Glitches that are okay to use...

I wanted to bring this up to the community due to the conflicting information that SE has clearly provided.

As you may remember, the Ungermax glitch (if you don't see here: Yoshi-P's Ungarmax reply ) was left as an /action in the games coding which could be used on the overworld or in any dungeon.

This was his response:

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Originally Posted by Naoki_Yoshida

Players we judge to have exploited this bug not to progress through content, but solely out of curiosity, will not be subject to disciplinary action. Not only was this a major bug that was created by developer error, it persisted for months due to our failure to properly process user reports, and the resulting usage by curious players upon word of it spreading is understandable. Our analysis of battle and other log data from the period of when information on the bug was disseminated until the bug was fixed confirms that these players did not profit from its usage, and we see no reason to hold them to account. That being said, we must strongly encourage you all to not experiment with these bugs in the future, and to that end will be sending mails to all concerned.

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This was left in the game UNINTENTIONALLY but players were banned for using it in ways that SE did not think was appropriate. However, the deciding factor was if the player benefited from its use. Those who didn't were slapped on the hand and asked to stop. Those who did or attempted to benefit had stricter punishments.


This brings me to glitches that are currently being REWARDED.

The interior housing design contest has clear abuse of the housing glitch with individuals making staircases, balconies, and other seemingly impossible setups. These individuals are being rewarded with exclusive prizes that are unobtainable aside from community events.

Here are a couple of links from winners (names excluded) showing glitched setups (more setups like these can be found by looking through the design contest posts from winners/losers):

House Example 1

House Example 2

House Example 3

I'm just looking for clarification on why some glitches seem to be penalized and some are not. Shouldn't it be a blanket statement/approach on how SE handles cheating to get an advantage? If I was to share how this was done on the forums, I'm pretty sure I'd get banned, so why is this being rewarded?

Housing glitches aren't giving people an unfair advantage in any aspect of gameplay. I've actually seen tutorials of how to do them on this forum, but they don't seem to have been of any concern to the mods.

The better question to me is why they don't take the rampant botting/hacking issues more seriously when it's arguably worse then the Ungarmax debacle in some ways as far as how much of an unfair advantage people are getting from it on top of being disruptive to other players.

Ungarmax was letting people use massive damage to completely skip phases or pull out wins in high end content that others have to struggle with fairly, thus leading to undeserved wins and clears.

Housing glitches let people.... make pretty houses. And hurt no one except people who can't be arsed to put work into their own homes.

Trying to compare them is extremely silly at best and at worst, makes you look kinda salty about winners. But this forum is usually rolling in salt, so I guess that's par for the course?

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Originally Posted by Kaoru_Nagisa

Ungarmax was letting people use massive damage to completely skip phases or pull out wins in high end content that others have to struggle with fairly, thus leading to undeserved wins and clears.

Housing glitches let people.... make pretty houses. And hurt no one except people who can't be arsed to put work into their own homes.

Trying to compare them is extremely silly at best and at worst, makes you look kinda salty about winners. But this forum is usually rolling in salt, so I guess that's par for the course?

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There is a difference between the two, you are correct. But it's what Yoshi-P says that makes Ungarmax relevant, it's the fact that the players that were penalized based on if they benefited from using the glitch. In that regard, Ungarmax and the housing glitch can be considered the same, now that there is a benefit attached.

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Originally Posted by Mikheli

There is a difference between the two, you are correct. But it's what Yoshi-P says that makes Ungarmax relevant, it's the fact that the players that were penalized based on if they benefited from using the glitch. In that regard, Ungarmax and the housing glitch can be considered the same, now that there is a benefit attached.

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It really can't be. Plenty of houses won in the contest that did not visibly use any major housing glitches whatsoever.

That renders your supposed point of using house glitches to "win" contests completely moot.

And comparing it to Ungarmax is still completely idiotic, to be entirely honest.

I really doubt they even recognize specific glitches. As far as they know, maybe there are placable stairs in the game.

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Originally Posted by DevonEllwood

I really doubt they even recognize specific glitches. As far as they know, maybe there are placable stairs in the game.

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SE has been fully aware the glitches exist for quite a long time, and have never released statements about people not using them - or put in preventative measures to stop the use of them.

SE realizes housing glitches harm no one. Housing glitches do not give you clears of the highest end content in the game and the rewards that come with it. It just makes someone's house pretty.

The horror, I know. /s

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Originally Posted by Kaoru_Nagisa

SE has been fully aware the glitches exist for quite a long time, and have never released statements about people not using them - or put in preventative measures to stop the use of them.

