned inside them, so they can be used as a quick way to get slow units to the battle even if there are no walls to pass.
  • Certain civilisations have a range bonus on the arrows fired by a Town Centre containing garrisoned villagers. This means you can delete your starting Town Centre, build a new one near your enemy's Town Centre and plink arrows at them with your extended range while they sit there helplessly.
    • Relatedly, the Persians have a double HP bonus for the town center, which is meant to ease the economy, minimize the necessity of rushing and make repairs highly cost-effective. However, there is a strategy called the "Persian Douche", which involves a Dark Age boom before deleting the town center and building a new one precisely in range of the enemy's. A properly executed douche can be disruptive to the enemy's economy.
• AI Dungeon 2:
  • There are multiple options for the player to use to help keep the AI in AI Dungeon 2 on track; however, some players deliberately use said features to better control the story. An example is the remember command. Its main use is to help the AI remember a detail it may have forgotten. Players, however, tend to use it as a form of Character Customization.
  • AI Dungeon 2 originally run on a text-generating neural network called GPT-2, created by the company OpenAI. In 2020, OpenAI created GPT-3, a much more advanced version, with only a limited number of people given access to the GPT-3 API. However, GPT-3 was quickly implemented into AI Dungeon 2... which meant that people could use the game as a backdoor to play around with GPT-3 directly in ways unrelated to gaming^note Although non-paying players were limited to a crippled version of GPT-3, especially by abusing the "custom prompt" option to simply send any arbitrary input. In an attempt to avert this somewhat, the developer of AI Dungeon 2 changed things so that entering a custom prompt will initially return a response from the less-advanced GPT-2 model.
• Alien: Isolation:
  • The flamethrower, in addition to by and large averting Video Game Flame Throwers Suck, makes for a handy replacement for the flashlight. While it's not as bright, the fire at the tip of the weapon's muzzle sufficiently illuminates dark areas, doesn't run on batteries, and won't attract attention from enemies.
  • To a lesser extent, the same goes for some other throwable items like the Molotov and Flashbang: the latter comes with an LED that is bright enough to illuminate small spaces while the former has a lit fuze that can be exploited to the same effect.
• Arknights:
  • There is nothing about operator Mountain that would indicate that his purpose is to be quickly deployed, then retreated or holding off early pressure and standing until the end. Yet, it isn't at all uncommon to see him being used as a Vanguard in cases where DP generation is already being taken care off by Flagbearer Vanguards who are rendered a sitting duck when they do so. His low cost of 11 DP (as little as Starter Mon Fang and among his fellow 6-stars, only Phantom who's an actual Fast-Redeploy operator, has a lower DP cost) and low windup time of his second skill made this possible.
  • The Percussive Maintenance-powered turret guns that Stainless can build with his third skill have far more utility than just being able to shoot at enemies, as there are plenty of operators who benefit from having a target for them to attack while there are no enemies nearby. To name a few examples, anyone using an offensive recovery skill can charge it by hitting a turret, Musha and Reaper Guards can use them as a source of free healing thanks to their Life Drain, and both Splash and Chain Casters can attack them in order to hit enemies standing just outside of their attack range.
• Exploiting the physics engine in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts to fly. To do this, find one vehicle parts crate ^note (or anything flat and grabbable, really, but the parts crates are ubiquitous), 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.
• Battlefield series
  • Battlefield 1942 gives us the Jihaddi Jeep (or Kamikaze Jeep) tactic, where one covers their Jeep with tons of C4 and then drives into the enemy, jumping out at the last minute and detonating the C4s via remote just as the jeep makes contact. To reiterate, the purpose of Jeeps is to help stranded teammates get back into the fight. It’s so unfair a tactic that using it gets one immediately branded a troll and probably kicked from the multiplayer game session.
  • In Battlefield 2, it's possible (though often impractically difficult) for a team's Commander to crush enemy soldier with supply crates. When a patch added airdropped cars intended for getting stranded teammates back into the fight, it didn't take long for Commanders to instead use the cars as "cartillery" to much more easily crush soldiers — or worse, dropping them on enemy planes or runways to make the planes crash. An Obvious Rule Patch made airdropped cars impossible to place on runways and randomly deviate a few meters from the target, making cartillery all but impossible.
• 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.
• Below the Root is an old example of a perfectly good loophole. Certain hostile Non Player Characters wander the map, and if your character runs into them, they'll be instantly transported to a prison house of the hostile character's faction. Seeing as you lose no time by being captured, it's fairly easy to escape the prison houses if you have the right tool (the Nekom house actually contains the best tool to escape, so if you have the key or have learned telekinesis, it's yours for the taking), and the houses themselves are not that far from important locations in the game, the kidnapping mechanic can easily be turned into rapid transit.
• The Binding of Isaac has Chocolate Milk, an item that reduces your attack power to 10% but allows you to charge up tears to increase their attack power by as much as 400%. Due to an oversight however, you can now fire tears as fast as you can tap the fire button. They're very weak, yes, but you can so effectively pin down enemies with the knockback of these weak tears that you can hold entire crowds of foes at a distance and just drain their health. It's a particularly useful tactic against Ultra Greed, as he uses the Damage Scaling mechanic that reduces the effectiveness of fully-charged tears, but rapid-firing tears will make quick work of the coins he summons and do just as much, if not more damage over time than fully-charging it.
• Though the whole point of Besiege is to make whatever ludicrous devices and machinations you want and that anything goes as long as you complete the objective, people have still managed to find ways to use parts in ways the devs didn't intend:
  • A well-publicized and Game Breakery tactic is the reverse cannon. By putting a cannon that isn't attached to your machine and aimed in the opposite direction of the target, you can hurl the cannon itself at the target. By strapping a bomb or two to the cannon and getting the angle right you can throw bombs at targets from very far away and well outside of their range, but even just the cannon itself will do surprising amounts of damage.
  • Similarly, is the shrapnel cannon, which is effectively an oversized shotgun, but due to a programming quirk doesn't actually shoot projectiles but a sudden and very abrupt burst of momentous force. Since bombs can only be detonated by fire or physical contact, a shrapnel cannon placed behind a bomb will fire the bomb with more range than any other projectile in the game. Since this combo is so small, it's easily possible to construct a turret on a tank with as many as six bombs and cannons.
  • Ballasts are intended for use in balancing flying machines, and yes they work fine for that purpose. Once you discover that ballasts have variable weight, don't break, burn, or freeze, and otherwise have the exact same properties as wooden blocks, you'll never use wooden blocks again and will build everything out of ballasts.
  • Because of their low friction, half-pipes and plows are more useful as skis on hovercrafts than for their intended purpose. In fact, barring the use of glitches or non-vanilla mods, using steam cannons for propulsion and plows as skis will make the fastest land vehicle possible.
• BioShock series
  • The Wrench Lurker line of Gene Tonics in BioShock grant a large damage boost to the Wrench when attacking an enemy who is unaware of your presence. It's obviously intended for stealthy players who like to sneak around and Back Stab the enemy from behind. However, someone eventually figured out that stunning an enemy with Electro Bolt or Insect Swarm puts them in the "unaware" state for the duration of the stun, rendering stealth obsolete as you can simply stun an enemy, walk right up to them, and smack them in the face while still getting the damage boost for being "stealthy".
  • Bioshock Infinite has the In-Universe example of the Skylines: originally they were solely used to carry freight from place to place until kids got the idea of making hooks and dangling from them to get around. It caught on to the point where eventually "skyhooks" were manufactured to allow people to get on them more conveniently and these even became standard issue in Columbia's police and military. Booker doubles down on this trope by using one as his primary melee weapon.
• In Borderlands, Brick's Berserker Rage ability was supposed to be a close-up damage enhancer that had health regeneration to keep you alive. In practice, it's used mainly as a way to restore health between battles (with the right upgrades, Athena's shield can do the same thing). To discourage this for fellow berserker Krieg in Borderlands 2, the devs carefully wrote his entire Skill tree to avoid anything ever encouraging him to stall, hide or otherwise do something other than running around hurting people (for example, his Buzz Axe Rampage restores health, like Berserker Rage - but only when he kills people, not when it's activated).
• In Castlevania: Harmony of Despair:
  • The Yorick soul is meant to be a weak projectile that can be hit into enemies; however, most players use the Yorick soul to act as a double-jump of sorts, by launching the projectile upwards and then jump-kicking off the projectile (considering that this was how most players ended up using the Yorick soul in Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, it's probably an Ascended Glitch). The Puppeteer soul is also often used to trigger glitches that can send Soma (the only character who can use the Souls) great distances quickly.
  • Besides online multiplayer, the PS3 version of the game also features local multiplayer, which in addition to its intended use is also played solo (on a large enough HD screen so you can still see the stage while at max distance zoom) in order to more quickly farm chest contents.
• City of Heroes:
  • Ouroboros is 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. The portal itself could be created in mission areas, allowing characters a quick exit in missions that otherwise would require them to manually exit.
  • The invention system allowed players to turn their characters into Game Breakers, albeit taking considerable amounts of money or luck to get them there. One particularly effective path involved boosting your recharge to insane levels on a melee character with click-based defensive powers such as Regeneration, allowing them to spam high level offensive and defensive abilities that would normally take considerable time to recharge. Especially notable was Domination, the Dominator archetype's inherent power. In normal play, you would charge your Domination bar with attacks, and once full, you could activate it to enjoy certain useful bonuses, and then the bar would be emptied... unless you stacked enough recharge reduction so that Domination recharged before it expired, at which point you could use it again, since the bar was still full. End result, the bar never emptied, as long as you exploded into a colorful burst every minute and a half.
• Civilization VI:
  • Great People make surprisingly good scouts. They have very high movement and are immune to damage — if attacked, they just teleport back to your nearest city.
    • One of Indonesia's more easily-forgotten perks is that their religious units do not pay the usual movement cost to go from land to sea or vice versa. Combine this with their naturally-high movement and the Missionary Zeal belief (ignore the movement costs of hills, woods and rainforests), and Indonesian Missionaries are possibly the most efficient scouting units in the game.
  • One of Scythia's bonuses is that when they generate a light cavalry unit, they receive a free second one as well. The intended result is an overwhelming cavalry horde. Soon after release, though, people would instead buy a light cavalry unit with Gold, receive a free second one and then sell those units for Gold on the same turn. Because you'd sold two rather than just one, you generated a small profit on your initial payment. So do it again. And again. And again. An Obvious Rule Patch ensued.
  • One of Australia's bonuses is doubled production for 10 turns when they receive a declaration of war. Obviously this is intended as another contributor to their intended defensive playstyle. However, if Australia declares war on another civilization, and that civ is currently suzerain of a city-state, the city-state will declare their own war on Australia, triggering the defensive bonus even when they're by all accounts the belligerent.
  • The New Frontier DLC collection introduced Apocalypse Mode, with increased natural disaster intensity and frequency. This mode also includes Soothsayer units, which can trigger natural disasters on purpose (why build siege engines when there's a handy volcano?). Players soon discovered a synergy with an oft-neglected wonder called the Great Bath, which has two main abilities: One, it prevents an adjacent river from flooding and two, for every flood that would have happened it causes tiles along that river to yield +1 Faith, stacking. Combine this with a unit that can deliberately trigger floods whenever you want, and the tiles along the Great Bath's river can yield 100+ Faith per turn, per tile.
  • One of the earlier Great Generals, Boudicca, has the unique ability to recruit adjacent barbarian units to join your army. The game helpfully highlights tiles you can activate this ability on — even in the fog of war. This means that Boudicca can essentially serve as a barbarian-detecting radar, even in areas you don't have direct map vision.
• In Command & Conquer: Generals, one of the major weaknesses of the Chinese faction is that they lack a Fragile Speedster unit. This is especially problematic against the GLA, whose Rocket Buggies can pound Chinese units from afar and speed off with nothing able to catch them except MiGs. The Zero Hour expansion pack adds the Listening Outpost, a van with two Tank Hunters in it that is stealthed while stationary and also capable of detecting enemy stealth. Ostensibly, the Listening Outpost was meant to be used as an early-warning alert system, but most China players use the Outpost as their scouting unit because it's the fastest ground vehicle available.
• Cragne Manor: The Creepy Doll you find early on is used in a small puzzle that can be solved quickly. However, some players kept it around because its dialogue mentions adjectives and interactable objects in the room, which includes things they might have overlooked at first.
• In Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped, the best way to get the box gem and win the time trials of the various motorcycle races is to not try to race. Instead, sit back for a solid minute or two and let the cars get so far ahead that you have no hope in hell of ever catching up. You don't have to win the race to get the box gem and the time trial doesn't start until you move forward and touch the clock icon, so letting these cars get ahead of you and coming in last place allows you to gather the boxes at your leisure and focus on swiftly navigating the roads without having to dodge the other cars.
• Dark Souls:
  • Dark Souls: The Dung Pie is a throwing item that inflicts Toxic on the enemy, but also on the thrower. However, the Toxic inflicted by Dung Pies is much less damaging than the Toxic inflicted by the Blowdart Snipers of Blighttown. Players venturing down into Blighttown have been known to inoculate themselves from the Blowdart Snipers by deliberately giving themselves Toxic from Dung Pies. This would eventually get a nod from FromSoftware in their later game Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice in the form of Contact Medicine, an item with the express purpose of inoculating you from Poison by giving you a weaker form of it.
  • Dark Souls III: The dagger's Weapon Art is intended to provide you with better chances at a backstab by allowing quick, aggressive movement. However, since it also provides that same quick, aggressive movement in ass-deep poisonous swamp mud, many players — especially speedrunners — use it to accelerate movement through the most obnoxious parts of Farron Keep. The Art and corresponding technique were also carried over into Elden Ring (and added to extra weapons such as claws), where it's especially useful for the Lake of Rot.
• Using the gear box to downshift in Daytona USA allowed drifting around corners without sacrificing speed. Attempting to do this in Daytona USA 2 will result in a spin out, suggesting that this tactic wasn't what the developers intended.
• While this is largely the biggest selling point of the Dead Rising series, that you can use anything as a weapon, even things that have no business whatsoever being used as weapons, it's cheekily Played for Laughs in Dead Rising 2 when you make your way into "Hot Excitorama" and get your hands on a "massager". Oh Chuck you dear sweet child, that is not a massager.
• Deep Rock Galactic:
  • Supply Drops, as the name implies, are meant to deliver handy supplies (both ammunition and healing) right to your location; the fact this location is underground merely necessitates it to pack a heavy drill at the bottom to reach your location. Anything that happens to be under this drill when the Supply Drop arrives is going to get crushed, leading to a One-Hit Kill on anything that isn't a Dreadnought (and those will still visit a world of pain thanks to it); as such, with a little timing they can double as makeshift orbital strikes.
  • Enor Pearls are meant to be mineable resources, large and glowing stones to be dug out and stuck in the MULE to fuel your crafting... but they are perhaps the most luminous of all minerals, and the pearl stays together and is easily carried and thrown around, so some players decide to use it as a lantern to supplement their flares, and just pack it into the MULE right at the end of the mission.
• In Defense of the Ancients, there is no such thing as Not The Intended Use. If you can do it, then it is a feature. This includes:
  • Denying: Killing your own soldiers before the enemy can kill them so they miss out on gold and experience.
  • Pulling: Luring neutral creeps far enough out of their camp to trigger the respawn on them and create duplicates which can then easily be farmed with area effect damage.
  • Orb walking: Using attack modifiers such as burning arrows, not by toggling them on but by manually casting each individual arrow. This counts as a spell and therefore ignores Ghost Scepter and does not draw enemy aggro.
