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* ''GuildWars2'' saw a 1 second cooldown added to the Thief's stealth attacks with all weapons a short time before the ''Path of Fire'' expansion was out. This is due to the Deadeye elite specialization coming in this expansion and how stealth works in general that gave birth to an exploit based around the shortbow's [[PainfullySlowProjectile notoriously slow projectile]] : firing a stealth attack twice before the first one connects and breaks stealth. Already frustrating on its own since the shortbow's stealth attack immobilizes (a very strong status effect in this game in particular) and several applications stack in duration, the Deadeye's long range rifle attacks would allow this on a highly damaging stealth attack that also steals several enemy status buffs.
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* ''VideoGame/DarkSouls'' had it bad in several cases:
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* ''VideoGame/DarkSouls'' ''VideoGame/DarkSoulsI'' had it bad in several cases:
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** 1.05 patch nerfed the Elite Knight Set bad. As a result however, it spawned the dreaded "Masked Giant" setup. The Masks are head equipments that, while low on defense, has some very good effects. Mask of the Father, in particular, raises your Equip Burden, allowing you to equip heavy armors for torso, arms and legs. The Giant set is second-best set once fully upgraded, and using the Father Mask allows one to equip them all under 50% with minimal stat investments. But what truly broke this combination is the Dark Wood Grain Ring, which grants users an alternate "cartwheel" roll. Said roll is faster than even "fast roll" (roll motion for under 25% equip load) ''and'' has more invincibility-frames. So people were running with second-best armor and having the maneuverability of a ninja on meth. Even worse, the Hornet Ring boosted backstab damage to crazy levels, especially with knives and rapiers, and widespread practice of roll-stabbing [[note]]temporarily untargets an opponent, rolls quickly behind, turns around and backstabs[[/note]] and pass-through stabs [[note]]where, after passing an opponent, using the lock-on function to turn faster than the opponent can to backstab[[/note]] made the combination highly lethal. Patch 1.06 reduced the buffs granted by the Masks, Hornet Ring ''and'' the Dark Wood Grain Ring, effectively killing the combination thrice-over.
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** 1.05 patch nerfed the Elite Knight Set bad. As a result however, it spawned the dreaded "Masked Giant" setup. The Masks are head equipments that, while low on defense, has some very good effects. Mask of the Father, in particular, raises your Equip Burden, allowing you to equip heavy armors for torso, arms and legs. The Giant set is second-best set once fully upgraded, and using the Father Mask allows one to equip them all under 50% with minimal stat investments. But what truly broke this combination is the Dark Wood Grain Ring, which grants users an alternate "cartwheel" roll. Said roll is faster than even "fast roll" (roll motion for under 25% equip load) ''and'' has more invincibility-frames. So people were running with second-best armor and having the maneuverability of a ninja on meth. Even worse, the Hornet Ring boosted backstab damage to crazy levels, especially with knives and rapiers, and widespread practice of roll-stabbing [[note]]temporarily untargets an opponent, rolls quickly behind, turns around and backstabs[[/note]] and pass-through stabs [[note]]where, after passing an opponent, using the lock-on function to turn faster than the opponent can to backstab[[/note]] made the combination highly lethal. Patch 1.06 reduced the buffs granted by the Masks, Hornet Ring ''and'' the Dark Wood Grain Ring, effectively killing the combination thrice-over. Of course, [[MemeticMutation the Legend never dies]], and promptly discarded his rapier for a Chaos Zweihander instead...
** ''VideoGame/DarkSoulsII'' included one that was ''beneficial'' to players: To use the DualWielding "power stance", you must have at least 1.5 times the required Strength and Dexterity to wield each of the two weapons in one hand. However, ''Crown of the Old Iron King'' introduced the Smelter Hammer, which requires 70 Strength. This would require a Strength of 105 to power stance with, which is impossible as you cannot go above 99 Strength. So the developers altered the restriction on this weapon alone so that it could be power stanced at 99 Strength.
** ''VideoGame/DarkSoulsII'' included one that was ''beneficial'' to players: To use the DualWielding "power stance", you must have at least 1.5 times the required Strength and Dexterity to wield each of the two weapons in one hand. However, ''Crown of the Old Iron King'' introduced the Smelter Hammer, which requires 70 Strength. This would require a Strength of 105 to power stance with, which is impossible as you cannot go above 99 Strength. So the developers altered the restriction on this weapon alone so that it could be power stanced at 99 Strength.
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* Between player complaints and the way that it completely screwed over the matchmaking, Wargaming eventually figured out that it was probably for the best to limit teams of aircraft carriers and artillery in ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarships'' and ''VideoGame/WorldOfTanks'' respectively. In order to keep three highly coordinated long range bombardment units from simply focusing down enemies one at a time, the limitation was that any team of up to three players could only include one each of this particular unit type.
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* Several of the early games in the ''VideoGame/YouDontKnowJack'' series attempted to enforce NoFairCheating for players who tried to buzz in too quickly. On any standard question, if a player buzzed in before the answers appeared, the question would vanish, and the player would have to type in the answer, without the question. However, if a player typed in the right answer (by having seen the question before), they would sPtill earn the money. This was a major GameBreaker for people who played the games frequently. This changed starting with ''Volume 4: The Ride''. From then on, buzzing in too fast would give the player four nonsensical choices, [[FailureIsTheOnlyOption all of which counted as a wrong answer]].
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* Several of the early games in the ''VideoGame/YouDontKnowJack'' series attempted to enforce NoFairCheating for players who tried to buzz in too quickly. On any standard question, if a player buzzed in before the answers appeared, the question would vanish, and the player would have to type in the answer, without the question. However, if a player typed in the right answer (by having seen the question before), they would sPtill still earn the money. This was a major GameBreaker for people who played the games frequently. This changed starting with ''Volume 4: The Ride''. From then on, buzzing in too fast would give the player four nonsensical choices, [[FailureIsTheOnlyOption all of which counted as a wrong answer]].
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* ''VideoGame/PAYDAY2'' had several exploits patched out to counter people completing heists with little effort. The Cable Guy skill gave the player 10 cable ties when aced, which lead to people effortlessly stealthing heists since one person with the skill could tie up most of the hostages and if another player had the skill, then the group could tie down ''everyone''. The skill was nerfed to include only 5 cable ties, but it was then bumped up to 6 after [[TheyChangedItNowItSucks the community complained]]. The skill and/or mechanic was changed ''again'' later; allowing players to carry up to 10 ties yet only start with 6, but players could gradually get more cable ties from the ammo dropped by dead cops. This made both 'failed stealth' and extended loud heists a little easier, as you could re-tie any freed civilian hostages even if you had already used all of your starting cable ties, whilst keeping the challenge of successful stealth heists intact, as heists done in stealth would not yield enough ammo pickups to grant additional ties.
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* ''VideoGame/PAYDAY2'' had several exploits patched out to counter people completing heists with little effort. The Cable Guy skill gave the player 10 cable ties when aced, which lead to people effortlessly stealthing heists since one person with the skill could tie up most of the hostages and if another player had the skill, then the group could tie down ''everyone''. The skill was nerfed to include only 5 cable ties, but it was then bumped up to 6 after [[TheyChangedItNowItSucks the community complained]]. complained]].
** The skill and/or mechanic was changed ''again'' later; allowing players to carry up to 10 ties yet only start with 6, but players could gradually get more cable ties from the ammo dropped by dead cops. This made both 'failed stealth' and extended loud heists a little easier, as you could re-tie any freed civilian hostages even if you had already used all of your starting cable ties, whilst keeping the challenge of successful stealth heists intact, as heists done in stealth would not yield enough ammo pickups to grant additional ties.
** The skill and/or mechanic was changed ''again'' later; allowing players to carry up to 10 ties yet only start with 6, but players could gradually get more cable ties from the ammo dropped by dead cops. This made both 'failed stealth' and extended loud heists a little easier, as you could re-tie any freed civilian hostages even if you had already used all of your starting cable ties, whilst keeping the challenge of successful stealth heists intact, as heists done in stealth would not yield enough ammo pickups to grant additional ties.
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** The whole [=XP=] system was eventually overhauled due to a trend amongst players to play the levels as fast as possible by not going for any of the additional loot, meaning that people were playing a game about conducting criminal heists and robberies [[RefugeInAudacity by stealing as little as possible]]. The overhaul made it so that the experience earned from the heist was relative to how much loot was secured in the level, with more loot meaning more XP. This consequently made shorter levels less appealing, and the levels that have near-infinite loot bags in them jumped not only in how often they are played, but also in how long each instance goes on for on average.
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* Several of the early games in the ''VideoGame/YouDontKnowJack'' series attempted to enforce NoFairCheating for players who tried to buzz in too quickly. On any standard question, if a player buzzed in before the answers appeared, the question would vanish, and the player would have to type in the answer, without the question. However, if a player typed in the right answer (by having seen the question before), they would still earn the money. This was a major GameBreaker for people who played the games frequently. This changed starting with ''Volume 4: The Ride''. From then on, buzzing in too fast would give the player four nonsensical choices, [[FailureIsTheOnlyOption all of which counted as a wrong answer]].
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* Several of the early games in the ''VideoGame/YouDontKnowJack'' series attempted to enforce NoFairCheating for players who tried to buzz in too quickly. On any standard question, if a player buzzed in before the answers appeared, the question would vanish, and the player would have to type in the answer, without the question. However, if a player typed in the right answer (by having seen the question before), they would still sPtill earn the money. This was a major GameBreaker for people who played the games frequently. This changed starting with ''Volume 4: The Ride''. From then on, buzzing in too fast would give the player four nonsensical choices, [[FailureIsTheOnlyOption all of which counted as a wrong answer]].
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* ''PAYDAY 2'' had several exploits patched out to counter people completing heists with little effort. The Cable Guy skill gave the player 10 cable ties when aced, which lead to people effortlessly stealthing heists since one person with the skill could tie up most of the hostages and if another player had the skill, then the group could tie down ''everyone''. The skill was nerfed to include only 5 cable ties, but it was then bumped up to 6 after [[TheyChangedItNowItSucks the community complained]].
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* ''PAYDAY 2'' ''VideoGame/PAYDAY2'' had several exploits patched out to counter people completing heists with little effort. The Cable Guy skill gave the player 10 cable ties when aced, which lead to people effortlessly stealthing heists since one person with the skill could tie up most of the hostages and if another player had the skill, then the group could tie down ''everyone''. The skill was nerfed to include only 5 cable ties, but it was then bumped up to 6 after [[TheyChangedItNowItSucks the community complained]]. The skill and/or mechanic was changed ''again'' later; allowing players to carry up to 10 ties yet only start with 6, but players could gradually get more cable ties from the ammo dropped by dead cops. This made both 'failed stealth' and extended loud heists a little easier, as you could re-tie any freed civilian hostages even if you had already used all of your starting cable ties, whilst keeping the challenge of successful stealth heists intact, as heists done in stealth would not yield enough ammo pickups to grant additional ties.
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** ''Mario Kart 7'' had a glitch in the Maka Wuhu track in which you'd fall off the course and be dropped back at a later point, letting you skip almost an entire lap. It became such a problem that Nintendo issued a bug-fixing patch for the first time in its history. Said patch places a fence there preventing anyone from ever intentionally falling off over there.
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* In ''VideoGame/{{Shadowverse}}'', one of the expansions, ''Tempest of the Gods'', introduced two cards: Heavenly Aegis, a NighInvulnerable follower card that's immune to damage, destruction effects, and every card effect besides ones that change stats, and Test of Strength, a 2-turn field-wide effect which prevents followers on both sides from attacking the enemy leader unless they take out every enemy minion on the enemy side first. Heavenly Aegis was not affected Test of Strength, so it could freely ignore all enemy followers and attack face while the opponent's minions can never attack face because the Aegis was in the way, which meant only direct damage could hurt the user. 3 month's later, Test of Strength was changed to give every follower in play Ward instead. This change made the card behave almost exactly the same way as it did before except in two cases: followers with Ward-ignoring effects can now ignore Test of Strength, but more importantly, Heavenly Aegis is now forced to follow Test of Strength's rules.
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* In ''VideoGame/{{Shadowverse}}'', one of the expansions, ''Tempest of the Gods'', introduced two cards: Heavenly Aegis, a NighInvulnerable follower card that's immune to damage, destruction effects, and every card effect besides ones that change stats, and Test of Strength, a 2-turn field-wide effect which prevents followers on both sides from attacking the enemy leader unless they take out every enemy minion on the enemy side first. Heavenly Aegis was not affected Test of Strength, so it could freely ignore all enemy followers and attack face while the opponent's minions can never attack face because the Aegis was in the way, which meant only direct damage could hurt the user. 3 month's later, Test of Strength was changed to give every follower in play Ward instead. This change made the card behave almost exactly the same way as it did before except in two cases: followers with Ward-ignoring effects can now ignore Test of Strength, but more importantly, not only is Heavenly Aegis is now forced to follow Test of Strength's rules.rules, the enemy can also ignore the Aegis.
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* In ''VideoGame/Shadowverse'', one of the expansions, ''Tempest of the Gods'', introduced two cards: Heavenly Aegis, a NighInvulnerable follower card that's immune to damage, destruction effects, and every card effect besides ones that change stats, and Test of Strength, a 2-turn FieldEffect which prevents followers on both sides from attacking the enemy leader unless they take out every enemy minion on the enemy side first. Heavenly Aegis was not affected Test of Strength, so it could freely ignore all enemy followers and attack face while the opponent's minions can never attack face because the Aegis was in the way, which meant only direct damage could hurt the user. 3 month's later, Test of Strength was changed to give every follower in play Ward instead. This change made the card behave almost exactly the same way as it did before except in two cases: followers with Ward-ignoring effects can now ignore Test of Strength, but more importantly, Heavenly Aegis is now forced to follow Test of Strength's rules.
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* In ''VideoGame/Shadowverse'', ''VideoGame/{{Shadowverse}}'', one of the expansions, ''Tempest of the Gods'', introduced two cards: Heavenly Aegis, a NighInvulnerable follower card that's immune to damage, destruction effects, and every card effect besides ones that change stats, and Test of Strength, a 2-turn FieldEffect field-wide effect which prevents followers on both sides from attacking the enemy leader unless they take out every enemy minion on the enemy side first. Heavenly Aegis was not affected Test of Strength, so it could freely ignore all enemy followers and attack face while the opponent's minions can never attack face because the Aegis was in the way, which meant only direct damage could hurt the user. 3 month's later, Test of Strength was changed to give every follower in play Ward instead. This change made the card behave almost exactly the same way as it did before except in two cases: followers with Ward-ignoring effects can now ignore Test of Strength, but more importantly, Heavenly Aegis is now forced to follow Test of Strength's rules.
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* In ''VideoGame/Shadowverse'', one of the expansions, ''Tempest of the Gods'', introduced two cards: Heavenly Aegis, a NighInvulnerable follower card that's immune to damage, destruction effects, and every card effect besides ones that change stats, and Test of Strength, a 2-turn FieldEffect which prevents followers on both sides from attacking the enemy leader unless they take out every enemy minion on the enemy side first. Heavenly Aegis was not affected Test of Strength, so it could freely ignore all enemy followers and attack face while the opponent's minions can never attack face because the Aegis was in the way, which meant only direct damage could hurt the user. 3 month's later, Test of Strength was changed to give every follower in play Ward instead. This change made the card behave almost exactly the same way as it did before except in two cases: followers with Ward-ignoring effects can now ignore Test of Strength, but more importantly, Heavenly Aegis is now forced to follow Test of Strength's rules.
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* ''VideoGame/StarTrekOnline'' has had a number of them that has had fans fuming over them:
** One of the many bonus weekend events was Dilithium Weekend, which allowed players to gain, depending on the source, 1.5x or 2x more Dilithium for reputations and other projects. However, players discovered that this also applied towards the reputation rewards (which normally netted you 32,000 Dilithium and would up that to over 40,000), thus a rule of thumb was to never reach Tier 5 of a reputation or convert marks into Dilithium until such a weekend. Cryptic soon locked out anything reputation-wise from the event because that meant no one was completing reputations ''until'' the event, which just devalued reputations.
** After players complained about how hard it was for them to obtain event ships for all of their characters during the 4th Anniversary event, Cryptic changed it so that, when you completed the event once, you could get it for other characters on a 90% Discount. However, this meant that players could hoard the marks throughout their characters so that they could instantly get the ship the first day of the event and not touch the event afterwards, thus devaluing the event. Starting with the Summer 2015 event, this was changed to have specialized marks for each event.
** One of the many bonus weekend events was Dilithium Weekend, which allowed players to gain, depending on the source, 1.5x or 2x more Dilithium for reputations and other projects. However, players discovered that this also applied towards the reputation rewards (which normally netted you 32,000 Dilithium and would up that to over 40,000), thus a rule of thumb was to never reach Tier 5 of a reputation or convert marks into Dilithium until such a weekend. Cryptic soon locked out anything reputation-wise from the event because that meant no one was completing reputations ''until'' the event, which just devalued reputations.
** After players complained about how hard it was for them to obtain event ships for all of their characters during the 4th Anniversary event, Cryptic changed it so that, when you completed the event once, you could get it for other characters on a 90% Discount. However, this meant that players could hoard the marks throughout their characters so that they could instantly get the ship the first day of the event and not touch the event afterwards, thus devaluing the event. Starting with the Summer 2015 event, this was changed to have specialized marks for each event.
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* ''VideoGame/{{Warframe}}'' has seen quite a few of these over the years.
** When Syndicates first launched, there was no limit to how quickly you could gain reputation, which had two really bad effects. First, players could reach the max rank for a Syndicate in conceivably less than a day of hard work, even though the developers had intended for Syndicates to be a long-term goal. Second, players could easily farm up an endless supply of Syndicate rewards to trade to other players, throwing off the in-game economy and killing any sense of rarity these items might have had. Needless to say, the developers very quickly introduced a cap to the amount of reputation you could earn per day, albeit with some other quality-of-life changes to make reputation farming less painful.
** When login rewards were overhauled into the Daily Tribute system, a few Primed mods were added as rewards for reaching certain milestones; once it became clear that people might create alt accounts simply to farm these and sell them off to other players, the developers made the mods untradeable.
** Various mission types feature special rewards that can be earned by completing certain mostly-optional objectives. At first, the game would immediately show you what reward you'd get. Then people started abusing this by aborting missions when they didn't get the reward they wanted, and the developers changed it so that the rewards would be hidden until you finish the mission.
