History ObviousRulePatch / VideoGames

** Landing on the Nature Preserve islands would get you wanted for trespassing and the PIDF guards patrolling the island will immediately turn hostile. But if yopu didn't touch land by being mounted on a Pal, the guards would ignore you and there would be no effect on your WantedMeter. The 0.1.5.0. patch changed it so your presence alone would increase your WantedMeter and turn the PIDF guards on the island hostile.

** ''{{Videogame/Palworld}}'':
*** Nails used to be the premiere money making method because of their simple production chain and the relatively high price they sold for. In fact, they were ''so'' efficient at making money that that instead of crafting ammunition, people crafted nails, sold them for gold and then bought ammunition. Come 0.1.5.0., nail prices were significantly decreased.
*** Landing on the Nature Preserve islands would get you wanted for trespassing and the PIDF guards patrolling the island will immediately turn hostile. But if yopu didn't touch land by being mounted on a Pal, the guards would ignore you and there would be no effect on your WantedMeter. The 0.1.5.0. patch changed it so your presence alone would increase your WantedMeter and turn the PIDF guards on the island hostile.

** ''{{Videogame/Palworld}'':
** Nails used to be the premiere money making method because of their simple production chain and the relatively high price they sold for. In fact, they were ''so'' efficient at making money that that instead of crafting ammunition, people crafted nails, sold them for gold and then bought ammunition. Come 0.1.5.0., nail prices were significantly decreased.
** Landing on the Nature Preserve islands would get you wanted for trespassing and the PIDF guards patrolling the island will immediately turn hostile. But if yopu didn't touch land by being mounted on a Pal, the guards would ignore you and there would be no effect on your WantedMeter. The 0.1.5.0. patch changed it so your presence alone would increase your WantedMeter and turn the PIDF guards on the island hostile.

* ''{{VideoGame/Overwatch}}''

*** On the subject of Lord Kazzak, players looking to cause trouble could lure Kazzak all the way to Stormwind and watch as he proceeded to sack the city, wiping out [=NPCs=] and low level players left and right. Blizzard eventually responded by ensuring world bosses like Kazzak would not leave their designated areas.

** 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 was not a beast (such as a slime or a hydra) was allowed to stay (Presumably, Blizzard's future plans to make Worgen playable would have made players keeping Worgen as pets dive too close to UnfortunateImplications for their tastes).

** The Reaver Shark coupled with stockpiling crates allowed players to essentially skip a huge portion of the game, so they were nerfed in Journey's End (1.4) to prevent this — Crate Stockpiling by splitting Crates into Pre-Hardmode and Hardmode variants, and the Reaver Shark by reducing its Pickaxe Power to 59, making it unable to mine Hellstone. To quote the changelog written by the devs on the two subjects:

*** On the subject of Lord Kazzak, players looking to cause trouble could lure Kazzak all the way to Stormwind and watch as he proceeded to sack the city, wiping out [=NPCs=] and low level players left and right. Blizzard eventually responded by ensuring bosses like Kazzak would not leave their designated areas.

--->(About Crates) ''Fishing in Pre-Hardmode to skip early Hardmode was an example of a fun alternate path to progression, but taken too far. You can still fish up ores and alternate ores via Crates - but now, Pre-Hardmode Crates will only contain Pre-Hardmode ores and vice versa for Crates fished up in Hardmode. This allows you to fish instead of mine, but at least forces you to face the challenges of early Hardmode to do so.''

** Also, if your ship SHOULD died from CONCORD attack and you didn't - you cheated, it doesn't matter why you didn't. CONCORD ships are very powerful and you couldn't outtank them but there are a lot of other tricks and new ones were invented so this rule patch was added

** [[PurposelyOverpowered Absolute Virtue]], who is for all intents and purposes totally invincible due to its 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 it (other than beating it old-schooled way), Square-Enix will immediately squash it by [[NewPowersAsThePlotDemands giving Absolute Virtue new resistances and powers as its flaws were discovered]].

*** A theoretical method of defeating Absolute Virtue 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 Modus Veritas 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 botting in most cases). As soon as people discussed how it could be used to defeat Absolute Virtue, "certain notorious monsters" were given a resistance to Modus Veritas. Guess who was at the top of the priority list?

