Gaming

So, this will take some context... I used to play a MUD (multi user dungeon, think text based WoW), whose rare equipment was called "reboot" gear. Basically the gear would only spawn once per server reboot, and then that was it. So it was first come first serve.

So, there was a stun ability called bash. You could use it on doors to try and break them down. If you were over encumbered, you'd take damage based on your inventory weight. Well, one day I realized the skill "hunt" would allow you to accumulate weight beyond the normal constraints, and I wondered "Hmmm... Wonder if I can kill myself with a bash door." So I proceeded to hunt up a few thousand deer, then tried to bash the door. Client lost connection, weird, but no biggie, hey the server rebooted! Collect the gear, then go back to my side project. Try again, disconnect again... Server reboot again? Huh... Interesting.

Pretty sure I was causing some number to exceed the values normally allowed for what must have been an integer variable, which was crashing the server. My buddy and I did this a half dozen or so times to farm up gear, and the immortals (aka game admins) all had things like "Warning! Server unstable!" In their titles and whatnot. Pretty funny. And definitely the biggest exploit I've ever personally discovered.

A while back but in ratchet and clank there was a part where you were sliding on this roller coaster type thing collecting coins. If you ran off it would send you back just a few feet and restart. I’d tie a rubber band stand my controller and have it where you grabbed a coin and ran off track. Let out go over night and wake up with a ton of coins.

I didn't discover it but learned it from a friend. Cloning pokemon in gen2 (don't remember if it worked in gen1) by turning the console of after swapping a Pokémon from a box to your party but before the game saved the changes.

In planescape:Torment there were plenty of repeatable conversations that gave xp.

On sea of thieves you could build your emissary/flag with reapers bones quickly and safer by equipping the flag only when you're ready to sell. Then sell 15ish crates of rum, plants or cloth which will bring you're flag/emissary rank up so you earn more gold for the remaining loot. The advantage was that when you were flying the reapers flag you was visible to everyone on the server so this way you could collect treasure invisible (On the map) until you were ready to sell.

In the WoW raid Ulduar, the beginning sequence is a seige where members of the raid party get in seige machines and use them to blow up huge waves of incoming enemies (very easily, like shooting infantry with a tank). One holiday season, there was a bug with the holiday event where you could get the event drops from doing this seige with essentially no real effort. These enemies were not supposed to drop the event items. They were not bound to your character and could be sold on the auction house for gold. I must have x10ed my net worth before they managed to patch it out a few days later.

Super Mario Bros. World 1-2 break into the ceiling and you can run and skip most of the level

FIFA 2006, on free kicks if you look all the way downward and go full power on the kick it will hit the crossbar 100% of the time. Usually ends up in an easy rebound goal.

Diablo, how I dublicate items by accident by picking them up from behind the town portal.

empyreon galactic survival : food bars that you keep in your suit production slot wont decay forever : dunno if they fixed it yet

In dying light, the head stop insta-kill skill doesn't actually require the enemy to be prone on the ground, it only requires the head to be a certain distance below you. So stand on the slanted front of those work vans/ ambulances and stomp your little heart out. Tons of easy exp and a super safe way to kill dozens of zombies.

Biggest exploint? Nah..

Most cool one? Definetly.

Game: Commander Keen 4: Secret of the Oracle From 1991.

I discovered a secret area in the first level that gave you 8 extra lifes. Just take them. Die and rinse and repeat.

Note: I was at most 6-7 years old when discovered this myself and i rebought commander keen a few years ago, the secret area is still there!

edit: here's a video of the area https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z29jQvVLaXY. Still blows my mind i discovered this on accident as a kid.

In Ultima Online, you could buy all the house deeds from a vendor. The way they coded the economy, this caused demand to go up and you could then resell them to the vendor for a higher price. I stayed up for over 24 hours making millions doing this. The kicker was that gold actually had weight. You couldn't move with 100k gold on you. You had to drop your gold on the ground, move a few spots, pick up your gold, and drop it a few spots in front you all the way to the bank.

To this day, I look for economy exploits like this in every game I play.

