The Great Stat Exploit of ????-2021
May 13, 2022 6:22:02 GMT -5
punished ppurg and mehtastic like this
Post by lechuck on May 13, 2022 6:22:02 GMT -5
There was a severe exploit in the game up until last year when it was finally fixed. I discovered this exploit myself two or three years ago through observation and experimentation, but it seems to me like it must have been in the game ever since the introduction of the reroll feature in, what was it, 2004 or something? As such, it seems unlikely to me that nobody else had figured it out the same way I did. The fact that it wasn't fixed until last year makes me wonder just how many knew this secret. I'm sure a few other cheeky punters worked it out and kept it to themselves throughout the years.
The exploit: if you used spice to increase your stats, and then did a reroll and reroll undo, the boost from spice would lock in permanently. Say you started with 12 strength and then snorted two pinches of strength spice. Your strength was then 18, and if you did a reroll+undo, it would think that your base strength was 18 with +6 on top from spice. You would now have 24 strength until the spice wore off and the stat reverted to its "natural" 18, which was permanent. In this way, you could increase any stat to whatever level you could manage with spice. Spice stacks infinitely until you die from overdose after like 8 pinches or something, so if you wanted, you could make a human with HG strength. Of course, that would be very noticeable and you'd get caught eventually; but if you knew what the exact limits for your race were, you could carefully sniff exactly as many grains as it took to bring you to those limits and then play a character with technically legal but completely insane stats.
How I found out: when you activate barrier/listen/scan/guard, your maximum stun goes down by some amount. Before this fix, if you did a reroll+undo with these on, your stun cap would reset but you would still technically have the -stun debuff from these abilities, only your natural stun would have reverted to whatever 100ish number your endurance gave you. You could then toggle them off and your stun cap would go up by whatever amount. You could get like +25 to your maximum stun this way. I actually reported this bug twice but staff never cared to fix it. One day, it dawned on me that the code might work the same way with any temporary adjustment to attributes. I tried with spice, and lo and behold, it worked. I told only one player about this, and I have no idea if they told others, but the fact that this bug had probably existed for the better part of two decades makes me pretty sure that I wasn't the first one to figure it out. In fact, the player that I told later joined staff, and I wonder if that's why it got fixed. You know who you are, pal.
In theory, this exploit should also have worked with magic spells and with the temporary max hp debuff from bloodburn. If you got bloodburn and let your hp drop down to the single digits, then did a reroll+undo and ate a cure, your hp would have reverted to the base amount determined by your endurance and then gradually gone up by whatever amount the bloodburn debuff had inflicted while it wore off. I never cared to experiment that extensively with it, but I bet that would have worked. But this is one of those things that any staff member would have noticed immediately upon glancing at your stats. Humans don't just have 200 hp.
The fix appears to be that the reroll command now removes all buffs/debuffs and other temporary effects before rolling your new stats. The fact that I reported the stun cap bug twice, like 4-5 years ago, and it didn't get fixed at the time, makes me wonder if staff were using it on their characters; but I have no way of knowing.
From what I heard, it was finally fixed because Lotion got caught doing it. He's certainly not the one I told, but since I talk to nobody from Arm anymore, I have no idea if he found out on his own or was told about it by someone. I will say that between my discovery of this bug and the fixing of it, I didn't really play any serious characters and didn't go around abusing it to fuck people over. I mostly just dicked around a bit with shortlived throwaways and didn't play the game for real. If I wanted to, I could have played world-conquering supermen with all-maxed stats, but I had already stopped taking Armageddon seriously by then. But I do wonder if others have been doing so. If you know of anybody whose characters always seemed to have suspiciously amazing stats, that might be the reason. It seems unthinkable to me that nobody else ever discovered this exploit on their own, and since it wasn't fixed until last year, others may very well have been using it all along.
For staff, if there are any older characters with suspiciously amazing stats, you might check the logs to see if their first actions upon entering the game were to snort spice and reroll+undo. Judging by the release notes, the bug was fixed in the September 1st 2021 update, so it would have to be a character created before then.
