Obvious Rule Patch / Video Games

• Pokémon

A-F

• AdventureQuest had a One-Hit Kill 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.
• The Age of Empires series:
  • The first level of the Genghis Khan campaign in Age of Empires II features a somewhat infamous Easy Level Trick: This level involves completing tasks for various tribes to unite them under your banner, but it is possible to use a Monk to convert the tribes' units without completing their requests. In Definitive Edition, this was fixed by having these tribes attack the Monk should you try to convert them.
  • In Age of Empires III, Britain has access to the Manor, a replacement to the House that spawns a Settler upon construction. The Manor notably cannot be manually deleted, which is virtually the only thing in the game that is restricted in this way. This appears to be a measure against players trying to repeatedly build and demolish Manors as a way of creating Settlers, which combined with training them normally at your Town Centers could be quite potent as a strategy.
• Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the first game in the Animal Crossing series which has free Downloadable Content 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, allowing them to access these events at any time and subsequently spoiling them on the Internet.
• In Astral Chain, you have a number of AED charges that is tied to your difficulty level: 6 on Casual (infinite with an Unchained mode toggle), 2 on Pt Standard, and 0 on Pt Ultimate. You can gain extra charges by either upgrading your Legatus or finding AED battery items in the field, even on Pt Ultimate. A patch later revised this so that on Pt Ultimate, you get zero revives, period, and upgrades and items will not get around that.
• Many exploits in the Baldur's Gate series have been patched out by the Enhanced Editions. They are listed here.
  • Probably the most popular example was at the beginning of the second game. There is a cutscene that shows the main character awake in a prison. The cutscene also erased all the eventual items in the inventory, since imported characters would mantain their weapons and items as well (this was a legit mechanic in the first game). However, before the cutscene started, there was a fraction of second with a black screen when players could pause the game, drop all the items on the ground before the cutscene script erased them, and then pick them up after the cutscene ends. This could make all the first part of the game a lot easier.
  • Another very popular exploit that was patched: pause the game, drink a potion from the inventory, swap it with a magic scroll and the character would cast the spell even if he/she weren't a wizard. This was a common technique to summon a familiar when not playing a mage or a wizard.
  • In Baldur's Gate III you could trivialize the boss battle against Astarion's vampire master Cazador by knocking him into the surrounding chasm. However, since he can fly this was later patched out.
• In the early version of Battlefield 3 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.
• In an early release of Battlefield 2142, 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.
• Billy vs. SNAKEMAN 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.
• In The Binding of Isaac Afterbirth +, the Void item is an activated item which destroys any pedestal items in the room upon use. For passive items, this results in a random stat boost. For activated items, 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. Likewise, the Smelter item copies the effects of trinkets, and several exist which are consumed upon use. The most notable of these is the Missing Poster, which reincarnates the character as the Lost. Prior to it being patched out, the combination of these two granted effective immortality, since the Missing Poster's effect could be reused endlessly.
• In Bonfire, every hero can use a Charged Attack to make their attack stronger at the cost of motivation points. Attacks also grant motivation points equal to the damage dealt. This meant that, at certain power levels, charged attacks generated enough motivation points to instantly refund the cost, making them essentially free. The 0.9.35 update changed this so that charged attacks no longer grant motivation points.
• Broken Knuckles is a ROM Hack of Sonic 3 & Knuckles 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.
• Civilization:
  • In 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 replanted forests contained no useful wood.
  • In V, the original win condition to achieve Domination Victory was "be the last civilization in control of their original capital". This meant that it was entirely possible to get this victory without ever declaring war or attacking anybody in a game, since other civilizations could capture each other's capitals to satisfy the requirement. It was later changed to "control all civilizations' original capitals".
  • When VI was first released it had two strategies/exploits that were quickly patched out:
    • The first one was that builders could go around the world removing all the features they see, which would increase food or production in their nearest city. Normally it's a consideration of whether you want a large sum of food/production now or wait to improve tiles for more stable food/production income, but since the features aren't in your territory it didn't matter. Later the game limited removing features to only inside your territory.
    • The second was that selling units always gave you back the same amount of money, so people were simply selling builders (which normally had limited uses and would disappear) after they only had one use left, or selling a military unit when they encountered enemies they can't win (you're going to lose the unit either way, so you might as well get some gold from it). This even gave rise to the 'Saka horse archer exploit' - basically because of a certain Civ's ability to get two horse archers for the price of one it worked out to be cheaper and faster to produce a horse archer, then sell them for gold, then use that gold to purchase the unit you actually wanted. Again, this was patched out by limiting when you can sell units.
• The Corridor: No, you can't just change your controls to get through the Interface Screw level. If you try, every button you try to bind will just be "invalid", forcing you to use the default bindings.
• Dark Souls 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 Demon's Souls' 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 Mask of the Father 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 and pass-through stabs ^note where, after passing an opponent, using the lock-on function to turn faster than the opponent can to backstab 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, the Legend never dies, and promptly discarded his rapier for a Chaos Zweihander instead... This setup is best known as the "GiantDad" build.
• Dark Souls II included one that was beneficial to players: To use the Dual Wielding "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's Smelter Hammer, initially required 105 Strength to power stance, but the cap is 99. So the developers altered the restriction on this weapon alone so that it could be power stanced at 99 Strength.
• Dark Souls III has the Hollowslayer Greatsword, which deals bonus damage to Hollows. Naturally, enemy players are immune to this effect no matter how much Hollowing they have, or else it would probably be the only weapon anyone would ever use for PvP.
• In Defense of the Ancients, 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 Invisible Wall 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.
  • 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.
  • From the very early days of the game, Shadow Fiend had an ultimate ability called Dark Flames, which gave him an orbiting ring of fireballs that dealt continuous contact damage. The catch is that the restrictions of the Warcraft III engine also made the ability usable by illusions. As such, Shadow Fiend could build a Manta Style, which can be activated to create two illusions of the user, and then tear up everything in his general vicinity. Shortly after his release, Shadow Fiend was forbidden from buying Manta Style, which lasted until his ultimate was reworked into his now-signature Requiem of Souls (which, as an active ability, cannot be used by illusions).
  • Arc Warden had a particularly nasty synergy with the Divine Rapier, which gives an astronomical amount of attack damage but drops when the user dies, free to be picked up and used by the enemy. Sounds okay on paper until you take into account Arc Warden's ultimate ability Tempest Double, which creates a clone of himself that can use all of his abilities and items - including the Rapier, which the clone will not drop when killed. This in turn allowed Arc Warden to safely terrorize enemies with the enormous damage output offered by Divine Rapier by sending the clone on suicide runs while the real Arc Warden hangs back in friendly territory. Eventually, Tempest Double was patched to no longer copy items that drop on death (namely Divine Rapier, as Arc Warden rarely if ever wastes an inventory slot on the other item in this category).
  • Batrider has an ability called Sticky Napalm which boosts every instance of damage Batrider deals to an affected enemy by a fixed value. One patch after his release, the ability was changed to no longer work with Radiance, an item which continuously damages enemies near the wielder, for reasons that should be quite obvious.
  • Bottle ferrying has been a strategy that's occasionally made some heroes too powerful in the laning phase. Using a courier, they would give it their empty Bottle and have it run back to the fountain to refill it and deliver it back to them. On heroes like Shadowfiend, whose creep-clearing and hero-busting nukes was offset by his low mana pool, it was the go-to strategy for mid laners. Changing the courier's movespeed was an extremely delicate procedure that would affect all other aspects of it, and preventing courier from filling up a bottle could've been too drastic of a nerf. So in 6.78 how was bottle ferrying nerfed? In a logic-defying move, they made the courier move 30% slower when it carried an empty Bottle.
  • One of the changes that happened during 6.84 is that several skills can now affect creep-heroes and ancients. One of this unfortunate case would include Necrophos's Heartstopper Aura affecting Ancient creeps. Disregarding the fact that it's easily countered, weakens other lanes and is significantly slower than lane farming, a lot of low-lever pub players began picking him for the sole purpose of AFK jungling on the Ancient camp; stand outside its spawning range as the aura withers down its HP, occasionally moving to stack the creeps before rushing an Aghanim's Scepter to snowball off kills that have been weakened by other allies. Due to the severe criticism of this tactic, this interaction is quickly removed in the next patch by making Ancient creeps immune to Heartstopper Aura.
  • Originally, Lone Druid's Spirit Bear could not use the item's active skill and more specifically, if given an Armlet, it will be the courier version which does not give the item's Cast from Hit Points power. Then come the port Dota 2, this interaction is overlooked and the Spirit Bear could fully wield the Armlet item without the Strength attribute bonus nor the life drain and as soon as this interaction has been found, Lone Druid's pick rate goes up the roof as players could purchase a mid-game item, toggle it and then give it to the Spirit Bear where it gains the power of a late-game item without any of the negative perks that come with it including the health loss penalty. Come the next patch after this exploit is found, Spirit Bear now loses health when using Armlet's active skill, completely neutering the interaction as well as no longer making the item viable for Lone Druid anymore.