** Damage 2.0 was a large-scale effort to do this to the entire damage system, mainly to eliminate the so-called "rainbow builds" that predominated at the time. While it did force players to use different builds for different enemies, build diversity just ended up being restricted to which order you'd slot in your elemental mods.
** Originally, Redirection and Vitality would increase your shields and health by an amount proportional to their current value. Equipping both meant that almost nothing was a threat to you, so they got changed to calculate the extra from the base value at level 0 instead.
* ''VideoGame/BorderlandsThePreSequel'' featured a few changes that were obviously responses to issues from ''VideoGame/Borderlands2''.
** While Slag was an interesting idea in theory, it ended up being effectively mandatory at higher levels, since it boosted all other damage types with no downsides whatsoever. It got replaced by Cryo, which only benefited a few kinds of damage and suffered against shields, making it more situational.
** ''2''[='=]s level scaling got way out of hand, to the point where you'd be lucky if your equipment lasted longer than a couple of levels in TVHM and UVHM. ''TPS'' tweaked the numbers a bit, allowing you to hold onto good items for a while.
** Moxxi weapons were a major crutch in ''2'', since they'd heal you for a fraction of the damage you did. ''TPS'' opted to include only a couple, making them much rarer.
** Relics mostly gave BoringButPractical stat boosts, and most players gravitated towards the Bone of the Ancient, which would increase cooldown rate and elemental damage of a certain type. Oz Kits got a much wider array of situational bonuses, and none of them could boost either cooldown rate or individual damage types.
** When Syndicates first launched, there was no limit to how quickly you could gain reputation, which had two really bad effects. First, players could reach the max rank for a Syndicate in conceivably less than a day of hard work, even though the developers had intended for Syndicates to be a long-term goal. Second, players could easily farm up an endless supply of Syndicate rewards to trade to other players, throwing off the in-game economy and killing any sense of rarity these items might have had. Needless to say, the developers very quickly introduced a cap to the amount of reputation you could earn per day, albeit with some other quality-of-life changes to make reputation farming less painful.
** When login rewards were overhauled into the Daily Tribute system, a few Primed mods were added as rewards for reaching certain milestones; once it became clear that people might create alt accounts simply to farm these and sell them off to other players, the developers made the mods untradeable.
** Various mission types feature special rewards that can be earned by completing certain mostly-optional objectives. At first, the game would immediately show you what reward you'd get. Then people started abusing this by aborting missions when they didn't get the reward they wanted, and the developers changed it so that the rewards would be hidden until you finish the mission.
** Damage 2.0 was a large-scale effort to do this to the entire damage system, mainly to eliminate the so-called "rainbow builds" that predominated at the time. While it did force players to use different builds for different enemies, build diversity just ended up being restricted to which order you'd slot in your elemental mods.
** Originally, Redirection and Vitality would increase your shields and health by an amount proportional to their current value. Equipping both meant that almost nothing was a threat to you, so they got changed to calculate the extra from the base value at level 0 instead.
* ''VideoGame/BorderlandsThePreSequel'' featured a few changes that were obviously responses to issues from ''VideoGame/Borderlands2''.
** While Slag was an interesting idea in theory, it ended up being effectively mandatory at higher levels, since it boosted all other damage types with no downsides whatsoever. It got replaced by Cryo, which only benefited a few kinds of damage and suffered against shields, making it more situational.
** ''2''[='=]s level scaling got way out of hand, to the point where you'd be lucky if your equipment lasted longer than a couple of levels in TVHM and UVHM. ''TPS'' tweaked the numbers a bit, allowing you to hold onto good items for a while.
** Moxxi weapons were a major crutch in ''2'', since they'd heal you for a fraction of the damage you did. ''TPS'' opted to include only a couple, making them much rarer.
** Relics mostly gave BoringButPractical stat boosts, and most players gravitated towards the Bone of the Ancient, which would increase cooldown rate and elemental damage of a certain type. Oz Kits got a much wider array of situational bonuses, and none of them could boost either cooldown rate or individual damage types.
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** Every time a new weapon is introduced, there's a 75% chance something like this would happen due to the developers not paying close enough attention to the code. One of the most notable was the Red Tape Recorder which, on release, downgraded a building based on it's ''animation''. This meant that going from level 3 to level 1 took about 3 seconds, making it impossible to save the upgrades since unless the engineer was already whacking the building, it takes more than 3 seconds to actually knock the damn thing off. It also meant that the RtR was completely useless at getting rid of buildings, since a building build animation is exponentially longer than it's upgrade animation. The developers later admitted that this was not the intended effect, but a random hazard in the coding messed it up and it took quite a while to iron it out (it down downgrades at a set speed at all levels, which was the intended effect).
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** Every time a new weapon is introduced, there's a 75% chance something like this would happen due to the developers not paying close enough attention to the code. One of the most notable was the Red Tape Recorder which, on release, downgraded a building based on it's ''animation''. This meant that going from level 3 to level 1 took about 3 seconds, making it impossible to save the upgrades since unless the engineer was already whacking the building, it takes more than 3 seconds to actually knock the damn thing off. It also meant that the RtR [=RtR=] was completely useless at getting rid of buildings, since a building build animation is exponentially longer than it's upgrade animation. The developers later admitted that this was not the intended effect, but a random hazard in the coding messed it up and it took quite a while to iron it out (it down downgrades at a set speed at all levels, which was the intended effect).
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* ''VideoGame/StarWarsTheOldRepublic'' has an arena game called Huttball, which the point of it was to get the ball into the enemies goal while [[BloodSport killing everyone on the opposite team]]. Players started to just grab the ball and camp with it in a corner. It was changed so the ball would EXPLODE if it was left in the same place for to long ({{Justified|Trope}} because the game is for the Hutt's entertainment, and you were boring them).
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* ''VideoGame/StarWarsTheOldRepublic'' has an arena game called Huttball, which the point of it was to get the ball into the enemies goal while [[BloodSport killing everyone on the opposite team]]. Players started to just grab the ball and camp with it in a corner. It was changed so the ball would EXPLODE if it was left in the same place for to too long ({{Justified|Trope}} because the game is for the Hutt's entertainment, and you were boring them).
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*** ''[=MechWarrior=] Online'' has addressed the lots-of-identical-weapons problem with a '''particularly''' obvious rule patch - "ghost heat". Now firing two [=PPCs=] (say) at once still makes twice the heat of firing one, but firing three [=PPCs=] at once (or too quickly in sequence) makes 4.26 times the heat of firing one, firing four makes 7.36 times the heat, and it gets worse from there. Firing two AC/20s at once makes 3.92 times the heat of firing one; firing three AC/20s makes '''9.24''' times the heat of one!
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** ''Online'' uses "Quirks" to distinguish often near-identical mech chassis, which provide flat bonuses to certain specs. For example, a mech carrying missiles might be able to fire them 10% faster with 5% less heat. These quirks are primarily used as a band-aid to cover up poor mech design or weapon placement; one surefire way to determine the base performance of a mech is to gauge how many quirks it has. If it has few, it's probably a pretty solid mech. If it has a lot of powerful quirks, it's probably total dogshit and will live or die by these quirks. For example, the legendarily bad [[NonindicativeName and poorly named]] ''Awesome'' assault mech is built like a barn, with widely spaced, low-slung weapons and giant arms that protrude above cover. As such, it carries a host of extremely potent quirks that only make it ''barely'' usable.
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* Many ''SwordOfTheStars'' updates were not only enhancements but also to close loopholes. One such loophole, called the Destroyer Spam, involved sending a fleet made up of a number of dreadnoughts and/or cruisers and scores (maybe even hundreds) of destroyers. The game has an ArbitraryHeadcountLimit for battles in the form of command points, depending on the command ship used and technology researched. Basically, the points determine the number of your ships that can be in a battle at any given point. However, the "numerical superiority" mechanic was meant to encourage larger fleets and rewarded the larger fleet in a battle by increasing command points proportional to the number/class of ships larger than the other fleet(s). The LoopholeAbuse involved using the number of destroyers (useless by the time dreadnoughts are used but cheap and quick to build) to boost the numerical superiority and increase the ability to field more dreadnoughts/cruisers in battle. Naturally, the developers quickly put a cap on how many destroyers figure into the mechanic.
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* Many ''SwordOfTheStars'' ''VideoGame/SwordOfTheStars'' updates were not only enhancements but also to close loopholes. One such loophole, called the Destroyer Spam, involved sending a fleet made up of a number of dreadnoughts and/or cruisers and scores (maybe even hundreds) of destroyers. The game has an ArbitraryHeadcountLimit for battles in the form of command points, depending on the command ship used and technology researched. Basically, the points determine the number of your ships that can be in a battle at any given point. However, the "numerical superiority" mechanic was meant to encourage larger fleets and rewarded the larger fleet in a battle by increasing command points proportional to the number/class of ships larger than the other fleet(s). The LoopholeAbuse involved using the number of destroyers (useless by the time dreadnoughts are used but cheap and quick to build) to boost the numerical superiority and increase the ability to field more dreadnoughts/cruisers in battle. Naturally, the developers quickly put a cap on how many destroyers figure into the mechanic.
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* In the original version of ''VideoGame/DragonQuestVII'', any skills and spells learned were kept permanently, no matter which job the character used. With enough patience, every party member could learn every skill and spell in the game, making them incredibly overpowered and functionally identical to one another. When the game was remade years later, this was modified: now skills and spells from basic classes were permanent, but those from {{Prestige Class}}es could only be used while the character was using that specific class.
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* In the original ''VideoGame/WanganMidnight Maximum Tune'', the "gacha" exploit--periodically rapid-shifting to the previous gear and back--allows the player to gain short bursts of faster acceleration. ''Maximum Tune 2'' onwards prevents it by forcing the player's gear to neutral if they try it.
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* In the original ''VideoGame/WanganMidnight Maximum Tune'', the "gacha" exploit--periodically rapid-shifting to the previous gear and back--allows the player to gain short bursts of faster acceleration.acceleration; not only counter to the way the game is meant to be played but also inducing faster wear-and-tear on the shifter assembly. ''Maximum Tune 2'' onwards prevents it by forcing the player's gear to neutral if they try it.
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*** A similar problem occurred with a Paladin talent called Reckoning in ''The Burning Crusade''. Reckoning had a chance to give you a stack whenever you got hit, and your next basic attack would have you attack an extra number of times equal to the extra number of stacks. One Paladin noticed that Reckoning had no limit on the number of stacks you could get and had a Rogue hit him for hours until he had hundreds of Reckoning stacks, then walked up to the world raid boss Lord Kazzak and killed him in one hit (supposedly almost crashing the server when it had to resolve all the attacks at once). Not long afterward, Reckoning was patched to cap at four stacks.
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This is not an example of Obvious Rule Patch because the developers didn't prevent something from happening with the updates; they watered down very powerful grindings, which is the trope Nerf. I moved the bone meal and armor examples to that page.
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* ''VideoGame/{{Minecraft}}'' always has an eventual patch released to address balancing issues or automation. Bone meal, which acted as fertilizer for trees and crops, was changed to require several uses before the plants fully grow instead of requiring just one bone meal. Mobs that spawn in with tools/weapons and/or armor (when it was first introduced) was altered to have their dropped equipment be worn down so that players don't farm for free items with little effort. The dev team also stated that they heavily dislike automation methods that allow players to acquire resources with little effort, but do not mind the more crazier automation methods used to gather items since the player is putting a lot of effort into their farming.
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* ''OpenTTD'', a ''TransportTycoon'' derivative, had a number of ways that players could make money faster or spend less than intended, but these required insane amounts of micromanagement[[note]]For example: after delivering a load of cargo, a vehicle will head back empty to pick up another load. If you sell the vehicle at the point of unloading and buy a replacement at the loading dock, you don't need to pay the operating costs while it drives back.[[/note]], and nobody used them. Then, version 0.7 removed the original [[ArtificialStupidity AI]] and let players design their own AIs -- and someone [[http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=39756 wrote an AI]] that exploited ''all'' those edge cases. Cue version 0.7.2, aka "eliminate the creative use of game mechanics".
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* ''OpenTTD'', ''VideoGame/OpenTTD'', a ''TransportTycoon'' fan-made ''VideoGame/TransportTycoon'' derivative, had a number of ways that players could make money faster or spend less than intended, but these required insane amounts of micromanagement[[note]]For example: after delivering a load of cargo, a vehicle will head back empty to pick up another load. If you sell the vehicle at the point of unloading and buy a replacement at the loading dock, you don't need to pay the operating costs while it drives back.[[/note]], and nobody used them. Then, version 0.7 removed the original [[ArtificialStupidity AI]] and let players design their own AIs -- and AIs--and someone [[http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=39756 wrote an AI]] that exploited ''all'' those edge cases. Cue version 0.7.2, aka "eliminate the creative use of game mechanics".
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* In ''VideoGame/TheBindingOfIsaac Afterbirth +'', the Void item is an activated item which destroys any pedestal items in the room upon use. If the pedestal item is another activated item, the Void permanently gains the effect of that item. It didn't take long for players to figure out that this could be used to copy the effects of activated items which are normally destroyed upon use, like Diplopia (duplicates all pickups and items in a room) and Mama Mega! (kills almost everything in every room for that floor except bosses), and use them without limit. The game was quickly patched to render these items immune to Void's effect -- attempting it immediately uses the items without copying their powers.
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** For a long time, Triple Triad tournaments were unpopular due to players rigging games between their friends or people paying them to rig games. The game allowed players to pick and choose who they wanted to play against in the tournament, which is how all the cheating began. The developers eventually modified this rule in several ways; first, players have to visit the Battle Hall in order to play in the tournament and said hall is in an instance, which prevents people trying to meet with others wanting to do win trading. Second, the game will pick opponents for you instead of allowing people to pick who they want to battle against. Thirdly, each player can only be played against once. The rule changes have effectively eliminated win trading and the top 20 players are now people who actually play instead of cheating.
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*** The Endless Battle Clause itself had to be modified several times to account for [[{{Troll}} certain creative types]] finding ways around the convoluted ban, which at its core involved a leppa berry [[note]]Restores 10 PP to any move that runs out of PP[[/note]], the move Recycle [[note]]Recovers a used item, such as a leppa berry, in this case allowing for infinite PP restoration[[/note]], and some method of keeping the opponent from suiciding from Struggle recoil, of which there are shockingly many methods.
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*** A similar problem occurred with a Paladin talent called Reckoning in ''The Burning Crusade''. Reckoning had a chance to give you a stack whenever you got hit, and your next basic attack would have you attack an extra number of times equal to the extra number of stacks. One Paladin noticed that Reckoning had no limit on the number of stacks you could get and had a Rogue hit him for hours until he had hundreds of Reckoning stacks, then walked up to the world raid boss Lord Kazzak and killed him in one hit (supposedly almost crashing the server when it had to resolve all the attacks at once). Not long afterward, Reckoning was patched to cap at four stacks.
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* Due to the infamous amount of infinite combos and glitches that dominated competitive play for ''VideoGame/MarvelVsCapcom2'', Capcom's made a point of patching infinite combos out of ''VideoGame/MarvelVsCapcom3''.
** ''Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3'' added [[Franchise/AceAttorney Phoenix Wright]], who was a stance based fighter. He gathers evidence in Investigation mode, uses them in Trial mode and if he has 3 good pieces of evidence and lands an Objection, he enters Turnabout mode, which has a time limit, but during this time he has the highest damage output in the game. The timer only runs while Phoenix is on point. When the game was released, he was instantly shot to Assist tier due the Turnabout timer (and [[BackgroundMusicOverride theme song]]) freezing when he's switched out and his Press The Witness (a forward moving barrage move) assist being practically invincible (he can be hit from behind but that's very impractical) while he's in turnabout mode, even being able to interrupt all non-cinematic Hypers (i.e. any Hyper Combo that doesn't shift the camera). This was quickly patched, forcing people to use him more offensively, ironically enough. The timer still freezes while he's inactive, however.
** ''Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3'' added [[Franchise/AceAttorney Phoenix Wright]], who was a stance based fighter. He gathers evidence in Investigation mode, uses them in Trial mode and if he has 3 good pieces of evidence and lands an Objection, he enters Turnabout mode, which has a time limit, but during this time he has the highest damage output in the game. The timer only runs while Phoenix is on point. When the game was released, he was instantly shot to Assist tier due the Turnabout timer (and [[BackgroundMusicOverride theme song]]) freezing when he's switched out and his Press The Witness (a forward moving barrage move) assist being practically invincible (he can be hit from behind but that's very impractical) while he's in turnabout mode, even being able to interrupt all non-cinematic Hypers (i.e. any Hyper Combo that doesn't shift the camera). This was quickly patched, forcing people to use him more offensively, ironically enough. The timer still freezes while he's inactive, however.
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* Due to the infamous amount of infinite combos and glitches that dominated competitive play for ''VideoGame/MarvelVsCapcom2'', Capcom's made a point of patching as much infinite combos out of ''VideoGame/MarvelVsCapcom3''.
''VideoGame/MarvelVsCapcom3'' as they can. Players eventually discovered ways to perform infinites however, although they're not as abusable as 2.
** ''Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3'' added [[Franchise/AceAttorney Phoenix Wright]], who was a stance based fighter. He gathers evidence in Investigation mode, uses them in Trial mode and if he has 3 good pieces of evidence and lands an Objection, he enters Turnabout mode, which has a time limit, but during this time he has the highest damage output in the game. The timer only runs while Phoenix is on point. When the game was released, he was instantly shot to Assist tier due the Turnabout timer (and [[BackgroundMusicOverride theme song]]) freezing when he's switched out and his Press The Witness (a forward moving barrage move) assist being practically invincible (he can be hit from behind but that's very impractical) while he's in turnabout mode, even being able to interrupt all non-cinematic Hypers (i.e. any Hyper Combo that doesn't shift the camera). Not to mention virtually every assist with good invincibility frames were nerfed from vanilla, which made Phoenix dominate this niche. This was quickly patched, forcing people to use him more offensively, ironically enough. The timer still freezes while he's inactive, however.