In oblivion running gives you XP in Athletics. The game has auto run which can let you level Athletics almost AFK, but the game won't give you XP if you run into a wall. A slight incline though against a wall will give you XP. Auto run overnight and quick level 100 Athletics.

In the original teenage mutant ninja turtles konami arcade machine, if you put a coin and spam the start button, you get a lot of credits.

PSX Diablo dupe trick. A pal and I were just messing around after school one day when we chanced into it.

GTA 2 flying, found it by accident and probably spent more time flying around the map then playing it once I did

Friend and I played hunters in WoW. Back in the original vanilla days. We were both skinners/leatherworkers. Bought all of the highest level hide available on the server and put it back on the AH a couple days later at a higher price. Good times.

In Third Age Total War mod (pretty sure it also works for the base game; Medieval 2 Total War)... when playing as Gondor, you are often harassed by the Haradrim, who will send armies at you with tons of cavalry.

Due to the mechanics of the game and AI playstyle, they will batter down the gate and send everyone through it, quite literally trampling your guys to death.

Best way to solve this issue is to place a group of Ithilien Rangers behind the gate and have them deploy stakes, then send them back up the wall.

When the gates break down and their cavalry ties to break through, they will get utterly skewered on the stakes, making pretty much every battle a guaranteed win.

In Terraria, if you are in a multiplayer game hosted by another person, you can drop items and alt f4 out of game and rejoin it to duplicate items

In oblivion you could stack effects on all of your armor pieces. Something like 25% chameleon on over 5 pieces of armor would net you about 125% invisibility. Also the hairband on the controller stick in the corner for max level sneak.

In morrowind also found out you can go into a home you like, taunt the owner until they attack you, kill them and become the new owner of that home.

Friend and I discovered that in Arma 3 Altis Life game you could sell your house before the server reset for the day, and upon relogging you would still have your house. Then you could sell your house again and wait for the next restart.

Took the mods a few weeks before they caught on. They checked the logs and noticed every reset we'd "earn" ~24 million dollars in a few minutes.

I miss those days, they were good friends back then :(

In the OG Super Mario Strikers on the GameCube, with Toad as your sidekick you could take the ball just over the halfway line where you were able to shoot and along the wall. If you fully charged the shot and pointed your stick straight up or down depending on which side of the field you were on, Toad would curl the ball almost 90° into the far corner and the goalie would almost never save it.

Many years ago, i found the way to infinite bonus points in ISSS Deluxe for SNES. One of my proudest achievements.

In MLB 2002, if you catch a fly ball, you can give it to the shortstop, walk toward 2nd baseman. At a certain proximity, if you toss it to him, it'll glitch out, pop up in the air, and the center fielder can catch it for another out or 2.

Setting the clock ahead in Fable II and gaining gaining a ton of money through rent income.

Accidently discovered an emerald duplication glitch in Minecraft Bedrock, thus far it's still not fixed and I've never seen it online yet.

On an RPG minecraft server at 6AM there was a restart, if you used some of the "chest commands" and put stuff 1 minute prior to the restart the items would be duplicated, i made like 2k euros by duping stuff and selling that

Microtransactions are the biggest exploit in gaming ever, talking about the game/dev exploiting you.

It doesn't have to do with an in-game exploit. But around 10 years ago or so Xbox had a glitch where you could buy about 1000 MS points for .99 cents (about 10 dollars in MS Points that could be used for anything in the digital store).

The catch was that it was only supposed to be a one time per account thing.. or something of the sort. It was a long time ago. But for about a 12-24 hour period, it was unlimited. I ended up buying enough points to last nearly 10 years of buying whatever games/dlc I wanted. There were entire GameFaq threads where people were just giving away the 10 dollar Microsoft codes because everyone got them for 99 cents and had more points than they could ever spend. I probably gave away about 200 dollars worth of codes myself.

I ended up with about 500k Microsoft points (about 5k USD worth of points) that I slowly used over the years. They only recently ran out.

That was the best gaming exploit I ever was apart of.