  • Using self damage spells to suicide and deny the enemy a kill and associated rewards.
  • Bypassing the backdoor protection.
  • Killing the fountain turret that normally prevents fountain camping. This is completely unnecessary during normal gameplay, but you can.
  • There is a spell that indicates the spot where a target currently is and yanks them back to that point after a short delay. Intended as an offensive spell, it is seeing use as a means of giving your teammates a quick ride to the base shop and back. There has been at least one clear exception to the above rule: Bottle Crowing (using a courier to ferry one or more Bottles between their owners and the Fountain that refills them) has been severely nerfed by imposing a speed reduction per empty bottle carried - which is a bit backwards in terms of logic. Some exploits go beyond being features...
  • Playing the normally-used as position 5 hard support Wisp as a hard carry. Thanks to how its skills synergize, the midgame power spike becomes so devastating that it was actually played in the title-clinching game in the International 2019.
• The Dragon Tooth Sword in Deus Ex is intended as a powerful melee weapon. However, its constant glow means it doubles as a weak flashlight that doesn't burn up energy to use. It also does enough damage to make it possible to break open weak doors, allowing one access to contents locked inside, without needing to use up a lockpick or explosives.
• Secret missions in the 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 intended 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 Devil May Cry 4 secret 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.
  • Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening and Devil May Cry 4 have the infamous "jump-cancelling" technique which involves pulling off air and ground combos, jumping off of the enemy (therefore resetting the combo), and repeating the technique, allowing you to keep the Style Counter and combo going without immediately dropping.
  • A trick learned early-on by many players is that shooting Ebony & Ivory while airborne will slow down Dante's descent considerably. Often this is used as an evasive technique and works very well against attacks similar to Nevan's "electrify the floor" move in the third game.
• 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.
• DJMax Technika: The game'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).
  • In the opposite direction, 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.
• DoDonPachi Saidaioujou has the Hyper recharge technique. Normally, defeating a midboss, boss phase, or certain types of enemies turns all on-screen bullets into small star items. But during a Hyper, cancelled bullets turn into large star items, which are worth 10 times the usual small ones. However, items picked up during a Hyper don't charge up your Hyper gauge. This can be exploited by triggering a bullet cancel just as your Hyper times out, spawning a screenful of large items which do charge up your next Hyper because your previous one ended before you actually pick them up. Since this is much easier said than done (you only have a brief window to pick up a spawned star item before it falls off the screen), it became a high-level technique and turned into an Ascended Glitch: The Xbox 360 port actually includes a demonstration video teaching you how to do it, and in Ver 1.5, a Level 6 or higher Hyper turns all star items spawned into large ones plus higher levels above 6 increase the number of large star items spawned, making this exploit possible in more places than before.
• Skilled Doom and Doom II players use Strafe Running and Wall Strafe Running. The former allows for a 44% increase in speed when running diagonally, the latter allows for an over 300% boost if done just right along a wall.
• 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.
• In Dragon Quest IX, Sterling's whistle is used to summon the Global Airship. However, as your main character is technically the only one supposed to be onboard, using it will revive them at 1 HP if they're dead.
• Dwarf Fortress:
  • Anything trapped under a falling drawbridge is removed from existence. Forget the obvious utility in fortress defense — 'atom smashers' are best used to delete the tons of waste rock that excavating your fortress produces.
  • The "intended use" of vampires is to kill them before they drain your fortress dry. However, since they still count as members of the fort and can't die of starvation, thirst, or age, a common strategy is to wall them up somewhere to ensure you can't ever get a Game Over. At least, as long as you provide Due to the Dead so no murderous ghosts show up to get them.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Morrowind
    • The Alchemy system. The intended use is to craft potions that would improve your skills in combat and dialogue. However, it was discovered that by making and drinking an Intelligence potion, you can make better Intelligence potions which you can then drink. After a few iterations, you can easily make incredible Game-Breaker potions that increase all of your attributes to insane levels and allow you to regenerate thousands of health per second for many real world hours.
    • Creating a custom Levitate "on other" spell. The AI for characters and creatures isn't programmed to handle levitation, so it leaves them completely motionless and vulnerable to attack for the duration (like a high-level Burden spell). Works especially well on flying creatures, as it causes them to fall to the ground and take fall damage in addition.
    • One of the less common spell effects is the "Drain Skill" effect, which reduces one of the target's skills by a certain amount for a specific amount of time. The best target for this skill is of course yourself. You see, skill trainers increase a selected skill by one point for a certain amount of money dependant on the level of the skill. This ignores whether the skill has been magically reduced. As such, you can create a (for example) Drain Alchemy 100 pts. for 1 sec on self spell, cast it, get dirt-cheap Alchemy training since it registers your Alchemy skill as level 0, and at the end you'll have more levels in Alchemy than you started with. Rinse and repeat until all your skills are at the cap.
  • Skyrim
    • The game tries to fix the positive feedback loop of making potions that made you better at making potions from previous games by making you unable to make potions that boost Alchemy or enchant gear with effects that boost Enchanting. However, you can enchant gear with effects that boost Alchemy and make potions that boost Restoration magic, which the passive buffs from enchanted gear are classified as. If you enchant a full set of Alchemy-boosting gear, equip it, make a Restoration-boosting potion, drink it, then unequip and re-equip your gear, the Alchemy-boosting effect will be stronger, allowing you to make a stronger Restoration-boosting potion. Repeat as many times as desired, or at least until the game crashes due to the numbers on your created potions getting too big for it to handle.
    • Necromage is a perk in the Restoration tree that increases the effects of all spells on the undead. Situational, but not too bad on its face, given that a great fraction of the toughest enemies in the game are the various draugr lords, dragon priests and vampires. However, it turns out that the word "spells" can actually encompass a wide variety of effects, including Shouts, potions, gear enchantments, some perks, standing stones... And since there Ain't No Rule saying that only Non Player Characters are affected by the perk, a vampire Dovahkiin (technically undead) can merrily proceed to abuse the perk to become godlike.
• Elite Dangerous features ships with a wide variety of options and functions. Some ships are general-purpose ships with basic competence in most areas, while others are substantially more specialized. The Saud Kruger ships in particular are meant to be civilian luxury cruise ships, and pilots of such things become bus drivers to the rich and idle. However, nothing keeps a particularly crazy pilot from buying one of these cruise ships and turning it into a Pirate Orca.
• 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 limited quantity of food in the prehistoric epoch and the fact that prophets start off already at full power in the prehistoric epoch, versus other units that start off weak. With the High hit points of the towers, low hit points of Club Men and Rock Throwers, and the Prophets spreading Plague and Malaria, any invading army will be dead within seconds of invading, having done very little damage.
  • Using the Temple of Zeus to create "Death Knights". Basically, said temple would slowly heal your units, at the same rate that Plague drained your health. Cue players who noticed this exploiting it to make unstoppable Plague Armies of death, with their infected troops surviving due to the temple but rapidly bringing ruin to any enemies they encountered. It even became a Meta Game at one point where opponents would find ways to turn this against them the moment they see the Temple of Zeus being built.^note One way was to build your own ToZ, then build temples near areas you expect to meet the enemy to stop your units from getting the Plague.
  • Hades Cybers in the Nano Age Epoch. They can teleport to the battle front, and time warp a chunk of the opponent's army a few moments into the future to allow them to be fought in two smaller groups instead of one bigger group......Or they can instead teleport straight into the opponent's base, and time warp resource gathering citizens to cripple the opponent's economy, so that after a fight or two, they can't so easily rebuild. This one is particularly nasty because it exploits two design oversights, the first is that Time Warp does not alert the opponent like most attacks do, they literally have to catch you in the act. The second? Time Warp unassigns any task a unit was performing, which isn't a big deal on military units engaged in combat^note they'll quickly find themselves re-engaged, but is outright crippling if done to citizens gathering needed materials. Even a player who catches you in the act will still have to divert their military, and take time reassigning their citizens. If they don't catch you in the act? They've pretty much lost, especially if you were sneaky enough to self-destruct your unit before it gets spotted.
  • Some players, not aware of all the above, still used teleport as an easy way to spy on opponents.
• Endless Sky: Some of the larger ships have launch bays for small one-man fighter craft. However, since fighters are fragile, enterprising players noticed that instead of using them for combat, it's often more practical to strip out most of a fighter's systems and install an expanded cargo bay, then keep it permanently docked instead of launching it. This boosts overall cargo capacity with minimal extra crew costs. The Boxwing fighter (which is basically just a tiny engine strapped to a cargo container) was later introduced as an official nod to this strategy.
• A bunch of items in Factorio can be used for different purposes than they were designed:
  • Grenades are intended to be another weapon used to help clear out biter nests. Instead, many players will create stacks of grenades and throw them at every tree to clear out forests quickly.
  • Rather than building a full train system, placing disconnected cargo wagons on the rails with inserters on either end can be used to move items faster than conveyor belts over medium-length distances.
  • Cars can be put on conveyor belts, with inserters able to add and remove items from the car's inventory, allowing an incredible amount of throughput on even low-level belts.
  • Because steam never cools off and condenses into water, you can use it in some creative ways. A tanker wagon full of steam can be used to essentially ship electricity to outposts by train rather than running power lines. You can also use storage tanks full of steam to act as electricity storage, with much higher capacity than accumulators.
  • Biter nests won't rebuild anywhere that the player has placed buildings to keep them from spawning in the middle of a factory. The game will interpret any building as this, leading to "peace poles", a single electrical pole placed in a cleared nest to prevent it from rebuilding.
• In Fall from Heaven, civilizations that follow the Ashen Veil get access to Plague Zombies, which counterbalance an incredibly good base-stats-to-cost ratio with starting with the Diseased promotion, which cuts their stats down to the level they ought to be at. Since the Diseased promotion gets passed to any living unit that kills them, the idea is that they spread disease to your enemies. Only "Cure Disease" is an easy-to-get and spammable spell that works on them. Most Ashen Veil players that use them, just use them as mooks.
• Fallout and Fallout 2 have the Super Stimpak exploit. Essentially, the Super Stimpak is an extremely powerful healing item, but one with a downside: after about two minutes, you get hit by a "come-down" effect, which docks some of your health. Obviously meant as an alternative to the standard stimpak, which heals for less but doesn't do damage and isn't as heavy, but shrewd players realized that the mechanics of healing items include that NPCs will always accept you using one on them, and will never consider it some kind of offensive measure the way that attacking or stealing is. Moreover, you could also inject someone with about fifteen Super Stimpaks, causing all the healing to come at once, and then all the damage to come at once, which will kill them. And finally, to the game, somebody dying of a Super Stimpak overdose is more or less just an accident or a suicide, and therefore doesn't disturb other NPCs in the way that the player killing an NPC personally would. This means that instead of a healing item, many players regard Super Stimpaks as the best assassination tool in the game; just forcefeed a non-hostile NPC a massive pile of drugs, and then watch them die from withdrawal as every other NPC looks on and ponders why their boss is taking damage for no reason.
• Fate Series:
  • Fate/stay night, the first game in the series, is about seven magi summoning ancient heroes to fight each other for the Holy Grail. Most other entries are variants on this theme. Fate/Grand Order reveals that the entire Servant system was actually designed to fight the impossibly powerful Beasts as a team. This is also why the classes seem so unbalanced; it's using a Player Versus Environment system as a Player Versus Player system, so the classes that were designed for direct combat have an advantage when fighting the classes that were supposed to stay in the back and support them.
  • Fate/Grand Order has Osakabehime, who was designed with the intention of being a supportive character: her Noble Phantasm buffs max HP and Defense along with Quick-based attacks, while Chiyogami Manipulation helps an ally charge. However, she didn't really work as a support due to the fact that charging up her NP took too long, her charge skill wasn't as good as various other charge skills, and most support characters have their buffs stuck on skills instead of their NP, meaning they can use them on demand. Instead, players realized that if Osaka did all the attacking, then she could reliably charge her NP and stack its Defense buffs and heals on herself (as well as her natural Defense buff from Morph), making her exceptionally hard to kill and allowing her to stall opponents out. Consequently, she ended up being used by some players as a solo character, which is the exact opposite of her intended purpose (but does, funnily, fit her personality).
• Fat Princess had the Warrior class that could put up his shield to block melee attacks and arrows in front of him. Before being patched the Warrior could have put up his shield while carrying a princess, moving faster than intended and having the benefits of having a shield up at the same time.
• Fear & Hunger has the skill Leg Sweep, which instantly destroys the legs of any enemy it's used on. It's obviously intended for combat, but most players prefer to use it as a lockpicking tool thanks to a quirk in the game's programming that causes it to also break down doors in one hit. This allows for some useful Sequence Breaking opportunities, such as using the stairway connecting the Prisons and Catacombs as a shortcut to Le'garde's cell, or collecting the Miasma without having to loot the key from the Crow Mauler's body.
• Final Fantasy:
  • The Reflect spell is generally supposed to be used to block enemy magic, at the cost of your own healing and beneficial spells being bounced to the enemy. In many games in the series it can be used to multiply your spellcasting damage by putting Reflect on your party and hitting them all with a multi-target spell, bouncing multiple hits onto the enemy. And since in most games a reflected spell can't be reflected again, using Reflect in this way is a good way to bypass enemy Reflect spells too. Some bosses even use this tactic against you in later games.
  • Using the Swap spell to turn you into a statistical Physical God in Final Fantasy II. It swaps your HP and MP with the target, so its intended use is likely for emergency HP/MP refill purposes. However, the game usually levels up HP and MP if you end a fight with barely any left, so you can use Swap to switch with a level 1 goblin and basically always get a level out of it. Similarly, attacking your own characters to get an HP gain and level up weapons and spells. Akitoshi Kawazu mentioned that doing that never occurred to him when he designed the game, and the ability to strike the other PCs was only added so that you could wake them up if they got hit with a sleep spell.
  • In the DS remake of Final Fantasy IV, the Adrenaline augment doubles the damage a character inflicts when they're 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 probably isn't going to survive an attack at full HP anyway.
  • The Excalipoor in Final Fantasy V is a Joke Item that has high stats on paper, but only actually deals 1 damage per hit. Throwing it or using the blue spell Goblin Punch with Excalipoor equipped will draw from its stats and deal high damage. It also has perfect accuracy and ignores evasion, making it useful against Skull Eaters or with certain Spellblade abilities.
  • Final Fantasy VI:
    • Vanish makes the target evade all physical attacks while guaranteeing that magic will hit. Due to a glitch, bosses which are normally immune to instant kill attacks become vulnerable to them when under the effect of Vanish, making it possible to bypass most bosses easily. Steps were taken to fix this in the PlayStation remake, but it wasn't truly fixed until Final Fantasy VI Advance.
    • The spell Rippler trades status boosts/ailments with another target. Its intended use is to steal buffs from enemies and give ailments to them, but because of the way certain other abilities are coded, it can also be used to give a character the Magitek menu option, make Shadow's dog Interceptor protect another ally, or make any character use Gau's Rage or Mog's Dance techniques. Unfortunately, this also means an enemy capable of casting Rippler can inadvertently take these from you, causing Interceptor to disappear from the game forever.
  • The Death Sentence enemy skill in Final Fantasy VII is almost entirely useless when used on enemies, due to the ridiculously long timer before the instant-death actually takes effect. The optimal use for the spell is to give Tifa either the Powersoul or the Master Fist - weapons which drastically power up when the user is "near death" - and cast it on your own ally, making her strong enough to OHKO enemies with a single physical attack.