** ''Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3'' added [[Franchise/AceAttorney Phoenix Wright]], who was a stance based fighter. He gathers evidence in Investigation mode, uses them in Trial mode and if he has 3 good pieces of evidence and lands an Objection, he enters Turnabout mode, which has a time limit, but during this time he has the highest damage output in the game. The timer only runs while Phoenix is on point. When the game was released, he was instantly shot to Assist tier due the Turnabout timer (and [[BackgroundMusicOverride theme song]]) freezing when he's switched out and his Press The Witness (a forward moving barrage move) assist being practically invincible (he can be hit from behind but that's very impractical) while he's in turnabout mode, even being able to interrupt all non-cinematic Hypers (i.e. any Hyper Combo that doesn't shift the camera). Not to mention virtually every assist with good invincibility frames were nerfed from vanilla, which made Phoenix dominate this niche. This was quickly patched, forcing people to use him more offensively, ironically enough. The timer still freezes while he's inactive, however.
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** ''Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3'' added [[Franchise/AceAttorney Phoenix Wright]], who was a stance based fighter. He gathers evidence in Investigation mode, uses them in Trial mode and if he has 3 good pieces of evidence and lands an Objection, he enters Turnabout mode, which has a time limit, but during this time he has the highest damage output in the game. The timer only runs while Phoenix is on point. When the game was released, he was instantly shot to Assist tier due the Turnabout timer (and [[BackgroundMusicOverride theme song]]) freezing when he's switched out and his Press The Witness (a forward moving barrage move) assist being practically invincible (he can be hit from behind but that's very impractical) while he's in turnabout mode, even being able to interrupt all uncinematic hypers. This was quickly patched, forcing people to use him more offensively, ironically enough. The timer still freezes while he's inactive, however.
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** ''Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3'' added [[Franchise/AceAttorney Phoenix Wright]], who was a stance based fighter. He gathers evidence in Investigation mode, uses them in Trial mode and if he has 3 good pieces of evidence and lands an Objection, he enters Turnabout mode, which has a time limit, but during this time he has the highest damage output in the game. The timer only runs while Phoenix is on point. When the game was released, he was instantly shot to Assist tier due the Turnabout timer (and [[BackgroundMusicOverride theme song]]) freezing when he's switched out and his Press The Witness (a forward moving barrage move) assist being practically invincible (he can be hit from behind but that's very impractical) while he's in turnabout mode, even being able to interrupt all uncinematic hypers.non-cinematic Hypers (i.e. any Hyper Combo that doesn't shift the camera). This was quickly patched, forcing people to use him more offensively, ironically enough. The timer still freezes while he's inactive, however.
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** Dark Void is a very powerful move in Double Battles (putting both opposing Pokemon to sleep), normally mitigated by it being exclusive to [[OlympusMons Darkrai]], a Pokemon normally banned in competitions. However, Smeargle can learn any move in the game through Sketch, and as a result Dark Void Smeargle ran rampant through the Video Game Championships scene for years, annoying players to no end due to how difficult it was to counter. ''VideoGame/PokemonSunAndMoon'' not only [[{{Nerf}} Nerfed Dark Void's accuracy to 50%]], but made it ''automatically fail if used by any Pokemon other than Darkrai''.
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** Another issue in the same update was the Fists of Steel and the Buffalo Steak Sandvich; the Fists of Steel negated 50% of the range damage at the cost of doubling melee damage. This is intended for a heavy to get to the front lines with little fear about suffering too much damage. The Buffalo Steak Sandvich was part of an item set that included a pair of gloves that gave you more damage, in exchange for health (which made the combination into a sort of glass cannon). Unfortunately, paired with the Fists of Steel turned the heavy into a walking battering ram, able to close the distance between almost all classes in an instant and being near-immune to damage (the 50% damage reduction from the fists pretty much negated the Buffalo's Minicrit debuff and then some). Paired with a Medic some heavies walk right up to a sentry and punch it to death, ''without being ubercharged''. They later toned down the amount of damage negation as well as slowed the weapon change time, making it much easier to deal with heavies who try this.
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** Another issue in the same update was the Fists of Steel and the Buffalo Steak Sandvich; the Fists of Steel negated 50% of the range damage at the cost of doubling melee damage. This is intended for a heavy to get to the front lines with little fear about suffering too much damage. The Buffalo Steak Sandvich was part of an item set that included a pair of gloves that gave you more damage, in exchange for health (which made the combination into a sort of glass cannon). Unfortunately, paired with the Fists of Steel turned the heavy into a walking battering ram, able to close the distance between almost all classes in an instant and being near-immune to damage (the 50% damage reduction from the fists pretty much negated the Buffalo's Minicrit debuff and then some). Paired with a Medic some heavies could walk right up to a sentry gun and punch it to death, ''without being ubercharged''. They later toned down the amount of damage negation as well as slowed the weapon change time, making it much easier to deal with heavies who try this.
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** Duties allow the party to vote on abandoning it for whatever reason without penalty, but to mitigate people from abusing it (such abandoning an unpopular dungeon if it's picked for the daily roulette), at least 15 minutes need to pass before the feature becomes available.
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* Several of the early games in the ''VideoGame/YouDontKnowJack'' series attempted to enforce NoFairCheating for players who tried to buzz in too quickly. On any standard question, if a player buzzed in before the answers appeared, the question would vanish, and the player would have to type in the answer, without the question. However, if a player typed in the right answer (by having seen the question before), they would still earn the money. This was a major GameBreaker for people who played the games frequently. This changed starting with ''Volume 4: The Ride''. From then on, buzzing in too fast would give the player four nonsensical choices, [[FailureIsTheOnlyOption all of which counted as a wrong answer]].
* In an early version of ''VideoGame/NeverwinterNights'', a loophole in the rules was found that let monks wear a shield in their offhand, making them virtually unhittable for no real downside. In the very next patch, monks were made unable to wear shields and retain monk dodge / attack bonuses at the same time.
** And then Monk/Shifter builds began exploiting the equipment merge mechanism while polymorphed; they would get the AC bonuses from gear, and then get the monk dodge bonus after merging tower shields and full plates (since they weren't actually wearing them after morphing). Later versions turned all AC bonuses earned this way into dodge bonuses, which only stack up to a hard limit.
* In an early release of ''VideoGame/Battlefield2142'', it was entirely possible for two soldiers with nothing better to do to destroy their own Titan (and thus force their team to lose the round) by forcing a transport through the floor of the hangar bay and into the Core.
* ''VideoGame/EveOnline'' has had several updates that were borderline Obvious Rule Patches. However, the patch that prevented carriers from transporting loaded cargo ships was a glaringly Obvious Rules Patch.
** Similarly, nowadays [[HandWave graviton harmonics]] prevent [[StopHavingFunGuys players]] from taking a 3000 m³ cargo container that holds 3300 m³ of cargo... and putting another 3000 m³ container that holds 3300 m³ inside it leaving 300 m³ of free space. With enough cargo containers you could once haul an entire solar system's worth of ore in a single, moderately sized and priced ship.
* A fairly obscure item from ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'' called the Luffa would remove any bleed effect. A boss over 20 levels later would put a hefty bleed dot on raid members at fairly regular intervals. Everyone would equip their Luffa and make Moroes a total joke. The next patch put a spell level cap on the Luffa ie. you couldn't remove bleed effects over level 60 anymore.
** Other such items got similar treatments, essentially turning this into standard procedure. There are many such items in ''Mists of Pandaria'' that already state that they won't work on players above level 94... long before the next expansion was even announced.
** Similar restrictions exist for item enchantments, both to limit abuse of high-level enchantments on low level items and to keep certain temporary effects out of later content rather than removing them completely.
** An old patch for ''[=WoW=]'' allowed everyone in a group to place marks - graphical icons that go above monsters or players and are used to make them more visible or indicate a kill order for the group - instead of only the group's leader being able to do it. There followed an unofficial add-on which allowed players to automatically strobe the marks across the group members, rapidly swapping them around, much to the annoyance of many players. The very next patch added a notification of who was setting marks.
** In July of 2009, a hunter was discovered with a worgen (a sentient, werewolf-like creature) for a pet, and within a few hours the hunter community had figured out how and where to get [[http://www.wowhead.com/npc=24277 this particular beast]]; pretty much everyone who could obtain one had one. Within two days the tamed worgen were patched to have all their skills and attacks completely removed, and after a few more days they were replaced entirely by ordinary white wolves. This is only the case for the single Worgen, any "beast" that's not a beast (such as a slime or a hydra) were allowed to stay.
** There was a video posted on Website/YouTube a few years back where a paladin killed, in one move, a raid boss designed for dozens of players to take several minutes to bring down. The Reckoning talent had the effect that when a paladin was struck they might gain a stack of Reckoning, causing their next attack to hit twice. One enterprising player dueled a rogue many times without ever striking back, then went up to the boss in question and proceeded to hit it more than a thousand times in one blow. Within twenty four hours the talent was nerfed so that it caused you to hit ''twice'' for the next few attacks. Of course, seeing as Reckoning was about the only ability in the entire game that possessed neither stack limit nor duration, this was only to be expected.
** Before the ''Cataclysm'' expansion revamped most quests from vanilla ''[=WoW=]'', there was a long Alliance quest chain in the zone of Ashenvale where the intermediate quests made use of an item called "Dartol's Rod of Transformation", which temporarily turned the player into a furbolg. The change was purely cosmetic, but the rod was usable anywhere in the world and had no use limit, so players often kept the rod and never turned in the quest, as it was more attractive than the actual quest rewards. In patch 3.0.2, the text "Only usable in Ashenvale" was added to its description, but the restriction was never actually implemented and it was still usable outside Ashenvale. Eventually, Blizzard gave up and removed the requirement to turn in the rod at the end of the quest, allowing players to complete the quest and still keep it indefinitely. The modern version of the quest chain, introduced in ''Cataclysm'', uses another item called simply "Dartol's Rod", which is indeed only usable in Ashenvale. However, players who had the old rod before ''Cataclysm'' are allowed to keep it.
*** This change was later reverted, though some versions of the rod still have the requirement stated in the item description without being actually applied. Furthermore, Blizzard announced that in ''Warlords of Draenor'', most such quest items can be kept after the questline.
** Due to the way stats scale, a level 80 Paladin used some ''Mists of Pandaria'' drops to greatly increase his stats beyond what a level 90 in the same gear would have. Combined with Vengeance, which boosts attack power based on the strength of enemy attacks, he was able to solo several bosses in Mogu'Shan Vaults, a level 90 raid. Blizzard quickly capped Vengeance so that it could not exceed the health of the user.
** Early in the game's release, endgame PvP suffered from a problem where the damage a player did - suitable and balanced for PvE - was so high compared to their own health that certain classes could kill other endgame players outright in a single hit or two. PvP became a game of getting off that first devastatingly powerful nuke before the enemy could. This problem was addressed by adding Resilience to the game: A stat which exists for absolutely no purpose except to reduce the damage players take when facing enemy players.
*** Later on, PvP Power was added as an offensive stat, basically to counteract Resilience. In ''Warlords of Draenor'', Blizzard looks to largely eliminate both stats in favor of other tweaks to the basic damage calculations, but a special rule will still exist to limit the amount of damage deal with critical hits to other players.
*** PvP in general was subject to a lot of rule changes, especially when it comes to stun and crowd control effects. Those were fine in PvE, but for PvP most crowd control effects were nerfed significantly in a number of ways, some of which also applied in PvE. In addition, a trinket was added that allowed players to break out of such effects once every 2 minutes, which previously only the undead racial ''Will of the Forsaken'' ability could do.
* In ''DefenseOfTheAncients'', an item called "Kelen's Dagger" allows teleportation of one's own hero, and it's possible to teleport yourself into terrain that you cannot escape from, except by using Kelen's Dagger again later. Two heroes who can affect other heroes are arbitrarily forbidden from using Kelen's at all. [=DotA=] 2 now allows Pudge and Vengeful Spirit to use this item (now simply known as Blink Dagger), but attempting to trap an enemy on a cliff grants the enemy free pathing for a few seconds.
** Meanwhile there are items such as Force Staff, and the heroes affected by this restriction can be teleported onto cliffs by certain other heroes. Vengeful Spirit can also ask an ally to teleport onto an inescapable cliff, then use her Swap ability, then sit there waiting to deposit an unsuspecting enemy onto the cliff. In ''Dota 2'' the InvisibleWall on many cliffs has been removed, making cliff trapping a legitimate strategy using abilities such as Telekinesis or Vacuum. The restriction remains though, for largely arbitrary reasons.
** A blatant example is the nerf to bottlecrowing. The idea behind the strategy is that the mid laner, who usually buys a bottle (an item that refills mana and health and can be recharged at the fountain), uses the courier to continuously ferry the bottle back and forth to the fountain, making it almost impossible to push them out of the lane through attrition. The nerf? [[spoiler:The courier now moves 30% slower when carrying an empty bottle (but not a full one or any other item including heavy weapons).]]
** Another one was an interaction between Pudge's Meat Hook and Chen's Test of Faith, which if executed properly would pull anyone unfortunate enough to be hooked all the way to the fountain. Soon after this tactic was successfully used at ''The International 3'' to devastating effect, this interaction was completely removed.
* Starting in version 1.3, ''VideoGame/{{Iji}}'' tells you in some places (the arena for [[spoiler:Asha's rematch]] comes to mind) that "there's no need to fire your Nanogun here". Sometimes it was literally true, but in many cases it was because firing your Nanogun there could bug out the game.
** ''Iji'' has a few things like this in the later versions. When it became possible to win the game without killing anyone, this necessitated the player not fighting one of the bosses, because the only way to get by [[spoiler:is to kill him]]. The solution? [[spoiler:Have a new character help you by one-shotting him.]] However, ten minutes are added to your time... because otherwise a pacifist speedrun on the first couple of levels would be much faster than previously. The developer, Daniel Remar, wanted speedruns to be fair between versions.
** In a later update, it doesn't count as a kill if you reflect an enemy's fire back into them with a force field weapon. Previously, "pacifist" players would gather dropped power-ups by stocking up on health, moving right next to enemies, and catching rockets with the main character's face for the SplashDamage.
* ''VideoGame/KingdomOfLoathing'':
** Combat automatically ends with a special message after 30 rounds of combat (or 50 rounds for some bosses) have elapsed with no winner, with a net result equivalent to successfully running away on the 31st round. This was apparently done originally to prevent a possible near-infinite loop that would result if the player's Muscle was too low to hit the monster and his/her Moxie was too high for the monster to hit him/her, while his/her combat initiative was too low to run away. Newer mechanics make such a situation much less plausible, but the rule has remained and still serves to cap the potential effectiveness of any strategy that involves stalling and drawing out combat for per-round effects. Also, miner ghosts only take 1 point of damage from physical attacks. Without a round limit, a sufficiently skilled player could resort to CherryTapping to get a large number of stat points.
** The NinjaPirateZombieRobot familiar used to randomly give Meat with a fixed chance of about 1 in 9 per round of combat. Since this made it advantageous to drag out combat to as close to 30 turns as possible without going over and thus using up much more server resources than normal, the NPZR now only gives Meat in the first 10 turns of combat.
** Another much-maligned patch came with [=NS13=]: Before [=NS13=], players found that increasing monster level (which also increased XP gains) and increasing noncombat encounter chance were both extremely useful. So when [=NS13=] rolled out, the devs added a rule that made increased monster level cancel out increased noncombat chance. Unfortunately, this had the side effect of making monster level increasers less than useless. Over a year and a half later, the devs realized that [[ScrappyMechanic nobody liked this in the slightest]] and removed the rule.
** Another rule is "can't use Double Fisted Skull Smashing to wield a Chefstaff in your offhand." Due to the way DFSS (halves the power of offhand weapons but leaves enchantments alone) and Chefstaves (lowest power possible but incredible enchantments) work, this rule prevents two builds, a rather unpleasant one and a horribly broken one: the former, a weapon/chefstaff combo that makes a MagicKnight with no detriment for either one, the latter, a Chefstaff/Chefstaff combo that results in spells so powerful that it can take down anything almost in one hit.
** The ''[=KoL=]'' staff's usual modus operandi in the event of players accomplishing things they didn't count on players accomplishing is to reward the player for their cleverness/tenacity, then change the game so that the stunt can't be repeated. (Or at least, ''theoretically'' can't be repeated; after the first person beat the final boss without the [[UnusualEuphemism Smurf]], the changes they made turned out not to be sufficient to keep it from happening again. Now you auto-win or auto-lose depending on whether or not you have the item in question.)
* In the ProgrammingGame ''[=RoboWar=]'', allowing robots to teleport and fire weapons interchangeably in the same chronon let a robot with sufficient processor speed leap a considerable distance (depending on its current energy) to put a lethal contact shot into another robot, leaving it next to no time to defend or counterattack -- and executing another move after the shot (the "jerker" strategy) made it harder to target for a counterattack. That the robot's energy would already go deeply negative in the middle of the chronon didn't matter much (so long as it didn't fall below -200), since it wouldn't become immobilized by having negative energy until the next chronon. This allowed the "dasher" strategy to achieve considerable dominance, and in time most top-placing robots in tournaments, dashers or not, had to use "anti-dasher" techniques. To rebalance the game, a patch was instated (amid much controversy) to prevent move/shoot in the same chronon.
** An earlier patch was the "aggressive scoring system". The original scoring system simply granted your robot one point for surviving to the end of the battle. A game-theory analysis of this says the optimal strategy is to only start attacking if your opponent does, and sure enough, by the eighth tournament, the vast majority of "battles" consisted of two robots sitting there peacefully until the timer ran out, at which point they both scored a point. The patch was to change the scoring system to give one point for defeating the other robot (to encourage aggression) and one point for surviving to the end of the battle (to discourage suicidal aggression).
* The Silencer skill in ''[[VideoGame/FireEmblemElibe Fire Emblem: Rekka no Ken]]'' and ''[[VideoGame/FireEmblemTheSacredStones The Sacred Stones]]'' gives your Assassin the chance to instantly kill any foe, so long as they have a chance to land a critical hit. This allowed them to plow through most bosses with ease. While this was negated by the final bosses of both games, whose equipment automatically reduced the enemy's crit chance to 0, it still left most other bosses vulnerable. It was obviously fixed in ''[[VideoGame/FireEmblemTellius Path of Radiance]]'' and ''[[VideoGame/FireEmblemTellius Radiant Dawn]]'', where the description of the Silencer skill (now renamed Lethality) simply states it doesn't work on bosses without any reasoning or attempt at justification.