As for in-game exploits, the only one I can think of were the early GTA:V Online exploits that gave you alot of in game cash on the Xbox 360/PS3 version (that transfered all the way to the new ones).

I ended up exploiting those at launch to the point where even though I haven't touched GTAV in over 5 years, I can hop on and buy whatever I want. It actually kinda killed the game for me because there was never any reason to play because i could login and just buy whatever vehicles i wanted. I Never had to grind due to that early exploit.

When I was a kid playing the Rush series on N64 with my cousin I found out that if you just mash the controller buttons it unlocks all the cheat section that you needed codes for. I didn't have internet at the time so we couldn't look it up.

This one’s really niche, but it was so much fun back in the day.

In Warcraft 3 Frozen Throne custom maps (where DotA originated) there was one called Anime Fight, basically DotA without the buildings, the team with the most kills wins.

There was one area of the map for late-game farming, with a bunch of high-level mobs literally packed together as tight as they could fit, and they respawn constantly. Instant death even in the late game, but the rewards were good if you manage to take out a few of them.

Well, one of the character choices was Zero from Megaman X, and he has the ability Ensuizen, which has no cooldown. Not a great move normally, because you’ll just get kited in a fight, but take it up to that farming area and spam it as fast as you can, and you’ll take out one of the high level mobs far earlier than you normally could. Rinse and repeat until you’re taking out lots of them, getting super overpowered.

So from the other team’s perspective, it looked like I went AFK early on in the match, then suddenly came back with maxed level and items and started dominating the game while everyone else was barely getting started.

Very fun times.

In early versions of console Terraria Dragon Helmets (basically late game console exclusive armour) had a chance of spawning in random chests upon world generation, this was a bug.

So I made a bunch of worlds, found a bunch of Dragon Helmets, and sold them all for high amounts of gold.

I was set for basically the entire game.

I used to play this RTS called Warlords Battlecry 3. It was cool because you had a hero with classes and you could find equipment in chests while clearing maps and on dead heroes. I accidentally found out you could put any equipment on any item slot when I closed out of the inventory screen with something selected but I didn't place. I was like how the fuck did I get a shield on my boots spot? Once I knew you could, I just fucked around with the inventory until I figured it out. Anyways I posted it on the official forum back in the day and I got a lot of hate because apparently it ruined online games. Like summoners would stack their XP banner for summoned demons and have like level 10 demons and shit right off the bat.

Final Fantasy Tactics. After softlocking my (only) save file at the Wiegraf fight I tinkered around a bit on a new game and discovered I could just make my units beat the shit out of each other and heal each other over and over to grind levels easily. Made a party of lvl 99 super gods and absolutely demolished that game. Still one of my all time favorites.

Phantasy Star Online Episodes 1 & 2 for the GameCube.

Quite a few endgame bosses and enemies have invincibility periods where you could still target them but the game would register the hit as 0 damage, sometimes for minutes at a time. Weapons also sometimes had elemental effects and one of them was a series of effects called "draw" which stole health from the enemy to heal you.

Turns out the game would register the damage of your attack as 0 but the draw effect would still trigger, therefore still reducing the enemy's HP.

Regardless of class or stats, the best weapons in the game were handguns with the highest tier draw series you could find specifically for this reason.

Pixel gun 3d.

There was an exploit in the area 52 map that allowed you to go out of bounds, once out you could easily go behind the spawns and shoot through the wall and the enemy team was basically helpless. I got a stupid amount of kills every match, usually around 40.

The game haze had legendary glitches you could exploit. On one map you could take a car and drive it up the side of the canyon and end up on top of the map.

The best was on the mining map. The two teams are soldiers and rebels. The revels win if they can get inside the caves and open 3 flood gates to let crates of nectar(drugs) fall out a waterfall.

In order to enter the cave, you need to drive from the spawn point, though this metal warehouse, into this open quarry where the soldiers spawn. Then you shoot you're way into this bunker next to giant gates blocking the entry to the caves. Ones inside you turn a crank and that starts the cave part.