If I still cared to play Armageddon, I would urge the coders to revise the stat system and make it so that rolling great stats wasn't of such incredible importance for combat characters. Make the spread less random, make it so you can't just get objectively amazing or terrible stats. Make it so you get either highs and lows or decent in everything. The fact that you can roll godlike stats across the board, or trash stats overall, is not doing the game any favors and just compels players to scrutinize the stat system to look for advantages. It would be a better game if this eyesore was done away with in favor of a system with more fairness. There can still be characters who are stronger than usual, or notably clumsy, or whatever. Just don't let it be a game where one human fighter comes out with a total stat pool of 48 and another gets a sum of 67.
The exploit: if you used spice to increase your stats, and then did a reroll and reroll undo, the boost from spice would lock in permanently. Say you started with 12 strength and then snorted two pinches of strength spice. Your strength was then 18, and if you did a reroll+undo, it would think that your base strength was 18 with +6 on top from spice. You would now have 24 strength until the spice wore off and the stat reverted to its "natural" 18, which was permanent. In this way, you could increase any stat to whatever level you could manage with spice. Spice stacks infinitely until you die from overdose after like 8 pinches or something, so if you wanted, you could make a human with HG strength. Of course, that would be very noticeable and you'd get caught eventually; but if you knew what the exact limits for your race were, you could carefully sniff exactly as many grains as it took to bring you to those limits and then play a character with technically legal but completely insane stats.
How I found out: when you activate barrier/listen/scan/guard, your maximum stun goes down by some amount. Before this fix, if you did a reroll+undo with these on, your stun cap would reset but you would still technically have the -stun debuff from these abilities, only your natural stun would have reverted to whatever 100ish number your endurance gave you. You could then toggle them off and your stun cap would go up by whatever amount. You could get like +25 to your maximum stun this way. I actually reported this bug twice but staff never cared to fix it. One day, it dawned on me that the code might work the same way with any temporary adjustment to attributes. I tried with spice, and lo and behold, it worked. I told only one player about this, and I have no idea if they told others, but the fact that this bug had probably existed for the better part of two decades makes me pretty sure that I wasn't the first one to figure it out. In fact, the player that I told later joined staff, and I wonder if that's why it got fixed. You know who you are, pal.
In theory, this exploit should also have worked with magic spells and with the temporary max hp debuff from bloodburn. If you got bloodburn and let your hp drop down to the single digits, then did a reroll+undo and ate a cure, your hp would have reverted to the base amount determined by your endurance and then gradually gone up by whatever amount the bloodburn debuff had inflicted while it wore off. I never cared to experiment that extensively with it, but I bet that would have worked. But this is one of those things that any staff member would have noticed immediately upon glancing at your stats. Humans don't just have 200 hp.
The fix appears to be that the reroll command now removes all buffs/debuffs and other temporary effects before rolling your new stats. The fact that I reported the stun cap bug twice, like 4-5 years ago, and it didn't get fixed at the time, makes me wonder if staff were using it on their characters; but I have no way of knowing.
From what I heard, it was finally fixed because Lotion got caught doing it. He's certainly not the one I told, but since I talk to nobody from Arm anymore, I have no idea if he found out on his own or was told about it by someone. I will say that between my discovery of this bug and the fixing of it, I didn't really play any serious characters and didn't go around abusing it to fuck people over. I mostly just dicked around a bit with shortlived throwaways and didn't play the game for real. If I wanted to, I could have played world-conquering supermen with all-maxed stats, but I had already stopped taking Armageddon seriously by then. But I do wonder if others have been doing so. If you know of anybody whose characters always seemed to have suspiciously amazing stats, that might be the reason. It seems unthinkable to me that nobody else ever discovered this exploit on their own, and since it wasn't fixed until last year, others may very well have been using it all along.
For staff, if there are any older characters with suspiciously amazing stats, you might check the logs to see if their first actions upon entering the game were to snort spice and reroll+undo. Judging by the release notes, the bug was fixed in the September 1st 2021 update, so it would have to be a character created before then.
If I still cared to play Armageddon, I would urge the coders to revise the stat system and make it so that rolling great stats wasn't of such incredible importance for combat characters. Make the spread less random, make it so you can't just get objectively amazing or terrible stats. Make it so you get either highs and lows or decent in everything. The fact that you can roll godlike stats across the board, or trash stats overall, is not doing the game any favors and just compels players to scrutinize the stat system to look for advantages. It would be a better game if this eyesore was done away with in favor of a system with more fairness. There can still be characters who are stronger than usual, or notably clumsy, or whatever. Just don't let it be a game where one human fighter comes out with a total stat pool of 48 and another gets a sum of 67.