So in pvp when archers are gas/acid arrowing my thralls out of range so they dont attack back thats a exploit, so many things people do each time they play could be classed as a exploit. Just poor game design really. Fix would be to spawn a AI mob with a powerful range attack to knock them off, the fact that the servers lag when a maelstom occurs is all funcom with their poor coding an even worse servers.
An excuse Iâve seen a million times over. âItâs not an exploit because if the devs didnât want us to do it then we wouldnât be able to.â
Undermeshing is not an exploit. Glitching your weapon so you attack a hundred times a second is not an exploit. Using a specific series of actions to duplicate avatar tokens is not an exploit.
âIf the devs didnât want you to do it, you wouldnât be able to.â 
Someone was trying to use WoW earlier as an example. Imagine if you could go into any WoW raid, stand on a rock and kill any raid boss you wanted with no danger to yourself. All because the developers hadnât figured out how to instruct the boss on what to do when you stand on a rock. You think that would be acceptable? You think itâs just people being brilliant and shouldnât be looked on negatively at all?
Go ahead and add on to that that doing so causes the raid boss to spawn multiple copies, potentially enough to lag out the server. Still acceptable? Still just people being âbrilliantâ?
Yes William. That is also an exploit. Abusing âpoor game designâ is the very essence of using an exploit.
Exploits are not a list of specific actions that a developer committee has deemed to be offenses worthy of an account ban. That is simply a list of exploits than can get you banned if you abuse them. There are many exploits that are either not harmful enough or not advantageous enough or whatever to warrant being put on that list.
All dogs are animals, but not all animals are dogs. Do you understand?
Explain to me then why gas orbs, arrows, even bows are in the game.
There is no comparison between undermeshing or glitching and climbing on a rock. And the issue here is whether climbing on a rock and using a perfectly legal AOE weapon deserves banning. No oneâs arguing that it is killing the server. The question is who is responsible for that: the developers who implemented a mechanic that begs for that type of solution, or the players who applied it.
OMFG.
Are my words just invisible to you people? Can you see what I am typing here? Or can you only see the words AoE and exploit and youâre just filling in the gaps yourselves?
You know what. Never mind. I donât know why I let myself think for one nanosecond that people in an exploit thread would even understand the basic concept of an exploit. After all, Iâve seen this pattern repeated many, many times before. Iâve witnessed people claiming a PvP exploit that made you immortal was legitimate gameplay and that using it was the developers fault. Complete with video showing 50+ people beating on the guy with everything they had. Why should something as mundane as cheesing the AI be any different, even when it causes server lag?
So go ahead. Carry on explaining how nothing is ever an exploit. Iâm done wasting my time in this thread.
Both. Obviously. Arguing anything else is kindergarten-level of denying responsibility for your own actions.
If both are responsible, a permanent ban seems excessive to say the least. When you release something in early access to find the flaws, maybe you shouldnât punish the folks who further that cause.
In my opinion, the far bigger problem is the design, not the conduct. Climbing on a rock and using a gas arrow wonât feel like a bannable offense to many players. The one aspect that makes it bannable - the server lag - is something that naturally happens in the maelstrom. Obviously not to the extent here, where players actually figured out how to beat the mechanic.
They should make the rocks unclimbable until they figure out a better solution.
And give them a realy nasty range atacks.
I mean I donât play Siptah I have no idea wtf is going on in the screenshot. It just looks like someone is hacking by sucking all the bosses in (the video was unbearable to watch) so my apologies for saying hackers if that offended you somehowâŠ
I used to do something similar in asgarth mining steel. Stand on a pole and shoot poison arrows down and kill while they all gathered below. This all ended after the patch where the bosses/thrall run away after going to far from there spawn spot.
That would explain the confusion. Siptah has a game mechanic that doesnât exist in Exiled Lands: if you stay inside the Maelstrom for a while, monsters start spawning around you.
The way it works is that thereâs a lightning flash and a crash of thunder and a monster spawns where the lightning struck. At first itâs just one lightning strike every once in a while, and itâs relatively easy to deal with whatever spawned if youâre prepared. Then it ramps up to two lightning strikes every once in a while. Then the lightning starts striking more often.
And then all hell breaks loose.
Iâm not sure if it was supposed to be as abrupt as it is, or if itâs a bug. Either way, what you get is 2-4 lightning simultaneous strikes every 1-3 seconds. Let that sink in: thatâs roughly 2 new enemies every second.
