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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

Pretty cool exploit.

The idea of a free for all bug abusing server is pretty neat, a whole ‘nother level of the game.

I guess this is what “actually fighting” (rather than just using in-game battling mechanics) would look like if the metaverse really happened ever.

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the combat in 2b2t does not look like regular minecraft either.

because of a long history of duped high value items, PvP is just simply spamming ender crystals which deals massive damage when broken, and the defense is just how many "totems of undying" you have which absorbs lethal damage.

of course all the hacked clients automate placing ender crystals, reloading totems and identifying weak/strong locations so you're following those guidance to spam damage.

a little before that there were hacked +32,767 damage swords that will insta kill you that was patched out by the server.

That’s what I think is interesting about it, it looks like (from the outside at least; for all I know it could be super boring to play) a new system on top of the old one that obviates some of the old mechanics by ramming them to infinity/zero, but other mechanics emerge as a result.

What’s the difference between a weak and strong location?

I could imagine funny evolutions over time, just a random thought, if everyone is running a “glass cannon with lots of 1-hit protection” build, then I guess if players had to pick between fast/little attacks and big/slow ones, they’d favor the former. If everyone is walking around with little attacks just intended to trigger the 1-hit protections on their fellow glass cannons, then actually using the in-game armor system might turn those one hits into two-hits, making it relevant again. If the systems were properly tuned, (it could be exponentially difficult to gather 1-hit protections and extra lives, so turning those 1-hits into 2-hits could be really valuable), mechanics could be saved from obsolescence in interesting ways.

I’m not describing Minecraft at this point, just spitballing. It would be interesting to see a game designed with this evolution of “things being broken” taken into account, though. I guess that’s what Magic the Gathering is, hahaha.

> What’s the difference between a weak and strong location?

IIRC ender crystals can only be placed on bedrock, and a lot of PVP happens on the bombed-out terrain that goes all the way to bedrock.

The weak terrain in the bedrock are locations where it requires multiple jumps to get out of, iirc

Adding on to this, explosions deal significantly more damage if your whole player is exposed - so one block holes where the bottom half of the player hitbox is covered by bedrock on all sides are usually marked by hacked clients

> The idea of a free for all bug abusing server is pretty neat, a whole ‘nother level of the game.

Balance converging around bugs and exploits is pretty typical for all PvP sandbox games with cutthroat gameplay, even if not allowed by the server. ARK: Survival Evolved and Eve Online are infamous for having huge clans (thousands of players) willing to go extreme lengths at metagaming and bug exploitation. It isn't always that rosy, ARK had certain mechanisms to dox players and their multiple Steam accounts, which I believe led to a few spillovers of the ingame relations to the real life during the Great War. Sometimes it's very basic stuff though, like building a huge tower and breaking it upon being raided, DoSing the server and crashing it, after which it rolls back to a previous backup made 10-20 min ago, making your base very hard to raid if you have active players. (an ancient thing that was fixed many years ago)

Rust (the PvP game, not the language) also had the policy of encouraging players to spread and publish bugs and exploits on YouTube, but with the different aim - so that the devs would notice and patch those faster. This resulted in a pretty robust game that is extremely hard to exploit without resorting to actual external hacks.

The problem is, the optimal hacks usually don't make the game fun. It becomes a war of attrition.

> don't make the game fun

the fun is no longer the game in an anarchy server. It's in beating other play's strategies - which actually makes it quite close to a real war in the physical world.

For example, the 2b2t minecraft wars between factions involve logistics, misinformation and intelligence (such as spies, fakes etc). It's no longer just minecraft. But that's what makes it fun and interesting.

Yeah but that's not fun, that's tedious work 99% of the time that culminates in some rare fun.

> tedious work 99% of the time that culminates in some rare fun

Welcome to the multiplayer gaming, especially games like Minecraft or ARK.

Online games without hacks are usually fun the whole time, even Minecraft SMP. Lots of people play those casually.

This happened in PvE situations too -- Everquest always had people, especially guilds, running ShowEQ/MacroEQ to read mob locations off of the wire/from memory. Often could be used in non-unethical ways[1]

Sometimes you got funny situations like top guilds cheesing new raid content in their race to finish it first, leading the devs to go "cmon bro, you only played yourself" and then patching it immediately after, but almost never taking any loot away or banning anyone.

Also funny is the common situation where you don't want to _admit_ to everyone in your guild that you have at least one person running it, but you can kind of figure it out and it becomes an open secret.

1 - These are the days where you might have to clear down a dungeon 4 hours to see if a mob is up, or, even worse, to see if it's camped or not. Alternatively (or as a cover) people just parked alts but you get the idea. Also, come to think of it, Diablo had this too with maphacks and grabit and such

An in-between is Super Smash Bros Melee, where a lot of tournament-legal ingame tactics rely on bugs. But only ones you can exploit manually with a regular controller, not actual hacking, and also one exploit called Wobbling got banned in 2019 (note that this is a 2001 game).

In those cases the bugs are more like advanced fighting moves. I don't think item dup or insta-kill bugs would be allowed, even if they did exist.

Surprisingly none of those bugs have been found, but yeah they'd be banned. The weirdest thing people actually use is the yoyo glitch, which allows Ness to hit a player with a powerful move from anywhere on the map, but it's hard enough to execute that it's not OP.

I also quite liked the idea of a true anarchy server (from a gameplay perspective), but on 2b2t in practice this looked like a lot of the n-word being said in chat, so I stopped playing.

You can avoid this using chatfilters. Players who spam slurs are not worth talking to anyway.

But I agree that there are far better anarchy servers than 2b around.

Yeah, I'm good just not hanging out in the same place as people like that

Hypothetically if lots of players ran those kind of filters, a team could gain a benefit by including slurs in all their communications I guess, which would be an odd result.

or just use discord

>The idea of a free for all bug abusing server is pretty neat, a whole ‘nother level of the game.

Isn't this basically any non-VAC CS 1.6 server?

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