** Turned on its head in ''[[VideoGame/FireEmblemAwakening Awakening]]''. Now Lethality CAN be done on bosses; it just has a much lower chance of happening (unlike the Elibe games, it's independent of crit rate but unlike the Tellius duology, its activation chance is the user's Skill stat divided by four out of a hundred as opposed to 2). There are still bosses immune to it, but they're denoted by the special "Dragon Skin" skill which also grants other effects (like immunity to Counter). And Lethality can still activate; it'll just do the same amount of damage as a normal attack and won't have [[GoryDiscretionShot the graphics filter]].
** In games with both UnusableEnemyEquipment and VideoGameStealing, enemy-only weapons the game doesn't want you to have (mostly PoisonedWeapons) inexplicably turn into more standard weapons if you have a Thief steal them. The GBA games get around this by preventing Thieves from stealing weapons at all. (Also creating the ObviousRulePatch of preventing you from simply stealing all a boss' weapons to render them harmless)
** Most games in the series have a Dancer or similar unit, who can give other units an ExtraTurn. They make sure you ''never'' have two Dancers in your army at any one time, as they could otherwise endlessly dance for eachother for easy LevelGrinding. There are two specific situations where it's possible to clone a Dancer ([[DittoFighter Xane]] in the ''Akaniea'' games, the Replicate skill or specific chapter gimmicks in ''Fates'') and DevelopersForesight caught those too: Xane can't dance if he copies a Dancer, while in ''Fates'' if one "copy" of Azura sings, the other cannot for the rest of the turn.
* In the {{MMORPG}} ''Lords of Legend'', your level bonus is apparently capped at 5 times the number of troops. Few know about the cap, because in order to get even close to the cap, you have to spend weeks doing the exact opposite of what you are supposed to.
** It is also played straight with the 'invisibility' strategy (You don't show up on attack pages if you haven't won an attack yet), which has been severely nerfed with increasingly harsh and arbitrary restrictions on invisible players.
* ''Website/GaiaOnline'' has had quite a few:
** First, there's soulbinding, the most famous and controversial of the lot. In the first couple months of open beta, users were allowed to buy and sell their rings. This caused a few problems. The most obvious, of course, was that people could buy their way through the game, resulting in many CL 10s who had no idea what they were doing. Another effect was on the economy. Charge Orbs, the items that power up rings, were earned in-game, not bought. Higher-level rings are naturally more valued than weak ones, so people were charging up rings and then selling them, effectively creating expensive items with little to no cost to the users. This was quickly changed so that rings were "soulbound", meaning they could no longer be put on the marketplace.
*** But only rings acquired after the update or older rings that are equipped. Unsoulbound rings are still being sold, and there is also a new ring [[RevenueEnhancingDevices sold for real money]] as a Valentine's Day event item. It has officially been described as being permanently unsoulbound.
** A bit later, CL caps were placed on boss lairs so that people couldn't recruit their CL 10 friends to help them beat the boss. Clever players soon found a way to circumvent this by wearing low-level rings when entering the boss area, then switching out to their stronger ones. The devs soon closed this loophole.
* In ''VideoGame/{{Civilization}} III'', players could initially chop down and replant forests in relatively short order. This made a certain amount of sense, up to a point anyway, but it also created an infinite supply of construction materials. It was quickly patched so that [[FridgeLogic replanted forests contained no useful wood]].
* In ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXI'', you gain tactical points (TP) each time you hit an enemy, the amount varying based on the delay of your weapon (higher = more TP per hit). You have to have at least 100% TP (of a 300% cap) in order to perform a weapon skill. This sounds reasonable, except very early on, weapon skills that hit multiple times gave full TP return per hit, leading to being able to perform these weapon skills back-to-back with no need to accumulate TP in the mean time assuming you used a special type of otherwise useless weapon with almost no damage rating and max delay. Creator/SquareEnix patched this very quickly so that only the first hit (first two when you're dual-wielding) give full TP, and subsequent hits only give 1%.
** [[ThatOneBoss Absolute Virtue]], who is for all intents and purposes totally invincible due to his ability to use the most powerful abilities of every job, as well as cast high-level black magic that players don't even have access to instantaneously and frequently, wiping out alliances of players in seconds. Every time a method is discovered to defeat him, Square-Enix will immediately squash it by [[NewPowersAsThePlotDemands giving Absolute Virtue new resistances and powers as his flaws were discovered]].
*** When players killed him by attacking him from areas he couldn't fight back, the developers gave him the ability to draw players to him if they got too far away.
*** Later on, the devs were pressured into rethinking the absurd difficulty of some of their bosses after some bad publicity involving an [[BladderOfSteel 18-hour-long fight against a different monster]], so they lowered the HP of both that boss and Absolute Virtue and forced them to despawn if not defeated within two hours. Players discovered that a legion of Dark Knights using a combination of the job ability Souleater [[CastFromHitPoints (consumes HP to increase damage dealt)]] and Blood Weapon (restores HP equal to melee damage inflicted), he could be bumrushed into defeat. Within days, a patch was made that gave Absolute Virtue (and ONLY Absolute Virtue - other monsters that had previously been defeated with this method were totally untouched) increasing resistance to Souleater damage, making it useless.
*** A theoretical method of defeating him involved using the Scholar's Helix line of spells, which deal a fairly large amount of damage over time. The helix was placed on the enemy, and then a group of Scholars simultaneously use a job ability that doubles the damage dealt by the next tic of damage while halving its overall duration. The result is that most enemies in the game will drop dead immediately, although execution requires very precise timing (and, in most cases, botting). As soon as people discussed how it could be used to defeat Absolute Virtue, "certain notorious monsters" were given a resistance to the use of the JA. Guess who was at the top of the priority list?
* ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}'' has been subject to a few:
** In the earliest instance for the series, in Gen I Psychic-types dominated the metagame due to high stats, good movepools, nothing resisted Psychic-type damage, and the only attack type that Psychic-types were weak to (Bug) was too weak to do much damage to them and was not learned by many Pokemon. Ghost-types were also supposed to be strong against Psychics (as all of the official material stated), but instead didn't affect them at all, probably due to a programming error. Even if it had, though, the only Ghost-types were part Poison-type, meaning they were as weak to Psychic-types as Psychic-types were supposed to be against them. Generation II introduces Dark and Steel-types, the latter resistant to Psychics and the former entirely immune, as well as Dark moves dealing super-effective damage and having far better distribution. The Ghost type was also fixed in Generation II and has dealt super-effective damage from then on.
*** Happened again in Gen VI. Dragon-types, the InfinityPlusOneElement of the series, dominated the game due to, again, universally high-stats, great movepools, and the types that were supposed to be good against them (Ice-types and other Dragon-types) were not in practice (many Dragons learned Fire-type attacks that Ice is weak to). The solution came in the 18th type, Fairy, which is immune to Dragon-types as well as resisting Dark and Fighting, also common types, and in return being super-effective against all of them. In turn Fairies are weak to Poison and Steel, previously considered some of the worst attacking types in the game but now have utility as Fairy-counters.
** There are several moves that block the user from taking damage that turn, most commonly Protect. Attempting to use Protect multiple turns in a row sharply slices its success rate to prevent indefinite stalling. Furthermore, similar guarding moves like Detect and Endure all work on the same mechanic, so you can't just alternate between two such moves to avoid the success rate degradation.
** The games had constant problems with the Pokémon Wobbuffet. It's supposed to be a Pokémon that cannot directly attack but is streamlined to take advantage of damage reflecting attacks, but instead of being forced to attack, an opponent can just simply switch out his current Pokémon over and over until Wobbuffet runs out of PP. To prevent that, in Generation III Wobbuffet and its newly introduced pre-evolution Wynaut were both equipped with the Shadow Tag ability, which prevents the opponent from switching Pokémon in a battle against Wobbuffet/Wynaut until they were either recalled or knocked out or if the foe has some other trap-cancel ability that allows them to flee. Fair enough, except for in a competitive battle where both you and your opponents have Wobbuffet (or the much-less-common Wynaut) who are both equipped with Leftovers and facing each other. You can't fight back because Wobbuffet and Wynaut are only able to counter attacks, not dish them out. Their Shadow Tag abilities will also prevent either of them from switching out, and even if the two were to wear themselves down enough to use Struggle (the only move Wynaut/Wobbuffet knows that deals damage), Leftovers would cancel out what horrendously low damage their moves do, resulting in a draw by eliminating any chance that either of the two will faint. From Diamond and Pearl onward, Shadow Tag was changed so that any Pokémon who has the Shadow Tag ability who is locked into battle with a foe who also has said ability can negate the effect and switch out without problems. Also, Struggle now always takes away 25 percent of the user's ''maximum'' hit points, not 25 percent of the hit point damage the user did to the other guy, so that even if two trainers wound up with Wobbuffet as each person's last Pokémon, once Struggling began the match would end in 5 turns or less (because the 25 percent rounds down, someone with an HP amount that can be divided by 4 with a remainder of 1 could last 1 more turn). Also, Shadow Tag[[note]]and other trapping abilities/moves[[/note]] was changed again so that Ghost-type Pokémon are now immune to it.
** In the fifth generation of games there was a glitch involving the new move Sky Drop. The move makes one Pokémon take another into the air [[CaptainObvious (and then drop it for damage)]], and when a Pokémon is in the air, it cannot move or be hit (except by a few moves, like Thunder). There was previously a move called Gravity which made Flying-types or levitating Pokémon come to the ground (this meaning they can be hit by Ground-type moves). In a double battle, if one of your Pokémon uses Sky Drop and the other then uses Gravity, both your & the opponent's Pokémon will come to the ground... [[GameBreakingBug except while your Pokémon can move, theirs is treated as being in the air and cannot move, at all, until they are fainted by a move like, say, Thunder.]] The Obvious Rule Patch? Nintendo banned Sky Drop in Random online battles.
** In the fourth and fifth generation games, there have been problems with [[RageQuit players disconnecting to preserve their win-loss record.]] In ''VideoGame/PokemonXAndY'', however, disconnecting on players will count as a loss to the player who shut their game off.
** Pokémon with Oblivious as an Ability are immune to Infatuation, a status almost never used in any serious competition. In ''VideoGame/PokemonXAndY'', however, Pokémon with Oblivious were also now immune to the move Taunt, and specifically that move, essentially repurposing an Ability for an entirely different purpose (but one still marginally related to [[CaptainOblivious obliviousness]]).
** A meta example: when {{Website/Smogon}} decided that Mega Rayquaza was too much of a GameBreaker even for the [[CharacterTiers Uber tier]], they created the "Anything Goes" tier so they had somewhere to ban it to. The rules for Anything Goes are just what they sound like -- no bans, no restrictions... except that even in Anything Goes, the "Endless Battle" clause forbids movesets designed to [[{{Troll}} extend the battle indefinitely just to piss the other player off]].
* The UsefulNotes/VirtualConsole release of ''VideoGame/PokemonRedAndBlue'' does not allow Save States (a standard feature for other Virtual Console games released on the UsefulNotes/Nintendo3DS) to prevent players from cloning Pokémon.
* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVI'' had a couple:
** First is a major issue with Gau, a character who normally can't equip weapons but has a high innate attack power to make up for it, and the Merit Award, an accessory that allows its user to equip any type of weapon or armor in the game. When Gau had the Merit Award in the original version of the game, you could equip him with a weapon. Not only did this dramatically boost his attack power, but it also led to some very bizarre GameBreaker combos, such as the legendary "Wind God Gau". Later remakes of the game prevent Gau from equipping the Merit Award, sadly enough.
** Gogo, while not nearly as GameBreaker status as Gau, could also achieve "Wind God" status with the Merit Award. This managed to last into the Playstation re-release, but was finally blocked in the GBA update. Another, separate rule patch was that of [[http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Psycho_Cyan_Bug "Psycho Cyan"]], but savvy players managed to find an alternate means of triggering this glitch anyway.
** The game also had a cheese glitch. In the game, Vanish could make your character disappear, thereby becoming unable to be physically hit. However, you could be hit by ANY magic attack with 100% accuracy. Players could exploit this by casting Vanish on a monster, then casting Death on them. The Death spell would ALWAYS hit ANY monster, boss or not, regardless if it would be able to hit them otherwise. Since Vanish was considered a ''positive'' status effect, extremely few enemies were made immune to it. This got fixed for the GBA re-release.
* ''VideoGame/Left4Dead'':
** The first game had an issue with melee shoving in VS mode. Players were literally shoving zombies for the entire game instead of actually using their guns, which made it a huge hassle for zombie players to approach and attack since they would [[CherryTapping get shoved to death.]] A patch then introduced melee fatigue, where survivors would have to wait before shoving again if they kept shoving too many times without stopping. This mechanic was made as a main feature in all game modes for the sequel.
** ''VideoGame/Left4Dead2'' also had a few things patched for VS mode due to complaints. Explosive ammo was removed due to survivors using the special ammo only on special infected, which basically meant that the survivors could not be touched due to the explosive ammo stumbling the zombie players. Using defibrillators would induce a 25 point penalty per use for the survivors. Spitters that spit their acid into a moving elevator would potentially wipe out the survivor team since they had nowhere to move away from the spit, so a patch was made where spitting into a moving elevator would make the acid quickly fizzle out to prevent a cheap win.
** The sequel also made it where melee weapons were not very effective on a Tank in order to encourage more gunning and running when survivors fight a Tank. Before this patch, survivors would use melee weapons (which ranged from the practical, like a sword, to absurd, like a frying pan) to kill a Tank quickly because each hit took 10% of the Tank's health off, which the Tank could then die in 10 hits. With 4 survivors using melee weapons all at once, it would be quite easy to drop a Tank, which frustrated Tank players in VS mode. A patch addressed this issue where now melee weapons only do half the damage they used to against a Tank.
** The Jockey gained a slight buff after complaints from players in VS mode came pouring in; The Jockey's main attack is to latch onto the survivors and ride them somewhere else while damaging them every second. The problem was the Jockey could be shoved off his victim (which is how it works) before he could do any damage at all if survivor players were quick enough. One patch later, the Jockey can now damage survivors as soon as he grabs them.
*** Something similar happened with the Smoker. The Smoker does damage by grabbing survivors with his tongue, pulling them toward him and trapping them. Originally, the Smoker couldn't cause damage to the player until his tongue attack fully retracted, implying that the tongue itself does no damage, but rather the damage comes from the Smoker hitting the survivor directly. Other survivors, however, were freeing their friends from the Smoker's tongue long before it reached the Smoker, so the attack was changed so that the survivor also takes damage during the dragging part of the attack.
** The Witch in the sequel had received a buff for Realism VS mode after people complained that the Witch was too easy for survivors to kill. Now Witches in Realism VS cannot be instantly killed with a head shot.
** When Survival mode was introduced in Left 4 Dead, people abused exploits and glitches in the maps by placing themselves in areas that the zombies could not "see" them at (players that are "off" the map are considered non existent by zombies), thus they could earn gold meals too easily. While some of the maps were patched to plug up the exploits, many others did not get detected. The sequel upgraded the AI Director to detect cheating in Survival mode where it will spawn Spitter acid onto a player that is not in the map or are in some spot that the zombies can't reach them and if the player avoids this check, the AI Director will just outright damage players until they get back to playing fair.
** Many maps had exploits that allowed players to skip crescendo events or large parts of the map to finish it faster. One example of this was in the 3rd level in No Mercy where players could destroy a door leading to the inside of a building. The door was supposed to be opened from the inside to let in players that got dragged outside through a window, but the door was easily broken with melee weapons, allowing players to skip the crescendo event. The door was patched to not break unless a Tank smashed it, but it still breaks with the grenade launcher.
* ''VideoGame/TeamFortress2'':
** The Gloves of Running Urgently gave the Heavy a speed boost when wielded, bringing his speed up from "extremely slow" to "about average". Another item, the Buffalo Steak Sandvich, was released later that temporarily increased the Heavy's speed to above average speed. These effects, when used together, allowed the Heavy to become one of the fastest classes in the game. Now, eating a Buffalo Steak cancels out the effect of the GRU.
** Another issue in the same update was the Fists of Steel and the Buffalo Steak Sandvich; the Fists of Steel negated 50% of the range damage at the cost of doubling melee damage. This is intended for a heavy to get to the front lines with little fear about suffering too much damage. The Buffalo Steak Sandvich was part of an item set that included a pair of gloves that gave you more damage, in exchange for health (which made the combination into a sort of glass cannon). Unfortunately, paired with the Fists of Steel turned the heavy into a walking battering ram, able to close the distance between almost all classes in an instant and being near-immune to damage (the 50% damage reduction from the fists pretty much negated the Buffalo's Minicrit debuff and then some). Paired with a Medic some heavies walk right up to a sentry and punch it to death, ''without being ubercharged''. They later toned down the amount of damage negation as well as slowed the weapon change time, making it much easier to deal with heavies who try this.
** The Sandvich item allows the Heavy to recover health by eating it, becoming helpless for the duration. Heavies used to be able to instantly start eating the sandvich as soon as they were done eating the first one. It lead to annoying situations where a Heavy would stand in the middle of a battlefield, [[StoneWall absorbing any damage done to him]], capturing objectives or being a bullet shield for his teammates. It was changed so the healing wasn't a constant heal but came in "bursts" and the Heavy would have to wait on a cooldown before the sandvich can be eaten again.
*** What's more, Heavies could throw their Sandviches on the floor to act a as a medium healthpack for their team. Most Heavies treated it as a free medium healthpack for ''themselves'', since it was much faster (if less effective) than standing still and eating it. Nowadays, a Heavy trying to pick up his own dropped Sandvich will see the Sandvich put back in his inventory instead.
** The Spy can turn invisible during which he is not able to use any of his attacks but originally he could still taunt while invisible. When the Sniper/Spy update gave him a taunt that could instant kill enemies, taunting while invisible was quickly edited out.
** Every time a new weapon is introduced, there's a 75% chance something like this would happen due to the developers not paying close enough attention to the code. One of the most notable was the Red Tape Recorder which, on release, downgraded a building based on it's ''animation''. This meant that going from level 3 to level 1 took about 3 seconds, making it impossible to save the upgrades since unless the engineer was already whacking the building, it takes more than 3 seconds to actually knock the damn thing off. It also meant that the RtR was completely useless at getting rid of buildings, since a building build animation is exponentially longer than it's upgrade animation. The developers later admitted that this was not the intended effect, but a random hazard in the coding messed it up and it took quite a while to iron it out (it down downgrades at a set speed at all levels, which was the intended effect).
** At first, the devs were a little bit sloppy about declaring particular surfaces as unbuildable by Engineers, since they had no means of reaching those areas. However, now that Engies can use the Wrangler to RocketJump themselves up to new areas, quite a few maps have had to be patched so keep one side from mounting a practically unbreakable defense.