• Dicey Dungeons: In "Finale", you can convince enemies to turn on Lady Luck and use their unique abilities on your side. However, the rules patch comes in on replays where Lady Luck has added "banned" party members to the list, but only after the first time since the first time you rebel against her is a total surprise to her, but every replay of Finale afterwards is part of the script she can plan for.
• In the first Disney Infinity game, the reward for buying all the characters was a Lightsaber, which instantly killed any enemy it struck on the third attack of its combo. While it retained this power in the second game, in the third game (which, coincidentally, included Star Wars characters as a key selling point), it was nerfed to not include this power, likely due to the second game having a survival mode where you could fight enemies and this presenting an easy way to grind.
• In the original version of Dragon Quest VII, 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 Classes could only be used while the character was using that specific class.
• In Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince, the "Mole Hole" DLC provides a small additional dungeon in which players can fight (and thus recruit) any monster they've befriended before. However, monsters such as the famous Metal Slime and its relatives, and the Piñata Enemy Bag O' Tricks and its ilk, do not retain their special traits of dropping additional EXP/money in this dungeon, in order to stop it from being used as an easy source of grinding.
• EVE Online: The patch that prevented carriers from transporting loaded cargo ships as a kind of galactic Bag of Holding was a glaringly obvious rules patch.
  • Similarly, nowadays graviton harmonics prevent 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.
  • Also, if your ship SHOULD have died from a 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

• 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 Game-Breaker, they were 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. Later, another obvious rule patch had to come after the introduction of recipes like Kovarex enrichment (the problem already existed in mods before that, though). The recipe is built around taking 40 of an item, and producing 41 - the point being it takes a while to get enough of the original item to get it running in the first place. But productivity modules work by adding another progress counter that slowly fills in... and when it does, you get another set of the outputs for free. The obvious fix was to make sure you get just _one_ extra item, rather than 41.
• Final Fantasy VI had a couple of things patched out in its Updated Rereleases. mostly removing a few unintentional Game Breakers that got missed the first time.
  • Gau became capable of winning battles all by himself once he got a hold of the Merit Award, an accessory that allows its user to equip any type of weapon or armor in the game, since Gau normally can't equip weapons. Not only did this dramatically boost his already-high attack power, but it also led to some very powerful combos, such as the legendary "Wind God Gau," which allowed Gau to sweep pretty much everything on the field for no cost. Later remakes of the game prevent Gau from equipping the Merit Award, sadly enough. Gogo, while not nearly as Game-Breaker 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.
  • The "Psycho Cyan" bug eventually got patched out, as by triggering just the right series of events, a player could win any battle in the game without giving an enemy a chance to strike back.
  • Cyan got a major change to his SwdTech/Bushido abilities after he sat on the low end of the tier list for a while. In the initial release, a player would have to charge up Cyan's special meter until it got to the attack they wanted, forcing them to do nothing while the enemies wailed on their party. While this could still work with Overly Long Fighting Animations, few players bothered. This was changed in the IOS remake so that the player selects which SwdTech/Bushido attack they want from a list, and the meter charges on its own without further player input, letting everyone else act while Cyan is charging.
  • The Vanish spell gives its target the Clear status effect, which makes physical attacks always miss in exchange for making magical attacks always hit. In the initial release, players could exploit a loophole in the game's code by casting Vanish on a monster, then casting Doom on them to cause instant death, which always worked regardless of whether or not the target had Contractual Boss Immunity to instant death spells, because the move was magical (even though other status effects did not work this way).^ExplanationThe reason that this happened is because of a programming error. The line of code that says "if attack is magical, and target has Clear status, attack hits" was accidentally checked before the code that read "if target is immune to Instant Death, and attack causes Instant Death, attack misses" as opposed to the other way around. Since Vanish was considered a positive status effect, very few enemies were immune to this one-two punch. Later versions of the game corrected this bug by making Vanish-Doom only work on anything not already immune to instant death, which is to be expected and far less game-breaking.
    • The PlayStation version did not fix the underlying glitch, but did fix one mistake regarding Phunbaba, a storyline boss the player has to fight in order to re-recruit Terra in the World of Ruin. Since casting Vanish/Doom on certain phases of the Phunbaba fight wrecked the scripts to the point of causing the game to be Unintentionally Unwinnable, Phunbaba was made immune to the Vanish spell... but for some reason, he was not immune to other sources of the Clear status effect. The GBA version finally fixed this glitch by making Phunbaba completely immune to the Clear status.
• Final Fantasy XI:
  • You gain tactical points (TP) each time you hit an enemy, the amount varying based on the Delay of your weapon (higher Delay = 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. This got patched very quickly so that only the first hit (first two hits when you're Dual Wielding) give full TP, and subsequent hits only give 1%.
  • 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 the old-schooled way), Square-Enix will immediately squash it by giving Absolute Virtue new resistances and powers as its flaws were discovered.
    • When players killed it by attacking from areas it couldn't fight back, it was given the Draw-In ability, which draws in players who are too far from it.
    • Later on, the devs were pressured into rethinking the absurd difficulty of some of their bosses after some bad publicity involving an 18-hour-long fight against a different boss, 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 (consumes user's HP to increase damage dealt) and Blood Weapon (restores HP equal to melee damage inflicted, negating Souleater's HP drain) could defeat Absolute Virtue. 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) a gradual resistance to Souleater damage.
    • 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 the 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?
• Final Fantasy XIV:
  • 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 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.
    • Possibly as a means to grind for older armor, either for glamour or to get gear for another job, you can run dungeons unsynched for dungeons 10 levels below the current level cap. This lets you keep the current job and item levels so you can take an overpowered character into a dungeon. The only downside is nobody gets XP for it.
  • 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 Rage Quit constantly. When the devs saw that 15 minutes wasn't enough, the timeout penalty was doubled to 30 minutes.
    • Another layer of Obvious Rule Patch on top of this is if someone quits the duty first, everyone else can quit the duty without penalty. Presumably this is to allow the other players to quit the duty freely so they're not forced to either wait for a replacement or continue on without a party member.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • When logging into the game, if there's a queue, you'd be forced to wait based on how many players were in the login queue. People got around it by hitting cancel when the queue popped and logged back in again to jump ahead of the line. This created unnecessary strain on the login servers and it wasn't until 5.0 where the problem was nipped in the bud by imposing a 30 second timeout for those who cancel their queue.
  • Blue Mage has the Self-Destruct spell, which deals massive damage while killing yourself. Players abused the spell during dungeon and trial runs where they would blow themselves up if the run was failing or they didn't learn a certain spell, basically hitting a reset button. A later patch stopped it by applying a 10 minute debuff where players can't blow themselves up again after the first use.
  • Prior to Shadowbringers, dungeons that counted in the leveling roulette had no item level requirement, though each major version's level cap content did as a means to encourage players to grind for end-game gear. However, it's still possible to skirt by at the minimum item level and leveling dungeons expected players to at least be near the previous major version's item level cap. Either by sheer tenacity or someone carrying them, it was still possible to get to the next major version undergeared. Or on the flip side, someone leveling up an alt job could walk into one of the dungeons undergeared because they're powering through their leveling. As a result, all leveling dungeons from Heavensward on have a minimum item level requirement to ensure players are at least geared up for it.
  • As of Patch 6.5, the Alliance Roulette requirements was changed such that you had to meet a minimum iLvl depending on which level your character's at. This was to prevent players from stripping their gear so they could guarantee they'd get Labirynth of the Ancients which due to Power Creep, tends to be a really fast duty to run.
• Fire Emblem:
  • The Silencer skill in The Blazing Blade and 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 allows for some potentially anticlimactic boss showdowns. 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 patched in Path of Radiance and 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. Some Awakening bosses have the Dragon Skin skill, which similarly prevents various insta-kills, %HP damage, or reflected damage.
  • Enemy-only weapons the game doesn't want you to have (mostly Poisoned Weapons) inexplicably turn into more standard weapons if you have a Thief steal them. The GBA games go one further by preventing Thieves from stealing weapons at all. (Also creating the Obvious Rule Patch of preventing you from simply stealing all a boss's weapons to render them harmless; other games block this by other means.)
  • The Vantage/Wrath combo in Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War: Vantage let you always attack first when on low health, Wrath made all your attacks crit on low health, meaning that any enemy that couldn't survive a crit would never get in a hit before dying instantly. It was balanced, though, by the fact that it requires a specific pairing setup, can only be used by two characters, and causes both of them to have bad base damage. The sequel, Fire Emblem: Thracia 776, gave you the ability to assign skills more freely, and also buffed Vantage and Wrath to not have health requirements—but also changed Wrath to only work if the enemy attacked you first. Therefore, if a character has Wrath and Vantage simultaneously, they will never be able to activate the former, since you will never attack second in a round.