  • Any limit break in Final Fantasy VIII can 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 by using 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 continue to scroll through her normally random skills until you get one you want. Considering "The End" even works on bosses, including the final and the bonus boss, it makes the entire game pointlessly easy.
  • Final Fantasy X features an intended, in-universe example. Tidus and Wakka have Blitzball skills that involve kicking and punching sports balls hard enough to move a long distance through water. As it turns out, this translates to doing considerable damage on impact when it's moving through the air (and in Wakka's case, even on airborne enemies hundreds of feet away). Oddly enough, Tidus' Jecht Shot, which involves punching and kicking the ball into several defenders before going for the goal, isn't used as a combat move in FFX (though he does use it as an HP Attack in Dissidia Final Fantasy).
  • The Ninja class in Final Fantasy XI was originally supposed to be a Stealth Expert Strategist attacking from the shadows. This is most evident in the effects of its signature armor, which actually lowers enemy focus on the ninja. However, using the Utsusemi special causes the ninja to gain shadows that absorb enemy attacks. Coupled with its superb evasion, the ninja is actually considered one of the best tanks in the game, for a while better than the heavily-armored Paladin because they took far less damage. Additionally, equipping Ninja as a subjob also allows you to dodge attacks, to the point where Square-Enix has been forced to design encounters under the assumption that everyone has Ninja as a subjob.
  • The Measure weapons in Final Fantasy XII are absurdly weak weapon types that randomly confer a positive status on hit. The intended use of measures was, one presumes, to be a tool for casters to buff the party without expending MP. The thing they're more useful for? Getting rid of Confusion. A confused character will physically attack their allies and themselves until they are either cured or physically struck; since the item that cures confusion is slow enough that the confused character will still get off an attack or two against their allies or themselves, it's better to just save money and equip confused characters with measures so they can't meaningfully damage the party — very important at high levels — and even buff them, then take it off when they're back to normal.
  • One of the default abilities of the Commando role in Final Fantasy XIII is Blitz, which is meant for Area of Effect physical damage. The thing is, every character has a unique Blitz, and while most take the form of a Spin Attack, Sazh instead unloads in a sweeping arc with his dual pistols. The intended effect is a multi-target spread shot in a frontal arc, but against an enemy large or close enough to get hit by all the shots, it's one of the best sources of single-target damage in the game. This makes the intended Jack of All Stats Sazh the best Commando in the game by far.
  • Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time has jump mechanics. It's possible, with some care, to position your party members and stack them on top of each other to solve climbing puzzles, rather than pushing and shoving crates.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics examples:
    • The Throw Stone/Dash ability in Final Fantasy Tactics lets you build up Job Points. Otherwise, it's just useless damage at long range; this also happens 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/Dash 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 or outright murder enemies by knocking them off, say, a cliff.
    • 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, since hitting a confused character will cure the status ailment. However, in the Self Imposed Challenges allowing only one character (out of the usual five), this can be a fatal flaw. A single character has no allies to accidentally attack, and if they have enough health, they will never be attacked in retaliation. And most of the hardest bosses in the game can cause confusion.
    • The AI will also never attack a character that has Death Sentence (a status that kills the victim in three turns). There is equipment that block instant kill abilities without negating the above status. So wear the equipment, get the status, and laugh as the AI proceeds to ignore you and die for their Artificial Stupidity.
  • Final Fantasy XIV :
    • There is a certain boss in A Realm Reborn whose normal mechanics can be avoided entirely by using a strategy the playerbase has come to call "Enrage." When the head of the development team found out about it, he stated that the boss was never meant to be killed in that manner, but that he admired the players' ingenuity. Thus, he decided not to do anything about it. When a patch unexpectedly made Enrage harder to use, the devs promptly released a hotfix that allowed it to work again. The strategy works like this: the boss has an intricate series of high damage attacks, but at a certain point it will stop using them to spam an area of effect explosion. This was meant to destroy parties, but instead people found that you can just bring extra healers for the tank and let the DPs sit back and whittle the boss to death, because it won't attack them.
    • A multi-part FATE in Northern Thanalan known as Dark Devices begins with the objective being to kill a small group of Cultist Lambs after pushing through masses of infinitely respawning enemies. Players quickly discovered that the huge amount of respawning enemies in a small area is ripe for mass amounts of killing for EXP instead of actually advancing the objective. Over the fifteen-minute timer, you can earn several hundred thousand EXP.
    • The old Cleric Stance, which swapped a healer's Mind (healing power) with Intelligence (magic attack), was intended for use while advancing solo quests. However, its only cost was a 5-second cooldown, which it shared with nothing else, and healers are already encouraged to take potshots at the enemy when their party doesn't actually need healing, so enterprising players would rapidly swap Cleric Stance on and off to make sure these potshots were as damaging as possible. The devs banned it from PVP where it was a Game-Breaker, but otherwise tried to neither discourage it nor make "healer DPS" mandatory; however, the playerbase shunned healers who refused to DPS during inevitable downtime, so as of 4.0 healer spell damage is calculated from Mind all the time and Cleric Stance is a simple damage buff that only bleeding-edge players care about (before being removed completely in 5.0).
    • Two seater mounts were made for nothing more than a fun bonus for players, but people quickly found out that you can easily ferry a player anywhere on the map regardless on whether or not they unlocked the ability to fly. This led to people carrying others to aether currents to help them unlock flying faster whereas the normal method involves navigating the landscape on foot and sometimes making tricky jumps. People also use the two seater mounts to get others to vista locations for their 100% Completion. The Eternity Ring, which is gotten by marrying another player in game, teleports you to your partner and was used for the same reasons as the two seater mount, but the ring can only be used once per 30 minutes.
    • Several side quests and repeatable quests are designed in a manner that helps new players or waiting players to get into a duty without having to wait a long time for other players to join. Said quests give players rewards in forms of money or randomized loot. Nothing stops players from doing the quests unysnced (meaning they can do the duties without being restricted by item level or character level) to reap the rewards.
    • Occasionally if one looks at the market board, they see items that normally sell for a pittance go for 999,999,999 gil, the maximum amount one can set it to. Now why would any one do that? Because the item in question goes on the market board instead of taking up an inventory slot in either you or your retainer. This gives you effectively 20 item slots per retainer if you don't want to sell anything.
    • Storywise, Deconstructed in the Stormblood Raid series, Omega. The questline revolves around Omega creating creatures of incredible power in the rift between worlds, luring in creatures from Hydaelyn, and pitting them against each other to determine what is the strongest (which Omega will then fight for itself in order to better itself for a purpose that isn't important right now). The player's party is an "anomaly" in that, in spite of their relative weakness, they are able to triumph over ever-more-powerful foes; last time it encountered something able to do this, it tries to recreate the opponent and found it failing to repeat the feat time and time again. Cid, an engineer, quickly determines that Omega's ability to create matter wasn't intended to create lifeforms, and as a result, is unable to do it properly - none of his creations has a soul, which is the determining factor in the heroes' triumphs.
• Fire Emblem:
  • A case of this was the source of the largest revolution in the series's metagame: the treatment of Crutch Character units, especially the early-joining "Jagen" characters. These are characters who join overleveled and prepromoted, with bases that are somewhat below-average for that level next to trained units, and typically posses poor growth rates. The intention is that these characters are meant to baby your weaker units when they join early, or ensure that the game isn't unbeatable if the player lost too many units to permadeath when they join late. For a long time, the common wisdom in the fandom was to avoid using these characters if at all possible: after all, they steal XP from the low-level units and their max-level stats aren't that high, so why bother? However, certain players (particularly skilled speedrunner Vykan) discovered that these "crutch" units could stay usable a lot longer than they were supposed to, and some could even tackle the hardest lategame chapters and come out on top. If anything, their focus on high base stats could be seen as a boon, because it meant these characters could thrive without needing to train them. High-level Fire Emblem play invariably involves making a lot of use out of prepromoted characters, and even outside of there, the common advice in the community has shifted from "never use them" to "use them regularly, and retire them once they're at risk of dying to common enemies... which might not ever happen."
  • The Rescue staff. As the name implies, it can be used to rescue characters in trouble. The way it does this, however, is by teleporting the unit the staff was used on to a space next to the unit. You can also use this as a simple teleportation staff by moving the staff user somewhere you want the teleporter to be and then "rescue" them from that position. This can be used with the Warp staff, which is actually used for teleportation, usually by warping a staff user somewhere and then having them rescue the next person you want in that location, thus giving you two units in that position.
  • The rescue mechanic from the GBA and Tellius games allows a unit to carry another as long as its Aid is higher than their Con, at the cost of halving the carrier's Skill and Speed. The intended use was, as the name implies, to rescue units in danger. Low turn count players and speedrunners instead use it as a movement tool, allowing units to cross vast distances of the map in a very short time, by combining mounted classes' ability to move again after rescuing with the fact that a second unit can take a carried unit from their first carrier and drop them in the same turn.
  • Fire Emblem: Awakening introduced the Pair-Up mechanic, which replaces the Rescue mechanic, and allows two units to occupy one spot. The intended use is to help more mobile units ferry less mobile units, have weaker or in-danger units take refuge with a safer unit as they won't count as an active unit anymore, or to just plain get higher stat bonuses from teaming up. It can also be used to be able to move one extra space if you need to get somewhere real fast. This can be done with two units of the same mobility; have the one farther from where you need to go pair up with the one closer, have that one move, then drop the first unit off in front of them. On the next turn, have them pair up with the first unit, have the first unit move and then drop the second guy off. Since you can switch which character is in the lead before drop-off, you can also do this to help a less mobile unit travel with a more mobile unit. It's the same strategy, only you switch so the less mobile unit is in the lead and have them drop the more mobile unit off so that it's the more mobile unit carrying the less mobile unit each turn.
  • Abusing the Pair-Up mechanic can also be used to have two characters traverse most of the map in a single turn. Both units must have the Galeforce skill, which is a Game-Breaker as it is as it lets a character move again in the same turn after killing an enemy. If two units with Galeforce pair up, the character in the lead can move and kill an enemy. Once dead, Galeforce activates, letting the unit move again. But it's a paired unit, meaning there are two carriers of Galeforce, so once you move to the next enemy, you simply switch the lead character and have them kill the enemy, causing a second Galeforce to activate and thus, a third turn, letting you move even further. This is done to great effect if at least one of the characters is a flying unit, or has any of the movement enhancing skills. Fates fixes this by making Galeforce only trigger if the killing unit is not paired up with an ally, Attack or Defensive stance.
  • And, of course, these can be used in conjunction with the Rescue staff to make moving even easier, though Awakening doesn't have the Warp Staff.
  • The Blossom skill in Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn increases a character's stat growth rates at the cost of halving their experience gain. Its intended use was to help weaker characters gain stats more quickly, but speedrunners use it for the experience-halving effect, since watching the experience bar fill up wastes time.
  • Draug, the early-game armor knight in Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, is considered to have some rather odd growths for a Mighty Glacier: high Speed and Skill, low Strength and Defense. The intention seems to have been for them to combine with his high bases in the latter two skills to balance out his stats overall, but it's common in the remakes (which added reclassing) to instead move Draug into a natural Fragile Speedster class like Mercenary or Dark Mage.
  • In Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, levelling up with Bonus Exp is guaranteed to give 3 stat increases (unless you've capped all but 1 or 2 stats). This was intended to prevent you from Save Scumming for better level ups like you could in Path of Radiance, but it can also be used to raise stats a character would normally be weak in. For example, Aran is supposed to be a Mighty Glacier with high growths in HP, Strength, Skill and Defense but low Speed. By using Bonus Experience on him after he's capped his good stats, you can ensure he gains Speed on his remaining levels, turning him into a Lightning Bruiser. This works on all characters, letting everyone easily cap all their stats by the end of the game.
  • Fire Emblem: Three Houses:
    • Annette is set up to become a Mage/Warlock, due to her proficiency in Reason, high Magic stat, and low Defense. However, her proficiency in axes, combined with her Relic weapon, Crusher, being an axe (or Bolt Axe outside of Azure Moon), and not having weaknesses in lances or flying, makes her a solid pick for the Wyvern Rider and Wyvern Lord classes.
    • Ferdinand has high Strength and Speed, a wide range of proficiencies (swords, lances, axes, riding, and a budding talent in heavy armor), no skill weaknesses, and access to the rare Swift Strikes combat art, gearing him towards being an offensive unit. However, his Speed and evasion-granting personal skill, combined with his proficiencies in swords and riding, make him a solid pick for the Dancer class, of all things. ^note With Sword Proficiency Level 5, Confidence, Sword Avoid+20, an Evasion Ring, and the Jeralt's Mercenaries battalion, Ferdinand hits 80 Avoid before his own stats and terrain come into play.
• Genshin Impact:
  • Dehya's Stalwart and True ability allows her to gradually restore HP whenever it is very low. While this was obviously intended for combat, players have figured out that this also makes her ideal for exploring locations with HP-draining effects, such as Sheer Cold in Dragonspine and Balethunder in Tatarasuna (if not cleared yet) and Musoujin Gorge, hence making her nigh-unkillable. This also makes her unexpectedly compatible with the Ocean-Hued Clam artifact set, normally geared towards healers (such as Barbara and Kokomi), which boosts her self-healing and generates what's basically timed explosives, whose damage is based on the amount of healing before it explodes.
  • In-Universe: The Casket of Tomes is a device meant to find fellow players of Genius Invocation TCG who also have a casket, so you could play the game with each other. During the ''Duel: the Summoner's Summit" event, the Traveller was able to find a missing child as she was a card player and by using their own casket the Traveller could find her.
• One self-imposed challenge in Grand Theft Auto to get "special cars" involves killing an unkillable person. Fireproof, bulletproof, run-over-with-car-proof... No one succeeded until one genius found out they weren't repeatedly-landing-with-a-parachute-on-them-proof.
• Guild Wars
  • The "Charge" ability — and other similar ones — are often used to get around quicker.
  • In Guild Wars 2, skills that include long forward jumps or teleports can be used to circumvent the more frustrating parts of jumping puzzles provided a character has enough resources to pull it off.
• 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. It is also possible to use Snarks (tiny throwable bugs that chase creatures) as ladders. The same could also be done with Laser Tripmines, though this was patched out in the Source engine version.
  • This extends to games that use the same engine, such as Team Fortress Classic. The TFC Medic and Scout also have a concussion grenade which was intended to be thrown at enemies to mess up their aim, but instead evolved into a powerful mobility tool that the player can use to launch themselves across the map.
• 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 Hay Day, nectar bushes' flowers turn white when drained of all their nectar. They're meant to be chopped down afterwards, but some players like the look of white nectar bushes and keep them as decorations or makeshift fences.
  • When you advertise an item for sale in the newspaper, an "!" appears next to your name if you need help with filling a crate, reviving a plant, etc. Rustic bouquets are one of the most commonly sold items in the newspaper, so some people buy them from other players to use them as "!" advertisements (and/or so they don't have to sell other, more valuable things just to get other players' attention).
• The mine-laying corvette in the first Homeworld. Intended to simply defend an area of space, it becomes a devastating fleet-killer when you know the direction the enemy is coming from. A squadron of these makes the final two Nintendo Hard levels very easy, easily destroying the asteroid with an engine shot at your mothership in the second-to-last level while the fleet takes on the asteroid's escort and blunting the simultaneous attacks of enemy squadrons in the final battle.
• Jet Set Willy has 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.
• In Kerbal Space Program, due to some quirks of the physics engine, several rocket parts are frequently used for purposes other than designed. Sometimes cheats or mods amplify this.
  • The Hitchhiker storage compartment is simply meant to ferry passengers into space, but often serves as the habitation module for a space station or planetary base.