** The Loch-n-Load grenade launcher was useful for its ability to kill Scouts, one of the Demoman's greatest counters, in one hit due to its increased damage and the grenades' faster movement speed. The Smissmas 2014 update added a damage cap for the weapon so it can only deal a maximum of 123 damage under normal conditions, ''specifically'' so it can't one-shot Scouts. The Scout has 125 HP under normal conditions.
* ''VideoGame/MarioKart'':
** Snaking. Players discovered the ability to perform a power slide on a straight road and quickly build up a mini-turbo (by mashing left/right as fast as possible), release it, then start a new power slide in the opposite direction, repeating back and forth until they hit a curve (where power sliding for mini-turbos normally comes into play). ''VideoGame/MarioKartDoubleDash'' started this trend and it was even more apparent in ''DS'' where the best time trial records came from snaking and [[ComplacentGamingSyndrome everyone online always snaked with the same specific characters/karts]]. Nintendo changed the mechanics in ''Wii'' so that mini-turbos built up from how much you turned during a power slide instead of based on the player's manual dexterity.
** In ''Wii'', bikes. Bikes can perform wheelies to attain a small speed boost, but players milking this zoomed ahead of players that didn't do the same (or couldn't, if they used karts). The intended balance is that bikes in a wheelie can't turn and will severely slow down if bumped by another vehicle, and bikes could only get the weaker level of mini-turbo, but these were virtually non-issues to skilled players. ''7'' got rid of the bikes. ''8'' brought them back, but stripped out the wheelie mechanic[[note]]although getting a boost will activate a purely aesthetic wheelie[[/note]] and gave them back the second level mini-turbo, making them functionally identical to karts.
* ''VideoGame/{{Prototype}}'' has a thermobaric tank that can destroy any building in one shot. There is a [[MassMonsterSlaughterSidequest Kill Event]] that involves using one. After doing the event, the player is left with the tank and 50 rounds for the big gun. Patch: If you use the tank to destroy a military base or infected hive, the tank will ''inexplicably vanish'', preventing you from cleaning up the entire map with it.
* Due to the infamous amount of infinite combos and glitches that dominated competitive play for ''VideoGame/MarvelVsCapcom2'', Capcom's made a point of patching infinite combos out of ''VideoGame/MarvelVsCapcom3''.
** ''Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3'' added [[Franchise/AceAttorney Phoenix Wright]], who was a stance based fighter. He gathers evidence in Investigation mode, uses them in Trial mode and if he has 3 good pieces of evidence and lands an Objection, he enters Turnabout mode, which has a time limit, but during this time he has the highest damage output in the game. The timer only runs while Phoenix is on point. When the game was released, he was instantly shot to Assist tier due the Turnabout timer (and [[BackgroundMusicOverride theme song]]) freezing when he's switched out and his Press The Witness (a forward moving barrage move) assist being practically invincible (he can be hit from behind but that's very impractical) while he's in turnabout mode, even being able to interrupt all uncinematic hypers. This was quickly patched, forcing people to use him more offensively, ironically enough. The timer still freezes while he's inactive, however.
* One of the many balance patches for ''VideoGame/{{Warcraft}} III'' introduced a new armor type, "Unarmored". Originally it was reserved for units that indeed logically had no armor, like [[SquishyWizard Squishy Wizards]]. However, later patches changed some units to have the "unarmored" armor type but still have armor for balance reasons.
** In one of Reign of Chaos' missions, the game explicitly tells you to load Goblin Sappers into Zeppelins to use them as bombs. This obvious GameBreaker (Sappers autocast 250 damage in an area, a Zeppelin can carry eight Sappers and drop them while moving) was allowed in multiplayer and even recommended in the StrategyGuide. Come ''The Frozen Throne'', not only is this no longer possible, but it also applies to the RoC mission, where trying to load Sappers gets you an error message.
* ''VideoGame/BillyVsSNAKEMAN'' has a Village mechanic called {{Kaiju}} - giant monsters that the entire village can battle, which reward powerful items to the villagers which do the most damage and upgrades to the village itself when they fall. Originally, they simply vanished once their health was depleted. When the "enticement" mechanic was introduced, allowing any villager to summon a kaiju to the village (instead of just the village's leader) at the cost of a rare item, there were two recorded cases of villages summoning and defeating over a ''hundred'' kaiju in a single day. Now, when a kaiju runs out of health, its HP becomes "Crippled", and it stays in the village until Dayroll, whereupon it is officially defeated and cleared.
* ''VideoGame/StarWarsTheOldRepublic'' has an arena game called Huttball, which the point of it was to get the ball into the enemies goal while [[BloodSport killing everyone on the opposite team]]. Players started to just grab the ball and camp with it in a corner. It was changed so the ball would EXPLODE if it was left in the same place for to long ({{Justified|Trope}} because the game is for the Hutt's entertainment, and you were boring them).
* ''VideoGame/AdventureQuest'' had a OneHitKill ability known as Power Word Die, which was a very rare special attack available to the Blade of Awe. For several years, this ability worked on just about everything, aside from monsters which were obviously designed to be unbeatable. Shortly after the game's EXP/Gold formula was retooled for balance purposes, and higher level monsters gave out exponentially higher loot than lower level encounters, PWD received an adjustment in order to counter abuse. Its odds of successfully instant killing the enemy were now based on a formula based around the monster's power level compared to that of the player, so that lower level characters were no longer able to skip several levels at once by killing monsters far beyond their level with sheer luck and persistence.
* ''OpenTTD'', a ''TransportTycoon'' derivative, had a number of ways that players could make money faster or spend less than intended, but these required insane amounts of micromanagement[[note]]For example: after delivering a load of cargo, a vehicle will head back empty to pick up another load. If you sell the vehicle at the point of unloading and buy a replacement at the loading dock, you don't need to pay the operating costs while it drives back.[[/note]], and nobody used them. Then, version 0.7 removed the original [[ArtificialStupidity AI]] and let players design their own AIs -- and someone [[http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=39756 wrote an AI]] that exploited ''all'' those edge cases. Cue version 0.7.2, aka "eliminate the creative use of game mechanics".
* ''VideoGame/DarkSouls'' had it bad in several cases:
** Pre-1.05 games had the problem with Ring of Fog. Simply meant to be a more effective version of ''VideoGame/DemonsSouls''' Thief Ring, it quickly became the mainstay of all too many players due to the fact that equipping it means you are untargetable. This, in a game where locking on to an enemy allows for strafing amongst other things, makes for more than 90% players who aren't good enough to fight without lock-ons suffer. Patch 1.05 nerfed the ring such that you can always lock-on to it.
** 1.05 patch nerfed the Elite Knight Set bad. As a result however, it spawned the dreaded "Masked Giant" setup. The Masks are head equipments that, while low on defense, has some very good effects. Mask of the Father, in particular, raises your Equip Burden, allowing you to equip heavy armors for torso, arms and legs. The Giant set is second-best set once fully upgraded, and using the Father Mask allows one to equip them all under 50% with minimal stat investments. But what truly broke this combination is the Dark Wood Grain Ring, which grants users an alternate "cartwheel" roll. Said roll is faster than even "fast roll" (roll motion for under 25% equip load) ''and'' has more invincibility-frames. So people were running with second-best armor and having the maneuverability of a ninja on meth. Even worse, the Hornet Ring boosted backstab damage to crazy levels, especially with knives and rapiers, and widespread practice of roll-stabbing [[note]]temporarily untargets an opponent, rolls quickly behind, turns around and backstabs[[/note]] and pass-through stabs [[note]]where, after passing an opponent, using the lock-on function to turn faster than the opponent can to backstab[[/note]] made the combination highly lethal. Patch 1.06 reduced the buffs granted by the Masks, Hornet Ring ''and'' the Dark Wood Grain Ring, effectively killing the combination thrice-over.
* ''VideoGame/{{Minecraft}}'' always has an eventual patch released to address balancing issues or automation. Bone meal, which acted as fertilizer for trees and crops, was changed to require several uses before the plants fully grow instead of requiring just one bone meal. Mobs that spawn in with tools/weapons and/or armor (when it was first introduced) was altered to have their dropped equipment be worn down so that players don't farm for free items with little effort. The dev team also stated that they heavily dislike automation methods that allow players to acquire resources with little effort, but do not mind the more crazier automation methods used to gather items since the player is putting a lot of effort into their farming.
* Many ''SwordOfTheStars'' updates were not only enhancements but also to close loopholes. One such loophole, called the Destroyer Spam, involved sending a fleet made up of a number of dreadnoughts and/or cruisers and scores (maybe even hundreds) of destroyers. The game has an ArbitraryHeadcountLimit for battles in the form of command points, depending on the command ship used and technology researched. Basically, the points determine the number of your ships that can be in a battle at any given point. However, the "numerical superiority" mechanic was meant to encourage larger fleets and rewarded the larger fleet in a battle by increasing command points proportional to the number/class of ships larger than the other fleet(s). The LoopholeAbuse involved using the number of destroyers (useless by the time dreadnoughts are used but cheap and quick to build) to boost the numerical superiority and increase the ability to field more dreadnoughts/cruisers in battle. Naturally, the developers quickly put a cap on how many destroyers figure into the mechanic.
* ''VideoGame/MarioParty'' had Chance Time (or a similar event of a different name) which was an event designed only to screw people over. Many games have been won or lost all because Chance Time forced two players to exchange/give their coins, stars, or both. Players who were winning for most of the game could suddenly lose the entire game because of Chance Time and players who kept losing could suddenly win without any effort. The event was eventually scrapped by ''Mario Party 7'', but returned in ''Mario Party 9'' with different rules and outcomes.
** Hidden Blocks were also removed at some point due to the blocks having a 50/50 chance of giving the player a free star.
** The three Bonus Stars given out at the end of every board in the first game were A) who won the most mini-games, B) who had the most coins at any point, and C) who landed on the most ? spaces. The trouble was that whoever got star A was almost guaranteed to get star B, because mini-games were the most reliable way to win coins. The game was usually [[GoldenSnitch decided by these Bonus Stars]], which was frustrating. This was changed in ''Mario Party 2'' and all subsequent ''Party'' games to include other Bonus Stars, such as who traveled the farthest and who spent the most in items. Later releases also included even more random events, like who landed on the most blue spaces, and limited it to only three random Bonus Stars.
* In the early version of ''VideoGame/{{Battlefield3}}'' any player with a mortar can use it in their spawn zone, so the opposite team cannot kill them without trying to enter to the opposite spawn zone. This was fixed in later versions, so a mortar can only be deployed in areas when any player can reach and preventing those blind spots. This is even warned over in the loading screens.
* ''Videogame/MechWarrior'':
** The series has always been plagued by "poptarters", players who load up their HumongousMecha with a lot of long-ranged sniping weapons, then stick [[JetPack jump jets]] on it. They hide behind a hill, then when they detect an enemy, jump up, fire their weapons, then drop behind cover and repeat once their guns have reloaded. The ''Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries'' [[FreewareGame free re-release]] tried to counter this by introducing the advanced radar server setting, which limits radar to line of sight (and force first-person mode was promoted), which hampered poptarting. ''Mechwarrior Living Legends'' made the [[CameraAbuse camera shake violently]] when using jumpjets, the game had no third-person view, in addition to [[OverHeating large amounts of heat generated]] due to the jump jets being ''much'' more powerful at pushing the mech up into the air (making it hard to accurately shoot except at the apex of the jump). The [[ScrewedByTheLawyers final update]] put the final nail in the dedicated poptarter's coffin, as the heat revamp made going over the heat redline (common when poptarting) ''far'' [[GoingCritical more dangerous]].
*** ''[=MechWarrior=] Online'' has addressed the lots-of-identical-weapons problem with a '''particularly''' obvious rule patch - "ghost heat". Now firing two [=PPCs=] (say) at once still makes twice the heat of firing one, but firing three [=PPCs=] at once (or too quickly in sequence) makes 4.26 times the heat of firing one, firing four makes 7.36 times the heat, and it gets worse from there. Firing two AC/20s at once makes 3.92 times the heat of firing one; firing three AC/20s makes '''9.24''' times the heat of one!
** The Planetary League for ''Living Legends'' had several extremely annoying examples of LoopholeAbuse - such as camping inside the spawn hangar to force a draw - which were quickly removed with obvious rule patches - in this case, forcing mechs still in the hangars after the round begins to be forfeited.
** From version 0.1 to 0.6, air combat in ''Living Legends'' was decided by pretty much one factor: how many [[GameBreaker Shiva "E" variants]] - a massively armored, relatively fast jet that could instagib anything in the sky and rip ground forces apart - your side brought. [[ScrewedByTheLawyers The final update]] swapped out its standard LBX shotguns with gimped "air LBX" shotguns that turned the god of the skys into a JokeCharacter; and it was the only aircraft variant to have the air LBX replacements.
* ''PAYDAY 2'' had several exploits patched out to counter people completing heists with little effort. The Cable Guy skill gave the player 10 cable ties when aced, which lead to people effortlessly stealthing heists since one person with the skill could tie up most of the hostages and if another player had the skill, then the group could tie down ''everyone''. The skill was nerfed to include only 5 cable ties, but it was then bumped up to 6 after [[TheyChangedItNowItSucks the community complained]].
** Some levels were completed a little ''too'' quickly due to certain skills enabling players breaching safes and [=ATMs=] with ease. The game was patched to force an escape sequence on players that go loud in single day heists in order to curb farming[[labelnote:*]]With one exception: the Ukranian Job, which involves stealing a tiara from a safe, can be completed in half a minute, if the team rushes in, blows the safe, and rushes out. Even if the alarm is going off, if the team escapes ''before'' police show up (not hard), there's no escape sequence. If ECM jammers prevent the alarm from going off (also not hard), there's no escape sequence ''and'' the job is technically completed in stealth for a bonus on the next heist. The trade-off is that the bulk of the payout on Ukrainian Job is from the additional loot on the map: just stealing the tiara is barely worth the job, and the experience is extremely low as well[[/labelnote]].
* In ''VideoGame/SuperSmashBros Melee'', the dev team discovered the "wavedashing" glitch[[note]] canceling out of a jump animation by air-dodging diagonally downward into the ground; this allows you to preform ground attacks while sliding forward[[/note]] pretty early in development, but [[ThrowItIn left it in]]. Then they discovered how much of a [[NoobBridge drastic gap]] it created between newcomers and veteran players, and it was one of the first things they removed from ''Brawl''. In addition, the physics were altered so that the ability to {{combo}} was taken out entirely. [[BrokenBase The reactions to both of these have been mixed]].
** ''Super Smash Bros. for 3DS'' has a "Conquest" mode, in which characters are divided into teams to which players can contribute points (about once per day for a week) by playing as those characters in online battles; if the team to which the player contributed the most points is the one that earned the most points overall at the end of the week, that player earns an in-game reward. Initially, the current percentages of points for each team were displayed on the menu; however, this led to most players simply choosing to contribute points to whichever team was already winning in order to get the reward, leading to very lopsided victories. To fix this, a patch was made to the game that hid the percentages for each conquest until it was over. Even later, it was further patched to give lesser rewards to contributors to the losing teams as well.
* ''VideoGame/NetHack'': WishingForMoreWishes is forbidden. Wishing for a magic lamp gives you a regular lamp. Wands of wishing can only be recharged once, and wishing for a wand of wishing will give you an empty or [[AntiMagic cancelled]] wand that's already been recharged.
* Frequently occurs in the ''VideoGame/SuperRobotWars'' franchise, where developer Banpresto will either {{Nerf}} or overhaul game mechanics so exploitable in one installment into something more standardized if the mechanic returns in the next. Some examples include:
** The "Squad System" from the second ''VideoGame/SuperRobotWarsAlpha'' game allowed up to four allied units to group into a single squad without limitations. By ''Alpha 3'', the system was tweaked to ensure each squad cannot exceed a predetermined size limit.
** The "Partner Battle System" in ''VideoGame/SuperRobotWarsK'' gives solo units a reason not to be in a partner unit, since they can earn faster kills and Will gains on their own via "Combo Attack", since a partner unit cannot use it. ''VideoGame/SuperRobotWarsL'' revamps this, where being in a partner unit nets both units additional combat and statistical bonuses that a solo unit could not earn.
** The [[MinMaxersDelight "SP Regeneration" and "Attacker"]] pilot skills in ''VideoGame/SuperRobotWarsOriginalGeneration'' was every player's go-to duo of skills for all pilots on the roster when purchasing these skills. The ''Second Original Generation'' ensures both skills are no longer available for sale, fixing them as character-exclusive skills.
* In the original ''VideoGame/WanganMidnight Maximum Tune'', the "gacha" exploit--periodically rapid-shifting to the previous gear and back--allows the player to gain short bursts of faster acceleration. ''Maximum Tune 2'' onwards prevents it by forcing the player's gear to neutral if they try it.
* ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xcaGkyeZRA Broken Knuckles]]'' is a ROMHack of ''VideoGame/Sonic3AndKnuckles'' that kills the player if they try to move with the left or right buttons, forcing you to glide or spin-dash if you want any kind of lateral motion. There is an unavoidable area in Hydrocity Zone that levitates you upwards with fans, but since you're floating in midair, you can't glide or spin-dash. So the hacker added a spring on the wall to force you out.
* In ''VideoGame/ShovelKnight'', Plague Knight's version of the "Untouched" feat[[note]]Beat any member of the Order of No Quarter without taking any damage[[/note]] in the Plague of Shadows DLC specifically excludes King Knight in the description. King Knight's attack patterns are very predictable and slow compared to the other bosses, so he would be the easiest Quarter member to pull off the feat with.
* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIV'':
** Speed running in dungeons became the norm amongst players simply because it let them beat the dungeon faster and waste less time. By having the party's tank get the attention from as many enemies as possible, the DPS players could nuke everything down by spamming their AOE abilities. The speed run tactic caused a few changes; Holy and Flare, the White and Black Mage's strongest AOE spells, got nerfed in potency and then nerfed again where [[DiminishingReturnsForBalance any enemy hit with the spell past the first enemy was hit with less power]]. Speed bumps were also employed a lot more in the form of "gates", such as having to kill specific enemies to get a key or needing to kill all enemies to disable a barrier blocking the way. The devs also enforced an item level sync for certain dungeons so that players couldn't effectively farm said dungeons for certain items by using powerful gear.
