Mines

So at the moment units can't kill mines. I pointed this out to Jables and uber is working on it - but my main concern is about the credibility of the PA community how incredibly prevalent they have become in ranked games. Some players seem to be using them normally, and may not know of the issue. Others are blatantly exploiting them. I had a game the other day on Meso where my opponent did nothing but spam mines and AA around the middle of the island out of range of my levis (and my levis couldn't attack the mines). It used to be mines only came out every third game or so - which I keep track of because I put skitters in my land armies obsessively and find mines even if I don't run into them.

Is ranked really so competitive that this many players would exploit a bug like this? (The only player I've played in ranked recently who didn't use mines was [MBC]pieman09, props to him ) Is there / should there be some system for reporting exploitative play? Would this put an unnecessary burden on Uber? I know such a system may be abused by players who are just salty rather than aware of actual exploitation of unintended mechanics.

It makes no sense to report players who do things that you can do in the game. The game needs to be fixed, that's all.

When they fix the mines, this problem will go away. For now, in ranked games, just rush his combat fabber with a scout escort so you can see them.

You can also use infernos, or aoe type units to kill them.

I would say using broken mines is *not* something I can do in the game. I am aware of the bug and therefor using mines would be exploitative. I am not willing to engage in exploitative play.

Using broken mines is currently something that you can do. They've already fixed the bug, which is a lot easier than creating a reporting system. Just fix the root of the issue and you're done.

The whole point of this thread is that mines aren't the root of the issue, the chronic prevalent abuse of a broken mechanic in ranked play is. ^.^ It doesn't particularly matter what the mechanic is, the problem is how the community reacted to a broken mechanic.

edit: I don't actually think a reporting system is a good idea. I was trying to seed a conversation on the topic.

Well, before we can talk about the chronic prevalent abuse of a broken mechanic in ranked play, we shoud answer the question:
What is "broken"?

When I look at the endless numbers of posts about balance, I fear that there is no answer to it. Because like balance, it is highly subjective.
Look at the broken mechanics of mines. If you were a player that started just in the period where the bug was present, this mechanic wouldn't look like it was broken, it would rather look like it was intentionally put this way.
And this is a important point here, all what we are seeing is a mechanism, but mechanism do not account for any judgement. So basically speaking there is no distinction between good or bad use, you can use it in whatever way you like it.

If we had a rule set, that defined bad behaviour, we could judge if someone abuses something, but there is no rule - except you insist that "Do whatever the game play mechanics allows you to do" is a rule.

You won't win this one I'm afraid.... You shoulda seen the response I got when I complained about people using multiple accounts in ranked.

Apparently gentleman's rules / fair play / enjoying the game are all secondary concerns to rank and winning theses days (and pa has a relatively nice community compared to some).

Isn't it fixed in the new PTE?

Yeah, the specific issue mentioned is fixed... A big part of the op argument though is the fact it shouldn't have been an issue, but the overriding 'win at any cost' philosophy of the community made it into a bigger problem than it should've been...

As mentioned above, this stems from the problem that there is only game mechanics, which are solely mechanisms and not attached to any judgement. How should someone, not reading the forums, know what is right and what is not?

How about setting up an gentleman's agreement and making sure it is visible to the playerbase?

Well the issue is, when an *experienced player* (which anyone in the upper leagues should be) finds out about an obvious exploit, they really shouldn't be abusing it.

I mean I played TA on line for years back in the 90s, and there were *lots* of things broken in TA that could be exploited and never got officially fixed (not at least until much later with community patches). There were quite a few agreements put in place, at least between well known players, not to exploit obvious faults (for example the ability to fly bombers off the edge of the map to sneak past AA).

The attitude back then was *we've found this is broken, so don't do it please*. With PA what we have is *we've found this is broken, trololol lets pwn anyone who doesn't know about it and make them look stupid har har*....

As an old TA (and Spring RTS) veteran I find this attitude pretty frustrating, and frankly it stems from the highly competitive players that have come in from other online RTS titles *cough* Star Craft *cough*....

then don't.

There is absolutely no way in three blue hells you can force the internet at large to do something.
They won't stop using mines.

I havnt used it yet. Probably because mines havnt found their way into my playstyle yet. I'm all for exploiting whatever I can but this is a little too broken. Most exploits take time to exploit so you can be unsure if feature or exploit. The more it is exploited the quicker it will be fixed though.

sad but true.

it stems from the idea that competitive games should simply not have exploits that break gameplay.
Players find exploits and abuse them. If they turn out fun for gameplay they stay, if they break it the developer fixes it. Sure if they break gameplay so bad that it makes the game pointless (unlimited eco, unlimited unit hp, etc) players should refrain from using them, but I if I remember correctly mines can be killed using infernos right? So not totally broken.

Luckily PA has active developers, so it isn't that much of an issue. I mean how many really broken exploits are there in PA?

This is why gentleman's rules exist. Tali to the person you'll be fighting at the beginning of a match!

Ridiculous.
There should be no exploits in the firstplace. (Im 100% sure Uber will deal with that)
If there are exploits in the game the playerbase will abuse them, how naive are you ?
Doesn´t matter what game gerne etc. has literally nothing to do with sc2.
Just a general observation from tons of multiplayer games.

If you don´t want to deal with that play custom games with friends.

Yup, mines have been fixed in the PTE.

The Com-in-Astreus patrol exploit is still working, isn't it?

Same as building upside down below bridges on metal planets?

Also a number of funny little DoS attacks, using e.g. the pause menu, special UTF8 characters in chat, abuse of disconnects?

We still do have a number of rather obvious and annoying exploits in PA. And at least the first two ones aren't even technical issues - they are the result of a flaw in the game design.