  • Plantable flags are meant to mark your landing sites on other celestial bodies, but also make a great way to mark the location of the space center, and by using a pair of them help you line up on the runway for landing spaceplanes.
  • Due to issues with the aerodynamics system, various control surfaces (flaps, elevators, elevons, etc) can be used to propel an atmospheric craft infinitely without any source of fuel. This is known as an "Infiniglider". In early versions of the game before the introduction of landing legs, winglets and fins were often used for this purpose.
  • Cargo bays were introduced in version .25. Because they have axial symmetry, they were immediately flipped over and converted to bomb bays by just about everyone.
  • The EVA packs the Kerbals wear have limited fuel, but are automatically refilled whenever a Kerbal boards a spacecraft. This doesn't draw from the craft's store of monopropellant, oxidizer, or liquid fuel, so for those with a lot of patience, it can be used as a low-thrust engine with infinite range.
• Microsoft probably did not intend for the Kinect to be used to dock satellites in space. The Kinect is more notable for its uses outside of gaming than in gaming, being used in everything from robot navigation to scanning dig sites.
• Kingdom Hearts
  • In Kingdom Hearts II, the Reflect spell is meant to be your defensive spell used to block enemy attacks and perform a shockwave magical counterattack. However, when cast is midair it will maintain your momentum from your jump, even moreso when used in a Drive Form. This abuse allows a player to spam Reflect to make difficult leaps at much lower levels than were obviously intended.
  • Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, the Sliding Dash ability is a Dash Attack and one of the most basic commands in the game, available in the first world you visit. However, when used in midair it becomes a substitute for Glide. Usage of a Sliding Dash or two allows the characters to reach out-of-reach treasure chests not intended to be reached until they revisit the world with new movement abilities. Further, many of these chests contain end game deck commands, allowing for a Disc-One Nuke by reaching them so early.
  • Storywise, Deconstructed in Kingdom Hearts III, Sora primarily uses the Power of Waking to restore the hearts of those that have been put to slumber, such as Ventus, or Roxas. However, during the climactic battle against Xehanort, Sora starts abusing the power to perform feats it was not originally intended for. After his friends are killed by a massive swarm of Heartless, Sora uses the Power of Waking to bring them back to life, but Xehanort's various incarnations and Chirithy repeatedly warn him that he's misusing the power by doing this. Young Xehanort describes it as "traversing hearts to reach worlds, not traversing worlds to reach hearts", and Chirity states it's meant to wake sleeping hearts, not restore hearts that have vanished from existence. By doing so, Sora has not only altered the flow of history, but violated a very important law of the world, and that he'll pay a steep price for doing it so many times, risking losing the power altogether, and jeopordizing his own existence. Sure enough, after he restores Kairi using this power, Sora eventually vanishes from the world, and Melody of Memory implies he was banished to a realm that exists opposite to reality, a fictional world, and cannot escape it under his own power.
• League of Legends:
  • 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 Enchanters, but 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. The item gives you a very large mana pool over time by using abilities on champions. It was originally thought of as a caster item, but then people started to use it on other characters, such as Corki and Ezreal, both high physical damage characters who nonetheless have abilities worth spamming. Riot took note of this and made the Manamune, which is an item for DPS characters that builds from Tear of the Goddess, and the Winter's Approach for tanks.
  • 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 damage 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. It went to the point that Riot decided to rework his kit to return him back to his root as a tanky melee fighter.
  • Sion, a giant undead berserker with a massive axe, was 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 guaranteed hitting 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 make this less prominent, and Sion has since been reworked as a high-health tanky fighter.
  • Pre-Rework Poppy's ultimate, Diplomatic Immunity, was essentially meant to force Poppy and her target into a one-on-one fight. That was fine; there are several other characters with similar ults. It did this by having Poppy ignore every form of damage or crowd control from anyone but her chosen target. Problem is, ''nowhere in the rules for the ability did it say Poppy actually had to fight her target''. She could target someone who was basically no threat to her, and then merrily lay in to the team's Glass Cannon without fear, since that person had no way of retaliating. Poppy, like Sion, was completely reworked, and her current ult is still good, but less game-breakingly ridiculous.
  • Evelynn was designed as a stealthy assassin midlaner. Then people realized you could compensate for her terrible, just-too-squishy early game by playing her in the jungle, where she was unlikely to be interrupted as she farmed creeps, and could easily use her invisibility to sneak up on the other jungler and kill-steal. She turned out to be an utter Game-Breaker there, and for a while was riding an unstable nerf-buff cycle that left her intermittently unplayable before her complete rework.
  • The Ability Power 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 a multi-targeting dash that makes him completely unhittable for a second, Tryndamere has a 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. Ability Power Tryndamere has been nerfed, and Ability Power Yi was done away with entirely when Riot removed his AP ratios in his rework.
  • Quinn was intended to be a bottom lane Attack Damage Carry, but she gets more play as a top lane bruiser due to her mobility and harassment, as well as her ultimate swapping her with Valor, making her a melee bruiser herself for a bit.
  • 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 the basis of 'Catcher' and 'Vanguard' champions as supports. For example, a Morgana or Lux support can use their Dark/Light Binding to root champions (leaving them easy kills), and are thus sometimes played as supports despite being designed for mid-lane.
  • Players are intended to start a match by buying some basic items. Instead, many players simply bought around thirteen healing potions and/or a flask and/or several wards. Flasks were made more expensive, and healing potions became limited to 5 at a time.
  • A build for a lane carry featuring several items intended for jungle tanks allow Ezreal to kite his enemies around thanks to the items giving him on-hit slows, DoTs on all his spells and infinite mana. Despite the core item being nerfed, Blue Ezreal is still the dominant build for the character, even in competitive play.
  • Using placeable vision wards as targets for teleport skills (Katarina, Lee Sin, the teleport spell) or to draw turret fire is a perennial fan-favorite example of emergent utility and depth for these characters. Riot Games briefly flirted with the idea of removing this, but were swiftly met with enough backlash that they settled for simply temporarily unstealthing and revealing wards when they were used for such a purpose.
  • In general, champions are often used in different roles than intended. Sometimes the developers say "eh, close enough" (Diana was intended as a roaming jungler but is often played in mid lane as something of an anti-mage), sometimes a Nerf follows (Enchanters Janna and Soraka mid, ^note often referred to as battlemage Soraka or Janna or the support Lulu as a DPS^note referred to exclusively as "Machinegun Lulu).
  • Several mage-type champions with good autoattacks end up being used as hybrid attack speed characters (Kennen, Lulu) or straight ADCs (Twisted Fate). They don't strictly deal as much damage as their intended ADC counterparts, but the utility they bring from their spells(most notably stunning) makes for a safer playstyle.
  • It used to be possible to block off an entire lane with Heimerdinger's turrets, meaning that minions built up behind it until the turrets were destroyed and a giant tidal wave of minions poured into the enemy base. This was swiftly patched.
    • Aniva's Crystallize ability generates an impassable wall of ice. In URF mode (where cooldowns are 20% their normal value), the wall cooldown is less than the time it lasts for, and so the minion tidal wave trick can be pulled off to whatever extent your patience can stand.
  • Syndra possesses an ability called Force Of Will, where she picks up a unit with her mind and can throw it at the enemy to damage and stun them. Until the Obvious Rule Patch preventing it, it was also used to simply carry important units like the buff-giving monsters Brambleback and Sentinel out of the enemy jungle so that their jungler couldn't get the XP and gold that they needed in sequence.
  • Placement of Teemo's Noxious Trap shrooms is almost as much about the vision they give you at important map locations as it is about tricking people into stepping on them.
    • Speaking of Teemo, he's intended to be a squishy ambusher, but it's fairly common to build him tanky (Tankmo), and take advantage of his Global Taunt (A memetic version of the taunt ability that acts on players- Teemo is so frustrating to play against that people will drop everything just to kill him) to draw enemies away from your teammates and onto the aforementioned noxious traps.
  • Believe it or not, Blitzcrank was supposed to be a solo top-lane bruiser. Then people realized that his Rocket Grab ability worked best when other team members were around to completely melt the poor sod he caught with it. Now he's most commonly played as a tank support.
  • The new Runes Reforged system introduced at the end of 2017 was based heavily around discovering these, to the end that one category was named Inspiration and described as 'Creative tools and rule-bending'.
  • The champion Yuumi was intended as a support Familiar who has the power to buff her allies by attaching to them, which left her untargetable but also unable to use normal attacks. Then players started using her as an ADC with Garen or some other Stone Wall as a support, focusing their items on building up the damage of Yuumi's Prowling Projectile Q. This turned Yuumi into a Glass Cannon who couldn't be hit, forcing people to try to wear down her attached tank while she sniped them with impunity. Yuumi's damage had to be nerfed into the ground to prevent the exploit.
  • The pings intended for quick team communication each have their own distinct icon. The ping that's supposed to mean "an enemy is missing" has a question mark as its icon, which is significantly more often than not used to highlight "questionable" acts, usually from one's own team. One ping's abuse, however, because such a problem that Riot ultimately removed it altogether. As part of a set of four new pings added to the game, one of them was a ping to "bait" the enemy, denoted in-game by a fishing hook icon. It didn't take long for the playerbase to interpret the "hook" as "something to tie a rope to", and the ping was ultimately mainly used as a subtler way of telling another player to off themselves. With no way of convincing the playerbase to use the ping as-intended, Riot just decided it was easier to get rid of it altogether.
• 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, 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.
• The cooking system in The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel can be abused for free money. Every character has dishes they're best at making, which have a high chance of producing a "great" or "unique" version of that dish. Some of these sell for more than the cost of their ingredients. Elliot's Simple Omelette gets the most use this way, as both him and the recipe are available very early.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past:
    • Jumping in water before getting the Zora's Flippers drops Link back where he was before he jumped in the water and gives him Mercy Invincibility… without actually damaging him. This makes wandering around in areas near water a lot easier; just jump right on in before you get hurt. Getting through Zora's River is made much easier with this exploit, though admittedly it's the last possible place you can use it (Zora's River is the very place you get the Flippers that cancel the exploit, which are themselves necessary to complete the game). Later Zelda games that require Flippers to swim either damage Link when he falls into water or drop him off at the beginning of the room (or both).
    • Due to a programming quirk the bug catching net was able to reflect Agahnim's magic attacks and, owing to the net's slower and wider swinging arc, was an easier alternative to the Master Sword. Later games in the series have bottles and the fishing rod intentionally capable of combating Ganon in direct response to this.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time:
    • The Deku Stick was intended to be used as a makeshift torch to light other torches or burn webs. While you could attack with the stick, it would break upon impact. Players would later discover that the stick's attack power matched the Master Sword and even more so if it was used as a jump attack since jump strikes do more damage. This makes nearly all the bosses fought as child Link a complete joke.
    • The Lens of Truth is designed to slowly deplete Link's magic when it's active. However, it takes about a second or two before you start to actually lose any magic. If you rapidly and continuously enable and disable the Lens' power, you can reveal your targets without using up any magic, at the minor cost of making what you're trying to see flicker in and out of sight.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:
    • You can't move something with Magnesis while you're standing on it, presumably to prevent players from lifting themselves by their bootstraps. But you can stack two metal objects on top of each other and stand on the top one, then lift the bottom one with Magnesis. Link isn't touching the object he's lifting, so Magnesis doesn't cancel.
    • One of Stasis's main uses is to send an object flying. Many players—speedrunners in particular—use this to travel across great distances very quickly… by having the object smack into Link and send him flying.
    • Stasis and Magnesis also highlight any objects that they can affect, which can make finding certain treasures and items easier in places that would ordinarily be difficult to see them in, such as tall grass or underwater. Conversely, a lack of highlight makes spotting octorocks much easier.
    • Many shrines' puzzles can be skipped by clever exploitations of the game's physics, whether it be Stasis-launching, using bombs to Rocket Jump, or generally abusing Link's Ragdoll Physics. The game designers seemed to recognize this: all shrines praise the player's resourcefulness in clearing them, rather than whatever trait the shrine was intended to test.
    • The Camera Rune lets players know when something that they can take a picture of is in it's sight. Players can use this to counter Maz Koshia's cloning technique, as only the real one will register.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom carries on the "unintended uses of various objects" that Breath of the Wild started.
• Ultrahand inherits the highlighting and thus detection properties of the previous hame's Magnesis and Stasis.

  • The Shock Emitter that has a pitifully short range and paralyzes enemies on contact has that range extend greatly in the rain or in water; Link can thus use it to catch large sums of fish.
  • Recall's primary purpose is to reverse an object's previous movement, but the visual effect that appears when it activates highlights every object that can be targetted, making it useful for finding small objects that might otherwise be obscured.
  • The Portable Pot is meant to be used as a one-time-use cooking vessel, but its unique shape makes it very useful as a ball-and-socket joint for Ultrahand builds. The fact that the pot is flexible also makes it an excellent suspension for vehicles.
  • The ability to fuse items to shields supposed to be used for making shields more durable or giving them unique properties. However, the fact that the Hudson Deconstruction service allows items to be unfused means that many players use them to store items that can't otherwise be placed in the inventory (i.e. Talus hearts, Flux Cores, etc.) or to smuggle objects out of Shrines.
  • The Lightning Sage's ability highlights the area around Link in yellow to indicate its range as it expands. This has the side effect of illuminating dark areas without the need for torches, brightbloom seeds, or glow potions.

• MapleStory 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.
• Mario Kart:
  • 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 online was still running, so you had to do it as well if you wanted to have a shot at winning.
  • Mario Kart Wii: Popping a wheelie with bikes. The wheelie gives you more speed, but as a trade-off, getting hit slows you down immensely. This 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 puts karts in the dust since their mini-turbos aren't powerful enough to keep up with bikers that pop wheelies everywhere. Bikes aren't included in Mario Kart 7, and while they return in Mario Kart 8, they can no longer do wheelies on command.
  • There's a sort of meta-strategy that's used online to avoid the dreaded Blue Shells by abusing how the mechanics of the item works. It always targets the player in first place, so in games where you can check what items other players are carrying (DS, 7, and the Wii U version of 8), players in first who see someone that has it will deliberately hit the brakes 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 Spiny Shell also began to use another trick with it by never using it at all: since the aforementioned games let you see what item everyone is carrying, people will try to do everything they can to make sure they aren't the target. 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 it, turning the entire pack into a game of cat-and-mouse.
• Marvel vs. Capcom 3:
  • Morrigan's Astral Illusion Hyper creates a clone of herself on the opposite side of the screen, duplicating all her movements and attacks for a brief period. This effectively means all her attacks hit twice - or, as famously demonstrated by Chris G, you can use it to utterly fill the screen with projectiles coming from both directions and leave the opponent unable to get a move in. It helps that Morrigan's projectiles are large, slow-moving and can be fired in mid-air as well.
  • Frank West's Prestige Points system means that whenever you use his Snapshot move, the number of hits in your current combo are converted into points. Above certain thresholds Frank levels up, gaining power boosts and access to new moves. If you don't have the technical ability/know-how to create extremely long, many-attack combos, it also works if you take an assist with a standard damage but multi-hitting attack (Dormammu's Dark Hole, Dante's Jam Session, Amaterasu's Cold Star, Dr. Strange's Eye of Agamotto etc.) - many of which are considered extremely good assists in their own right. After a couple of successful uses, Frank can hit Lv. 3 (his main power spike) and start doing a lot of damage without any long comboing required.
