Critical Bugs and Exploits

What is a critical bug or exploit? When it comes to bugs, anything that crashes either the servers or game client has to be fixed as soon as possible; that's just plain common sense. We don't know any developer who wouldn't work as long as it takes to find and fix a crash bug. Some exploits, especially attempts at duplication of items, require players to intentionally crash servers through the introduction of lag or what looks like a denial of service attack (streaming huge amounts of data at a server until it slows to a crawl or crashes from the load) and should be treated the same as crash bugs.

The same criticality goes for duplication bugs that don't require crashing the servers to implement; anything that allows a player to duplicate game items outside the context of the gameplay should be found immediately. Whether you close it right away is a more interesting issue; live teams have been known to put in logging code just to see who is using the dupe bug consistently, so those people can be removed from the game at a later time.

Beyond that, we get into the realm of theory and speculation, at least from the developer's point of view. What may be a critical exploit or harmful bug to the community relations or player relations team ”one that must be fixed right now ”might not be a priority at all for the live development team. Is being able to stack flour sacks around a boss monster to prevent him from moving and making him easier to kill a critical exploit that must be fixed immediately, or can it wait until the next scheduled patch? How about players using a teleportation spell to strand non-magic users on an island? You certainly want to stop that kind of activity, but should it be fixed right now, or can it wait?

These are tough areas for decision makers , and the best guideline we can give is this: If a bug or exploit thoroughly screws up the balance of the game and/or is used to prevent other players from playing normally and requires gamemaster (GM) intervention to set right, it probably ought to be fixed as soon as possible. In other words, if it generates help calls to the GMs, it ought to go to the top of the "fix" queue.