  • Within Genealogy, the Arena, rather than permanently killing someone who loses there, simply boots them out at 1 HP. Additionally, Genealogy's version of Miracle increases evasion rate considerably if you have less than 11 HP, all the way up to an added 90% at 1 HP. Needless to say, this would create a potential problem of a character entering the arena, losing, and then going back in with a massive evasion chance stacked on. To solve this, the game simply refuses to activate Miracle if you enter the arena with 10 or fewer HP, meaning units with it have to simply hope their enemy does the right amount of damage to get them there normally.
  • Thracia featured Status Effects that last for the entire chapter. To make up for this, it made it so that bosses cannot be affected, and neither can The Hero, Leif, meaning it's impossible to make the game unwinnable by having the enemy target Leif.
  • Most games in the series have a Dancer or similar unit, who can give other units an Extra Turn. They make sure you never have two Dancers in your army at any one time, as they could otherwise endlessly dance for each other for easy Level Grinding. There are two specific situations where it's possible to clone a Dancer (Xane in Shadow Dragon and Mystery games, the Replicate skill or specific chapter gimmicks in Fates) and Developer's Foresight 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 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.
  • In one chapter of Radiant Dawn, your team consists entirely of your Squishy Wizard protagonist and a Purposefully Overpowered unit who showed up to protect her from a midnight ambush. The Rescue mechanic, which lets your units "pick up" one another and render the rescued unit invulnerable, is unavailable on this map — if you try it, the protagonist will insist on taking part in the battle.
  • In Fire Emblem Heroes, Resonant Battles is a mode where you chase down enemy Thieves and gain points depending on how many are defeated before they escape. To prevent players from cheesing the map via Galeforce (granting extra turns) or similar abilities, each enemy has a debuff where the unit that defeated it receives a -1 cooldown, effectively preventing all pre- and post-combat skills from activating, including Galeforce. Also to limit extra turns, the mode penalizes the player's score if they deploy more than one Dancer during an attempt.
• Five Nights at Candy's: The cameras have a night vision mode you can use to actually see the contents of the various rooms. However, using this mode is unnecessary for the main cast because their glowing white eyes show up in the dark, meaning you can just stay put in the office (and check on Blank) until a pair of white pinpricks appear outside the doors. Night Four introduces Old Candy (and Night Six adds RAT), who lack eyes entirely; since their nonexistent eyes don't glow on the cameras or at the doors, using night vision is required to track them and close the doors at the right time.
• Five Nights at Freddy's:
  • Five Nights at Freddy's: Bonnie and Chica only attack when you lower your camera, leading to the obvious solution of simply never bringing up the camera at all. To counter this, Foxy forces you to bring up the camera to prevent him from rushing you, which also gives Bonnie and Chica the opportunity to attack.
  • Five Nights at Freddy's 2:
    • The Puppet is placated by using the cameras to wind the music box, which prevents you from breezing through nights by just sitting idly, putting on the Freddy mask, and never checking the cameras so that the other animatronics don't have a chance to advance.
    • The first night makes it seem that the flashlight is unnecessary and that you can just alternate between using the cameras and wearing the Freddy mask. Then Foxy is introduced in Night 2, and the flashlight's purpose becomes clear: you need the flashlight to ward off Foxy, and you cannot put on the Freddy mask or use the cameras at the same time as the flashlight.
• Frackin' Universe: This Starbound mod patches out one vanilla exploit and had two internal patches.
  • The planet type known as Strange Sea could originally spawn any fluid as an ocean. They were soon patched out so that elder fluid/essentia obscura oceans could no longer spawn as this was intended to be a rare resource. The planets were were further patched to only have oceans of alien juice/plasmic fluid due to how many resources can be obtained by centrifuging or extracting various liquids as well as providing an easy and infinite source of fuel.
  • On the vanilla side, the Martinus Transformation was patched out after people exploited it to get infinite amounts of otherwise rare liquids.
• Friday Night Funkin' Vs. Dave and Bambi: The Cheating song, meant as a Nintendo Hard punishment for cheating, could be easily cheesed by turning on ghost tapping and spamming the keys all you want in disregard of the copious Interface Screws present. Enter Unfairness, its successor which forces your ghost tapping off so you can't simply spam through, to make itself properly unfair.

G-L

• Gaia Online 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 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.
• Granblue Fantasy: During the Unite and Fight event after the release of Summer Zooey, it was possible to combine her and the Dark version of Sarunan (previously considered a Joke Character) to rapidly farm honor and ranking by massively overkilling the bosses. Queue a hard cap on the amount of honors one could earn from a single battle applied before the qualifying day was even complete, which was then applied retroactively.
• Players in Grand Theft Auto III could evade a high wanted level by merely having their car sprayed at a Pay'n'Spray. Beginning in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, the wanted level is instead temporarily suspended after a respray before it goes to zero stars. Any crime that is committed during that time will reinstate the original wanted level. Grand Theft Auto 4 took it a step further (likely for realism more than anything) by requiring you to at least get out of sight of the cops before the Pay 'n' Spray will take your car, and Grand Theft Auto V removed them completely (again, likely for realism) in favor of a wanted level system similar to games like Metal Gear Solid and Ghost Recon.
• Guild Wars 2 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 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.
• Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft:
  • The 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 against heroic Loatheb, who has whopping 99 health, Kel'Thuzad will destroy the card and mock you.
    Kel'Thuzad: This is heroic Naxxramas! I won't stand for such cheap tactics here.
  • Dreadsteed was originally a 4 mana 1/1 that resummoned itself whenever it died. Then Defile came along, a Warlock spell that would deal 1 damage to all minions and repeat if anything was destroyed. This meant once there's a Dreadsteed on the board you could nuke the board for 14 damage^note Repeating effects have a hard limit of 14 to prevent infinite loops for 1/4 the cost of Twisting Nether! Dreadsteed was emergency nerfed to resummon at the end of the turn instead of immediately, pretty much killing the card off sadly.
  • Shadowboxer was an unassuming 2/3 Mech for Priest that dealt 1 damage to a random enemy whenever a character was healed. This was well and good, until people figured out that you could combine it with Unidentified Elixir for a 1 in 4 chance of giving it Lifesteal, converting its damage into healing, which combined with its effect to deal as much damage as your hero was missing health. This was more funny than outright broken, but it wasn't so when Zilliax was announced, which had an effect to grant any Mech Lifesteal. Suddenly, people began posting OTK decks using the cards long before Zilliax was even released. Blizzard issued an emergency nerf to Shadowboxer to make its effect only work off of minions getting healed.
  • The Witchwood card set introduced the Echo keyword, which let you play multiple copies of the same card with Echo until the end of turn, and The Boomsday Project added the Magnetic keyword, which allows a Magnetic minion to combine with another Mech minion and give it its stats and effects to it instead of being played normally. Later, Blizzard introduced SN1P-SN4P, a legendary minion with both Echo and Magnetic. Its introduction immediately caused discussions of potential abuse, since if you could get its cost down to 0, you could Magnetize it to another Mech an infinite number of time until the timer ran out for lethal damage. There was already another minion that could do that: Reckless Experimenter^note Has the effect "Deathrattle minions cost 3 less, but die at the end of your turn.", and SN1P-SN4P also had a Deathrattle. Reckless Experimenter was prematurely nerfed to prevent minions from costing less than 1. This was already one Obvious Rule Patch, but this change only affected Standard mode. 0-cost SN1P-SN4P was abused to hell and back in Wild mode using other cards, notably Mechwarper and Summoning Portal, and it got to a point where Blizzard nerfed the entire Echo mechanic by preventing Echo copies from costing less than 1.
  • In Battlegrounds mode, one peculiar minion was Pogo-Hopper. It gained +2/+2 for every Pogo-Hopper you'd played before in the match. Its awful starting stats and the inconsistency in being able to find Pogo-Hoppers made Pogo strats mostly a joke, although a few heroes were more successful with it. Then Battlegrounds added a new hero, Jandice Barov, whose Hero Power swaps a non-Golden minion with a random one from the tavern. This made Jandice the absolute best Pogo-Hopper hero in the game, since she could not only reliably scale its Battlecry every turn by re-buying it, she could stack its Battlecry buff on itself continuously. This strategy alone placed her on the top of the tier list, since that one minion gave her enough stats to beat over any non-Poisonous strategy. Jandice did get nerfed, not by changing her Hero Power in any way, but by removing Pogo-Hopper from the game mode altogether.