** Spiritbonding gear for materia is a tedious task for gatherer and crafters, but players discovered that they could wear the same crafting/gathering gear inside dungeons to farm materia much faster. However, this caused grievances among other players since materia farmers were a liability from using gear that heavily gimped their HP, defense, and attack power. The developers released a patch where the rate of spiritbinding gear was determined by the gear's item level versus the target's "item level" (if a dungeon drops ilvl70 gear for example, then you'd need to wear gear around that level to get a good binding rate). If your gear's level was too high or too low against what you were facing, you would either have a slow bind rate or have no binding at all.
** In the beginning of 2.0, players could leave duties whenever they wanted and screw over their party. This would lead to the creation of the 15 minute timeout penalty as a minor form of punishment and a deterrent towards people who RageQuit constantly. When the devs saw that 15 minutes wasn't enough, the timeout penalty was doubled to 30 minutes.
** When signing up for a duty, the game enforces a ready check for all players once there's enough players to start the duty. Players that were fishing for in progress duties (duties where there's a party with missing members) would keep withdrawing from the duty when it popped up until they got an in progress duty so that they could try to get a group that was near the end of the run and finish it faster. This behavior greatly annoyed everyone trying to get a duty started since withdraws happened numerous times in a single session, delaying the duty from starting. It was then patched where withdrawing 3 times in a day got you a 30 minute time out for each withdrawal after.
* When it was discovered that the free-to-start game ''VideoGame/{{Ironfall}}'' could be used to jailbreak the UsefulNotes/Nintendo3DS, Nintendo responded quickly by pulling the game from the [=eShop=] until the exploit was patched. However, anyone who had downloaded it beforehand could just refrain from updating to the new version, making this fix relatively useless, until Nintendo released part 2: an update to the 3DS's firmware that could completely block players from playing select titles if they aren't up to date. The ''only'' game this is actually used for is ''Ironfall''.
* The ''VideoGame/HearthstoneHeroesOfWarcraft'' adventure ''Curse of Naxxramas'' shipped with these already in place for heroic mode, banning specific cards that would otherwise make some encounters trivial. For example, if you try to play Alexstrasza[[note]]Sets a hero's health to 15[[/note]] against heroic Loatheb, who has whopping 99 health, [[BigBad Kel'Thuzad]] will destroy the card and mock you.
-->'''Kel'Thuzad''': This is heroic Naxxramas! I won't stand for such cheap tactics here!
* In the 3DS version of ''VisualNovel/VirtuesLastReward'', a GameBreakingBug can wipe out your save file if you save while inside of a puzzle room (most commonly the PEC room). Digital copies of the game "fix" the bug by disabling saving during puzzle rooms.
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* In an early version of ''VideoGame/NeverwinterNights'', a loophole in the rules was found that let monks wear a shield in their offhand, making them virtually unhittable for no real downside. In the very next patch, monks were made unable to wear shields and retain monk dodge / attack bonuses at the same time.
** And then Monk/Shifter builds began exploiting the equipment merge mechanism while polymorphed; they would get the AC bonuses from gear, and then get the monk dodge bonus after merging tower shields and full plates (since they weren't actually wearing them after morphing). Later versions turned all AC bonuses earned this way into dodge bonuses, which only stack up to a hard limit.
* In an early release of ''VideoGame/Battlefield2142'', it was entirely possible for two soldiers with nothing better to do to destroy their own Titan (and thus force their team to lose the round) by forcing a transport through the floor of the hangar bay and into the Core.
* ''VideoGame/EveOnline'' has had several updates that were borderline Obvious Rule Patches. However, the patch that prevented carriers from transporting loaded cargo ships was a glaringly Obvious Rules Patch.
** Similarly, nowadays [[HandWave graviton harmonics]] prevent [[StopHavingFunGuys players]] from taking a 3000 m³ cargo container that holds 3300 m³ of cargo... and putting another 3000 m³ container that holds 3300 m³ inside it leaving 300 m³ of free space. With enough cargo containers you could once haul an entire solar system's worth of ore in a single, moderately sized and priced ship.
* A fairly obscure item from ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'' called the Luffa would remove any bleed effect. A boss over 20 levels later would put a hefty bleed dot on raid members at fairly regular intervals. Everyone would equip their Luffa and make Moroes a total joke. The next patch put a spell level cap on the Luffa ie. you couldn't remove bleed effects over level 60 anymore.
** Other such items got similar treatments, essentially turning this into standard procedure. There are many such items in ''Mists of Pandaria'' that already state that they won't work on players above level 94... long before the next expansion was even announced.
** Similar restrictions exist for item enchantments, both to limit abuse of high-level enchantments on low level items and to keep certain temporary effects out of later content rather than removing them completely.
** An old patch for ''[=WoW=]'' allowed everyone in a group to place marks - graphical icons that go above monsters or players and are used to make them more visible or indicate a kill order for the group - instead of only the group's leader being able to do it. There followed an unofficial add-on which allowed players to automatically strobe the marks across the group members, rapidly swapping them around, much to the annoyance of many players. The very next patch added a notification of who was setting marks.
** In July of 2009, a hunter was discovered with a worgen (a sentient, werewolf-like creature) for a pet, and within a few hours the hunter community had figured out how and where to get [[http://www.wowhead.com/npc=24277 this particular beast]]; pretty much everyone who could obtain one had one. Within two days the tamed worgen were patched to have all their skills and attacks completely removed, and after a few more days they were replaced entirely by ordinary white wolves. This is only the case for the single Worgen, any "beast" that's not a beast (such as a slime or a hydra) were allowed to stay.
** There was a video posted on Website/YouTube a few years back where a paladin killed, in one move, a raid boss designed for dozens of players to take several minutes to bring down. The Reckoning talent had the effect that when a paladin was struck they might gain a stack of Reckoning, causing their next attack to hit twice. One enterprising player dueled a rogue many times without ever striking back, then went up to the boss in question and proceeded to hit it more than a thousand times in one blow. Within twenty four hours the talent was nerfed so that it caused you to hit ''twice'' for the next few attacks. Of course, seeing as Reckoning was about the only ability in the entire game that possessed neither stack limit nor duration, this was only to be expected.
** Before the ''Cataclysm'' expansion revamped most quests from vanilla ''[=WoW=]'', there was a long Alliance quest chain in the zone of Ashenvale where the intermediate quests made use of an item called "Dartol's Rod of Transformation", which temporarily turned the player into a furbolg. The change was purely cosmetic, but the rod was usable anywhere in the world and had no use limit, so players often kept the rod and never turned in the quest, as it was more attractive than the actual quest rewards. In patch 3.0.2, the text "Only usable in Ashenvale" was added to its description, but the restriction was never actually implemented and it was still usable outside Ashenvale. Eventually, Blizzard gave up and removed the requirement to turn in the rod at the end of the quest, allowing players to complete the quest and still keep it indefinitely. The modern version of the quest chain, introduced in ''Cataclysm'', uses another item called simply "Dartol's Rod", which is indeed only usable in Ashenvale. However, players who had the old rod before ''Cataclysm'' are allowed to keep it.
*** This change was later reverted, though some versions of the rod still have the requirement stated in the item description without being actually applied. Furthermore, Blizzard announced that in ''Warlords of Draenor'', most such quest items can be kept after the questline.
** Due to the way stats scale, a level 80 Paladin used some ''Mists of Pandaria'' drops to greatly increase his stats beyond what a level 90 in the same gear would have. Combined with Vengeance, which boosts attack power based on the strength of enemy attacks, he was able to solo several bosses in Mogu'Shan Vaults, a level 90 raid. Blizzard quickly capped Vengeance so that it could not exceed the health of the user.
** Early in the game's release, endgame PvP suffered from a problem where the damage a player did - suitable and balanced for PvE - was so high compared to their own health that certain classes could kill other endgame players outright in a single hit or two. PvP became a game of getting off that first devastatingly powerful nuke before the enemy could. This problem was addressed by adding Resilience to the game: A stat which exists for absolutely no purpose except to reduce the damage players take when facing enemy players.
*** Later on, PvP Power was added as an offensive stat, basically to counteract Resilience. In ''Warlords of Draenor'', Blizzard looks to largely eliminate both stats in favor of other tweaks to the basic damage calculations, but a special rule will still exist to limit the amount of damage deal with critical hits to other players.
*** PvP in general was subject to a lot of rule changes, especially when it comes to stun and crowd control effects. Those were fine in PvE, but for PvP most crowd control effects were nerfed significantly in a number of ways, some of which also applied in PvE. In addition, a trinket was added that allowed players to break out of such effects once every 2 minutes, which previously only the undead racial ''Will of the Forsaken'' ability could do.
* In ''DefenseOfTheAncients'', an item called "Kelen's Dagger" allows teleportation of one's own hero, and it's possible to teleport yourself into terrain that you cannot escape from, except by using Kelen's Dagger again later. Two heroes who can affect other heroes are arbitrarily forbidden from using Kelen's at all. [=DotA=] 2 now allows Pudge and Vengeful Spirit to use this item (now simply known as Blink Dagger), but attempting to trap an enemy on a cliff grants the enemy free pathing for a few seconds.
** Meanwhile there are items such as Force Staff, and the heroes affected by this restriction can be teleported onto cliffs by certain other heroes. Vengeful Spirit can also ask an ally to teleport onto an inescapable cliff, then use her Swap ability, then sit there waiting to deposit an unsuspecting enemy onto the cliff. In ''Dota 2'' the InvisibleWall on many cliffs has been removed, making cliff trapping a legitimate strategy using abilities such as Telekinesis or Vacuum. The restriction remains though, for largely arbitrary reasons.
** A blatant example is the nerf to bottlecrowing. The idea behind the strategy is that the mid laner, who usually buys a bottle (an item that refills mana and health and can be recharged at the fountain), uses the courier to continuously ferry the bottle back and forth to the fountain, making it almost impossible to push them out of the lane through attrition. The nerf? [[spoiler:The courier now moves 30% slower when carrying an empty bottle (but not a full one or any other item including heavy weapons).]]
** Another one was an interaction between Pudge's Meat Hook and Chen's Test of Faith, which if executed properly would pull anyone unfortunate enough to be hooked all the way to the fountain. Soon after this tactic was successfully used at ''The International 3'' to devastating effect, this interaction was completely removed.
* Starting in version 1.3, ''VideoGame/{{Iji}}'' tells you in some places (the arena for [[spoiler:Asha's rematch]] comes to mind) that "there's no need to fire your Nanogun here". Sometimes it was literally true, but in many cases it was because firing your Nanogun there could bug out the game.
** ''Iji'' has a few things like this in the later versions. When it became possible to win the game without killing anyone, this necessitated the player not fighting one of the bosses, because the only way to get by [[spoiler:is to kill him]]. The solution? [[spoiler:Have a new character help you by one-shotting him.]] However, ten minutes are added to your time... because otherwise a pacifist speedrun on the first couple of levels would be much faster than previously. The developer, Daniel Remar, wanted speedruns to be fair between versions.
** In a later update, it doesn't count as a kill if you reflect an enemy's fire back into them with a force field weapon. Previously, "pacifist" players would gather dropped power-ups by stocking up on health, moving right next to enemies, and catching rockets with the main character's face for the SplashDamage.
* ''VideoGame/KingdomOfLoathing'':
** Combat automatically ends with a special message after 30 rounds of combat (or 50 rounds for some bosses) have elapsed with no winner, with a net result equivalent to successfully running away on the 31st round. This was apparently done originally to prevent a possible near-infinite loop that would result if the player's Muscle was too low to hit the monster and his/her Moxie was too high for the monster to hit him/her, while his/her combat initiative was too low to run away. Newer mechanics make such a situation much less plausible, but the rule has remained and still serves to cap the potential effectiveness of any strategy that involves stalling and drawing out combat for per-round effects. Also, miner ghosts only take 1 point of damage from physical attacks. Without a round limit, a sufficiently skilled player could resort to CherryTapping to get a large number of stat points.
** The NinjaPirateZombieRobot familiar used to randomly give Meat with a fixed chance of about 1 in 9 per round of combat. Since this made it advantageous to drag out combat to as close to 30 turns as possible without going over and thus using up much more server resources than normal, the NPZR now only gives Meat in the first 10 turns of combat.
** Another much-maligned patch came with [=NS13=]: Before [=NS13=], players found that increasing monster level (which also increased XP gains) and increasing noncombat encounter chance were both extremely useful. So when [=NS13=] rolled out, the devs added a rule that made increased monster level cancel out increased noncombat chance. Unfortunately, this had the side effect of making monster level increasers less than useless. Over a year and a half later, the devs realized that [[ScrappyMechanic nobody liked this in the slightest]] and removed the rule.
** Another rule is "can't use Double Fisted Skull Smashing to wield a Chefstaff in your offhand." Due to the way DFSS (halves the power of offhand weapons but leaves enchantments alone) and Chefstaves (lowest power possible but incredible enchantments) work, this rule prevents two builds, a rather unpleasant one and a horribly broken one: the former, a weapon/chefstaff combo that makes a MagicKnight with no detriment for either one, the latter, a Chefstaff/Chefstaff combo that results in spells so powerful that it can take down anything almost in one hit.
** The ''[=KoL=]'' staff's usual modus operandi in the event of players accomplishing things they didn't count on players accomplishing is to reward the player for their cleverness/tenacity, then change the game so that the stunt can't be repeated. (Or at least, ''theoretically'' can't be repeated; after the first person beat the final boss without the [[UnusualEuphemism Smurf]], the changes they made turned out not to be sufficient to keep it from happening again. Now you auto-win or auto-lose depending on whether or not you have the item in question.)
* In the ProgrammingGame ''[=RoboWar=]'', allowing robots to teleport and fire weapons interchangeably in the same chronon let a robot with sufficient processor speed leap a considerable distance (depending on its current energy) to put a lethal contact shot into another robot, leaving it next to no time to defend or counterattack -- and executing another move after the shot (the "jerker" strategy) made it harder to target for a counterattack. That the robot's energy would already go deeply negative in the middle of the chronon didn't matter much (so long as it didn't fall below -200), since it wouldn't become immobilized by having negative energy until the next chronon. This allowed the "dasher" strategy to achieve considerable dominance, and in time most top-placing robots in tournaments, dashers or not, had to use "anti-dasher" techniques. To rebalance the game, a patch was instated (amid much controversy) to prevent move/shoot in the same chronon.
** An earlier patch was the "aggressive scoring system". The original scoring system simply granted your robot one point for surviving to the end of the battle. A game-theory analysis of this says the optimal strategy is to only start attacking if your opponent does, and sure enough, by the eighth tournament, the vast majority of "battles" consisted of two robots sitting there peacefully until the timer ran out, at which point they both scored a point. The patch was to change the scoring system to give one point for defeating the other robot (to encourage aggression) and one point for surviving to the end of the battle (to discourage suicidal aggression).
* The Silencer skill in ''[[VideoGame/FireEmblemElibe Fire Emblem: Rekka no Ken]]'' and ''[[VideoGame/FireEmblemTheSacredStones The Sacred Stones]]'' gives your Assassin the chance to instantly kill any foe, so long as they have a chance to land a critical hit. This allowed them to plow through most bosses with ease. While this was negated by the final bosses of both games, whose equipment automatically reduced the enemy's crit chance to 0, it still left most other bosses vulnerable. It was obviously fixed in ''[[VideoGame/FireEmblemTellius Path of Radiance]]'' and ''[[VideoGame/FireEmblemTellius Radiant Dawn]]'', where the description of the Silencer skill (now renamed Lethality) simply states it doesn't work on bosses without any reasoning or attempt at justification.
** Turned on its head in ''[[VideoGame/FireEmblemAwakening Awakening]]''. Now Lethality CAN be done on bosses; it just has a much lower chance of happening (unlike the Elibe games, it's independent of crit rate but unlike the Tellius duology, its activation chance is the user's Skill stat divided by four out of a hundred as opposed to 2). There are still bosses immune to it, but they're denoted by the special "Dragon Skin" skill which also grants other effects (like immunity to Counter). And Lethality can still activate; it'll just do the same amount of damage as a normal attack and won't have [[GoryDiscretionShot the graphics filter]].
** In games with both UnusableEnemyEquipment and VideoGameStealing, enemy-only weapons the game doesn't want you to have (mostly PoisonedWeapons) inexplicably turn into more standard weapons if you have a Thief steal them. The GBA games get around this by preventing Thieves from stealing weapons at all. (Also creating the ObviousRulePatch of preventing you from simply stealing all a boss' weapons to render them harmless)
** Most games in the series have a Dancer or similar unit, who can give other units an ExtraTurn. They make sure you ''never'' have two Dancers in your army at any one time, as they could otherwise endlessly dance for eachother for easy LevelGrinding. There are two specific situations where it's possible to clone a Dancer ([[DittoFighter Xane]] in the ''Akaniea'' games, the Replicate skill or specific chapter gimmicks in ''Fates'') and DevelopersForesight caught those too: Xane can't dance if he copies a Dancer, while in ''Fates'' if one "copy" of Azura sings, the other cannot for the rest of the turn.
* In the {{MMORPG}} ''Lords of Legend'', your level bonus is apparently capped at 5 times the number of troops. Few know about the cap, because in order to get even close to the cap, you have to spend weeks doing the exact opposite of what you are supposed to.
** It is also played straight with the 'invisibility' strategy (You don't show up on attack pages if you haven't won an attack yet), which has been severely nerfed with increasingly harsh and arbitrary restrictions on invisible players.
* ''Website/GaiaOnline'' has had quite a few:
** First, there's soulbinding, the most famous and controversial of the lot. In the first couple months of open beta, users were allowed to buy and sell their rings. This caused a few problems. The most obvious, of course, was that people could buy their way through the game, resulting in many CL 10s who had no idea what they were doing. Another effect was on the economy. Charge Orbs, the items that power up rings, were earned in-game, not bought. Higher-level rings are naturally more valued than weak ones, so people were charging up rings and then selling them, effectively creating expensive items with little to no cost to the users. This was quickly changed so that rings were "soulbound", meaning they could no longer be put on the marketplace.
*** But only rings acquired after the update or older rings that are equipped. Unsoulbound rings are still being sold, and there is also a new ring [[RevenueEnhancingDevices sold for real money]] as a Valentine's Day event item. It has officially been described as being permanently unsoulbound.
