TheOneOmega
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I think there's a bit of terminological confusion here over the term "exploit." Some people are attributing the term to a state of the game in and of itself, while others are using the term to refer to actions an individual performs while interacting within such a state of the game.
For those who are using "exploit" in the first sense, perhaps as synonymous with "bug," it makes sense to say, at least in retrospect of MindArk's announcement, that what happened is an exploit. Contrary to other changes to the loot system and "happy hour" type occurrences, we are now in a good position to say what happened in this instance was not intended by the developers. Note that it would be a category error to assign culpability just on the grounds of this sense of the term exploit. No individual performs an exploit in this sense, whether they were affected by it or not, logged in or not, have an account or not, etc.; this meaning of exploit is entirely defined in terms of the state of the game.
There are at least three important categories of ways in which such a bug could affect an individual. The first is when an individual performs the same actions they would have performed if the bug did not exist (or at least their hypothetical game theoretic strategy treats bugged states and non-bugged states the same), but the outcomes they experience are altered because of the bug. I take it as requiring no argument that this category does not merit culpability. An example would be a player who suffers a crash and is unable to log back in because they equipped an RK-0 (then named RK-5) during a Fort Event Battle (this used to be a thing). Sometimes the altered outcomes in these cases will affect an individual positively, and other times negatively.
The second category is, I'll just define it implicitly, everything in between the first and third categories. Here we do have the possibility of establishing different degrees of culpability on the part of the individual, depending on the context. The primary focus of policy enforcement in this category should be on individual education, broad communication, and software improvement, rather than harsh punishment, and the most common penalty for less-than-serial offenders should be temporarily-tracked warnings with upgrades to suspensions if too many are accrued before others "fall off" (something like points accrued for traffic violations perhaps).
The third category is when an individual intentionally alters their actions to gain an unfair advantage from a bug, knowing that what they are doing is a violation of policy and the developers' intent. This is what, in most formal policy systems, would be called "cheating." For those who are using "exploit" as synonymous with "cheating" in this sense, exploitation certainly does merit culpability, indeed, often a high degree of it (there are plausibly cases where skipping the warnings and going straight to suspensions would be appropriate, so long as the individual's side of the story is thoroughly heard out during the investigation period, and the totality of the evidence actually places the individual in this category beyond reasonable doubt), but it is meaningless to attribute this sense of the term exploit to the state of the game in abstraction from any player action, so one could not say generically that what happened was an exploit in this sense.
This appears to be leading to a motte-and-bailey fallacy in which, by equivocating on the term "exploit," some folks are making a case for there being an exploit in the first sense (the motte) and using that conclusion to draw inferences about exploitation in the second sense (the bailey).
For those who are using "exploit" in the first sense, perhaps as synonymous with "bug," it makes sense to say, at least in retrospect of MindArk's announcement, that what happened is an exploit. Contrary to other changes to the loot system and "happy hour" type occurrences, we are now in a good position to say what happened in this instance was not intended by the developers. Note that it would be a category error to assign culpability just on the grounds of this sense of the term exploit. No individual performs an exploit in this sense, whether they were affected by it or not, logged in or not, have an account or not, etc.; this meaning of exploit is entirely defined in terms of the state of the game.
There are at least three important categories of ways in which such a bug could affect an individual. The first is when an individual performs the same actions they would have performed if the bug did not exist (or at least their hypothetical game theoretic strategy treats bugged states and non-bugged states the same), but the outcomes they experience are altered because of the bug. I take it as requiring no argument that this category does not merit culpability. An example would be a player who suffers a crash and is unable to log back in because they equipped an RK-0 (then named RK-5) during a Fort Event Battle (this used to be a thing). Sometimes the altered outcomes in these cases will affect an individual positively, and other times negatively.
The second category is, I'll just define it implicitly, everything in between the first and third categories. Here we do have the possibility of establishing different degrees of culpability on the part of the individual, depending on the context. The primary focus of policy enforcement in this category should be on individual education, broad communication, and software improvement, rather than harsh punishment, and the most common penalty for less-than-serial offenders should be temporarily-tracked warnings with upgrades to suspensions if too many are accrued before others "fall off" (something like points accrued for traffic violations perhaps).
The third category is when an individual intentionally alters their actions to gain an unfair advantage from a bug, knowing that what they are doing is a violation of policy and the developers' intent. This is what, in most formal policy systems, would be called "cheating." For those who are using "exploit" as synonymous with "cheating" in this sense, exploitation certainly does merit culpability, indeed, often a high degree of it (there are plausibly cases where skipping the warnings and going straight to suspensions would be appropriate, so long as the individual's side of the story is thoroughly heard out during the investigation period, and the totality of the evidence actually places the individual in this category beyond reasonable doubt), but it is meaningless to attribute this sense of the term exploit to the state of the game in abstraction from any player action, so one could not say generically that what happened was an exploit in this sense.
This appears to be leading to a motte-and-bailey fallacy in which, by equivocating on the term "exploit," some folks are making a case for there being an exploit in the first sense (the motte) and using that conclusion to draw inferences about exploitation in the second sense (the bailey).
Love you bro!