  • Pandaren Importer was a 2-mana 1/3 that Discovered a spell that wasn't in your starting deck. Following the 2022 set rotation, people figured out that Rogue had few enough spells in Standard format that they could use Pandaren Importer to generate any one specific spell by filling the rest of their deck with spells they didn't want. Combined with the newly reintroduced Brann Bronzebeard^note Doubles your Battlecry effects, this let the Rogue generate two copies of Shadowstep^note 0-mana spell that returns a friendly minion to your hand and makes it cost two less with every Importer. When used with Fogsail Freebooter^note 2-mana minion that deals 2 damage if you're holding a weapon, which Rogue can fulfill with their Hero Power, this would deal 4 damage to the enemy hero, then the Shadowsteps would bounce both the Importer and Freebooter and make them cost 0. Then repeat for infinite damage. Before the set even launched, Importer was nerfed to a 3 mana 2/4 to prevent this interaction.
  • The Death Knight spell Corpse Explosion spends 1 Corpse (a secondary resource gained whenever a friendly minion dies) to deal 1 damage to all minions, repeating until either you're out of Corpses or no more minions are alive. Very quickly after this card was added, people figured out that as long as you had three Corpses, you could cast this with a Grim Patron^note 3/3 minion that summons a fresh Grim Patron whenever it survives damage or Gruntled Patron^note Similar effect, but it only triggers once instead of every time it takes damage to recast Corpse Explosion until the recast limit was hit. While this was way too expensive to be a viable board clear, what it did have was an absurdly long animation. This could let you skip the opponent's turn by overwriting it with this uninterruptible combo. After issuing an emergency ban for the Patrons for a few days, Blizzard decided there was no elegant solution here and simply decided to enforce a special exception where the Patrons do not trigger their effects until Corpse Explosion is done resolving.
• Heroes of Might and Magic III:
  • One particularly unfair strategy was called "Gremlin Rush", which abused the fact that every hero starts with a small army when hired from the tavern. What you could do was deposit all but one creature from that army into your starting town then go run into the nearest monster, retreating immediately. The retreated hero would then be available to rebuy from the tavern, and you could repeat this process until you ran out of gold. This would leave you with several hundred tier 1 creatures on the first day and a few tier 2 and 3 ones as well. The best faction to do this with was Tower, since their Master Gremlins are the best tier 1 creature. This was swiftly given the kibosh, first by making it so that a retreated hero would have zero movement points remaining when bought on the same day they retreated, then making it so that only the first two heroes you buy each week have an army (one of which will not be of your starting faction).
  • The Horn of the Abyss Game Mod added a new adventure map location where you could fight a huge guard of Iron Golems in exchange for a few Giants joining you. This was intended to be a mid-to-lategame challenge, but players figured out that you could attack them with nothing but a few Harpy Hags, which are fast creatures that "strike and return" and also don't suffer retaliation, letting you kite the golems forever while very slowly killing them. This could be done as early as day 2 if you were playing Dungeon, which was massive Sequence Breaking to get Giants that early. The real problem however is that this could take hours to do, which was mind-numbingly boring for both the person doing it and the people waiting to take their turns. The Wasteland update fixed this by introducing a brand new creature called Steel Golems to replace Iron Golems as the guards. The two creatures are fairly similar, but Steel Golems have too high of a speed for Harpies to kite.
• In one Heroes of Newerth patch, the item Grimoire of Power was modified to temporarily give a large amount of magic damage-based lifesteal when activated on top of its passive magic damage lifesteal. While pretty strong on magic damage based carries like Parallax and Oogie, the one hero where it was really effective on was Ravenor, who could build up huge amounts of added magic damage to his autoattacks in extended fights. The next patch, Grimore of Power was nerfed overall, but was deemed too good on Ravenor and made the lifesteal 25% less effective on Ravenor, and only Ravenor. This has since been reverted
  • One of Moira's ability, Mana Sunder, temporarily drains the target's mana pool to 0, which regenerates back to whatever it was over time. The mana drain effect also lowers the target's max mana by 90%. What does this accomplish? It somewhat reduces the effectiveness of mana restoration during the effect, but more importantly, it prevents you from comboing it with Magebane's ultimate to nuke someone for their full missing mana without going through the effort of running out their mana first.
  • Plague Rider's ultimate, Plague Carrier, was buffed to instantly kill creep units to make the skill more reliable at chaining between heroes. Players would later exploit this effect to nuke triple-stacked Ancient neutral camps for a big early-game gold boost. This strategy was specifically nerfed by having Plague Carrier give reduced gold and XP from Ancient units it kills, scaling up to normal at max level.
• Iji:
  • Starting in version 1.3, certain places lacking enemies, such as the arena for Asha's rematch before the boss appears, will block weapon usage, telling you "there's no need to fire your Nanogun here". In many of these places, there are obvious story reasons for this, but in other cases this is only 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 is to kill him. The solution? 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 1.6, 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 Splash Damage. This patch was un-patched in the next update, which introduced true non-lethal weapons, giving pacifist players enough toys that they didn't need this one anymore.
• In Inscryption, Leshy's strongest card, The Moon, has a weakness to both the Death Touch sigil which kills it instantly and the Stinky sigil which reduces its attack to 0. Leshy even has unique dialogue complaining about how Moons do not have a sense of smell. In Kaycee's Mod, the challenge mode, the moon gets a Made of Stone sigil that explicitly provides immunity to Stinky and Death Touch.
• When it was discovered that the free-to-start game Ironfall could be used to jailbreak the Nintendo 3DS, 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.
• Kingdom of Loathing:
  • 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 Cherry Tapping to get a large number of stat points.
  • The Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot 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 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 Magic Knight 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 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.)
• Left 4 Dead:
  • The first game had an issue with melee shoving in VS mode. Players were 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 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.
    • Arguably, the actual reason for the fatigue update was to remove an exploit involving binding the Shove and the Switch Weapons buttons to the mouse wheel. The result was a, rather short-lived, stint of practitioners of the Hokuto Shinken fending off hordes of zombies by themselves.
  • Left 4 Dead 2 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.
  • 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 medals 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.
  • The Passing campaign has the survivors from the first game assisting the players in the finale by shooting zombies and giving out supplies. To keep things balanced, the assisting survivors will not show up in VS or Scavenge mode.
• In The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV, there was an ability Rean could do that made him cast arts instantly over and over again without any delay penalty whatsoever, meaning that he could just cast high-end spells and it would still be his turn. With the proper equipment, he'd have a casting time and a delay of 0 which allowed him to just whittle the enemies to death. It was patched when it was discovered and Rean is forced to have a delay of 1 which meant that at some point, enemies would have a turn before it was Rean's turn again.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has an In-Universe case. Men are forbidden from entering Gerudo Town. However, they'll make an exception for Gorons because there are no female Gorons.
• If you're wondering why you inexplicably can't jump from a vehicle in your LEGO Adaptation Game, it's because players figured out they could strategically park vehicles in earlier games and bypass puzzles.
• The Magic Music in LOOM consists of "drafts": hum four notes on the C major scale while holding your distaff, get a magical effect. You have to learn the drafts properly by hearing someone or something else sing them; if you sing a draft before you "should" know it, it doesn't work. On the game's Standard and Practice modes, when you hear a draft, your distaff glows to tell you which notes are being sounded; on Expert mode, you have to be able to recognize notes on the C major scale just by hearing them. There is a draft that is used in the climax to foil the Big Bad's plan, that you learn "properly" just before using it (at great personal cost). In the original version of the game, this draft had actually been used already in a cutscene. During the cutscene, you don't have your distaff, and so Standard and Practice players would not learn the climactic draft at that time. In later versions of the game, the developers noticed that anyone who can play on Expert mode would learn the draft during the cutscene, and changed the cutscene to use a different draft.
• 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.
  • You don't show up on attack pages if you haven't won an attack yet. Exploiting this "invisibility" has been severely nerfed over time with increasingly harsh and arbitrary restrictions on invisible players.
• Love of Magic: Two of your companions, Xochi and Dylan, can have the ability to refresh your other companions and let them use their abilities again. They do not refresh each other, so that you can't create an infinite loop and use your third companion's ability an infinite number of times.

M-Q

• Mario Kart:
  • 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). Mario Kart: Double Dash!! started this trend and it was even more apparent in DS where the best time trial records came from snaking and 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 and gave them back the second level mini-turbo, making them functionally identical to karts.
  • 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 patch to correct the respawns in 2012.
  • 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, Bullet Bill, Blue Shell, 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.
• Mario Party
  • The first Mario Party has mini-games that require rapidly rotating the controller's control stick. In its original Nintendo 64 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 Mario Party Superstars, and since the Nintendo Switch does use control sticks, the instruction screens for these games explicitly warn against using the "palm" strategy.
  • Chance Time (or a similar event of a different name) was an event designed to force two players to exchange/give their coins, stars, or both. Players who were winning for most of the game could suddenly lose the entire thing 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 removed early on, as they had a 50/50 chance of giving the player a free star. They returned in Mario Party Superstars, though.
  • 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 decided by these Bonus Stars, which was frustrating. Mario Party 6 replaced Star B with a star given to whoever used the most items. Starting from 7 three random Bonus Stars out of six are chosen that award a star for things including shopping, how many spaces travelled and how many Red spaces were landed on.