• Mass Effect:
  • In Mass Effect, the Mako's usefulness in combat decreases sharply the more levels you gain. Eventually, players will inevitably handle outdoor firefights by getting out of the heavily-armored armed vehicle and instead using it as cover. Conveniently, the Mako can't be destroyed if you're not in it. The Mako can also be used to Goomba Stomp large enemies like geth armatures, leaving them pinned to the floor and mostly unable to fight back when you get out of the Mako to shoot them to death on foot.
  • Mass Effect 2: A technique known as "checkpoint dashing" can be used to circumvent difficult sections of an area. Many checkpoints exist physically in the game, and trigger as soon as the player reaches them. As such, the player can simply rush through a section to trigger the checkpoint, die, and continue from the next scene without any enemies hounding them. In a few places, you don't even need to physically be at the checkpoint; if you manage to spawn a combat drone close enough to the checkpoint, the cutscene will still trigger. Similarly, a Vanguard can charge to the end with the same results.
• MechWarrior
  • The humble Machine Gun in MechWarrior: Living Legends is built in mind for Anti-Infantry and light Anti-Air usage, as it deals a truly pathetic amount of damage against Battlemechs and tanks. However, they actually became a favored auxiliary weapon in battlemech fights, especially if the enemy mech has an "aircraft" torso rather than a "man-walker" design; by spraying the machine guns wildly across the battlemech's nose ahead of the cockpit, you can effectively blind the pilot through the sheer amount of Bullet Sparks thrown up; the obstructed view not terribly effective against moving targets, but a stationary sniper is completely incapable of seeing what he's shooting.
  • This has been a staple of the Mechwarrior series ever since it was still called Battletech and was only a pen-and-paper RPG. Fill up a Mech with machine guns and you make it into the ultimate short-range brawler - the Death of a Thousand Cuts effect of all the peashooters firing together quickly stacks up to damage levels that overshadow even dedicated short-range guns, and all with extremely cheap and plentiful ammunition.
  • MechWarrior 4 is not immune to this either. Until it was removed in later iterations of the multiplayer, some mad people would take light 'Mechs stuffed to the gills with flare launchers, then go around firing their massed flare launchers at enemies. This had a threefold purpose: One, flare launchers can blind pilots when fired en masse (the official guidebook even acknowledges this). Two, any 'Mech with flares stuck on it is visible to other 'Mechs out to almost a kilometer. Three, with enough flares, one could lag your opponent's game to a complete standstill because many graphics cards and RAM sticks of the time couldn't handle being drowned in over a dozen particle-emitting light sources at point blank range simultaneously.
• The RPG Maker series of games sees a lot of use for RPG's but it has also become famous for horror games like The Witch's House and even horror themed RPG's like Fear & Hunger.
• In Hard Man's stage in Mega Man 3: scrolling the bees offscreen to make them disappear is such a time-honored trick that the hint mode in later releases^note Rockman Complete Works (Japan-only) and the Anniversary Collection actually suggests it to you.
  • In Mega Man 8, the Tornado Hold was intended as a multi-hit weapon, with its lifting Mega Man being just a physics touch. However, players very quickly noticed that said physics touch was extremely useful for platforming, to the point that in practice, it's almost never used offensively. The mechanic was abused so much that it was actually made into a recovery move^note alternate recover move for Mega Man's character in Smash.
• 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 lampshades the trope by calling the player when doing this and saying "That's not what it's used for!"
• Metal Gear Solid V: Since any resources you call in are airdropped from above, you can use that offensively on your behalf; until it was patched, landing a crate directly on Quiet's head was the fastest way to defeat her.
• 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 is in getting the Space Jump immediately after landing on Tallon IV, which breaks the game wide open. The rereleases make this trick harder (though not quite impossible), and the dash is Nerfed somewhat in the sequels.
• Minecraft:
  • Torches can be used not only to light dark places, but also to quickly remove a pile of gravel/sand by placing it underneath while it's falling (thus preventing your shovel from wearing down), and to get an oxygen boost when you're underwater by placing it on a wall up close. The gravel/sand thing is a bug that was solved but reintroduced due to popular request, while the oxygen boost was removed in an update that made the meter regenerate over time rather than instantaneously.
  • Minecarts are good for transportation, but also for storing villagers in a convenient place to make sure they don't go away. This way you can make a villager market with no need to go find them as they're randomly walking about town.
  • While using a fishing rod to snag a mob uses up three durability (versus one for fishing), it is generally considered worth it to wrangle mobs and to prevent pesky Ghasts from flying away.
  • Beds are coded to explode when used in the Nether or the End, but those explosions lets them be used as much more easily craftable TNTs to mine for Ancient Debris in the Nether or deal large chunks of damage to the Ender Dragon, a trick often exploited by speedrunners.
  • The main function of the armor stands is to hold your armor when you're not using it, but clever redstone engineers have used it to make perpetual clocks for their circuits: create a water current that loops itself, throw in an armor stand, put a detection plate somewhere nearby that transforms the stand's weight into redstone signal, and done!
  • Prior to 1.11.1, bows with the Punch II enchantment could be used to begin and prolong flight when you were wearing the elytra (wings): every time you hit yourself with an arrow by shooting at a certain angle during flight, you got lifted, allowing to perpetuate your glide until you ran out of arrows or your bow broke, and even this could be prevented by applying the Infinity and Mending enchantments to the bow (the former provides infinite arrows, the latter allows for endless bow durability). 1.11.1 removed the ability to apply both Infinity and Mending to a bow, but those players who already have such a bow can still use it. In response to what the fanbase was doing, Mojang gave fireworks an additional use: propel the player to tremendous height upon releasing, which achieves the same goal but in a much easier (and safer) way.
  • The Wither, the most powerful mob in the game, may be used to farm gigantic amounts of wood automatically.
  • Smart players have found a way to use Iron Golems (whose main purpose is to protect villagers from aggresive mobs and players) to attract Slimes to their doom in a cacti trap, netting infinite slime balls. Iron Golems can also be summoned and killed in iron farms by systematically creating and uncreating dozens of villages in just about the area of one by exploiting the game's village-creating rules with massive redstone circuits.
  • Campfires were intended to be both a source of light and a free, albeit slow method of cooking food. They're more commonly used in traps and mob grinders as a source of damage.
  • Version 1.9 allowed players to craft End crystals to respawn and redo the Ender Dragon fight. Destroying them resulted in a powerful explosion that could very easily kill you, necessitating that you destroy them with a ranged weapon. They soon found a second use as an Improvised Weapon in PvP servers as a single explosion could kill someone in maxed-out armor at point-blank range.
• Monster Hunter Generations has the Arisen Phoenix hunter art, which clears all buffs and debuffs affecting the player and converts them into health. Its intended use appears to be getting yourself out of a bind when a monster has managed to hurt you with multiple negative blights. Hunting Horn players, who stack buff upon buff on themselves as their shtick, consume their own easily-renewed buffs for a free near-full heal.
• Moonbase Alpha was published by NASA as a realistic simulation of maintenance of a lunar outpost. But people ended up playing it just to hear the chat system's text-to-speech option say silly things like "aeiou" and "John Madden", and even sing.
  "It's not gay if it's on the moon."
• 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.
• Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja 4 (and 5) have "Unlimited Chakra" feature in Versus Mode, making jutsu spam possible without worrying about your chakra. Scaled up to eleven with Might Guy and his trademark flying kick/punch attack Night Phoenix which has easy button combination to activate, fast start-up time, fast recovery time, can be done off the ground, launches his opponent flying if the attack connects and deals considerable chipping damage if the attack is blocked. In no time, Guy players would be filling the screen with blaze of fire as Guy keeps pummeling his opponents.
• Nippon Ichi games are all about exploiting the game mechanics to make incredibly powerful characters. It's necessary for taking on the optional content.
  • Phantom Brave allows you to boost an item's stats by fusing another item to it, gaining a permanent increase measured by the difference between the items' stats. It also allows you to exchange Titles on items and characters, which increase or decrease stats by certain percentages, the worst being the -80% Title "Failure". Put the Title on an item to reduce the stats, fuse it to some other stuff to bring the stats up to a reasonable level... then put the original Title back, multiplying the stats by fivefold or more.
  • Disgaea 5 re-introduced Map Creation in its initial release on Playstation 4, to allow users to make maps and upload them to challenge other users. Maps were divided into two categories — "Challenge" Maps were intended to give other users a serious challenge, whereas "Money" Maps would reward users. Trouble is, Money Maps would only unlock in the post-story game after unlocking the Carnage Dimension and clearing Martial Training 5 on Carnage mode, making any potential rewards from playing Money Maps more or less useless. That said, users began making maps that allowed for extremely fast Weapon and Skill Mastery, alongside the mass collection of Revenge Shards, allowing lagging units to be quickly brought up to speed.
• Greeters from Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus are an in-universe example, originally being "self-promoting" vending machine droids that, due to a programming quirk, were so obsessive about making a sale they would chase down customers and electrocute them if they refused to buy anything. Rather than scrap them or try to fix their homicidal tendencies, they were re-purposed into security droids that eerily still excitedly greet Abe as they chase him.
• The software Opening Night and American Girls Premiere (which both used the same engines and wonky text to speech systems), as reviewed here, was intended to introduce kids to the concept of theatre by allowing them to create their own stage productions. Unfortunately, the games text to speech lacked a word blacklist, the actions were incredibly melodramatic (and hilarious), and the characters could walk through walls. So you can imagine what sorts of plays people created with it. The comments on LGR's reviews state that they did things like have the characters fall down the stairs, enact murder mysteries, attack each other, parody programs, and Toilet Humor.
• Palworld:
  • Campfires were intended as a source of warmth and light as as well as a way to cook food. When it was found that walking over a campfire lights you on fire, inflicting damage over time, people quickly began to use them in traps. Whether it's the simple trick of luring enemies into walking over campfires or the more involved (and crueler) technique of trapping them with a hanging trap and then building a campfire under them.
  • Thanks to glitchy furniture hitboxes, people have used them to make unusual buildings such as staircases and lampposts.
• Paper Mario
  • The Danger Mario set-up. Combine badges that give you attack boosts when you have low HP, and badges that lower your HP to the point of being in Danger mode (5 HP or less) and not leveling up the HP stat, you get a Mario who's always powerful. Every attack in the game can be avoided, so low HP isn't a problem.
  • The sequel has a setup called Yoshi Peril, which basically takes Danger Mario up to eleven; it relies on Yoshi being at 1 HP (abusing badges which give a damage bonus per hit when at 1 HP, together with multiple-hit attacks to multiply the bonus). How to get to 1 HP? Use a Point Swap item, which swaps your HP and FP. How to get to 1 FP? Well, the Double Dip badge allows you to use two items in a single action, at the cost of FP, and happens to cost exactly the right amount of FP to use. This has lead to the bizarre situation of players using Double Dip to use only one item, allowing them to set up Yoshi Peril in half a turn (and then annihilating enemies in the other half a turn).
  • Super Paper Mario's Pixl Assist Character Carrie is designed for carrying your character over dangerous surfaces safely (spike traps etc.). However, Carrie movement has a flat speed value - so it makes Bowser move at the same speed as everyone else. Given that Bowser has twice the health and attack power of all other characters, this turns him into a very effective Lightning Bruiser. Even worse, Bowser's breath attack can only be activated on the ground - but Carrie counts as a platform under your feet at all times, even in midair, so Bowser can now hit enemies for lots of damage from a range even while jumping.
• Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous
  • There's a mythic ability called "master shapeshifter" which increases the user's Strength, Dexterity and Constitution by 4 while under Polymorph effects and allows unlimited use of Wild Shape, intended for Druids, Shifters and transmutation focused spellcasters to be stronger when transformed and the fomer two to use their forms without limit before level 20. However the Kitsune Race has a built in effect to change into a human which counts as a polymorph effect but doesn't restrict any of their abilities other than losing a weak bite attack and since the ability bonuses are Polymorph effects they stack with other spells and items that boost these attributes, this can be used to make Kitsune overpowered especially in martial combat roles while using what was intended to merely be a flavor ability. The only drawback is it makes the character model look like a boring human instead of a cool fox-person.
• PAYDAY: The Heist:
  • 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 Overkill 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. A similar phenomenon happens in the sequel regarding Cloakers and Tasers. Normally, every time you go down, it counts as going into bleedout mode, and if you go down four^note plus one with Nine Lives aced, or twice without it on One Down mode times without healing in-between, you're sent into custody. Getting downed by a Cloaker's kick attack or a Taser's shock does not count towards one of your downs and your health is cut down to half when you're revived. However, if your health is below half, your health is then restored back to half after you get revived, which means you might be better off getting downed by either two to save the use of a doctor bag.
  • 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.
• Perfect World: The Cube of Fate, a bonus level, 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.
• In Pikmin, if any color pikmin other than blue wanders into water, they'll flounder about for a bit before drowning. Naturally, this means that only blue pikmin can get items submerged in water. However, certain puzzles involve taking blue pikmin to an island to build a bridge or otherwise clear a path for their other colored brethren. And when pikmin fall into water, you're given a small window that you can use to lead them back to land. With careful timing, it's possible to lead non-blues into water and have them swim across short channels without dying. Throwing them halfway across before starting to lead them can practically double the distance they can swim. Utilizing this trick can help players collect certain ship parts/treasures much earlier in the game than intended and tends to be vital for minimum day runs.
• In PlanetSide 2, tanks are designed largely to murder other ground vehicles and infantry, with Anti-Air being relegated to dedicated vehicles as tank cannons can only aim about 30 degrees up. Immediately after release, players started to prop their tanks nose-up on rocks and use the main cannon to One-Hit Kill aircraft who could laugh off the pathetic Anti-Air flak weaponry. The Prowler took this to its logical conclusion, with its Anchored Mode ramping up the rate of fire, reload speed, and projectile speed up to ridiculous levels, allowing it to nuke Galaxy transports and Liberator Gunships from a kilometer away; it was silly enough that anchored mode's projectile speed bonus was later nerfed.
• Even Platform Hell hacks can be subject to this trope. Here's a tool-assisted playthrough of the hack Glitch Abuse 2 in under three minutes (a playthrough of the intended route takes at least ten, and that's still with a few unintended skips in there) thanks to a glitch that turns a Pokey into a goal object, and here's a playthrough of the hack Super Mario World Intrigue that subverts the hack's intention for Mario to be a One-Hit-Point Wonder for most of the stages, thereby allowing large chunks of several stages to be skipped. And here's a run of Kaizo Mario World 3, which takes Yoshi into situations he isn't meant to be taken into and uses other glitches to bypass some of the hardest platforming in the game.
• Pokémon:
  • Leveling up increases both max HP and current HP. Result: Rare Candies, which automatically level up a Pokémon, can revive fainted Pokémon, albeit at only a few HP. This also works when evolving Pokémon using an evolution stone. However, since Rare Candies are rarer than Revives, some players prefer saving their Rare Candies for a different unintended use: leveling up with Rare Candies is one of the easiest ways to get sufficient data to determine a Pokémon's hidden stats (called IVs). Use the candies to level a freshly-caught or -hatched Pokémon a few times, plug its new stats into an online IV calculator, then reset the game afterward so you still have Rare Candies to use on the next Pokémon whose IVs you want to figure out.
  • The Global Trade System (GTS) is supposed to be used to trade Pokémon with other players around the world. However for a player with two copies of compatible games it can also be used to "trade" with yourself to easily transfer items and perform trade based evolutions without needing a trustworthy person or a second game system. In one game simply put up for trade something so common that no one will pick it up (any Com Mon works just fine) and request for something specific you know is in the second game. Load up the second game, attach an item if needed, initiate the trade and pick up your new item/evolved Pokémon in the first game.