** A bit later, CL caps were placed on boss lairs so that people couldn't recruit their CL 10 friends to help them beat the boss. Clever players soon found a way to circumvent this by wearing low-level rings when entering the boss area, then switching out to their stronger ones. The devs soon closed this loophole.
* In ''VideoGame/{{Civilization}} III'', players could initially chop down and replant forests in relatively short order. This made a certain amount of sense, up to a point anyway, but it also created an infinite supply of construction materials. It was quickly patched so that [[FridgeLogic replanted forests contained no useful wood]].
* In ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXI'', you gain tactical points (TP) each time you hit an enemy, the amount varying based on the delay of your weapon (higher = more TP per hit). You have to have at least 100% TP (of a 300% cap) in order to perform a weapon skill. This sounds reasonable, except very early on, weapon skills that hit multiple times gave full TP return per hit, leading to being able to perform these weapon skills back-to-back with no need to accumulate TP in the mean time assuming you used a special type of otherwise useless weapon with almost no damage rating and max delay. Creator/SquareEnix patched this very quickly so that only the first hit (first two when you're dual-wielding) give full TP, and subsequent hits only give 1%.
** [[ThatOneBoss Absolute Virtue]], who is for all intents and purposes totally invincible due to his ability to use the most powerful abilities of every job, as well as cast high-level black magic that players don't even have access to instantaneously and frequently, wiping out alliances of players in seconds. Every time a method is discovered to defeat him, Square-Enix will immediately squash it by [[NewPowersAsThePlotDemands giving Absolute Virtue new resistances and powers as his flaws were discovered]].
*** When players killed him by attacking him from areas he couldn't fight back, the developers gave him the ability to draw players to him if they got too far away.
*** Later on, the devs were pressured into rethinking the absurd difficulty of some of their bosses after some bad publicity involving an [[BladderOfSteel 18-hour-long fight against a different monster]], so they lowered the HP of both that boss and Absolute Virtue and forced them to despawn if not defeated within two hours. Players discovered that a legion of Dark Knights using a combination of the job ability Souleater [[CastFromHitPoints (consumes HP to increase damage dealt)]] and Blood Weapon (restores HP equal to melee damage inflicted), he could be bumrushed into defeat. Within days, a patch was made that gave Absolute Virtue (and ONLY Absolute Virtue - other monsters that had previously been defeated with this method were totally untouched) increasing resistance to Souleater damage, making it useless.
*** A theoretical method of defeating him involved using the Scholar's Helix line of spells, which deal a fairly large amount of damage over time. The helix was placed on the enemy, and then a group of Scholars simultaneously use a job ability that doubles the damage dealt by the next tic of damage while halving its overall duration. The result is that most enemies in the game will drop dead immediately, although execution requires very precise timing (and, in most cases, botting). As soon as people discussed how it could be used to defeat Absolute Virtue, "certain notorious monsters" were given a resistance to the use of the JA. Guess who was at the top of the priority list?
* ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}'' has been subject to a few:
** In the earliest instance for the series, in Gen I Psychic-types dominated the metagame due to high stats, good movepools, nothing resisted Psychic-type damage, and the only attack type that Psychic-types were weak to (Bug) was too weak to do much damage to them and was not learned by many Pokemon. Ghost-types were also supposed to be strong against Psychics (as all of the official material stated), but instead didn't affect them at all, probably due to a programming error. Even if it had, though, the only Ghost-types were part Poison-type, meaning they were as weak to Psychic-types as Psychic-types were supposed to be against them. Generation II introduces Dark and Steel-types, the latter resistant to Psychics and the former entirely immune, as well as Dark moves dealing super-effective damage and having far better distribution. The Ghost type was also fixed in Generation II and has dealt super-effective damage from then on.
*** Happened again in Gen VI. Dragon-types, the InfinityPlusOneElement of the series, dominated the game due to, again, universally high-stats, great movepools, and the types that were supposed to be good against them (Ice-types and other Dragon-types) were not in practice (many Dragons learned Fire-type attacks that Ice is weak to). The solution came in the 18th type, Fairy, which is immune to Dragon-types as well as resisting Dark and Fighting, also common types, and in return being super-effective against all of them. In turn Fairies are weak to Poison and Steel, previously considered some of the worst attacking types in the game but now have utility as Fairy-counters.
** There are several moves that block the user from taking damage that turn, most commonly Protect. Attempting to use Protect multiple turns in a row sharply slices its success rate to prevent indefinite stalling. Furthermore, similar guarding moves like Detect and Endure all work on the same mechanic, so you can't just alternate between two such moves to avoid the success rate degradation.
** The games had constant problems with the Pokémon Wobbuffet. It's supposed to be a Pokémon that cannot directly attack but is streamlined to take advantage of damage reflecting attacks, but instead of being forced to attack, an opponent can just simply switch out his current Pokémon over and over until Wobbuffet runs out of PP. To prevent that, in Generation III Wobbuffet and its newly introduced pre-evolution Wynaut were both equipped with the Shadow Tag ability, which prevents the opponent from switching Pokémon in a battle against Wobbuffet/Wynaut until they were either recalled or knocked out or if the foe has some other trap-cancel ability that allows them to flee. Fair enough, except for in a competitive battle where both you and your opponents have Wobbuffet (or the much-less-common Wynaut) who are both equipped with Leftovers and facing each other. You can't fight back because Wobbuffet and Wynaut are only able to counter attacks, not dish them out. Their Shadow Tag abilities will also prevent either of them from switching out, and even if the two were to wear themselves down enough to use Struggle (the only move Wynaut/Wobbuffet knows that deals damage), Leftovers would cancel out what horrendously low damage their moves do, resulting in a draw by eliminating any chance that either of the two will faint. From Diamond and Pearl onward, Shadow Tag was changed so that any Pokémon who has the Shadow Tag ability who is locked into battle with a foe who also has said ability can negate the effect and switch out without problems. Also, Struggle now always takes away 25 percent of the user's ''maximum'' hit points, not 25 percent of the hit point damage the user did to the other guy, so that even if two trainers wound up with Wobbuffet as each person's last Pokémon, once Struggling began the match would end in 5 turns or less (because the 25 percent rounds down, someone with an HP amount that can be divided by 4 with a remainder of 1 could last 1 more turn). Also, Shadow Tag[[note]]and other trapping abilities/moves[[/note]] was changed again so that Ghost-type Pokémon are now immune to it.
** In the fifth generation of games there was a glitch involving the new move Sky Drop. The move makes one Pokémon take another into the air [[CaptainObvious (and then drop it for damage)]], and when a Pokémon is in the air, it cannot move or be hit (except by a few moves, like Thunder). There was previously a move called Gravity which made Flying-types or levitating Pokémon come to the ground (this meaning they can be hit by Ground-type moves). In a double battle, if one of your Pokémon uses Sky Drop and the other then uses Gravity, both your & the opponent's Pokémon will come to the ground... [[GameBreakingBug except while your Pokémon can move, theirs is treated as being in the air and cannot move, at all, until they are fainted by a move like, say, Thunder.]] The Obvious Rule Patch? Nintendo banned Sky Drop in Random online battles.
** In the fourth and fifth generation games, there have been problems with [[RageQuit players disconnecting to preserve their win-loss record.]] In ''VideoGame/PokemonXAndY'', however, disconnecting on players will count as a loss to the player who shut their game off.
** Pokémon with Oblivious as an Ability are immune to Infatuation, a status almost never used in any serious competition. In ''VideoGame/PokemonXAndY'', however, Pokémon with Oblivious were also now immune to the move Taunt, and specifically that move, essentially repurposing an Ability for an entirely different purpose (but one still marginally related to [[CaptainOblivious obliviousness]]).
** A meta example: when {{Website/Smogon}} decided that Mega Rayquaza was too much of a GameBreaker even for the [[CharacterTiers Uber tier]], they created the "Anything Goes" tier so they had somewhere to ban it to. The rules for Anything Goes are just what they sound like -- no bans, no restrictions... except that even in Anything Goes, the "Endless Battle" clause forbids movesets designed to [[{{Troll}} extend the battle indefinitely just to piss the other player off]].
* The UsefulNotes/VirtualConsole release of ''VideoGame/PokemonRedAndBlue'' does not allow Save States (a standard feature for other Virtual Console games released on the UsefulNotes/Nintendo3DS) to prevent players from cloning Pokémon.
* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyVI'' had a couple:
** First is a major issue with Gau, a character who normally can't equip weapons but has a high innate attack power to make up for it, and the Merit Award, an accessory that allows its user to equip any type of weapon or armor in the game. When Gau had the Merit Award in the original version of the game, you could equip him with a weapon. Not only did this dramatically boost his attack power, but it also led to some very bizarre GameBreaker combos, such as the legendary "Wind God Gau". Later remakes of the game prevent Gau from equipping the Merit Award, sadly enough.
** Gogo, while not nearly as GameBreaker status as Gau, could also achieve "Wind God" status with the Merit Award. This managed to last into the Playstation re-release, but was finally blocked in the GBA update. Another, separate rule patch was that of [[http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Psycho_Cyan_Bug "Psycho Cyan"]], but savvy players managed to find an alternate means of triggering this glitch anyway.
** The game also had a cheese glitch. In the game, Vanish could make your character disappear, thereby becoming unable to be physically hit. However, you could be hit by ANY magic attack with 100% accuracy. Players could exploit this by casting Vanish on a monster, then casting Death on them. The Death spell would ALWAYS hit ANY monster, boss or not, regardless if it would be able to hit them otherwise. Since Vanish was considered a ''positive'' status effect, extremely few enemies were made immune to it. This got fixed for the GBA re-release.
* ''VideoGame/Left4Dead'':
** The first game had an issue with melee shoving in VS mode. Players were literally shoving zombies for the entire game instead of actually using their guns, which made it a huge hassle for zombie players to approach and attack since they would [[CherryTapping get shoved to death.]] A patch then introduced melee fatigue, where survivors would have to wait before shoving again if they kept shoving too many times without stopping. This mechanic was made as a main feature in all game modes for the sequel.
** ''VideoGame/Left4Dead2'' also had a few things patched for VS mode due to complaints. Explosive ammo was removed due to survivors using the special ammo only on special infected, which basically meant that the survivors could not be touched due to the explosive ammo stumbling the zombie players. Using defibrillators would induce a 25 point penalty per use for the survivors. Spitters that spit their acid into a moving elevator would potentially wipe out the survivor team since they had nowhere to move away from the spit, so a patch was made where spitting into a moving elevator would make the acid quickly fizzle out to prevent a cheap win.
** The sequel also made it where melee weapons were not very effective on a Tank in order to encourage more gunning and running when survivors fight a Tank. Before this patch, survivors would use melee weapons (which ranged from the practical, like a sword, to absurd, like a frying pan) to kill a Tank quickly because each hit took 10% of the Tank's health off, which the Tank could then die in 10 hits. With 4 survivors using melee weapons all at once, it would be quite easy to drop a Tank, which frustrated Tank players in VS mode. A patch addressed this issue where now melee weapons only do half the damage they used to against a Tank.
** The Jockey gained a slight buff after complaints from players in VS mode came pouring in; The Jockey's main attack is to latch onto the survivors and ride them somewhere else while damaging them every second. The problem was the Jockey could be shoved off his victim (which is how it works) before he could do any damage at all if survivor players were quick enough. One patch later, the Jockey can now damage survivors as soon as he grabs them.
*** Something similar happened with the Smoker. The Smoker does damage by grabbing survivors with his tongue, pulling them toward him and trapping them. Originally, the Smoker couldn't cause damage to the player until his tongue attack fully retracted, implying that the tongue itself does no damage, but rather the damage comes from the Smoker hitting the survivor directly. Other survivors, however, were freeing their friends from the Smoker's tongue long before it reached the Smoker, so the attack was changed so that the survivor also takes damage during the dragging part of the attack.
** The Witch in the sequel had received a buff for Realism VS mode after people complained that the Witch was too easy for survivors to kill. Now Witches in Realism VS cannot be instantly killed with a head shot.
** When Survival mode was introduced in Left 4 Dead, people abused exploits and glitches in the maps by placing themselves in areas that the zombies could not "see" them at (players that are "off" the map are considered non existent by zombies), thus they could earn gold meals too easily. While some of the maps were patched to plug up the exploits, many others did not get detected. The sequel upgraded the AI Director to detect cheating in Survival mode where it will spawn Spitter acid onto a player that is not in the map or are in some spot that the zombies can't reach them and if the player avoids this check, the AI Director will just outright damage players until they get back to playing fair.
** Many maps had exploits that allowed players to skip crescendo events or large parts of the map to finish it faster. One example of this was in the 3rd level in No Mercy where players could destroy a door leading to the inside of a building. The door was supposed to be opened from the inside to let in players that got dragged outside through a window, but the door was easily broken with melee weapons, allowing players to skip the crescendo event. The door was patched to not break unless a Tank smashed it, but it still breaks with the grenade launcher.
* ''VideoGame/TeamFortress2'':
** The Gloves of Running Urgently gave the Heavy a speed boost when wielded, bringing his speed up from "extremely slow" to "about average". Another item, the Buffalo Steak Sandvich, was released later that temporarily increased the Heavy's speed to above average speed. These effects, when used together, allowed the Heavy to become one of the fastest classes in the game. Now, eating a Buffalo Steak cancels out the effect of the GRU.
** Another issue in the same update was the Fists of Steel and the Buffalo Steak Sandvich; the Fists of Steel negated 50% of the range damage at the cost of doubling melee damage. This is intended for a heavy to get to the front lines with little fear about suffering too much damage. The Buffalo Steak Sandvich was part of an item set that included a pair of gloves that gave you more damage, in exchange for health (which made the combination into a sort of glass cannon). Unfortunately, paired with the Fists of Steel turned the heavy into a walking battering ram, able to close the distance between almost all classes in an instant and being near-immune to damage (the 50% damage reduction from the fists pretty much negated the Buffalo's Minicrit debuff and then some). Paired with a Medic some heavies walk right up to a sentry and punch it to death, ''without being ubercharged''. They later toned down the amount of damage negation as well as slowed the weapon change time, making it much easier to deal with heavies who try this.
** The Sandvich item allows the Heavy to recover health by eating it, becoming helpless for the duration. Heavies used to be able to instantly start eating the sandvich as soon as they were done eating the first one. It lead to annoying situations where a Heavy would stand in the middle of a battlefield, [[StoneWall absorbing any damage done to him]], capturing objectives or being a bullet shield for his teammates. It was changed so the healing wasn't a constant heal but came in "bursts" and the Heavy would have to wait on a cooldown before the sandvich can be eaten again.
*** What's more, Heavies could throw their Sandviches on the floor to act a as a medium healthpack for their team. Most Heavies treated it as a free medium healthpack for ''themselves'', since it was much faster (if less effective) than standing still and eating it. Nowadays, a Heavy trying to pick up his own dropped Sandvich will see the Sandvich put back in his inventory instead.
** The Spy can turn invisible during which he is not able to use any of his attacks but originally he could still taunt while invisible. When the Sniper/Spy update gave him a taunt that could instant kill enemies, taunting while invisible was quickly edited out.
** Every time a new weapon is introduced, there's a 75% chance something like this would happen due to the developers not paying close enough attention to the code. One of the most notable was the Red Tape Recorder which, on release, downgraded a building based on it's ''animation''. This meant that going from level 3 to level 1 took about 3 seconds, making it impossible to save the upgrades since unless the engineer was already whacking the building, it takes more than 3 seconds to actually knock the damn thing off. It also meant that the RtR was completely useless at getting rid of buildings, since a building build animation is exponentially longer than it's upgrade animation. The developers later admitted that this was not the intended effect, but a random hazard in the coding messed it up and it took quite a while to iron it out (it down downgrades at a set speed at all levels, which was the intended effect).
** At first, the devs were a little bit sloppy about declaring particular surfaces as unbuildable by Engineers, since they had no means of reaching those areas. However, now that Engies can use the Wrangler to RocketJump themselves up to new areas, quite a few maps have had to be patched so keep one side from mounting a practically unbreakable defense.
** The Loch-n-Load grenade launcher was useful for its ability to kill Scouts, one of the Demoman's greatest counters, in one hit due to its increased damage and the grenades' faster movement speed. The Smissmas 2014 update added a damage cap for the weapon so it can only deal a maximum of 123 damage under normal conditions, ''specifically'' so it can't one-shot Scouts. The Scout has 125 HP under normal conditions.
* ''VideoGame/MarioKart'':
** Snaking. Players discovered the ability to perform a power slide on a straight road and quickly build up a mini-turbo (by mashing left/right as fast as possible), release it, then start a new power slide in the opposite direction, repeating back and forth until they hit a curve (where power sliding for mini-turbos normally comes into play). ''VideoGame/MarioKartDoubleDash'' started this trend and it was even more apparent in ''DS'' where the best time trial records came from snaking and [[ComplacentGamingSyndrome everyone online always snaked with the same specific characters/karts]]. Nintendo changed the mechanics in ''Wii'' so that mini-turbos built up from how much you turned during a power slide instead of based on the player's manual dexterity.
** In ''Wii'', bikes. Bikes can perform wheelies to attain a small speed boost, but players milking this zoomed ahead of players that didn't do the same (or couldn't, if they used karts). The intended balance is that bikes in a wheelie can't turn and will severely slow down if bumped by another vehicle, and bikes could only get the weaker level of mini-turbo, but these were virtually non-issues to skilled players. ''7'' got rid of the bikes. ''8'' brought them back, but stripped out the wheelie mechanic[[note]]although getting a boost will activate a purely aesthetic wheelie[[/note]] and gave them back the second level mini-turbo, making them functionally identical to karts.
* ''VideoGame/{{Prototype}}'' has a thermobaric tank that can destroy any building in one shot. There is a [[MassMonsterSlaughterSidequest Kill Event]] that involves using one. After doing the event, the player is left with the tank and 50 rounds for the big gun. Patch: If you use the tank to destroy a military base or infected hive, the tank will ''inexplicably vanish'', preventing you from cleaning up the entire map with it.
* Due to the infamous amount of infinite combos and glitches that dominated competitive play for ''VideoGame/MarvelVsCapcom2'', Capcom's made a point of patching infinite combos out of ''VideoGame/MarvelVsCapcom3''.