  • In entries that play traditionally (fixed turn count, four players move independently), there's an event held at the fifth to last turn, giving a player (usually last place) an advantage and/or changing game mechanics. Turn counts for these games are always multiples of five^*Except in 3, where this is occasionally derailed by the Wacky Watch. However, when Mario Party 7 added a mechanic where Bowser hijacks the game every five turns, the mechanics change got bumped back one round so it wouldn't take place at time same time as the Bowser event.
  • 9 had a event on Bowser Space where Bowser would take away half of the Mini-Stars of the player who landed on the space. However, if the player was in last, he would either let them be or outright double their current Mini-Star total. Due to the latter being demonstrably unfair, in Mario Party 10, when this same circumstance occurs, Bowser does not spare or reward the player in last and properly deducts half of their Mini-Stars.
• Due to the infamous amount of infinite combos and glitches that dominated competitive play for Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Capcom's made a point of patching as much infinite combos out of Marvel vs. Capcom 3 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 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 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.
• MechWarrior:
  • The series has always been plagued by "poptarters", players who load up their Humongous Mecha with a lot of long-ranged sniping weapons, then stick 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 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 camera shake violently when using jumpjets, the game had no third-person view, in addition to 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 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 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!
  • 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 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.
  • The Planetary League for Living Legends had several extremely annoying examples of Loophole Abuse - 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 Shiva "E" variants - a massively armored, relatively fast jet that could instagib anything in the sky and rip ground forces apart - your side brought. The final update swapped out its standard LBX shotguns with gimped "air LBX" shotguns that turned the god of the skys into a Joke Character; and it was the only aircraft variant to have the air LBX replacements.
• Metal Gear:
  • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater made gun suppressors consumable items and gave them durability. This addresses the issue in the previous game and the remake of the original where the suppressed tranquilizer pistol provided players with a very optimal strategy that undermined the very stealth aspect of the game: shooting everything that moves was effective but would also net you a poor rank in the end, but the tranquilizer allowed you to silently and non-lethally shoot everything that moves from the shadows and still net the best rank the game without using even a lick of stealth. The sudden addition of suppressor health limited the tranquilizer gun just enough that you couldn't constantly rely on this strategy.
  • Starting with Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, unequipping a weapon no longer reloads the magazine. This is because in earlier games, players could instantly reload a gun by quickly unequipping and re-equipping it. The manual for Metal Gear Solid even suggests this. But this tactic ended up making the motorcycle sequence in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater an absolute cakewalk, when it was supposed to be relatively challenging; during that sequence, using the reload glitch removes the long delay between shots for an RPG-7, allowing Snake to hold back a giant tank with little effort. After that, the devs decided to patch out the glitch for making the games too easy.
• Minecraft:
  • A bow with both Mending and Infinity enchantments is essentially a Game-Breaker, being a weapon that is self-repairing with EXP and never runs out of ammo as long as there is at least one arrow in your inventory. Players were using Bows with Mending, Infinity, and Punch (increased knock-back enchantment) to shoot themselves while using Elytra (read: gliders) which pushed themselves up higher into the air, exploiting the game's physics to allow for near-infinite flight. A later update made Mending and Infinity mutually exclusive enchantments (without cheats), but allowed for firework rockets to be used for legitimate prolonged flight in its place (any bows enchanted before this update still kept their enchantments however).
  • During snapshots for The Wild Update, the Warden had several vulnerabilities that undermined its Run or Die concept, such as being pushed around by water, damaged by lava, the inability to pass rails like many other mobs, and could be blocked off by walls. Several of these issues were fixed, such as it now being immune to water and lava, could pass rails, and if the player was out of range, it would use a ranged sonic boom attack that not only bypassed walls, but also pierced all armor, enchantments and shields.
  • It's very rare, but a villager can even trade treasure enchantments like Mending and Infinity right out the gate. Since you can reroll sales by destroying and replacing their work station, and then making a trade to "lock" those sales, a patient player can repeatedly reroll a villager until they get one of these rare enchantments, allowing players to have access to these enchantments within an hour or so of beginning gameplay or to build the much-beloved "trading hall" of villagers with specific trades. The 23w31a snapshot announced they would heavily Nerf this by only allowing master-level villagers of specific biome types to sell specific enchantments, with only Jungle-type villagers (a village that doesn't naturally spawn; you have to build it yourself) being able to sell Mending, effectively killing the trading hall build and forcing players to wander around and get lucky instead.
  • Speaking of trades, it is possible, if unlikely, to have a villager offer a trade for more than 64 emeralds. Since you can only stack emeralds up to 64, this made that trade impossible for you no matter how many emeralds you had in your inventory. The way the devs fixed it was to automatically apply a discount that drops it to 64 if it ever goes any higher.
• Monster Hunter
  • The Charge Blade is a transforming weapon which can transition between two different modes: a sword and shield mode, where players’ attacks charge up energy phials, and an axe mode, where those phials are used up for more powerful attacks. In the weapon's first iteration in Monster Hunter 4, players were able to access the full burst and shield charge moves through a combo in sword mode, which lead to many players forgoing the slow and heavy axe mode altogether. While this combo still remained in Generations, pulling it off would only give the player a yellow shield buff. In order to access the more powerful red shield buff and burst attacks, players would need to transition to axe mode, which brought the weapon closer to its’ original vision.
  • If a player completely exhausts the Switch Axe’s charge gauge from using too many attacks in sword mode, they would normally be forced to switch back to axe mode until their gauge refilled, or play through a lengthy animation in which their avatar replaces the weapon’s charge canister. However, the Hunting Art “Energy Charge” in Monster Hunter Generations gave players a quick way to recharge the gauge in the middle of a combo. The gauge refill, combined with the Art’s incredibly fast recharge rate, effectively allowed players to remain in sword mode and spam powerful attacks for the entire hunt. This Art received a heavy nerf in Generations Ultimate to reduce its recharge rate and the amount of gauge it restored.
• NetHack: Wishing for More Wishes 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 cancelled wand that's already been recharged.
• In an early version of Neverwinter Nights, 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.
  • Monk/Shifter builds exploited the equipment merge mechanism while polymorphed to 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 New Horizons, the "Sail To"-system, from the original game, enables the players to fast travel to different locations near them, including other ships. In practice, this essentially allows teleporting to a fleeing enemy, making catching them a non-issue. The mod rectifies this in Realistic Sailing Mode by only allowing you to teleport to enemies that are slower than players, e. g. those they could also catch without "Sail To".
• Nightmare Creatures 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. 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 Nintendo 64 port of the game.
  "The game was almost complete, a few days to gold submission, when the publisher tells me he could finish the game in minutes by just dodging every single fight in the game. He was right, we were in panic mode. The adrenaline was a last minute patch, a panic reaction to a problem that was not really one. I hated it. I remember there is a cheat mode to disable it. Try L1, R2, R1, L2, select in the main menu."
• Noita:
  • Chaotic Polymorphine transforms the player or any creature that touches it any of the other creatures in the game. It was the subject of two separate rule patches.
    • Players would repeatedly douse themselves in the potion until they transformed into a tunneling worm. This allowed them to easily reach hidden areas well before acquiring wands capable of achieving the same feat. The polymorphine was patched so that after 85 transformations the player runs the risk of being permanently transformed.
    • While transformed, players initially had unlimited flight in this form which could be used to get past difficult obstacles. The flight was nerfed so that even creatures that have naturally unlimited flight had a limited capacity.
  • The Pyramid sub-zone originally contained three mid-game quality wands that could be reached early in the game with a bit of luck. The wands were eventually removed in favor of a mini-boss which drops a comparable wand if defeated.
  • The East and West Worlds are heavily degraded and glitchy copies of the main world, artifacts of world generation. Originally sealed off from the main game by thick walls, players quickly learned to break through and raid said worlds for extra loot. In order to limit this without fully stopping it, the rock wall was filled with Cursed Rock which causes massive damage to anybody trying to pass through, requiring far more effort and planning than previously. The Orbs of Knowledge were also modified to cause damage when acquired.
• Octopath Traveler: Enemies will always go first in a round after coming out of Break (consecutively performing all of their actions if they can move multiple times), even if they're under the effects of Leghold Trap, which makes enemies go last. This is so that the party can't indefinitely stun-lock a boss with the ability, which is cheap to cast and available almost immediately.
• OpenTTD, a fan-made Transport Tycoon 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., and nobody used them. Then, version 0.7 removed the original AI and let players design their own A.I.s—and someone wrote an AI that exploited all those edge cases. Cue version 0.7.2, aka "eliminate the creative use of game mechanics".
• Overwatch:
  • Originally the game allowed more than one copy of the same character on a team. It quickly became apparent that certain characters were both very effective and extremely annoying when used in multiples, especially in competitive games with well coordinated teams. The limit of one of a given hero per team limit was implemented in competitive play very shortly after the games release, and was (somewhat contentiously) added to standard quick play matches a few months after that. Certain arcade and custom game modes still allow it, however.