  • In Pokémon Black 2 and White 2, you can buy Casteliacones once per day with the option of either just one for $100 or a dozen $1,200. After purchasing, go to the maid in the trailer on Route 5 and sell each Casteliacone to her for $2000 apiece. $2000 times the dozen option is $24,000; minus the $1,200 paid for a dozen is a $22,800 profit. If you want some leftover, buying 12 and selling only one still nets an $800 profit, along with 11 leftover Casteliacones for your own needs. Even if you only buy and then sell one, you still make a profit of $1,900, which is plenty to buy twelve more the next day. Seeing as you can amass on Full Heals using other practical means (Pokémarts, lottery stands in Join Avenue, etc.), it's a rather zero-cost daily cash generator.
  • Two metagame gimmicks revolve around unintended usage of mechanics that give you a Last Chance Hit Point. F.E.A.R. has you give a Focus Sash to a Rattata, and let the Sash save you with one last hit point. For your attack that turn, use Endeavour - which makes the opponent's health equal to yours. Quick Attack will then give you attack priority for enough Scratch Damage to finish them off. S.A.B.E.R. has you give a Shell Bell to an Aron that has Sturdy, an ability that gives you the Last Chance Hit Point if you would otherwise have been knocked out in one hit. Use Endeavour for your attack that turn, and the Shell Bell will heal you based off the damage dealt. In this case, that's likely to be all your health - while they lose practically all of theirs.
  • The Burn status condition deals damage over time, but also cuts your physical Attack stat in half. This means that you do less damage to yourself if affected by confusion, as well as any moves like Foul Play that get stronger with the target's own stats. Combine this with Pokemon whose abilities nullify damage dealt by status conditions and Burn is actually a positive thing.
    • You can only have one status condition at a time, so something troublesome-but-not-crucial like Burn or Poison is preferable to something like Sleep or Freeze that basically makes your Pokémon useless for five turns.
  • The Substitute move sacrifices 1/4 of the user's HP to create a decoy that can absorb that much damage before breaking. It's supposed to be used as defensive tool, but it also gained popularity on Glass Cannon movesets as a way to activate Critical Status Buff abilities and items as quickly as possible, while getting a shield as an added bonus. (The combination of substitute and the "raises speed when on low HP" Salac Berry being nicknamed "Sub-Salac")
  • The Sheer Force ability is supposed to raise the power of moves with secondary effects (chance of burn, etc) at the cost of removing their secondary effects. Simple enough, but a quirk in the way this is handled^note when a move with a secondary effect is used, all effects that would normally take place after attacking are skipped meant the user would not suffer HP loss from the Life Orb item (while still receiving its power boost) as long as they used a move affected by Sheer Force, essentially allowing them to use the Life Orb with no downside. This became such a key part of Sheer Force Pokémon's playstyles that Game Freak left this in in all later games.
  • Choice items give a x1.5 boost to a particular stat but restricts the Pokémon that holds it to the first move chosen when switched in. However, there are some moves, such as Volt Switch and U-Turn, where the user attacks and switches out. Since they don't return to play until switched back in again, switch-out moves allow these Pokémon to attack without having to commit themselves to one move.
    • And in some annoying cases, the moves Trick or Switcheroo will be used to give the opponent the Choice item. Not only will it lock them into a move, but you'll get their (usually beneficial) item. Especially troublesome if it's a move your Pokémon is immune to. (I.e. psychic moves vs a dark type).
  • A low Attack or Special Attack stat ordinarily means you shouldn't be using moves that run off those stats, as damage dealt will also be low. However, that low damage becomes a benefit in double battles if you use a strategy involving attacking your own teammate to activate an effect, as the teammate will have most of their HP left. A popular example is Terrakion, whose Ability, Justified, raises Attack with each Dark-type hit it takes; paired up with Whimsicott, who deals low damage but has Beat Up, a Dark-type move that hits four to six times when a battle begins. Whimsicott uses Beat Up on Terrakion, Terrakion is almost completely unharmed, and Terrakion proceeds to trample over all of the opponent's Pokémon.
  • Using a Repel prevents the player from running into any Random Encounters with a lower level than your lead Pokémon. Their intended purpose is to help players go back through earlier routes without having to waste time on weak wild Pokémon, but another use for them is to force a specific encounter to appear — if a route has a rare Pokémon that can spawn at a higher level than the Com Mons in the area, then you can guarantee it will appear by putting a Pokémon with that level at the front of your party and using a Repel. This is particularly useful when searching for roaming Legendaries, or if you're doing a Nuzlocke run and can only catch the first Pokémon you see in that area.
• In [PROTOTYPE], the various Events, save the timed race ones, require 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 your 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.
• 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.
• Pump It Up: The latest machine, Pump It Up Prime 2's LX Cabinets added a webcam feature. The latest patches allow registered machines online to take photos, if players choose to snap a picture or not. Needless to say, certain players have took inappropriate pictures, which can be seen in piugame's website in the photo gallery section.
• 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 Classic and Team Fortress 2 is designed for just that.
• Quest for Glory III: You can use the underside of the Simbani wrestling bridge like monkey bars to train the hero's strength. If you try this while Uhura is watching, she gets upset and says that's not what the bridge is for.
• When a monster is killed by attacks from several players in Ragnarok Online, the EXP is split between the intervening players, then boosted according to the number of them. This was intended to make group play more rewarding and enjoyable. However, this boosting always occurs, even if the players were never in the same party to begin with. The next logical step is, of course, travelling with your character to popular leveling spots and beating the resident monsters within an inch of their lives, never killing them. When another unsuspecting player finished them off, you will easily receive between 2 to 6 times the normal amount of EXP the monster was worth.
• Ratchet & 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.
• Red Dead Redemption II: A recent Online update provides a new role, the Naturalist, and new tools to fulfill that role. One such tool is sedative ammo for the Varmint Rifle. And while it works a treat at non-lethally neutralizing wild animals for the purpose of collecting samples, it's still dangerous to certain smaller creatures and birds. ...Which makes it perfect for bird hunting, as even a glancing shot is lethal, and the low damage of the round itself preserves the carcass's value. It even works on birds that aren't flying, such as turkeys and chickens.
• Resident Evil series:
  • If you are grabbed by a prone zombie it will deal some damage before your character ultimately kicks off or crushes its head for an instant kill. Normally, as health is more scarce than ammunition, you're much better off avoiding this and taking down zombies with your guns. That is, until you encounter the zombified Brad Vickers in Resident Evil 2, an optional enemy who takes tons of abuse to put down and yields hidden costumes and new weapons when defeated. You could pump a ton of ammo into him, or you could knock him down, let him grab your leg, and kill him instantly at the cost of a bit of health.
  • The remake of Resident Evil gives you more ammo, but has zombies come back as the much more powerful Crimson Heads if you don't properly dispose of their bodies by either incineration or beheading them. There isn't enough kerosene in the game to burn them all, which normally would force you to either dodge some or deal with a more powerful zombie later, but if you purposely kill zombies so their corpses are touching, you can burn all of them with one dose of kerosene thanks to a bug in the game's flame mechanics. Since most zombies appear in at least pairs, it is actually possible to kill and burn every zombie in the game and only deal with the two mandatory crimson heads that appear. The HD remaster even adds an achievement for doing this.
  • Another example in the remake: Chris carries flash grenades, which on any normal day would be thrown to temporarily blind and disorient human opponents. However, this is no normal day and there are no human opponents: thus Chris uses them in self-defense by shoving them into a zombie's mouth and then either letting it go off or shooting it to detonate it, decapitating the zombie instantly.
• In Satisfactory, ramming a hostile creature itself with a vehicle like a tractor is harmless. This forced players to come up with creative ways to dispose off the wretched firespitter beasts (for those not wanting to confront one directly or waste precious time sniping). Cue the Jihaddi Tractor trick, when one redditor decided to try taking a page out of the Battlefield 1942 trolling playbook and apply the tactic to Satisfactory. This involves ramming the beast with a tractor rigged with nobelisks, which do damage enemies (as well as other players, friendly creatures, and yourself). There's No Kill like Overkill indeed.
• 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.
• "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 Battlefield: 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 implemented counters to this strategy, such as Spies (who can leave the spawn unnoticed and take down the campers, unless the campers are Pyros which they usually are), Bonk! (A secondary for Scout that makes him invulnerable but unable to attack for 8 seconds) and Ubercharges (which let the "besieged" take the enemy down while invulnerable). The Splatoon games have countermeasures too; the first two games have a force field around each team's spawn point that enemies cannot penetrate by any means, allowing you to freely shoot at spawn-trappers while they can't lay a finger on you (some stages also have the spawn point on a raised platform, providing a terrain advantage against any would-be attackers), while Splatoon 3 grants spawning players temporary invincibility and gives them some control on where and when they spawn.
• Splatoon: Each of the first two games has one Special Weapon that has a direct benefit—Echolocator in the first game reveals the locations of all opponents to the entire team for several seconds, and Bomb Launcher in the second game grants the player an unlimited number of bombs until the Special Weapon meter runs out—but also provide you with an instant ink refill, overriding absolutely everything that could delay it, including cooldown time when deploying things like Splash Walls or Squid Beakons during which you're ordinarily prohibited from refilling your ink. This secondary benefit can be a lifesaver for players running critically low on ink and don't have time to replenish their ink under normal circumstances, such as if they're under attack at the moment.
  • This is especially true for Bomb Launcher in the Salmon Run mode: As large numbers of Salmonid come at the players at once, waiting for the bombs to detonate is much too slow, and being able to shoot and shoot, then immediately refill and keep shooting is more useful.
  • The third game does its damnedest to send this strategy to Davy Jones' locker. There are three specials which have this effect, all of which are less than optimal at it. The Big Bubbler and the Killer Wail 5.1 require the user to stop firing for a second and a half while the special is deployed, during which they are completely defenseless. The Zipcaster lacks this delay, but it doesn't protect you from return fire and you stick out like a sore thumb, which is more than likely to get you splatted. Notably, only the Killer Wail 5.1 is available during Salmon Run, where it is better used to shoot down distant Flyfish.
• Splinter Cell
  • Sticky Cameras across all the games can be used to non-lethally knock out opponents. The intended way to use them is to stick one to a surface, wait for a guard to draw near, and release the knockout gas. Or, you can just shoot the guard in the head with one to knock him out the old fashioned way.
  • In Splinter Cell: Double Agent, the normally harmless OCP can be used as a lethal weapon exactly one time. If you shoot Jamie Washington with it he will die instantly as it shorts out his pacemaker long enough to give him a fatal heart attack, which is something you'll only know is possible if you found the email in the third mission from Enrica which mentions his pacemaker and bad heart.
• StarCraft
  • 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. To say nothing of mission 7 in the Terran Campaign, which can be beaten in less than 30 seconds just by casting Defensive Matrix on the SCV carrying the beacon and rushing to the objective. Similarly, in Starcraft: Brood War, in mission 6 of the Terran campaign, it's possible to win even without landing your buildings, by simply loading the siege tanks you're provided with at the beginning, flying them up to the corner of the map, and letting them rain destruction on the command center you're supposed to go through a base to destroy.
  • Starcraft II has an in-universe example in "The Dig", in which a ginormous laser drill used to cut through several very resistant doors turns out to be remarkably effective at quickly destroying otherwise hard-to-kill units and structures.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic has a few whoppers, especially during their special events.
  • There's one datacron on Tatooine that is supposed to require a suicide run through enemy territory. The best way to get it is to sneak through the little-used free-for-all PvP area and avoid the enemy base.
  • Doing a particularly nasty Heroic (party mission) that is set in an open area? Well, the Arbitrary Headcount Limit is 4 people, but it doesn't mean that two four person parties (or several two person parties with companion bots) can't team up and kill the boss twice. Say Party A is fighting a Champion-level boss solo. Party B waits a couple seconds and joins in. Party B will get no actual credit for the fight, but they can damage or tank the boss along with Party A. Boss respawns, and it's Party B's turn to start the fight while Party A helps. It doesn't matter if there's a vast level difference between parties or even if the parties are in the same faction.
  • Doing the Bounty Contracts and you need the target dead while your pal needs the target alive or you're after the same target, but different levels (the bounty target spawns at the level of the highest party member)? Break party, trigger the fight twice so you both get the outcome you need (especially useful for healers, as they won't get credit for the kill, but they won't get attacked, either, leaving them to keep allies alive without being bothered).
  • The Return of the Gree event was a first-rate case of it, though; hoping to trigger more interest in open world, free for all PvP, they set up an area just for that, and placed obstacles needed for the event's daily PvE quests in there to entice people. However, the obstacles in the PvP area were half-difficulty. Cue server-wide "truces", Imperial and Republic players cooperating on the obstacles, orderly lines for a drop-off puzzle, and veteran MMO players scratching their heads, saying they had never seen anything like it.
  • Jedi Shadows and Sith Assassins get an ability to throw down a teleport puddle around level 55. It's intended use is for healers to stand in (it boosts healing output for those standing near it) or evade a boss's area attacks. But it can also come in handy when hunting hard to get datacrons or treasure chests as you can teleport back to safety and save yourself from a fatal fall (and having to do it all over again from the beginning) if you're quick on the draw.
  • Falling off a cliff or other high spot kills the character and gives a quick transport to the nearest medcenter, but if they aren't in combat, the damage to gear is negligible. Players can complete a quest, then jump off a cliff (or in one case, into a sarlacc) to get a quick transport back to base for turning it in.
  • The "/stuck" command is designed for teleporting a character to a safe spot if they hit a bug in the environment. If you are in combat (say you got stuck in a rock wall running away from a boss), it kills you and sends you to the nearest base with a reduced cost to your armor repair. Endgame operations players figured out about the reduced cost and use the "/stuck" command if the boss battle is going to be a wipe, which ends the fight and saves cash on repairs.
  • Stealth classes (Shadows, Assassins, Scoundrels, and Operatives) could flagrantly abuse the ability by sneaking right into an enemy camp or base and just having a look around. If you got too close to an enemy player, you could get discovered and dogpiled by them and every NPC in the place, but most NPC characters were fairly oblivious if you kept enough distance.
• Stellaris has the "Hegemon" Origin, which is a Game-Breaker if you decide you won't use it to play nice with the rest of the galaxy. You start as the President of a Hegemon Federation with two other members who are Xenophiles. That's two fully-powered AI allies who will follow you into wars against your neighbours... and then once your neighbours are dealt with, you are free to kick one of your partners out of the Federation and conquer them, and then to gobble up the other one as well. Doing this, you will have cleared out an entire quadrant of the galaxy and assumed control of a sprawling empire of 240 pops in a part of the game where other Empires will be lucky to control 50. Easy way to become the unquestioned non-Fallen Empire galactic superpower, and getting two traditions for free is just the icing on the cake.
• Street Fighter has Urien and his Aegis Reflector. Originally meant to reflect projectiles, it's been used for corner traps and unblockable combos.
  • In Street Fighter III, Ibuki got a close standing hard kick that was meant to bring the opponent into the air and extend juggles before ending. In Second Impact specifically players found out Ibuki can simply juggle her opponent with said attack to death since it doesn't have any juggle limits.
• The Suikoden series:
  • Suikoden II: A section of the wall between the Muse and Matilda border was accidentally flagged as movable. By pushing it aside, the Knightdom of Matilda can be accessed early in the game. Inside, a sidequest can be completed, two high-level characters can be recruited, and the entire party can be levelled from around level 15 to levels in the 30s.
