Speedbooking- is it an Exploit?

Yes it's an exploit. This is what Gaile said earlier today about Match Fixing on her wiki page:
Speedbooking is just the same. The quests are not intended to be played without spawns.
Also, in my opinion the Jinkies' post wins and should be the next article on their blog.

This time you won't hear players say "You cheated, f*ck off" & "Bye bye!".

Just in case nobody mentioned yet (skipped a lot of posts), think about the old Kurzick and Luxon HFFF. That was somewhat more abusive and a hell of a lot more of people did it for sure, and yet nobody but botters were banned. So you even if somehow you were still unsure about it - this should be enough to ease you off.

This is the part where bothaters came in and said:
And as Gaile said, you're not supposed to be able to do that, yet you do it.

Stupid idea which will negatively impact every area/mission where you may need to flag-path heroes to your rescue, or something else. Might as well just pop up 'return to outpost' when the last player dies and only H&H remain.

To have an "exploit" you're supposed to have a bug to exploit.

Here is none. It's a poor design characteristic the developers have already told us they're unable to alter - that was about the HFFF issue. Quests are not intended to be played without spawns, yet the game is VOLUNTARILY designed not to create spawns if the player is out of compass range. They fixed HFFF by changing the whole mission and the completion requirements for a reason.

How naive, I didn't even know of this technique before today, I used to think people speedbooking were just doing three quick missions on their own. Anyway, even though speedbooking is not something I'd approve, I hardly see an "exploit" here. Surely not a bannable offense, since there's no bug.

Dungeons and elite missions weren't meant to be run, yet I don't believe monks and sins got banned for that, go figure...

Not sure what you think "Bothaters"(try bot-haters, though not a word either just seems more sensible) have to do with whether or not this is defined as an exploit, but as Gaile did say, an exploit of a bug is against the EULA, would you have everyone that used Sliver Armor banned? Seeing as for the last few years that was apparently a bug and therefore its use in builds was an exploit. Pray you don't have an ele with that skill, hero or human... I think not, bugs happen, the design of heroes thus far seems to allow them to go from one end of a map to another without setting off enemies, if not, explain how when "Ghost Running" existed, the Devs chose to change the function of the elite UA rather then fix the heroes?

Not sure if Anet has a problem with players clearing missions in quick time, but my instincts say they might. This is pretty delicate, though. So they will have to take time to over look every bit of detail, including the skills involved in these builds and the difficulty of the missions so they can still balance everything and not make something one sided.

I may be totally wrong about the "Red Resign" stuff (I don't do PVP), but I think the /resign command was also VOLUNTARILY designed to be useful in some cases, just like spawns (performance I guess?). Didn't these people get banned by exploiting this function? Obviously they did knowingly abuse it, and so do speedbookers.

About the running... that's just skillz, not abuse of something illogical

Haha I didn't even know about this bug! This can be fixed, and was fixed by ArenaNet so... I'm not sure if anyone really abused this? Or gained benefits from it? Well anyway, about the Gaile quote... it's just what she said on her page

Sounds like an extreme case of butthurt.

hmm ah yeh! It's an exploit. Never thought about it actually. I think most people didn't think about it like that. And the chance that they will ban players for this is prolly lower then 0.01%.

Is repeatedly doing a short mission for 50000 XP and getting an easy survivor title really giving you an edge over other players? ANet permanently banned players for that!

I don't do it but if people are doing it manually by flagging and not running a bot program then this is fine by me. Anet stopped ghost running and HFF not by changing or outlawing this mechanic but by changing spawns and skills. That means that they have no history of finiding the mechanic illegal and that they act if they think it is getting out of hand.

Flagging your heroes is a valuable game mechanic - lets face it, it's the one good sure way of saving those idiot chosen in Divinity Coast.

Is it an exploit? Yes.

Is it likely ANet will ban accounts over it? No.

I brought this up in this thread:

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/p...0436507p5.html

and some trolls actually responded that, yes, people should be banned for doing this... :eyeroll:

Lol now that I think of it I never actually did speedbook unless you count the 1 min great destroyer run which doesn't use a bug by any means.
And yeah any decent player can fill a HM book easy I went from r8 to r10 on all 3 titles within a couple days just from that.

But back to the original post if anet were to ban for this minor bug yeah that would be pretty dumb considering the popularity of it and they would end up banning more than 3700 actual people instead of 3700 accounts.

A guildie has mentioned numerous times that the reasoning for hero and Hench not triggering spawns is to save on server space, as to populate the entire instance would use up too much server resources to be practical. Assuming this is accurate, this is no bug, and no exploit, a design flaw perhaps, but one that is used to create a smooth game instance. If anyone could confirm this it might put this discussion to rest.

In addition:
"Spawning is appearing on a map. This can be players or NPCs appearing at a specified point under a certain condition, e.g. when a point is reached that was set to spawn a group of enemies.
-Spawn /spawn(ing) point:
-The set points on the map that foes, NPCs, allies, etc. are scripted to appear.
-A group of such creatures that appear at such a point; an alternate form of mob."

No, they weren't banned.

If anything, their accounts would NEVER be terminated for just resigning or abusing the /resign commands, EVER. They'd be banned for MATCH MANIPULATION, which is the consequent effect.

Speedbooking has no consequent effect - someone does the mission anyway, even if they are someone's heroes - , speedbooking doesn't exploit a bug, speedbooking isn't an exploit.

Please note that "bug" ≠ "programming oversight". We have no bug here, end of story. A bug is, for example, the ability to access an otherwise inaccessible developer outpost and taking advantage of it: even if the game is programmed to void access to anyone with no credentials, somehow you manage to slip through and abuse it. Then you're banned for exploiting the bug.

The only action Anet could ever choose to apply against speedbooking is to alter the poorly designed missions so that you can't complete them with the speedbooking techniques (just like they did with the HFFF missions).

An in-game nerf for a poor choice of theirs is the ONLY answer (an answer to a question no one has ever asked), a suspension for users is plainly retarded, unless they also ban runners, ferrymen to Consulate Docks, Permasins and whatever is out the basic design of the game.

Not fighting anything but the final 'boss' in Curse Of The Nornbear to complete the quest is to me the same as the PVP points you gain by this 'trick'. Unearned, undeserved.

So in PvP it's wrong, in PvE nobody should care?

- What you gain has no impact on anyone else's game, while manipulating a match means you also influence other teams and their possibility of succeding.

- Skipping some parts of the missions can be done by taking shortcuts set in place by the designers themselves, but you still have to do the mission somehow. You can't beat the mission without at least killing the boss at the end of the Curse, but you can "win" a match doing nothing with match manipulation.

- Abusing the /resign command isn't the only way you can manipulate a match: the two teams can also come to prior agreement and manipulate the outcome of the match without using a single command line. The source of the problem is human conduct, something that is perceived as unsportly behaviour. That's what they usually take actions against, and it's strictly PvP-related.

- Anet doesn't condone abuses of design flaws. They just don't blame users and fix their flaws sooner or later. So they did remove the ability to HFFF, they did remove HB to prevent RR, they'll likely do something against speedbooking, but surely that won't be a mass-ban.

Tell that to those who didn't 'abuse this feature'...

It's still unearned, even if the PvP thing is worse.

P.S.: If you still think I'm totally wrong I'm OK with it, I'll no longer ague