  • The game divides heroes into Damager, Healer, Tank categories. Competitive players figured out that the optimal team composition was 3 tanks and 3 support heroes, with no actual damage heroes. Blizzard responded to this by changing the rules so that 2 damage heroes, 2 tanks, and 2 supports was the only allowed team composition, and everyone had to choose their role before looking for a match.
  • After being nerfed, Brigitte's Shield Bash can no longer pass through barriers. This is because beforehand it was common for Brigitte players to walk up to enemy Reinhardts, then use the bash to stun them and drop their barrier so their team could follow up while they were defenseless. This makes it the only physical attack in the game with this limitation.
  • The finale of the PvE "Retribution" mission involves the team getting swarmed by an infinite horde of mooks as they wait for their escape ship to arrive — once it does, the mission doesn't end until everyone boards it. When the mission first launched, it was common for players to grief their team by simply refusing to board the ship until they died, a state that instantly fails everyone the mission. Shortly afterwards, the mission was patched that those who end up incapacitated are simply left behind, allowing those on the ship to complete the mission.
  • In the 2018 version of Capture the Flag, it was made that anyone carrying the flag would drop it the instant they activate their mobility abilities, since as evinced in the past year, mobile heroes with the flag were virtually unstoppable. However, Lúcio briefly got around this with his rollerblading wall runs due to them being a passive ability, becoming an undisputed king of flag-taking before it was patched out a week later.
• 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 you didn't touch land by being mounted on a Pal, the guards would ignore you and there would be no effect on your Wanted Meter. The 0.1.5.0. patch changed it so your presence alone would increase your Wanted Meter and turn the PIDF guards on the island hostile.
  • 0.2.0.6 made it so flying or floating Pals are now immune to Falling Damage after people cheesed Jetragon by luring it off the nearby cliffs.
• 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 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.
  • 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^note With the exception of the Ukranian Job, which avoids this problem by a different method: the ostensible objective here is barely worth the job, and the experience is extremely low as well; the bulk of the payout is the additional loot on the map, giving players a more direct incentive to clean the place out thoroughly instead of speedrunning.
  • 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 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.
• The arena mode in Plants Vs Zombies 2 used to award two gauntlets for winning the first match. Gauntlets were removed as streak awards and replaced with mints after people found they could get crowns for free without regard to the timer by winning the first match, getting two gauntlets, spending a gauntlet to fight the second match, throwing the second match, spending a gauntlet to fight the first match, repeat ad nauseum.
• [PROTOTYPE] has a thermobaric tank that can destroy any building in one shot. There is a 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.
• Psychonauts 2: The November 2021 patch changed it so that Memory Vaults are immune to Pyrokinesis. The reason for this was because players could use a fully-upgraded Pyrokinesis to obtain the memory vaults in PSI King's Sensorium earlier than intended, and these two memory vaults spoiled two of the game's major twists.

R-Z

• Rimworld:
  • Some quests require your colony to host some guests, prisoners, or animals for an extended period. The easiest way to theoretically complete these quests is simply to put the prisoners/guests/animals in cryptosleep for the duration of the mission length, so the option to do this to them is blanked out to prevent this quest from being trivial to complete.
  • Raiders have a much higher chance of dying, rather than being downed, upon being incapacitated to prevent you from being able to rescue and recruit them in large numbers, keeping your colony from being able to amass new members too easily. The weapons raiders have are also always of terrible quality and have a hidden selling price multiplier to prevent you from being able to acquire weapons too easily, or selling the weapons to traders to accumulate wealth too quickly. The armour/clothes raiders wear will also be "tainted" if they die while wearing it, meaning it will incur a mood loss penalty if you take it from their corpses, again, to keep you from getting these resources too easily.
  • Similarly, quests from the Royalty DLC which have you allying with high-tech mercenaries from the Empire will state that the weapons they have are bio-coded, preventing your colonists from being able to use them if taken from the mercenaries and giving them zero resell value to traders. Their armour also have acid implants which destroy said armour upon the wearer's death, preventing you from taking it from their corpses. Attempting to take the armour/weapons from the mercenaries while they're still alive will damage your relationship with the Empire.
• RoboWar:
  • Originally, 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.
  • 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. This was patched with the "aggressive scoring system", giving 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 video game version of Sentinels of the Multiverse has achievements for winning a game without playing cards and winning a game without using powers. Both have the caveat that the player must play out at least one hero turn. This is because of the villain Wager Master, whose first turn can (with the cards falling the right way) end in a hero victory or loss; since the villain gets the first turn of any game, without the caveat, the player could just play against Wager Master over and over, resetting if they didn't win on his first turn.
• In Shadowverse, one of the expansions, Tempest of the Gods, introduced two cards: Heavenly Aegis, a Nigh-Invulnerable 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, an effect which only three rarely-used cards had at the time, but more importantly, not only is Heavenly Aegis is now forced to follow Test of Strength's rules, the enemy can also ignore the Aegis.
• Shantae: Half-Genie Hero: Trying to use the Bat transformation to just fly across Cape Crustacean, which is full of gaps, has the transformation work only for a limited time, instead of forever like usual.
• In Shovel Knight, Plague Knight's version of the "Untouched" feat^note Beat any member of the Order of No Quarter without taking any damage 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.
• StarCraft II had 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 Splash Damage, all the units emerge at the same time and are overlapping each other, this allowed the Archons to shred the opponents in mere seconds. Blizzard attempted to patch out this tactic by giving all units that emerge from the vortex Mercy Invincibility but even that didn't work and by Heart of the Swarm, they were forced to simply replace the Vortex ability with the Time Warp ability.
• Stardew Valley:
  • Garden pots allow you to grow any crop indoors. To prevent people from filling every indoor location with pots and breaking the economy in two, ancient seeds cannot be planted in them.
  • Crystallariums allow the duplication of any gem. To prevent mass production of prismatic shards and trivializing relationship building and money making (the shards are a universally loved gift — with Haley being the one exception — and sell for 2000 gold each), prismatic shards cannot be placed in a crystallarium.
• Star Trek Online 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.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic has an arena game called Huttball, which the point of it was to get the ball into the enemy's goal while 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 too long. Given that the entire point of the game is to entertain the Hutts, this is also completely in character.
• In Stellaris, when playing single-player you could say Screw the Rules, I Have Money! and use bribes to buy political favors in order to force through any new law you wanted in the Galactic Senate. Despite this being Truth in Television, the ability to buy favors was removed in Patch 3.9.3 so players couldn't trivialize diplomacy and buy their way to being granted the Emergency Authority needed to become The Empire.
• Street Fighter II: Battles could originally last as many as ten rounds in The World Warrior with enough draws or double knockouts. Since this ran the risk of someone hogging the cabinet, Champion Edition reduced the round limit to four.
• Frequently occurs in the Super Robot Wars 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 Super Robot Wars Alpha 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 Super Robot Wars K 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. Super Robot Wars L revamps this, where being in a partner unit nets both units additional combat and statistical bonuses that a solo unit could not earn.
  • The "SP Regeneration" and "Attacker" pilot skills in Super Robot Wars: Original Generation 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.
• Super Smash Bros.:
  • In 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 perform ground attacks while sliding forward pretty early in development, but left it in. Then they discovered how much of a 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. The reactions to both of these have been mixed.
  • Starting in For 3DS and Wii U, Star KOs and Screen KOs stop happening in the last five seconds of a match, to avoid the scenario of an assured win being turned into a tie because the match ended in the middle of the long animation and the final KO wasn't registered. The same installment also changed Screen KOs so that the character "sticks" on the screen first so that the animation lasts exactly as long as those of Star KOs, in the rare event that two fighters are both launched off the top at the same time on their last stock and which one loses first would not be determined by RNG.
  • 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.
  • In tournament play, many banned stages are because of specific incidents that caused matches to devolve into a war of attrition that is dull for players and spectators alike.
    • Most of the notorious strictness that Smash tournament play has^note While the "No Items, Fox Only, Final Destination" meme comes from shortly before Brawl's release, even Melee's rules were much looser at the time than they are now. comes from Brawl, where Meta Knight was so overwhelming and dominant that most rules were decided just to limit the damage he alone caused. Brawl's physics paired with his aerial specialization gave him virtually free flight, and, there were many stages where he was able to hang out in areas that other characters only might reach if they're lucky, so stages that he took particular advantage of were banned one by one until only three (Battlefield, Final Destination, and Smashville) were left. Artificial limits were also imposed on how many times one could grab a ledge, as the invincibility frames it granted was easy to repeatedly activate.
    • Kongo Jungle (64) was legal in Melee until one match in 2009, when someone playing as Ganondorf, who's a Mighty Glacier, faced off against Peach, who's able to hover. Peach was able to utilize the large, circular layout to play keep-away for the entire eight minutes until the timer ran out.