SE realizes housing glitches harm no one. Housing glitches do not give you clears of the highest end content in the game and the rewards that come with it. It just makes someone's house pretty.

The horror, I know. /s

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Which is why I mentioned "specific glitches" not glitches in general. The only glitch that that I remember seeing that was specifically mentioned (that I know of?) was the stacking of aquariums and I see at least one that won, so they either don't care or forgot. I still don't know how people do this one. I'm just happy I can finally change my house up for Halloween.

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Originally Posted by kupokage

Sometimes I run into the Cyclops fate in Coerthas as a level 70 SCH and Adlo the sprouts running around.

When farming fates for my relic/anima, I often unsync and let my MP tick back and heal if im dying before resyncing with full HP and continuing with the fate. Same in Eureka, i level sync to tag the NM, unsync to heal and rez, letting the party DPS, then resync at the end for credit.

It's always seemed shady to do that but... is that a glitch or exploit?

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It's an oversight. I do this all the time and if they had or wanted a fix for it, they would have done it a long time ago.

Sometimes I run into the Cyclops fate in Coerthas as a level 70 SCH and Adlo the sprouts running around.

When farming fates for my relic/anima, I often unsync and let my MP tick back and heal if im dying before resyncing with full HP and continuing with the fate. Same in Eureka, i level sync to tag the NM, unsync to heal and rez, letting the party DPS, then resync at the end for credit.

It's always seemed shady to do that but... is that a glitch or exploit?

Considering just how many winners incorporated glitches in their designs...

I'm hoping they'll revisit the item placement system and overhaul it completely. At this point they should just let us place any object anywhere in the room. There is already a safeguard in place that removes Collision Detection from all objects if PCs become stuck in Housing. I mean, don't get me wrong, I have some floating objects in my rooms too. So I can appreciate the time and effort in some of these designs that are utilized floating objects even more... cuz I know how long it can take to set up: place, re-zone, check positions, adjust, re-zone again, check positions, adjust, re-zone again, etc.

That being said... I don't think that every housing glitch is necessarily common knowledge either. So I did find it surprising just how many winning entries have floated objects and other glitches as centerpieces of their designs. If their intent is to engage the community at large, then allowing heavy use of glitches that are 1) time intensive to use, and 2) not common knowledge provided by any official source, then it immediately eliminates many possible entrants from the running to begin with. Thus... not exactly casual friendly.

Well the OP I guess you wanted to start a discussion similar to the one people for a long time are discussing- whether white lie is still a lie - is meant as a mean to hurt. The glitch that FFxiv tried to prevent was affecting the main gameplay and was harmful to the experience in general. While using housing glitches ... is pretty much a high end game, requires some patience and skill but most off all doesn’t affect anyone but person who used the glitch. On that not I am glad that someone else wrote that non glitched houses also won top prizes. Which means that there was no favouritism. Prizes were for houses that looked the best. It wasn’t blunt favouritism towards cheating but neutral judgement. So there was no unfairness committed towards unglitched houses as you are trying to suggest.

Trying to compare two glitches is a bit eh. Not the same thing. And not same level of seriousness. Chill

Glitches are only ever an issue if they do 2 things. Mess up a fight, or mess up the economy. They've known about going out of bounds forever and that's never been fixed. House glitching is a non-issue

I'm surprised people had the nerve to enter houses with clear glitch usage in this contest in the first place. A bold move but clearly worked out in the end.

I'm on the fence on this one. It doesn't appear to be against any rules. I don't believe there has been a statement about housing glitches at all save the aquarium one that was destroying the aquariums themselves.

On the otherhand, maybe if everyone knew about glitching and/or that it would not result in disqualification... maybe some contestants could have submitted a more impressive interior design.

There's a little harmless glitch I like to use that makes you look cooler.

So you know how certain weapon have a shiny effect when you draw them ? And then it disappears when you put it down ? You can keep that effect by drawing your weapon first then sitting down directly after the animation for drawing your weapon started.

And boom you have your shiny weapon.

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Originally Posted by Rowde

At this point they should just let us place any object anywhere in the room. There is already a safeguard in place that removes Collision Detection from all objects if PCs become stuck in Housing. I mean, don't get me wrong, I have some floating objects in my rooms too. So I can appreciate the time and effort in some of these designs that are utilized floating objects even more... cuz I know how long it can take to set up: place, re-zone, check positions, adjust, re-zone again, check positions, adjust, re-zone again, etc.

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I often advocate for advanced placement tools (mostly because after messing with placement using the tools we have now I often notice I've time travelled hours into the future). The variables for placement and angles all get saved already, so just give us access to manipulate that via the UI. Wildstar has a really nice UI for this and if the devs/users haven't checked it out, I would take the time to do so. It's completely free at the moment and it will be shut down sometime in Nov so please devs/cms, take a look at a great housing system before it's taken down. I want that kind of control in this game even if parts like resizing are left out.