  • Suikoden III: The Theater feature is meant to be something to create more money: Give the right characters and personality the right role to act and it will create a proper crowd-pleaser that would generate money. Giving the wrong characters for the roles will make the crowd boo... but invoking such wrong casting choices will actually generate very hilarious dialogues from the colorful cast of actors (for this game, 104 actors). And so, players tend to use the theater not for the intended money making machine, but for cases of the player wanting to roll over on the floor laughing their asses off.
• Super Smash Bros.:
  • As a platforming fighting game where you have to avoid falling off the edge of the screen, being able to get back to the stage if you fall or get knocked off is important. Every character has a double jump, and an upwards special move that is used for attacks but mostly as a makeshift third jump. This is intended. The drawback to using the third jump is that afterwards the character is unable to perform any action besides moving until they either A: hit the ground/grab a ledge or B: get hit. Naturally, people have found ways to abuse the fact that taking damage essentially gives you a fourth or higher jump. Examples include:
    • Purposely getting hit by an attack or projectile that was close enough.
    • If in a team-based mode, have a teammate throw an explosive item since they can still hurt teammates (though this is very risky and has a high chance of team KO), or if Friendly Fire is turned on, simply have the teammate attack you.
  • More character specific examples include:
    • Link, Young Link and Toon Link can pull out a bomb for their down special. They count as items and thus any normal attack will cause them to throw it instead, but the game allows you to perform special moves with an item, thus allowing them to pull the bomb out and then perform their upwards spin attack. The bomb detonates after a while even if you're holding it, and does negligible knockback and damage, so once it explodes and you take damage, you're free to perform another spin attack (or pull out another bomb, though it might take too much damage and you probably already made it back to the stage, and if you didn't it might take too long resulting in you falling).
    • Snake, to make up for the fact that his upwards special deals absolutely no damage and can't even be considered an attack, CAN perform actions after using it, just not another upwards special. Until he gets hit. At which point he can do it again. He also has a C4 charge as his downwards special, and it can very well hurt him. The trick here is to use his upwards special, wait 'til it finishes, drop a C4 charge, fast fall to catch up with it if need be, detonate it and then use another upwards special. It helps that the C4 charge may also propel you upwards. This is very powerful, and also leads to an alternate game mode using the Level Editor to create a stage that Snake can go under and infinitely use this tactic, and have two Snakes dogfight while using this.
    • Fox and Falco's Reflector's intended use is, as the name implies, to reflect projectiles. The Reflector damages enemies who make contact with it, however, and it comes out in one frame making it one of the fastest attacks in the game. Nicknamed the "Shine" by competitive players, it's used as an offensive tool for Combos far more than it is for reflecting.
    • Mega Man's Down Special, Leaf Shield, creates a shield that absorbs projectiles, damages nearby enemies, and can be thrown as a projectile, but Mega Man can't use almost any other attacks while the Leaf Shield is active. Just by looking at this move, you'd think it's best used defensively, and while players dismissed it as a situational and mediocre move initially, people then discovered that it can be used with a grab to deal a good amount of damage with it, and is even better for edge guarding by hitstunning them and screwing up many characters' recovery. Footstool jumping with the Leaf Shield gives Mega Man an easy way to KO opponents, which covers for Mega Man's low damage output.
  • The hitboxes in the game are tied to the character model. So an animation that has a character lean back or crouch slightly may cause them to just barely dodge an attack, or just barely get hit by it. This is extremely unreliable, however.
  • Lucario has a special mechanic that makes him become stronger the higher his damage percentage is. Thus, many players purposely take damage in order to have insanely powerful attacks.
  • Shulk's neutral special, Monado Arts, allows him to toggle between five different modes, each with their own benefits and drawbacks. The Smash Art is designed to be a Death or Glory Attack mode, as while it greatly increases Shulk's launching power, it also reduces his damage output and launch resistance. Turns out it has one more use: At low damage, Shulk can use the increased sustained knockback of Smash Art to escape combos.
  • Multi-Man mode has you take on a horde of CPU-controlled mooks with only normal moves and the inability to grab ledges so as to make KOing waves of them easier. You can try to ledgehog to try to bait some of them into falling off, but they'll catch on quickly and use downwards hitting moves to get you. Brawl introduces tether recoveries for certain characters, which previously existed as a way to hang onto walls for Link and Samus, but starting in this game home directly towards ledges and let you hang on without much effort. If this is used in Multi-Man Brawl, the mooks will just stand at the ledge waiting for you to go up before attacking. However, there's a lot of them, so you can just hang there and watch as they try to be the one closest to you and subsequently get pushed off, and then take advantage of the split-second invincibility offered by hoisting yourself up followed by the general invincibility of ledge attacks to knock a couple more mooks off, then return to your previous position as they scramble to get back to the stage. Rinse, repeat.
  • When you have no lives and have the match on a time limit, a way to defeat enemies while playing as Kirby is to suck them up, then jump off the edge of the stage, committing suicide and taking the enemy with you. This trick is referred to as Kirbycide. Bowser's side special can be used for something similar if you manage to grab an enemy near a ledge. This is no longer possible for most characters as of Super Smash Bros. 4; trying this will result in Bowser losing, but Ganondorf is guaranteed to win.
  • Air dodging and wavedashing in Melee. By air dodging diagonally downward into the ground, the character slides forward very quickly, and rapidly alternating between jump and diagonal downwards air dodging is vital in competitive play. In fact, this is seen as the only real use for Melee's air dodge, as it's not very reliable for its intended use (a half-second of invincibility) as it puts the character in a helpless state after it's executed. It was for this reason that the air dodge was revamped in Brawl to be much more useful for its intended use (probably too useful).
  • In all games, stale-move negation acts as an anti-spamming feature, reducing the damage of spammed moves encouraging players to use a variety of moves to attack. Brawl strengthens this mechanic by having it reduce the knockback with progressive use (which isn't present in previous or later installments). However, since moves with less knockback are easier to combo with, Brawl's stale-move negation is instead used to create even deadlier combos, especially when the spammed attack is a Smash Attack.
  • Ultimate is the only game on the Switch that was designed to work with the GameCube controller. Some other games on the Switch can be played with it, but they're usually not optimised for it, so it would seem that Nintendo didn't intend on anyone using it outside of Ultimate.
• Team Fortress 2 has a few:
  • The Rocket Jumper and Sticky Jumper are ostensibly training items—they are painted bright orange and deal no damage whatsoever to the player or their foes. In theory they are used to allow novice Soldiers or Demomen how to explosive-jump without killing themselves. In practice, people have used them to turn two somewhat slow but powerful classes into high-speed terrors, usually armed with Situational Swords like the Market Gardener (deals critical damage when rocket jumping) or the Ullapool Caber (a stick-type hand grenade used as a melee weapon, itself an example of this trope) to brutalize one or two opponents, then rocket away out of danger. They were also abused so much in Capture the Flag style game modes that they eventually had to remove the ability to carry the briefcase from players using these items. When these weapons first came out, they were also indistinguishable from their stock counterparts, meaning that in addition to the improved mobility, they could be used to fake out enemies into a retreat. The viability of both weapons still persist to this day as functional sidearms, especially the Sticky Jumper, even outside of gimmick loadouts. While the Rocket Jumper will leave the Soldier with a pitiful sidearm with poor range or damage in exchange for high mobility, the Sticky Jumper still permits a Demoman their primary Grenade Launcher, which, while tricky to master, can easily be the only weapon a player needs if they're consistent with it. Thus, the Demoman trades some defensive prowess and area control for unparalleled mobility... Which necessitated another nerf specifically for the Sticky Jumper - originally, like the stock Stickybomb Launcher, you could have up to 8 sticky bombs out at a time, ready to detonate. However, this was nerfed, as the mobility provided with a sticky jump using more than 2 stickies was absurd (and not realistic for training anyways, as there are very few situations where a Demoman would survive such a jump under other sticky launchers, all of which involve Medics).
  • Cloaking and disguising are the common tools of the trade for the Spy, and are usually used to get behind enemy lines relatively undetected. Used in the Mann Vs. Machine mode, however, it can be used to directly stop the progress of the robot hordes...by standing in front of the bomb carrier. It's possible to block an entire chokepoint with disguised spies and watch the bots futilely stand and jump in place.
  • The original Equalizer. In theory, the weapon was an emergency tool to pull out when wounded that would increase the Soldier's speed and striking power as he was injured, allowing him to fight his way out of a pinch and escape. In practice, it was an all-purpose tool for any situation. Offensive players would damage themselves with rockets, then go racing to the enemy spawn and start breaking faces, since the weapon's original damage values were enough to kill 5 out of 9 classes in a single non-critical blow (and any class in a critical swing). Even nerfing the damage did nothing to limit the tactic. Defensive players could use it to run away from a losing battle with impunity; the second-slowest class in the game could suddenly retreat from almost anyone for free. Valve finally split the weapon attributes into two separate weapons, and even then they had to add a debuff to the speed-based item to prevent people from employing that same tactics.
  • Wrangler jumping. Usually, the Engineer's Wrangler item allows him to selectively pick more dangerous targets as needed while making his sentry gun more durable. Some Engineers have taken to using it to rocket jump using their sentry gun's rockets, while also grabbing one of their buildings and flying to an unusual but often remote perch to set up shop there.
  • Bonk! Atomic Punch provides some six to eight seconds of invincibility for the usually fragile Scout and was made mostly to get past chokepoints full of enemy fire. Nowadays people use it to abuse the Scout's long but somewhat glitchy taunt kill, baiting people into coming up to them waiting for the temporary invincibility to wear off, only to get an instant-kill bat swing to the face.
  • Pyro rocket jumps. The compression blast ability for the Pyro allows them to reflect enemy projectiles such as rockets and grenades back at the enemy to deal increased damage. However, some highly skilled Pyros have taken to using enemy rockets to give themselves a rocket jump, flying across maps and often much, much closer to less than thrilled enemies.
  • The Short Circuit is an item that fires electrical pulses that destroy incoming projectiles but does very low damage. It's supposed to be used for protecting a nest from incoming fire. When a patch greatly increased the fire rate in addition to lowering the metal consumed per blast, Engineers were suddenly running into battle, sometimes in packs, zapping the enemy team to death. Subsequent patches nerfed the item's unintended offensive power.
  • Beggar's Bazooka, an inaccurate rocket launcher whose main purpose was to belch out rockets in packs of three, and exploding in your face if you tried to load more. Some players, however, ran with the "exploding in your face" issue, equipped their Gunboats, told their Medics to Uber them, and started to gleefully achieve flight, with every successive explosion propelling them while still in the air. Essentially, they turned a Spam Attack rocket belcher into a personal Orion drive. This was patched out by making the Beggar's Bazooka remove a loaded rocket from the clip every time it's overloaded (meaning after 3 explosions it will start to reload normally again).
  • The Spy's Dead Ringer allows him to fake his own death, and gave him massive (90%) damage resistance upon doing so in order to allow him to escape danger. This resistance was often used not for getaways, but to become a Stone Wall and tank damage and/or block an enemy's progress by standing in their way. The resistance was eventually nerfed and a speed boost effect was added to bring the item back in line with its original purpose.
  • The Spy's Taunt, the Box Trot is a cosmetic that makes the Spy imitate Metal Gear's infamous cardboard box creeping. The problem is that the Spy's impersonation of the box is too good, as he's completely unmoving with a low hitbox. The box blends into the scenery of most maps, allowing canny Spies to block capture points undetected by hiding just close enough.
  • The Boston Basher is a bat replacement - its advantage is a bleed effect, while its disadvantage is that when you miss with it, you take damage. The idea is obviously high risk/high reward, but Scouts rarely use their melee anyway. Instead, it's used to take damage when around a Medic, since Medics build ubercharge faster when they're healing an injured player.
• Terraria
  • The Grand Design is the ultimate wiring tool. However, while it was intended for wiring first, one of its ingredients is the Mechanical Lens, and so simply having it in your inventory lets you spot already placed wires. As such, it's worth having this thing on you while spelunking underground since it allows you to easily trivialize traps, and is especially useful in the trap heavy Jungle Temple.
    • Prior to 1.3.5, the Grand Design emitted light upon use, which led to people using it to find caves and for prospecting.
  • In the Journey's End update, golf balls and golf clubs were added. While these were intended as a Mini-Game, players soon discovered that these were great for finding floating islands and scouting potentially dangerous areas thanks to how the camera follows a golf ball in flight.
  • People have used the housing query feature, normally used to determine if a structure is suitable housing to look for caves. When the text changes from "this is a solid block!" to "this housing is missing a wall", the player will know that they have stumbled upon a cave.
  • Fireworks are a placable hardmode furniture item intended for making colorful displays and for decoration, despite doing damage. They're more often used for traps and obliterating bosses.
  • The Snowman Cannon is a powerful rocket launcher that fires explosive snowmen capable of homing in on enemies. Coupled with terrain destroying rockets, people used it for rapid, if imprecise excavation.
    • Taken up to eleven with the Celebration Mk2. While intended to obliterate large crowds thanks to its combination of no self-damage, spreading shots and rapid fire rate, people have coupled it with terrain destroying rockets to very rapidly remove large swathes of terrain.
  • The Torch God's Blessing was an item that was intended to somewhat nullify torch luck by instantly converting any standard torch into the biome appropriate one. However, it also means that ice torches, which can be used to make frostburn arrows (one of the best pre-hardmode ammunition types), are infinitely renewable.
  • An endgame tactic is to surround yourself with hostile slimes while fighting a boss. Slimes do piddling damage at that point, but you still get Mercy Invincibility, which allows you to ignore the really damaging boss attacks. The Final Boss's attacks ignore Mercy Invincibility from every other source in the game specifically to prevent it from being cheesed in such a manner.
  • Prior to the introduction of golf balls in the Journey's End update, Meteor Shot and Water Bolt were often used to find floating islands by exploiting their ability to bounce off solid blocks — if the projectile rebounded after flying off the top of the screen, that's a sign that there's a floating island overhead. These two items were intended for crowd control — for rangers and mages, respectively — due to their piercing and bouncing capabilities.
  • The Quick Stack feature automatically places the player's items into chests that also have those items, complete with an animation of them flying into the chests. The trick is that it also works on naturally spawning chests: if you try to Quick Stack in an underground shaft and your torches go flying off to the top-left corner, then you've just located a chest containing torches and other goodies.
• Tetris
  • 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's 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.
  • Tetris Friends 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. Friends also implements a back-to-back bonus system (which rewards the player for pulling off Tetrises or T-Spins 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 their moves carefully, one can reach ludicrous high scores in Marathon mode by manipulating these bonuses. As a result, the top twenty or so of the All Time Top 100 are playthroughs that use very few doubles/triples... and 0 Tetrises. In a game named Tetris. (A Tetris does score more points than a 4 line clear combo, but it deducts 12 lines from the maximum 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)
• Titan Quest: There is Experience Booster equipment. The expected use of these items is to level up faster from combat. However, these items also increase the experience claimed from finishing quests and the 85% recovery from a player's gravestone. Cue people with 18%+ Experience Booster intentionally dying and reclaiming their gravestone over and over again to make a net profit.
• The mother of this trope comes in with "total control" tool-assisted Speed Runs, which take control of the game and literally program in new code. Here's one for Super Mario World, which won TAS of the year for 2014 at tasvideos.org by a pretty wide margin, being run at AGDQ. It ends up literally programming Snake and Pong into the game code.
• Total War: Warhammer: One unintended effect of Bretonnia's mechanics (being a feudal country, their armies consist of conscripted peasant levies that greatly outnumber mounted nobles) was that having peasants in your army slowed down your economy, leading to players having as few peasants as possible and therefore armies consisting of mounted nobles greatly outnumbering the levies.
