Skipping cutscenes in MSQ Roulette

[Iscah]

Exploit's are usually bugs in the code that result in significant unfair advantage like Ungarmax, this one doesn't as it's hard to justify calling something an exploit when its something that literally involves turning your internet off and on again.

It's an exploit because it takes advantage of the way the game works, allowing you to break out of a cutscene that is clearly intended to lock you in place for its entire duration.

Within the game itself, there is no way to get out early. The cutscene has been made unskippable for the exact purpose of locking everyone down for the same period of time.

In normal gameplay you arrive at the trigger point, which tells the game to start playing the cutscene. It ticks off that progress flag. You have been shown the cutscene.

By disconnecting your Internet or closing the program, you've gone outside of the game in a way that the devs cannot control or prevent. When you log back in, you are exploiting the fact that the game does not recognise that you should still be watching the cutscene at a fixed pace, and thus is not able to hold you in place - because the "watching cutscene" status is itself the method of holding you.

You can get technical about whether you're exploiting a bug within the game itself or the way it interacts with other programs/network connections, but you are undoubtably taking advantage of a flaw somewhere to do something that the creators of the game did not intend to be possible.

And my dictionary, which I didn't look at until just now, defines 'exploit' as to "take advantage of for one's own purposes".

Argue the definition of a computer exploit if you like, but it's certainly exploiting the programming in a broader sense.

[Paladinleeds]

In normal gameplay you arrive at the trigger point, which tells the game to start playing the cutscene. It ticks off that progress flag. You have been shown the cutscene.

By disconnecting your Internet or closing the program, you've gone outside of the game in a way that the devs cannot control or prevent. When you log back in, you are "exploiting" the fact that the game does not recognise that you should still be watching the cutscene at a fixed pace, and thus is not able to hold you in place - because the "watching cutscene" status is itself the method of holding you.

Could Square Enix therefore change cutscenes to be "ticked off" after completion (at the longest level language cutscene per cutscene), rather than before. That way if you disconnect, it restarts the cutscene automatically? And if a new cutscene is tripped, the old one ends automatically and you're pushed to the new one? Could that potentially fix it?

[Iscah]

Could Square Enix therefore change cutscenes to be "ticked off" after completion (at the longest level language cutscene per cutscene), rather than before. That way if you disconnect, it restarts the cutscene automatically? And if a new cutscene is tripped, the old one ends automatically and you're pushed to the new one? Could that potentially fix it?

Potentially, but it would have the reverse effect and be a problem for someone with genuine disconnection issues - they'd still be locked in the cutscene after everyone else was finished.

It's also down to how much work they're willing to (or can afford to) actually put into it. Neither unskippable cutscenes or auto-scrolling text are new features added just for this situation. Changing the way the cutscenes are flagged could be a lot of work, especially when simply locking everyone into simultaneous cutscenes has exactly the same effect when the program is being used as intended.


If someone did genuinely disconnect and logged back in to find everyone else still in the cutscene, they don't have to rush into the next battle just because they physically can - they can stand and wait, or arrange inventory, or desynth stuff, or all the other things we used to be able to do while voluntarily waiting for the one person watching it. (I still have screenshots somewhere of a dance party while waiting at Ultima...)