    • In the first game, Hyrule Castle was legal until 2015, when in one match, Kirby was able to use his aerial superiority with the stage's abnormally high platforms and large gaps to make even Pikachu unable to touch him. Unfortunately, while the Kongo Jungle match above had the timer to mercifully end the match after eight minutes, the ability to put a time limit on Stock matches wasn't introduced until Melee^note Though later mods such as Smash Remix would backport the capability. There were no time-outs, so the match lasted for almost a full hour. It was the last legal stage in Smash 64 that wasn't Dream Land, so all future (unmodded) Smash 64 tournaments were Dream Land-only.
• Many Sword of the Stars 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 Arbitrary Headcount Limit 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 Loophole Abuse 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.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • 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; when equipped, the Fists of Steel granted the player a 50% resistance to hitscan and projectile damage at the cost of taking double damage from melee attacks. This is intended for a heavy to get to the front lines with little fear about suffering too much damage. Meanwhile, the Buffalo Steak Sandvich temporarily increases movement speed as well as granting a Mini Crit buff when eaten, at the cost of reduced health and restricting the player to their melee weapon. Players found that combining the effects of the Fists of Steel and the Buffalo Steak Sandvich turned the Heavy into a walking battering ram, ably to quickly close the distance between almost all classes this way; not helping matters is the fact that the FoS's damage vulnerability penalty was negated by the BSS's damage buff, meaning any player who tries to exploit the former risked getting punched out by the Heavy in a few blows before they can deal any significant damage. Paired with a Medic, some Heavies could even walk right up to a sentry gun and punch it to pieces without needing an ubercharge. 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, 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 its 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 its 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 now 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 Rocket Jump 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 125 HP Scouts.
• Terraria:
  • Corrupt Bunnies generated from Bunny Statues during Blood Moons used to drop money. To prevent automated money farming, statute spawned enemies longer drop any money as of version 1.2.
  • Mercy Invincibility abuse utilizing Hellstone or Meteorite blocks was a major part of fighting the bosses in the early stages of Terraria's development. By the Big 1.2 Update and its subsequent balance patches, this was changed to prevent such abuse in boss fights by making these blocks inflict a Burning status effect that damages you instead of dealing normal damage that would trigger Mercy Invincibility.
  • Meteor heads spawned in large numbers when enough meteorite was present on screen and were very easy for a hardmode player to kill, being prehardmode enemies. In 1.2.3, they were changed so they no longer dropped anything in hardmode after people used them to farm biome key molds and souls.
  • Critters spawned from statues used to be catchable. To prevent players from making easy gold and bait farms by using timers and statues, 1.3.1 made it so attempting to capture statue spawned critters would just make them vanish in a puff of smoke.
  • Statue spawned enemies were consistently patched to prevent AFK item and money farming. The first patch was in 1.2.0.2 so hardmode boss summons could no longer drop from them. 1.3.1 cut the item drop rate by a quarter. Finally, 1.4.0.1 made it so that players needed to inflict some damage on the spawned enemies before they will drop their items (no more using automated Death Traps or Lava Pits).
  • 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 as well as making it so only the higher tier ores and bars dropped from the rarer crates, 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:
    (About the Reaver Shark) Ah, our old friend the Reaver Shark - favorite tool of many to essentially skip most of Pre-Hardmode with only minimal fishing effort. This one was so out of tune, it reached meme status - and so we have lowered the mining power of the Reaver Shark from 100 to 59. This will make the Reaver Shark capable of mining anything up to Demonite/Crimtane - so it is still valuable and useful, but no longer the "skip to the end" tool it once was.
    (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.
  • Both the Moon Lord's Phantasmal Deathray and the Martian Saucer's Deathray were very easily nullified by simply hiding under a ceiling. The Journey's End 1.4 update made these attacks pass through terrain between the source and the player.
  • Flower boots were commonly used in critter farming to generate money or for use as bait. The most common technique was was to fire a flare onto some jungle grass, stand on the flare with flower boots equipped and keep swinging the net to rapidly fill your inventory with the captured critters. Flower boots were changed in 1.4.0.1, so that breaking plants while equipped with the flower boots multiplied the original chance of spawning a critter by 0.01%, rendering it incredibly unlikely for a critter to spawn.
  • Version 1.4.4 introduced a new liquid called Shimmer. This liquid allowed breaking down items into their original components and touching it rendered you invincible, allowed you to phase through blocks and disabled all control inputs (known as Shimmering). Numerous exploits and glitches were soon discovered and patched out as detailed below:
    • Originally, the only way to stop Shimmering was to wait until you fell into an open area. This was later fixed by allowing you to press a movement key to instantly end phasing and teleport to a nearby open area after twenty seconds (or they'll be teleported to a nearby open area after sixty seconds if no input is entered). The main reason for this fix was to break a softlock where players could be trapped by building teleporters at the top and bottom of a Shimmer column so they would fall through the Shimmer, hit the bottom teleporter, get teleported to the top, fall through the shimmer, repeat.
    • Shimmering used to render you completely invulnerable, allowing for cheap tactics. Come 1.4.4.4, Shimmering no longer made you invulnerable against bosses.
    • Timers used to be decraftable but this was patched out in 1.4.4.3 after it was discovered that decrafting a 1 second timer into a gold watch and a wire, and then decrafting the gold watch into 10 gold bars and selling the gold bars yielded one gold coin and twenty silver coins, whereas a 1 second timer only cost a single gold coin.
    • Prior to 1.4.4.5, items made with bones and Lihzahrd bricks could be decrafted in Shimmer, allowing access to the materials before they are normally encountered. In 1.4.4.5, they cannot be decrafted until after the respective boss (Skeletron and Golem) are defeated.
    • In versions before 1.4.4.3, the Terra Toilet could be obtained the moment you entered hardmode in certain special seeds (celebration and getfixedboi) by killing jungle mimics. The Terra Toilet could be broken down into a toilet and the broken hero sword via the Shimmer, allowing you to gain access to the Terra Blade before killing Plantera (which is when Mothrons start to naturally spawn during a solar eclipse). After 1.4.4.3, the Terra Toilet could no longer be decrafted and in 1.4.4.8, jungle mimics no longer dropped the Terra Toilet.
• Tokyo Afterschool Summoners has an in-universe example. The Game runs on time loops, and the goal of the game is to claim the Protagonist. Whenever the Protagonist dies, the world is reset to the beginning of the game and everything must start over. Three Guilds, having members who manage to retain their memories after the resets, figured out that they could just go for the Protagonist immediately after the game starts and circumvent the game's mechanics entirely, giving no other Guilds a chance to do anything. In subsequent loops, the Game Masters would force those three Guilds to sign treaties, preventing them from interacting with the Protagonist until the final stages of the game, or otherwise using their knowledge of past loops to destabilize the game.
• In the original Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune, the "gacha" exploit—periodically rapid-shifting to the previous gear and back—allows the player to gain short bursts of faster 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.
• One of the many balance patches for Warcraft III introduced a new armor type, "Unarmored". Originally it was reserved for units that indeed logically had no armor, like 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 Game-Breaker (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 Strategy Guide. 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.
• 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.
  • Ivara's second skill, Navigator, allows a player to turn any projectile they fire into a homing missile, by taking direct control of the projectile itself while Energy reserves lasted, and including a few extra things like acceleration control and, to ensure the skill worked as intended, infinite range to the affected projectile. Said advantage, however, remained under everyone's radar for a rather long time, because there simply wasn't any gun worthy exploiting this tidbit. Enter the Arca Plasmor, a BFG-esque weapon limited by, you guessed it, its short range. Players had a good time while it lasted, mostly because, aside from that exploit, the cautionary bonus to range was long since proven to be unnecessary.
  • When the Mod Quick Thinking (a Mod allowing you to survive lethal health damage by reducing your energy instead) dropped, players discovered that combining it with Rage (A Mod that gives you energy when you take health damage) allowed for a near-infinite loop that would make any Warframe borderline invincible. Eventually it was patched so that taking damage while Quick Thinking was active would not generate energy, making the combo generally useless.
• War Thunder had the flying Churchill glitch, which although hilarious was promptly patched after some days.
  • More relevant was the infamous bomber RP glitch: if your bomber crashed without scoring nor getting a single hit, all its bombs in the loadout, which obviously explode in the crash, would count as scored hits for assigning rewards at the end of the game, like research points or silver lions. When someone discovered this, players started to join battles flying bombers with the highest number of bombs available (points earned by the number of bombs rather than their explosive mass) only to deliberately fly to the ground in a suicide run. Other than ruining other people's games, this behavior was detrimental for the developer, as the game is free-to-play and revenues are made thanks to players purchasing premium accounts or vehicles to speed up research (something that is prevented by free research points awarded with this glitch). Gaijin patched the issue at speed-light and banned for one day all the accounts that received an anomalous increase in research points after crashing at the start of a battle. They were unbanned after reverting their research tree to the previous day and allowed to stay.