• Touhou Project:
  • Marisa B's Illusion Laser Glitch on Touhou Fuujinroku ~ Mountain of Faith. The only thing you have 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 can practically skip all spell cards that are not survival-oriented. Then again, Touhou Eiyashou ~ Imperishable Night granted us Malice Cannon, which consists of just tapping the focus button to alternate between Alice and Marisa, yet it deals devastating damage to anything it touches.
  • Several patterns have safe spots where you can sit without fear of getting hit. These safe spots are generally barely larger than your hitbox and entirely unmarked (Cirno's memetic "baka" image comes in part from having a glaringly huge one in the Easy Mode version of her Icicle Fall spellcard).
  • 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 a nausea-inducing circle around the boss that, technically speaking, bypasses most of the difficulty.
• Both Trine games have as a playable character the Mage, who can summon platforms out of thin air and levitate objects. Summoned platforms can of course be levitated, but if the player is standing on one the levitation effect stops as soon as the game detects significant movement. Emphasis on significant: if the player spawns a cube or platform, jumps on it and proceeds to ever-so-gently levitate it around, the game won't register the movement as such. As a result, the only thing stopping a player from completing the entirety of the game by very slowly floating through the levels is lack of patience — but this still allows for cheating your way out of particularly tough puzzles.
• Ultima Online has the gate travel spell, which opens a blue portal from where the caster is standing to wherever the caster chooses via a 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 its contents.
• Valheim:
  • Trolls do enormous amounts of damage to the environment when attacking, usually resulting in a One-Hit Kill for the low-tier-gear player. However, they're also relatively easy to dodge, so some players use trolls to clear forests and break up ore deposits instead of chopping/mining it themselves.
  • A greydwarf nest constantly and quickly produces greydwarves, meaning an unprepared player can quickly be overwhelmed if it's not destroyed. To a prepared player, they are an ever-regenerating source of stone and wood (the basic building materials of the game) and useful for farming weapon skills. Some even dig moats to one-on-one and/or set up fires around the nest to make it easier to kill them or just kill them via fire damage.
  • As shown by Let's Game It Out, campfires make excellent weapons for cheesing various bosses.
  • Hugin the raven will show up when the player first finds a burial chamber dungeon. However, deliberately ignoring him means he'll continue showing up at the entrance to all chambers, some of which have entrances hidden by trees or boulders.
• In Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune, there are perks for clearing a loop of Story Mode without losing any stages. Obviously, if the opponent crosses the finish line before you, it's a loss. However, being challenged by another player to a VS race cancels the current stage without counting it as a loss. As such, if you have a friend with you, and you think you are going to lose, you can have that friend start a game and challenge you to a race so you can try that stage again while maintaining story-undefeated status (even if you lose in VS and have to insert another credit, it's a negligible issue in comparison). This tactic stopped being used in Maximum Tune 4 onwards, where you can retire in Story Mode without losing undefeated status, although it does require the opponent to be at least one kilometer away from the goal as retiring requires a significant amount of time to perform (you have to turn around and drive the wrong way for 3 seconds).
• Warcraft III
  • Goblin Landmines are defensive items a player can obtain during several defense missions in the campaign, including the final mission. Logically, these mines deal massive Area Of Effect damage whenever an enemy unit goes near them. Players can also use Goblin Landmines offensively, by placing them near enemy buildings and lure enemy units to them. This will easily destroy enemy buildings. Since these items are in unlimited supply during the final mission, skilled players can easily level Archimonde's base when used in combination with potions of invulnerability, Sequence Breaking the final mission.
  • This walkthrough for 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 your base and those of your allies 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 walkthrough'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 overpowered 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.
• Warframe:
  • Limbo:
    • His ability to send allies and enemies into the Rift with Banish is intended to allow for some hard crowd-control on enemies or unique survival boosts for allies, even buffing allies with increased energy generation. However, Limbo's allies cannot attack anything on the opposite side of the Rift from them, interact with consoles or terminals, or pick up items while they are in the Rift, and have no control over who is Banished or for how long, making Limbo an ideal Trolling Warframe simply by swapping focus on which side is being isolated or kept alive. Players were given the ability to cancel Banish via rolling soon after his release, but as there is no mention of how in the game proper, most are unaware of it.
    • Complicating matters is the rework he received in Update 20, which made Limbo players capable of Trolling each other. Exiting or ending Cataclysm will remove any entity caught within from the Rift, including those affected by Limbo's passive. Stasis can also freeze up to 300 projectiles within the Rift, rendering allies' non-melee weapons entirely useless until the effect ends, and can be used by any Limbo in the party to affect the Rift across all Limbos in the party. Stasis was eventually modified so that it would no longer freeze allied projectiles, removing a significant amount of frustration.
  • Loki's Switch Teleport was most certainly not intended to get other players stuck in terrain, drop datamasses in unreachable locations, nor plant teammates in the middle of herds of Toxic Ancients/in the paths of attacking bosses, but that sure didn't stop players from doing any of those things. It was also most likely not intended to teleport bosses into places they would get stuck in. Players would use it on Raptor in particular, to trap him inside the storehouse he spawns on, before it was patched out.
  • Mag's Magnetize attracts all projectiles inside a small sphere. It is primarily a damage and accuracy boost against an enemy, but it can also be used to create emergency cover. This one got famous enough that it showed up in the official cinematic.
  • Nova:
    • Molecular Prime's Slow effect holds an interesting property that subjects Power Strength in-between the default percentage of a hundred percent. Due to the way the Power Strength stat scales, players found that reducing it would allow Molecular Prime to increase the speed of enemies, making missions on large maps run much faster. The developers liked it so much they kept it in.
    • The Neutron Star Augment allows Nova to detonate all of her remaining Null Star particles at once for some extra damage and crowd control. While the intended effects are still extremely weak, it does let Nova quickly reset Null Star so that she can regain its full damage reduction should enemies aggro too many of the particles.
  • Saryn has always been intended by the devs as a frame that causes damage over time by spreading devastating plague-themed debuffs to entire crowds. Originally however, the only build the playerbase considered viable for any level of play was exploiting a quirk of her Miasma's damage algorithm, dropping her "Power Duration" to less than a second, and dealing 10,000 damage in two ticks every time you pressed the 4 key. This culminated in a radical rework in Update 17 that made the gradual poisoning process both more deadly and less gradual.
  • Trinity's Link ability spreads damage to nearby enemies by means of glowing lines connecting Trinity to them. It can be used as an improvised early warning system, alerting the player to nearby enemies. Link has also been used as an offensive nuke; after linking herself with several enemies, Trinity can then proceed to use a self-damaging weapon to deal heavy damage to all the enemies she's linked with. Whenever one dies, it attaches to another, allowing her to clear entire rooms in defense or onslaught missions.
  • Valkyr's ultimate ability, Hysteria, makes her invulnerable while giving a hefty boost to her movement and attack speeds. It was definitely not inteded to allow her to traverse through sections of a fight without taking damage from enemies, giving Valkyr time to revive allies, hack consoles, and reach objectives with abandon. Ironically, this makes Valkyr, the screaming, enraged, berserker warframe, one of the best options for Infiltration missions targeting the Corpus, since she can just run straight through tripwires, slam Ciphers into the terminals, and run.
  • The Decaying Dragon Key gear item is normally an item used to open the Orokin Derelict's vaults, which while equipped in your gear wheel harbors a significant maximum shields penalty. This sounds bad on paper, but for a time it was considered optimal to play with one equipped: having fewer shields would make it easier to fully recharge your shield pool, and having full shields gives you a longer duration on your shield gate when they get broken. Therefore, players would benefit from the Decaying Dragon Key's debuff, using the Augur Set Bonus or the Brief Respite aura to convert their spent energy into full shields with a single ability cast, letting them perpetually keep their shields up and becoming effectively invulnerable to all damage. Eventually, this was nerfed by making it so shield gate duration isn't based on a binary "either your shields fully refilled or not" rule and making the Decaying Dragon Key also shorten your shield gate.
• The "Flee" ability in Warhammer Online is most of the time used to get from point A to point B faster.
• In case you broke your Wii's Sensor Bar or are looking for a cheap way to use a Wii remote on a PC, e.g. when playing on the Dolphin emulator, one could just use a suitable source of infrared light, such as a pair of candles for the Wiimote to be able to work properly. The candle trick isn't obviously without its risks though, due to them being a fire hazard. A less riskier method would be to get a pair of old remote controls and use a clothes peg to hold one of the buttons on them down (although you do need to be careful of which equipment will react to the code- usually your best bet are remotes from old hi-fi sets and DVD players).
• The 3-D Battles of WorldRunner: The game was made to be used with conventional red/green 3D glasses to view the 3D images, as the game predated the Famicom 3D System. Interestingly enough you can actually use the Famicom 3D System with the game to produce a 3D image since the shutter-glasses produce the same unsynchronized visual input to each eye as the red/green glasses do.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3:
  • The skill "Protector's Pride" (greatly raises Arts recharge speed when non-Defenders are targeted), given its name and the fact it's initially found on a Defender class, is probably intended to make it easier for your tank to Draw Aggro when an Attacker or Healer is in danger. It ironically sees the most use on hyper-aggressive team compositions that run no Defenders at all, since without a Defender on the field the fast recharge will always be in effect.
  • In the story, Alexandria came up with the Collectopaedia Cards in order to efficiently transfer supplies where they are needed and spy on Keves' own supply movements. During her quest strand, one person manages to use them as a makeshift SOS system and they also prove very valuable in inter-colony diplomacy after the Flame Clocks start to go. Alexandria acknowledges how the cards have evolved in unexpected yet greatly useful ways.
• Half the fun of the X-Universe series is finding bizarre ways to use things that Egosoft never considered. The Truelight Seeker, a fairly mediocre corvette that can mount almost every gun in the game, seems like a goofy gimmick until you realize it can mount Gauss Cannons, capital-ship-grade weapons that rely on ammo instead of the ship's reactor. The Blastclaw Prototype heavy fighter frequently doubles as an external cargo bay for the Hyperion. And we can't forget station-bombing, making use of the game's Ridiculously Fast Construction to build cheap stations inside enemy warships.
  • Before the introduction of tractor beams in Terran Conflict, the only accepted way of moving an asteroid from one place to another was to get a huge ship and very patiently nudge it in position by repeated small collisions. A more risky alternative was to get a very fast ship and piledrive it into the asteroid; the wacky physics sometimes caused the ship to survive and the bigger object to be propelled a fair distance away. Plenty of Save Scumming was usually required before the desired effect took place.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links added character skills to the popular card game and players quickly found ways to break them. Unsurprisingly, these skills tend to be given Obvious Rule Patch nerfs if the abuse becomes too egregious, and Konami later learned their lesson and started giving stricter deckbuilding requirements or activation conditions to skills with strong effects.
  • Cyber Style, exclusive to Zane Truesdale allows the player to summon 1-3 Proto-Cyber Dragons to the field depending on how much damage you've taken. The skill was supposed to make fusion summoning Zane's boss monster Cyber End Dragon easier, but players found it far more useful as an easy source of tribute fodder or just putting extra damage on board to attack for game. It got to the point that the skill was nerfed so that the monsters it summons can only be used for Fusion Summons. It would later be nerfed again because people still didn't use it for making Cyber End Dragon, instead using it for Cyber Dragons' much better Fusion options and was too good in that role as well.
  • A Trick Up the Sleeve, exclusive to Arkana allows the player to start with a level 7 or higher Dark Spellcaster type monster provided that you have one in your deck. A fitting skill for a character focusing on Dark Magician and one he actually used in the anime. But with the release of Cosmo Brain, it instead lead to Arkana becoming the undisputed master of Blue-Eyes White Dragon (an archetype more associated with Seto Kaiba) instead since guaranteeing that card in the opening hand became a massive boost to the archetype. It too reached the point of being nerfed, by preventing you from summoning effect monsters during your first turn.
  • Masked Tribute, exclusive to Lumis & Umbra allows the player to return a card from the hand to the deck in order to summon a normal monster with 1500 attack. It was intended to help summon their boss monster Masked Beast Des Guardius and prevented the summoning of any further monsters during that turn to prevent abuse but players quickly found that it didn't prevent tributing to set monsters in face down position or tributing during the opponent's turn which gave it massive synergy to the Subterror archetype and the dinosaur staple card Survival's End, to the point that many decks ran both. It's no surprise that it got nerfed, forcing the normal monster to be summoned in defense position and limiting tributes until the end of the opponent's turn.
  • Three Lord Pillars, exclusive to Sartorius Kumar puts The Material Lord on your field and all copies of The Sky Lord and The Spiritual Lord at the bottom of your deck. People quickly realized that that basically meant the same as playing with a 14 card deck so the skill set a new record for quickest emergency nerf yet in the game eliminating the whole sorting thing.
  • Contract Procrastination, exclusive to Declan Akaba allows players to skip their Standby Phase if they control a Dark Contract card. This is meant to dodge the maintenance cost of said Contracts (some of which cost as much as 2000 life points per turn), but it saw use as a way of keeping Golden Castle of Stromberg on the field without needing to banish 10 of your (at most) 30-card deck on each of your Standby Phases. Contract Procrastination was thus nerfed to only be usable once per Duel.
  • Surprise Present, exclusive to Tea Gardner, allows players to give one of their face-down Spell/Trap cards to the opponent once per Duel, letting them use the card but not look at it. While initially intended to be a cute gimmick by giving your opponent something detrimental and hoping they're dumb enough to activate it, it instead wound up as a skill of choice for Mekk-Knights by giving them Assault Mode Activate (a card that's unusable outside of very specific decks and is easily searchable) to facilitate the Mekk-Knight monsters' summoning conditions of having 2 or more cards in a single column. Surprise Present was thus nerfed to only be usable from turn 3 onward.
  • Mekk-Knights also sometimes made use of Middle Age Gears and Master of Rites II, skills exclusive to Dr. Vellian Crowler and Alexis Rhodes respectively that play a free Ancient Gear Castle and Ritual Cage respectively at the start of the player's first turn. While intended for Ancient Gear decks and Ritual decks respectively, Mekk-Knights didn't care what those cards actually did, and simply used the free cards as a way to kick-start their plays without spending a card of their own to set up a column (this was less problematic than Surprise Present and not addressed by the devs, since you were giving up one of your own Spell/Trap Zones instead of blocking one of the opponent's; however, Master of Rites II would later be nerfed for being useful in other contexts as well).
  • Elements Unite! is exclusive to the Paradox Brothers and lets them start with the three materials required for summoning their Awesome, but Impractical ace monster Gate Guardian already in play, at the cost of having only 500 LP and only Gate Guardian in hand, and the monsters on the field can't attack or use their effects. The intended use is pretty clear: allow them to easily summon Gate Guardian but not do much else... however, there was nothing stopping you from using the three free monsters for anything else, and when Orcusts were released, this was fully exploited by using them to summon Knightmare Mermaid and set up unbreakable Orcust boards from there, lack of a hand and LP be damned. This would die out when Mermaid was banned, as the drawbacks of the Skill made it too risky to use for anything less powerful.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! Legacy of the Duelist has an Anti-Frustration Feature that gave you a card and some DP every time you lost, roughly a third the reward of success would have been. However, it was also much faster than winning a game; one could realistically forfeit a match within 30 seconds or so. While you would need to actually win the duel to continue with the story (and thus unlock more fights and packs), you had the option to replay previously unlocked duels whenever you'd like. Put this together, and the fastest way to get DP and cards from your opponents was to repeatedly replay old duels and then immediately forfeit them.

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