The Cult of the Bugged Bag

Throughout my years playing Armageddon, one common thread I've noticed among those who form OOC cliques is the willingness to abuse game bugs before they are reported, and sometimes after they are reported but before they are fixed. Exploiting these bugs can be very beneficial to the players/PCs who know of them, as it offers an advantage that other players don't have. If a small enough group of players know about a bug, they can abuse it for a very long time before it's fixed without any staff noticing. In some cases, staff do notice but let it slide, because their own PCs are benefiting from the bug as well. Some past examples of this type of collusion include the group that abused the bug that allowed for permanent stat increases with spice, and various small groups that abused item duplication bugs or various bugs with the game's scripts.

Season one's most insidious bug by far is an issue with containers that seem significantly more generous than they probably should. Random containers -- usually a large bag, but sometimes other random containers around the world like dartboards and midden heaps -- will appear to be filled with a bounty full of items that have been placed in a container previously. The room will save with these items in the container, and more random items will fill it, making it a sort of fountain of items that players can take from to equip themselves or sell in shops.

Without getting too technical, this bug is likely due to an oversight in the way containers are managed in memory. If you think of a container item as a piece of code that is a portal to a hole that items are in, consider what would happen if two container items are a portal to the same hole. I put a necklace in my large bag, which portals it to the same hole that a random table in a tavern points to, and now the necklace is both in the bag and on the table. The item isn't duplicated, but simply in two places at once.

Now to the juicy part. My adventures into the OOC realm as a non-player have finally become limited by the fact that I refuse to roll a character, so I've only become tangentially aware of a group of players that have agreed to subtly collect items from bugged containers and report to each other when new containers are discovered. This post is me spoiling their fun. Sadly, the only containers I'm aware of have already been reported, so I can't advise anyone to check a container as it would risk them getting banned.

The staff can easily figure out who is in the Cult of the Bugged Bag by grepping runlogs with regular expressions. For starters, try "get (.*) dartboard" and see if anyone has been regularly pulling anything besides a dart out of them. Then try "get bag (.*)" to see if bags are getting pulled from furniture in public locations. Insert the standard "they won't because they're lazy" line here.