  • When the French tech tree was released, the Vautour jet bombers (which are late 50s planes with frontal autocannons, transonic max speed and a huge payload of bombs) had a battle rating of 8.0, meaning they could face anything from 7.0 to 9.0, but this meant they could occasionally face the much weaker ww2/post-war early jets. If you were playing against them with anything from 7.0 to 8.0, good luck trying to catch them in a dogfight, or avoiding getting all your bases and the airfield being bombed without being capable of intercepting them. Their battle rating was increased to 9.0 in the following patch.
  • Similarly, the Italian jet Sagittario II was initially released at 8.0, however it was so nimble and fast that it totally outclassed everything to ridiculous levels. It was increased too at 9.0 after a month and even afterwards it's a strong dogfighter which can outturn almost all of his opponents, has good acceleration for its tier, and heavy firepower.
  • Players in arcade battles used the A2D Skyshark to climb to absurd altitudes (which was easy to do with this aircraft and other players would not bother to try to catch it), then bomb to hell bases unpunished thanks to the autoreload function of this game mode. As a result matches ended in an easy and very short time. The Skyshark was then promptly uptiered to 9.0 in arcade battles, where there are jets that can easily reach their heights.
  • In the enduring confrontation mode of simulator battles you could indefinitely spawn any aircraft, provided you have funds. Some attackers and bombers (like the A2D) carry enough payload to devastate airfields and score tons of money and research points. Players discovered that it was much quicker to fly to the enemy airfields at low altitude, drop everything, and letting AAA kill you, or even bailing out, then spawning again. While the spawn cost reduced or even prevented the money gain from bombing, at the same time you could farm tons of research points in a very short time, unlocking entire trees in just a weekend. Players who resorted to these tactics were called "zombers" by the community because they were flying doomed to die, so metaphorically they were like the walking dead or "zombie bombers". The developers patched the game so that if you don't come back to the airfield and reload, you only get half research points.
  • Due to players abusing of airfield AAA to shot down whoever comes too close, and thus unnecessarily prolonging a match when losing, after a patch the game will count you as inactive if you stay too long on the runway without taking off, which means that if you are the last player in your time you risk to lose as if nobody was left.
• World of Warcraft:
  • A fairly obscure item 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: 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 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 rather uncomfortable).
  • There was a video posted on YouTube in 2007, where a paladin killed, in one move, Lord Kazzak, 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. ^note Since the server had to effectively resolve about 10,000 attacks at once when the paladin did this, it effectively brought the whole server to its knees for a couple minutes, with extreme lag for everyone in the area..
    • 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.
  • A similar flaw happened at the launch of Classic with the Shaman's Windfury Weapon. Windfury weapon gives a chance on a basic attack to duplicate that auto-attack twice more with boosted damage. The problem was when the game came out, Windfury Weapon could proc off of itself infinite times. It was very rare but not unheard of for a player to be one-shot by a PvP Shaman because Windfury procced twelve or fourteen times off a single swing. One of the first patches ever for the game included a hard limit on how many times Windfury could proc off itself, which only reduced it to unbelievably strong.
  • 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 existed 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 eliminated both stats in favor of other tweaks to the basic damage calculations, but a special rule still exists to limit the amount of damage players 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 the Legion expansion, Gul'dan dropped a very specific trinket called the Draught of Souls which, for most classes, was a decent on use damage item with a fairly low cooldown. Arms warriors, however, had a plethora of skills to augment the damage of said trinket (some basically passive like the Colossal Smash debuff on the target, and 3 others with cooldowns that aligned almost perfectly with the Draught of Souls cooldown) to such an extent that it became basically indispensable for that class, 20-30% (!) of the overall damage being done with the trinket effect being pretty common. Which was not only a problem because it forced warriors to acquire that trinket and design their playstyle around it, but also because it was practically impossible to come up with a better trinket until the end of the expansion, while the trinket dropped in the middle of it. This led not only to an overhaul of the warrior's number-crunching (Colossal Smash got nerfed while a lot of other skills were buffed to compensate for this), but also to a 20% nerf for Draught of Souls exclusively for the Arms warrior.
  • For a long time, people who had quests in dungeons often would join a group to complete the quest then leave before the dungeon was finished. To combat this, Warlords of Draenor gave every dungeon quest from that expansion onwards the added requirement of killing the final boss of the dungeon (i.e. a quest to loot something from the first boss of Black Rook Hold will also require players to kill the final boss of Black Rook Hold) so groups wouldn't have to stand around waiting for a new party member to finish.
  • The Mage Tower Challenges in Legion were notorious for having a difficulty highly dependent on a player's class and specialization. Most notably, Destruction warlocks and Windwalker monks had to fight the same boss, but while warlocks were stuck using a subpar demon due to it having their only interrupt ability, monks had a sixty second long incapacitate with a 15-second cooldown, making that part of the fight a cakewalk. Blizzard would later Nerf the monk incap ability so it only lasted long enough to function as an interrupt.
  • Getting the hidden skin for the Havoc demon hunter's artifact required looting a special necklace that caused an NPC to kick them up to a massive felbat they had to kill. Many savvy players realized they could just glide from nearby Highmountain to reach the felbat and kill it that way without farming for the necklace. Once flying was introduced to the Broken Isles, the felbat was patched to be out of phase (and thus unattackable) for anyone who didn't have the necklace in their inventory.
  • Corrupted gear in patch 8.3 was designed to grant the wearer benefits at the risk of detrimental effects that worsen the higher their Corruption level is, until at 80+ Corruption they would have to deal with constant self-inflicted damage and snares on top of increased damage taken and decreased healing received. Some high-geared players learned to funnel pieces with Twilight Devastation (which deals damage that scales with the user's health) to their tanks until they had Corruption levels of over 200 and just use invincibility periods to bypass the penalties while the tanks did Game-Breaker-level damage. Rather than nerfing Twilight Devastation's damage, a hotfix in July 2020 added another penalty that caused players with 200+ Corruption to lose 25% of their health a second while in combat. However, the Corrupted gear system was retired in patch 9.0 a few months later, rendering the addition of this rule ultimately moot.
• 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 World of Warships and World of Tanks 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.
• From XCOM: Long War, once the final objective is activated, the game spawns 16 battleships, one on each of the council nations, to bring them down. This is due to popular streamer and let's player Beaglerush figuring out that he could activate the final mission, then sending the troop carrier there and recalling it back to base to pass time and play the clock so all his equipment could finish to be built/repaired, and all of his soldiers could be healed, without incidents. This rule patch ensured that when the final mission is activated, players have to undertake it right now instead of cheesing an easy comeback.
• Yandere Simulator:
  • Discussed in advance with the Mask mechanic. Wearing a mask (which you can get access to as a Drama club member) gives you a free murder opportunity without any reputation loss (although you can still get caught if you fail to burn the evidence- DNA doesn't care what accessories you're wearing), but It Only Works Once, as masks will be banned afterwards. YandereDev noted that yes, this would essentially mean one free rival kill even if she's near Senpai (killing anyone where Senpai can see you is an instant game over, but if he doesn't know it's you...). The solution he proposed was that if a masked killer struck near Senpai, he would run up to you, take the mask off, and recognize you. He was unable to implement it then because he lacked the appropriate animations, but later he was indeed able to add it.
  • YandereDev watches the Lets' Plays. If a YouTuber finds a way to do something much easier than Yandere Dev intended it to be or something that he didn't even intend to be possible, odds are that the exploit will be patched in the next build. One big example of this is the addition of a "Follower Valid" bullet point to the Kidnapping Checklist that appears on the screen whenever you try to kidnap someone. Logically, you should be able to kidnap any student in the school, but the Follower Valid bullet point is checked off only if you have a female student with you who is not a member of the Student Council because kidnapping animations haven't been added in the game yet for male students or Student Council members and the game would thus experience weird glitches if someone tried to kidnap them. And then he had to patch out bugs that would let you kidnap one of these groups by trapping a valid follower in the kidnapping room, then going and getting another (the game treats the first follower as the one you're kidnapping for box-checking, but you will actually kidnap the invalid follower if you single out him). He's also had to patch out kidnapping teachers via an easter egg mode that causes them to react to you as if they were female students.
  • When the first official demo of the game was released, a speedrunner named Hatsune Elissu did an any% run of the game. Within a period of time less than 2 weeks, YanDev released a series of bug fixes to the demo, which included changes targeting specific strategies used in the speedruns, yet this did not prevent Hatsune from lowering the record time to under a minute.
  • The basic takeaway is that YandereDev does not it like when players exploit the game's... quirks and would rather prefer if they dispatch the targets in the way he intended (in which the Schemes you can buy from Info-chan, which give very specific instructions what to do, hints you towards) despite the game's sandbox nature.
• Several of the early games in the You Don't Know Jack series attempted to punish cheating players who buzzed 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 Game-Breaker 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, all of which counted as a wrong answer.

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