* When it was discovered that the free-to-start game ''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 first ''VideoGame/MarioParty1'' has mini-games that require [[SomeDexterityRequired rapidly rotating the controller's control stick]]. In its original UsefulNotes/Nintendo64 version, this resulted in a lot of broken sticks and sore hands, to the point that Nintendo had to issue special gloves for people whose hands were blistered from all this rotating. Every ''Mario Party'' game after the first one fixed this issue by removing control stick rotation from its mini-games; the few that survived which previously required rotating the stick were changed to require rapidly pressing a button instead. The exception is ''The Top 100'', which includes a couple stick-rotating games- the [=3DS=] uses a flat Circle Pad instead of a protruding control stick, making the use of the palm to rotate the stick (which was the cause of most of the problems) an impractical strategy. Some of these minigames returned in ''VideoGame/MarioPartySuperstars'', and since the UsefulNotes/NintendoSwitch ''does'' use control sticks, the instruction screens for these games explicity warn against using the "palm" strategy.

** 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]].

* ''VideoGame/NightmareCreatures'' has the Adrenaline Meter, a mechanic designed to force you into combat to keep it filled, or else you die[[note]]When not fighting it slowly empties, it fills completely when you kill a monster, and if it empties your health steadily depletes until you die[[/note]]. According to one of the developers, this was applied at the absolute last minute after the publisher realized he could just swooce through levels without fighting at all. Apparently they rather disliked it, and not only did they add a cheat code to disable it but also made it completely optional in the UsefulNotes/Nintendo64 port of the game.

** 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 ''Shadow Dragon'' and ''Mystery'' 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. While ''[[VideoGame/FireEmblemHeroes Heroes]]'' lets you deploy more than one Dancer on a map, they cannot perform for each other as long as both have Sing or Dance.

* ''VideoGame/AnimalCrossingNewHorizons'' is the first game in the ''VideoGame/AnimalCrossing'' series which has DownloadableContent for its timed holiday events rather than them already being in the game and only activating when the date occurs in real life. This prevents players from "time travelling" to and from these specific events by altering the calendar on their game console, [[GoodBadBugs allowing them to access these events at any time]] and subsequently spoiling them on the Internet.

* ''[[Franchise/StarCraft StarCraft II]]'' the infamous "Archon Toilet" tactic where you used the Protoss Mothership's "Vortex" ability to trap enemies and then sent in Archons after the enemies. Since Archons dealt SplashDamage, all the units emerge at the same time and are overlapping each other, this allowed the Archons to ''[[CurbStompBattle shred]]'' the opponents in mere seconds. Blizzard ''attempted'' to patch out this tactic by giving all units that emerge from the vortex MercyInvincibility but even that didn't work and they were forced to simply replace it.

* ''VideoGame/{{Factorio}}'': Productivity modules can be used to increase the overall output of the machine relative to its input, and the bonus is percentage-based, so using it on expensive high-end items gives you the most benefit. To prevent them from being a GameBreaker, they were [[https://wiki.factorio.com/Productivity_module nerfed]] after their introduction, such as beacons not accepting them, or only being usable for "intemediate products" - the latter is a vague definition that happens to include research and rocket parts, which are the main "items" to produce in the end- and post-game.

* ''VideoGame/ShantaeHalfGenieHero'': Trying to use the Bat transformation to just fly across Cape Crustatean which full of gaps, has the transformation work only for a limited time, instead of forever like usual.

** Throughout the whole series, you were much more likely to get a powerful item if you were lagging behind everyone else. This had people use the sandbag strategy where they would play terribly on purpose until they got a powerful item like the Thunderbolt or Star to get ahead of everyone else. Other people would use sandbagging to grief other players such as driving in reverse and hitting people along the way with strong items or camp at a row of item boxes and attack anyone that passed by. In the final Booster Course Pass DLC for ''Mario Kart 8 Deluxe'', Nintendo would change the item algorithm so that anyone who is sandbagging will only get common items like Green Shells.

* 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).

** ''9'' had a event on Bowser spaces where Bowser would take away half of the Mini-Stars of the person who landed on his space. However, if the person was in last, he would either let them be or outright double their current Mini-Star total. Due to this being demonstrably unfair, in ''VideoGame/MarioParty10'', when this same circumstance occurs, Bowser does ''not'' spare or reward the player in last and properly deducts half of their Mini-Stars.