Quote Originally Posted by Isaaru View Post
1. The development team really didn't consider it an exploit. Yoshi actually stated that it wasn't easy to do the BLM burn and not just anyone could do it. Also it was Golden Week and taking down the fight would not have been fair to those who were capable of beating it without BLM burn
They did consider that it wasn't the way Garuda should be killed, which is considering this as an exploit.

The definition of an exploit is playing a game in a way not intended by developers to earn an advantage over other players. If this was intended by DEVs, it wouldn't have been fixed.

Now are all exploit users punished? No. For Garuda SE decided not to do anything. They have almost no customers and cannot just start banning people because of their own stupid mistakes. Throw the Golden week in there, making SE unable to react quickly (besides removing the encounter temporarily, which would have upset lot of players, especially JP ones who were on holiday), and it explains their decision.

If the encounter was properly QA'd, this would have never happened, the first thing you think about when anything made by SE comes out is "Throw BLMs at it".

Data mining and reverse engineering is a form of exploit as well... You aren't playing the game the way developer intended it (i.e. finding out things by yourself rather than pulling data straight off game files). That is also punished in the EULA.

The following activities are also prohibited.
•Modifying, analysing, integrating and reverse engineering game data
•Utility creation and distribution
•Exploiting SQUARE ENIX programming that does not run as intended to gain profit or damage other players