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Originally Posted by Bahati

I'm surprised people had the nerve to enter houses with clear glitch usage in this contest in the first place. A bold move but clearly worked out in the end.

I'm on the fence on this one. It doesn't appear to be against any rules. I don't believe there has been a statement about housing glitches at all save the aquarium one that was destroying the aquariums themselves.

On the otherhand, maybe if everyone knew about glitching and/or that it would not result in disqualification... maybe some contestants could have submitted a more impressive interior design.

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The question wether or not glitches were okay was posted both in the english and the german forum at least - and went unanswered and ignored both times. I took that as a "dont ask, dont tell"-policy, which didnt allowed them to tell us "Yes, you can exploit this glitch" directly, but also realised that they had to ban basically every house-owner if they wanted to make the glitch punishable.
Kinda like how they're well aware of people using parsers, but wont ban the whole raiding scene.
They cant say its okay to use, but at the same time they wont do anything about it as long as no one gets hurt (and no, losing this contest doesnt count - since you were able to win without making use of the glitch aswell)

Quite simply the housing "glitches" that people are "exploiting" accomplish in part what people should be able to do with the in-built housing tools. The fact that you have to "glitch" to make things happen like putting a flower vase on your fireplace mantle is a failure of the housing tools that are available to the user.

honestly they should just make adjusting the y axis of furniture a feature at this stage. If its okay to exploit a buggy placement system at least make it easier to do so without jumping through a bunch of hoops.

Is it really that criminal to want my Lalafell Mender to use the Lalafellin Step Stool?

https://i.imgur.com/8QpCh8y.png

Housing 'glitches' are how we make up for the terribly limited housing system and has nothing to do with combat or progression advantage.

Oooor SE can patch all those glitches to prevent us from complaining further and make it fair for all. :D

Personally, I'm more salty over the fact EU and NA had separate topics yet got piled up together at the end and I'm suspicious of gpose being used on some shots but life goes on. Not worth throwing a fit over this. Grats to the winners!

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Originally Posted by Mikheli

This brings me to glitches that are currently being REWARDED.

The interior housing design contest has clear abuse of the housing glitch with individuals making staircases, balconies, and other seemingly impossible setups. These individuals are being rewarded with exclusive prizes that are unobtainable aside from community events.

Here are a couple of links from winners (names excluded) showing glitched setups (more setups like these can be found by looking through the design contest posts from winners/losers):

House Example 1

House Example 2

House Example 3

I'm just looking for clarification on why some glitches seem to be penalized and some are not. Shouldn't it be a blanket statement/approach on how SE handles cheating to get an advantage? If I was to share how this was done on the forums, I'm pretty sure I'd get banned, so why is this being rewarded?

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Most Housing "glitches" are actually not glitches as you think they are. The Housing system basically says "item is at x,y,z rotated n Degrees" nothing more. So this allows for overlapping things, and because the game allows you to place things on top of other things, that's how you get fake stairs.

What would be a bannable glitch, would be exceeding the number of placable items, since that would require finding a way to place items without it having an assigned owner. This is why earlier this year there was a warning about overlapping fishtanks might delete them, as whatever server-sided save process was probably setting the origin on the Y axis back to 0, thus causing the fish tank to collapse in on itself, and they then they likely had to delete the object otherwise it would never be movable since there are two objects with the same coordinates, and probably induces a crash in the client. Just speculating on why that specific item was singled out and not others.

Ungarmax by comparison was a security-by-obscurity decision, and clearly nobody bothered to see what happens if it was added to a macro, or executed like one. So when people start abusing it for gains, it's clearly an exploit. The dev's have shown a willingness to examine logs to determine who was abusing it and who were just curious.

At any rate, there are still glitches that people use, but are harder to trigger unless you know what the cause and effect are, and if it results in the battle being ended without going through all it's phases under normal circumstances then it's an exploit.

Please leave the house glitches alone as they are... some truly fantastic designs have evolved from them.

I like to think that they are working as intended.

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Originally Posted by Mikheli

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Just wanted to chime in about something regarding this. There was a point in time players were using furniture placement to be able to force their character to out-of-bounds areas in FFXIV. This is probably what lead to disciplinary action. A lot of the 'glitching' I see in this interior design contest doesn't really strike me as a glitch, as within the system, you're placing furniture and having the game remember where it was placed (even when a wall or table was removed).

I wish I could’ve experienced the Ungarmax glitch.