** ''Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3'' added [[Franchise/AceAttorney Phoenix Wright]], who was a stance based fighter. He gathers evidence in Investigation mode, uses them in Trial mode and if he has 3 good pieces of evidence and lands an Objection, he enters Turnabout mode, which has a time limit, but during this time he has the highest damage output in the game. The timer only runs while Phoenix is on point. When the game was released, he was instantly shot to Assist tier due the Turnabout timer (and [[BackgroundMusicOverride theme song]]) freezing when he's switched out and his Press The Witness (a forward moving barrage move) assist being practically invincible (he can be hit from behind but that's very impractical) while he's in turnabout mode, even being able to interrupt all uncinematic hypers. This was quickly patched, forcing people to use him more offensively, ironically enough. The timer still freezes while he's inactive, however.
* One of the many balance patches for ''VideoGame/{{Warcraft}} III'' introduced a new armor type, "Unarmored". Originally it was reserved for units that indeed logically had no armor, like [[SquishyWizard Squishy Wizards]]. However, later patches changed some units to have the "unarmored" armor type but still have armor for balance reasons.
** In one of Reign of Chaos' missions, the game explicitly tells you to load Goblin Sappers into Zeppelins to use them as bombs. This obvious GameBreaker (Sappers autocast 250 damage in an area, a Zeppelin can carry eight Sappers and drop them while moving) was allowed in multiplayer and even recommended in the StrategyGuide. Come ''The Frozen Throne'', not only is this no longer possible, but it also applies to the RoC mission, where trying to load Sappers gets you an error message.
* ''VideoGame/BillyVsSNAKEMAN'' has a Village mechanic called {{Kaiju}} - giant monsters that the entire village can battle, which reward powerful items to the villagers which do the most damage and upgrades to the village itself when they fall. Originally, they simply vanished once their health was depleted. When the "enticement" mechanic was introduced, allowing any villager to summon a kaiju to the village (instead of just the village's leader) at the cost of a rare item, there were two recorded cases of villages summoning and defeating over a ''hundred'' kaiju in a single day. Now, when a kaiju runs out of health, its HP becomes "Crippled", and it stays in the village until Dayroll, whereupon it is officially defeated and cleared.
* ''VideoGame/StarWarsTheOldRepublic'' has an arena game called Huttball, which the point of it was to get the ball into the enemies goal while [[BloodSport killing everyone on the opposite team]]. Players started to just grab the ball and camp with it in a corner. It was changed so the ball would EXPLODE if it was left in the same place for to long ({{Justified|Trope}} because the game is for the Hutt's entertainment, and you were boring them).
* ''VideoGame/AdventureQuest'' had a OneHitKill ability known as Power Word Die, which was a very rare special attack available to the Blade of Awe. For several years, this ability worked on just about everything, aside from monsters which were obviously designed to be unbeatable. Shortly after the game's EXP/Gold formula was retooled for balance purposes, and higher level monsters gave out exponentially higher loot than lower level encounters, PWD received an adjustment in order to counter abuse. Its odds of successfully instant killing the enemy were now based on a formula based around the monster's power level compared to that of the player, so that lower level characters were no longer able to skip several levels at once by killing monsters far beyond their level with sheer luck and persistence.
* ''OpenTTD'', a ''TransportTycoon'' derivative, had a number of ways that players could make money faster or spend less than intended, but these required insane amounts of micromanagement[[note]]For example: after delivering a load of cargo, a vehicle will head back empty to pick up another load. If you sell the vehicle at the point of unloading and buy a replacement at the loading dock, you don't need to pay the operating costs while it drives back.[[/note]], and nobody used them. Then, version 0.7 removed the original [[ArtificialStupidity AI]] and let players design their own AIs -- and someone [[http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?t=39756 wrote an AI]] that exploited ''all'' those edge cases. Cue version 0.7.2, aka "eliminate the creative use of game mechanics".
* ''VideoGame/DarkSouls'' had it bad in several cases:
** Pre-1.05 games had the problem with Ring of Fog. Simply meant to be a more effective version of ''VideoGame/DemonsSouls''' Thief Ring, it quickly became the mainstay of all too many players due to the fact that equipping it means you are untargetable. This, in a game where locking on to an enemy allows for strafing amongst other things, makes for more than 90% players who aren't good enough to fight without lock-ons suffer. Patch 1.05 nerfed the ring such that you can always lock-on to it.
** 1.05 patch nerfed the Elite Knight Set bad. As a result however, it spawned the dreaded "Masked Giant" setup. The Masks are head equipments that, while low on defense, has some very good effects. Mask of the Father, in particular, raises your Equip Burden, allowing you to equip heavy armors for torso, arms and legs. The Giant set is second-best set once fully upgraded, and using the Father Mask allows one to equip them all under 50% with minimal stat investments. But what truly broke this combination is the Dark Wood Grain Ring, which grants users an alternate "cartwheel" roll. Said roll is faster than even "fast roll" (roll motion for under 25% equip load) ''and'' has more invincibility-frames. So people were running with second-best armor and having the maneuverability of a ninja on meth. Even worse, the Hornet Ring boosted backstab damage to crazy levels, especially with knives and rapiers, and widespread practice of roll-stabbing [[note]]temporarily untargets an opponent, rolls quickly behind, turns around and backstabs[[/note]] and pass-through stabs [[note]]where, after passing an opponent, using the lock-on function to turn faster than the opponent can to backstab[[/note]] made the combination highly lethal. Patch 1.06 reduced the buffs granted by the Masks, Hornet Ring ''and'' the Dark Wood Grain Ring, effectively killing the combination thrice-over.
* ''VideoGame/{{Minecraft}}'' always has an eventual patch released to address balancing issues or automation. Bone meal, which acted as fertilizer for trees and crops, was changed to require several uses before the plants fully grow instead of requiring just one bone meal. Mobs that spawn in with tools/weapons and/or armor (when it was first introduced) was altered to have their dropped equipment be worn down so that players don't farm for free items with little effort. The dev team also stated that they heavily dislike automation methods that allow players to acquire resources with little effort, but do not mind the more crazier automation methods used to gather items since the player is putting a lot of effort into their farming.
* Many ''SwordOfTheStars'' updates were not only enhancements but also to close loopholes. One such loophole, called the Destroyer Spam, involved sending a fleet made up of a number of dreadnoughts and/or cruisers and scores (maybe even hundreds) of destroyers. The game has an ArbitraryHeadcountLimit for battles in the form of command points, depending on the command ship used and technology researched. Basically, the points determine the number of your ships that can be in a battle at any given point. However, the "numerical superiority" mechanic was meant to encourage larger fleets and rewarded the larger fleet in a battle by increasing command points proportional to the number/class of ships larger than the other fleet(s). The LoopholeAbuse involved using the number of destroyers (useless by the time dreadnoughts are used but cheap and quick to build) to boost the numerical superiority and increase the ability to field more dreadnoughts/cruisers in battle. Naturally, the developers quickly put a cap on how many destroyers figure into the mechanic.
* ''VideoGame/MarioParty'' had Chance Time (or a similar event of a different name) which was an event designed only to screw people over. Many games have been won or lost all because Chance Time forced two players to exchange/give their coins, stars, or both. Players who were winning for most of the game could suddenly lose the entire game because of Chance Time and players who kept losing could suddenly win without any effort. The event was eventually scrapped by ''Mario Party 7'', but returned in ''Mario Party 9'' with different rules and outcomes.
** Hidden Blocks were also removed at some point due to the blocks having a 50/50 chance of giving the player a free star.
** The three Bonus Stars given out at the end of every board in the first game were A) who won the most mini-games, B) who had the most coins at any point, and C) who landed on the most ? spaces. The trouble was that whoever got star A was almost guaranteed to get star B, because mini-games were the most reliable way to win coins. The game was usually [[GoldenSnitch decided by these Bonus Stars]], which was frustrating. This was changed in ''Mario Party 2'' and all subsequent ''Party'' games to include other Bonus Stars, such as who traveled the farthest and who spent the most in items. Later releases also included even more random events, like who landed on the most blue spaces, and limited it to only three random Bonus Stars.
* In the early version of ''VideoGame/{{Battlefield3}}'' any player with a mortar can use it in their spawn zone, so the opposite team cannot kill them without trying to enter to the opposite spawn zone. This was fixed in later versions, so a mortar can only be deployed in areas when any player can reach and preventing those blind spots. This is even warned over in the loading screens.
* ''Videogame/MechWarrior'':
** The series has always been plagued by "poptarters", players who load up their HumongousMecha with a lot of long-ranged sniping weapons, then stick [[JetPack jump jets]] on it. They hide behind a hill, then when they detect an enemy, jump up, fire their weapons, then drop behind cover and repeat once their guns have reloaded. The ''Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries'' [[FreewareGame free re-release]] tried to counter this by introducing the advanced radar server setting, which limits radar to line of sight (and force first-person mode was promoted), which hampered poptarting. ''Mechwarrior Living Legends'' made the [[CameraAbuse camera shake violently]] when using jumpjets, the game had no third-person view, in addition to [[OverHeating large amounts of heat generated]] due to the jump jets being ''much'' more powerful at pushing the mech up into the air (making it hard to accurately shoot except at the apex of the jump). The [[ScrewedByTheLawyers final update]] put the final nail in the dedicated poptarter's coffin, as the heat revamp made going over the heat redline (common when poptarting) ''far'' [[GoingCritical more dangerous]].
*** ''[=MechWarrior=] Online'' has addressed the lots-of-identical-weapons problem with a '''particularly''' obvious rule patch - "ghost heat". Now firing two [=PPCs=] (say) at once still makes twice the heat of firing one, but firing three [=PPCs=] at once (or too quickly in sequence) makes 4.26 times the heat of firing one, firing four makes 7.36 times the heat, and it gets worse from there. Firing two AC/20s at once makes 3.92 times the heat of firing one; firing three AC/20s makes '''9.24''' times the heat of one!
** The Planetary League for ''Living Legends'' had several extremely annoying examples of LoopholeAbuse - such as camping inside the spawn hangar to force a draw - which were quickly removed with obvious rule patches - in this case, forcing mechs still in the hangars after the round begins to be forfeited.
** From version 0.1 to 0.6, air combat in ''Living Legends'' was decided by pretty much one factor: how many [[GameBreaker Shiva "E" variants]] - a massively armored, relatively fast jet that could instagib anything in the sky and rip ground forces apart - your side brought. [[ScrewedByTheLawyers The final update]] swapped out its standard LBX shotguns with gimped "air LBX" shotguns that turned the god of the skys into a JokeCharacter; and it was the only aircraft variant to have the air LBX replacements.
* ''PAYDAY 2'' had several exploits patched out to counter people completing heists with little effort. The Cable Guy skill gave the player 10 cable ties when aced, which lead to people effortlessly stealthing heists since one person with the skill could tie up most of the hostages and if another player had the skill, then the group could tie down ''everyone''. The skill was nerfed to include only 5 cable ties, but it was then bumped up to 6 after [[TheyChangedItNowItSucks the community complained]].
** Some levels were completed a little ''too'' quickly due to certain skills enabling players breaching safes and [=ATMs=] with ease. The game was patched to force an escape sequence on players that go loud in single day heists in order to curb farming[[labelnote:*]]With one exception: the Ukranian Job, which involves stealing a tiara from a safe, can be completed in half a minute, if the team rushes in, blows the safe, and rushes out. Even if the alarm is going off, if the team escapes ''before'' police show up (not hard), there's no escape sequence. If ECM jammers prevent the alarm from going off (also not hard), there's no escape sequence ''and'' the job is technically completed in stealth for a bonus on the next heist. The trade-off is that the bulk of the payout on Ukrainian Job is from the additional loot on the map: just stealing the tiara is barely worth the job, and the experience is extremely low as well[[/labelnote]].
* In ''VideoGame/SuperSmashBros Melee'', the dev team discovered the "wavedashing" glitch[[note]] canceling out of a jump animation by air-dodging diagonally downward into the ground; this allows you to preform ground attacks while sliding forward[[/note]] pretty early in development, but [[ThrowItIn left it in]]. Then they discovered how much of a [[NoobBridge drastic gap]] it created between newcomers and veteran players, and it was one of the first things they removed from ''Brawl''. In addition, the physics were altered so that the ability to {{combo}} was taken out entirely. [[BrokenBase The reactions to both of these have been mixed]].
** ''Super Smash Bros. for 3DS'' has a "Conquest" mode, in which characters are divided into teams to which players can contribute points (about once per day for a week) by playing as those characters in online battles; if the team to which the player contributed the most points is the one that earned the most points overall at the end of the week, that player earns an in-game reward. Initially, the current percentages of points for each team were displayed on the menu; however, this led to most players simply choosing to contribute points to whichever team was already winning in order to get the reward, leading to very lopsided victories. To fix this, a patch was made to the game that hid the percentages for each conquest until it was over. Even later, it was further patched to give lesser rewards to contributors to the losing teams as well.
* ''VideoGame/NetHack'': WishingForMoreWishes is forbidden. Wishing for a magic lamp gives you a regular lamp. Wands of wishing can only be recharged once, and wishing for a wand of wishing will give you an empty or [[AntiMagic cancelled]] wand that's already been recharged.
* Frequently occurs in the ''VideoGame/SuperRobotWars'' franchise, where developer Banpresto will either {{Nerf}} or overhaul game mechanics so exploitable in one installment into something more standardized if the mechanic returns in the next. Some examples include:
** The "Squad System" from the second ''VideoGame/SuperRobotWarsAlpha'' game allowed up to four allied units to group into a single squad without limitations. By ''Alpha 3'', the system was tweaked to ensure each squad cannot exceed a predetermined size limit.
** The "Partner Battle System" in ''VideoGame/SuperRobotWarsK'' gives solo units a reason not to be in a partner unit, since they can earn faster kills and Will gains on their own via "Combo Attack", since a partner unit cannot use it. ''VideoGame/SuperRobotWarsL'' revamps this, where being in a partner unit nets both units additional combat and statistical bonuses that a solo unit could not earn.
** The [[MinMaxersDelight "SP Regeneration" and "Attacker"]] pilot skills in ''VideoGame/SuperRobotWarsOriginalGeneration'' was every player's go-to duo of skills for all pilots on the roster when purchasing these skills. The ''Second Original Generation'' ensures both skills are no longer available for sale, fixing them as character-exclusive skills.
* In the original ''VideoGame/WanganMidnight Maximum Tune'', the "gacha" exploit--periodically rapid-shifting to the previous gear and back--allows the player to gain short bursts of faster acceleration. ''Maximum Tune 2'' onwards prevents it by forcing the player's gear to neutral if they try it.
* ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xcaGkyeZRA Broken Knuckles]]'' is a ROMHack of ''VideoGame/Sonic3AndKnuckles'' that kills the player if they try to move with the left or right buttons, forcing you to glide or spin-dash if you want any kind of lateral motion. There is an unavoidable area in Hydrocity Zone that levitates you upwards with fans, but since you're floating in midair, you can't glide or spin-dash. So the hacker added a spring on the wall to force you out.
* In ''VideoGame/ShovelKnight'', Plague Knight's version of the "Untouched" feat[[note]]Beat any member of the Order of No Quarter without taking any damage[[/note]] in the Plague of Shadows DLC specifically excludes King Knight in the description. King Knight's attack patterns are very predictable and slow compared to the other bosses, so he would be the easiest Quarter member to pull off the feat with.
* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIV'':
** Speed running in dungeons became the norm amongst players simply because it let them beat the dungeon faster and waste less time. By having the party's tank get the attention from as many enemies as possible, the DPS players could nuke everything down by spamming their AOE abilities. The speed run tactic caused a few changes; Holy and Flare, the White and Black Mage's strongest AOE spells, got nerfed in potency and then nerfed again where [[DiminishingReturnsForBalance any enemy hit with the spell past the first enemy was hit with less power]]. Speed bumps were also employed a lot more in the form of "gates", such as having to kill specific enemies to get a key or needing to kill all enemies to disable a barrier blocking the way. The devs also enforced an item level sync for certain dungeons so that players couldn't effectively farm said dungeons for certain items by using powerful gear.
** Spiritbonding gear for materia is a tedious task for gatherer and crafters, but players discovered that they could wear the same crafting/gathering gear inside dungeons to farm materia much faster. However, this caused grievances among other players since materia farmers were a liability from using gear that heavily gimped their HP, defense, and attack power. The developers released a patch where the rate of spiritbinding gear was determined by the gear's item level versus the target's "item level" (if a dungeon drops ilvl70 gear for example, then you'd need to wear gear around that level to get a good binding rate). If your gear's level was too high or too low against what you were facing, you would either have a slow bind rate or have no binding at all.
** In the beginning of 2.0, players could leave duties whenever they wanted and screw over their party. This would lead to the creation of the 15 minute timeout penalty as a minor form of punishment and a deterrent towards people who RageQuit constantly. When the devs saw that 15 minutes wasn't enough, the timeout penalty was doubled to 30 minutes.
** When signing up for a duty, the game enforces a ready check for all players once there's enough players to start the duty. Players that were fishing for in progress duties (duties where there's a party with missing members) would keep withdrawing from the duty when it popped up until they got an in progress duty so that they could try to get a group that was near the end of the run and finish it faster. This behavior greatly annoyed everyone trying to get a duty started since withdraws happened numerous times in a single session, delaying the duty from starting. It was then patched where withdrawing 3 times in a day got you a 30 minute time out for each withdrawal after.
* When it was discovered that the free-to-start game ''VideoGame/{{Ironfall}}'' could be used to jailbreak the UsefulNotes/Nintendo3DS, Nintendo responded quickly by pulling the game from the [=eShop=] until the exploit was patched. However, anyone who had downloaded it beforehand could just refrain from updating to the new version, making this fix relatively useless, until Nintendo released part 2: an update to the 3DS's firmware that could completely block players from playing select titles if they aren't up to date. The ''only'' game this is actually used for is ''Ironfall''.
* The ''VideoGame/HearthstoneHeroesOfWarcraft'' adventure ''Curse of Naxxramas'' shipped with these already in place for heroic mode, banning specific cards that would otherwise make some encounters trivial. For example, if you try to play Alexstrasza[[note]]Sets a hero's health to 15[[/note]] against heroic Loatheb, who has whopping 99 health, [[BigBad Kel'Thuzad]] will destroy the card and mock you.
-->'''Kel'Thuzad''': This is heroic Naxxramas! I won't stand for such cheap tactics here!
* In the 3DS version of ''VisualNovel/VirtuesLastReward'', a GameBreakingBug can wipe out your save file if you save while inside of a puzzle room (most commonly the PEC room). Digital copies of the game "fix" the bug by disabling saving during puzzle rooms.
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