The greatest exploit was that there was a tiny little window right next to the crank. If you jumped at it just right, you would glitch and pop up on top of the room and land on these pipes. You can then walk on the pipes and get into the cave with the doors still shut. This was an automatic win because the other team COULD NOT SPAWN inside until it was opened. Awesome.

Another map had a path you could go to to end up on the inside of a building. Completely immune to bullets, but you can still shoot.

Lastly, there was a level set in the jungle. You start in this big hexagon prison area. The rebels spawn as pows and have their hands tied. The goal is to run as fast as you can out of the prison, go down these mino canyons to where you can call for a helicopter. Once it lands you get in and now you spawn outside the jail to assist others.

The exploit here is that as a rebel, you are invincible until you leave the jail. You can't use weapons but you can melee. Whenever a soldier accidentally gets in range can kick em to death, laughing your balls off.

Haze was a very flawed game but goddamn I loved that game so much.

In Quest 64 your evasion stat was based on the distance your character has moved.

You could wrap the cable around the joystick on the controller and force yourself to run around a tree in a safe area where nothing could spawn. You'd leave it on overnight.

Come back the next day and your chance to be hit was very small, and the area you could move while in battle was massive.

Not sure if an exploit but in WoW: WotLK I found out how to really «play» the auction house. I don’t remember the entire process, but I bought matherials, made items, which I disenchanted and sold. Earned well above 100k which was alot, in a few days. Bought that first mammoth mount with vendors pretty quick after release.

When I was younger and played GTA III my sister and I figured out that if you got out of the car immediately after a prostitute started to get into your car (but before she actually got into the car), she would follow you around on foot. And what was cool was you could get back into the car and initiate business with another lady, and you could slowly build up a group of prostitutes that would just follow you around on foot. I was THRILLED to discover that this still works in the recent remake. Not a huge exploit, but it was huge for me!!!

In Mega Man 3 on NES if you hold the right directional button down on the second controller while it's plugged in Mega Man can jump super high and become invulnerable.

Fallout 1 .

Use the rebuilt lawyer character, bump speech early, and suddenly for every vendor your sell price was higher than your buy price.

Do a series of big sell and you can clear out vendors starting out with the flares you start with

Fallout. I would pickpocket the gamblers at Gizmo's casino, reloading when I got caught. This reset everybody's inventory, so you could (gradually) get unlimited caps

I remeber getting 1936 tanks from Bosnia in 1914 because of a bug in Hearts of iron 4 "Great War" mod. When the great War started while entente doesn't even having a tank blueprint I was using tank divisions as Austria Hungary.

I made a YouTube channel when I was younger where I would find a bunch of call of duty glitches. Stuff like invisible walls you could use to get out the map, certain areas that would nullify kill streak rewards, etc. All was well until I actually started getting popular with like 50k+ views per video and then Activision had YouTube take my channel down. No warnings, just poof.

No specific exploit but I do miss it. It was fun unwrapping the new maps and finding places where the devs messed up 😅

Super Mario 3. Last world. There's a level (don't remember where) where you can change the bricks to coins over and over again. If you use your full time doing you lost 1 life but get like 5 o more lifes.

Back years ago, I accidentally found a glitch in Epic Mickey that skipped the Shadow Blot Boss Fight and the Battle of Ostown quest. This was I time before I had Internet access or a smartphone.

Baldurs gate dark alliance had an export character feature. Which would not only export your character but all their equipment.

Load character up with the most expensive equipment. Export.

Import sell all the equipment. Rinse and repeat. Essentially an item dupe and infinite gold trick in one.

Not necessarily an exploit, just a funny little coincidence. There was a NES vertical shooter game that I can't quite remember the title of (Guardian Legend -ish), that after each completed level displayed a "password code" for this level. It was a rather long string of characters and for some reason my copy of the game was in Japanese (no idea why, I'm from eastern Europe). You could input these codes directly from the main menu and jump straight to further levels. A 7-year old me just smashed the buttons on the password input screen and somehow, luckily, got it right on the first try and got access to a very late level in the game, it was amazing. To write down the level password I put a piece of paper on top of the TV screen and drew every Japanese character so I can play it later again.