Maybe if you get a clan of 10 people on a PVE server, where thereâs no friendly fire, they might dispatch those enemies roughly at the same pace they come. Maybe. Anyone else should either run the hell away â not just from that spot, but out of the whole Maelstrom, because the lightning onslaught will follow you â or try radically different tactics.
One tactic you could try is to get to a spot the mobs canât reach and then deal with them from there, using poison gas.
Thatâs part of what is happening in the video. The other part is that the server, of course, canât handle that many AIs running at the same time and ends up proverbially soiling its metaphorical bed.
So, just to recap: Funcom programmed the Maelstrom to spawn a steadily increasing number of monsters until the server itself canât handle it. Thereâs no need to kite anything anywhere, because the monsters will spawn right there.
Those were the facts. The rest is speculation, interpretation and discussion.
One thing I believe everyone could and should agree on is that this is something that can be abused â and probably is being abused already. Basically, the game hands you a nice, easy-to-use DDoS gun that can bring the whole server down to a crawl or even crash it.
Another thing I believe everyone could and should agree on is that abusing this should be considered an exploit and should be a bannable offense.
The question not everyone agrees on is whether standing at a spot the AI canât reach is, in itself, an exploit or not. Personally, I think most people â on both sides of this discussion â simply donât understand the concept of exploit, but Iâm tired of trying to change their mind, so Iâll leave it at that.
I hope all of this clarified the discussion a bit.
I wonder why they didnât go with an alternative mechanic where, instead of more and more mobs spawning in, the spawn rate stays within the same order of magnitude but the mob strength increases.
My guess is that the crazy spawn rate isnât intended.
the solution is the naelstorm soawns need to be on a timer. What i mean is something like this.
T1 spawn will dissappear after 2 minutes
T2 spawn will dissappear after 4 minutes
Boss spawns will dissapear after 7 minutes.
And for t2 and bosses add in the exiles star metal equation where if x amount are out then nothing will spawn at that level.
In video games, an exploit is the use of a bug or glitches, game system, rates, hit boxes, speed or level design etc. by a player to their advantage in a manner *not intended by the gameâs designers*.
Mobs not being able to climb is intended. Its a conscious decision by devs. They shipped the game fully aware of this. Same goes for âspawns stuff endlessly because we assume that players will die at some pointâ
It is an exploit
For me, its not, as i described above.
You are exploiting a hole in the AI
I donât consider it a hole in the AI, because devs allowed it to be this way. Before shipping the game, they were fully aware of this and said âwell, its fine for usâ.
Now, if you want to ban/punish players for making a poor game decision (be it choosing an engine in which this is a thing, or letting it like that for budget reasons), thats on you, but doesnât seem fair to me at all. Fix the game instead.
Go back and re-read what I posted. Just like several others before you, you have failed to comprehend the exploit despite it being exhaustively spelled out several times.
I think the mobs should at least try attacking and break the rocks if they are on harvestable ones. Otherwise yes itâs clearly unintented.
People always gotta be cheeseyâŠ
I like to just stay in the moshpit untill I die or my thrall is about to die. ( I play on modded private server so we can send thralls home via a mod)
The AI issue is known in UE4. This thread should be about UE4. Itâs not Funcom who designed the AI components. Everybody pushed for UE5 once they know this difference, but itâs been said Funcom is busy with another project.
I, programmer. An exploit must not be comprehensible to the general public. 
I got the hint of what Funcom does with exploits after we tried to publicly solve some. Threads get locked when itâs public.
This would be a logical thing to do rather than spamming creatures
Itâs tough to balance this mechanic for all types of play styles. Ideally they would make t3 more survivable to foster the siege mechanic that seems to be the core of this, and have the mobs slowly scale up in difficulty rather than numbers until the defenses are overwhelmed and players have to run. And make the rocks unclimbable.
Theres a big diff betwee hacking and exploit and even bigger between exploit and cheesing. Cheesing a mob by running around it, nobody disagrees its just a tactic.
Knowingly dragging the entire mob spawns to a central point at the cost of server performance and avoiding any and all damage is exploiting 
you can haggle the semantics all you want but everyone knows they arenât living up to any hint of the original design here.
Now its a combination of Funcoms inability to do square root radius math and normal / surface raycasting to determine if players are above height of mobs to then maybe scale this back.
so its a bit of Player column and a bit of competence problem of devs combined together resulting in an exploit that is hurting player experience and server perf.