Gaming

I didn't discover it, but the biggest exploit I can think of in gaming would be back in the original Everquest days.

There was a goblin banker in the bottom of a dungeon.

He was friendly to most players, so he was convenient to drop gear off if you were farming the dungeon.

In Everquest, you could exchange between all the different values of currency at a bank. They were valued at 10 to one for each level larger. So trade 10 silver netted you one gold.

Well, they patched one da, and somehow they messed up this ratio on this one goblins banker. You could transfer 1 Platnum to 10 gold and then back to Platinum at 1 to 1 ratio. 10 times your money, basically as fast as you could click.

This one bug destabilized the entire EQ economy on multiple servers. It was used by so many and so much money was dumped on the market all over the place that the devs couldn't get the money back out of the economy.

They banned a bunch of accounts that directly exploited it, but if you got the money second hand, there was no good way for them to "fix" it.

They probably should have just reset the servers, but they didn't. The economy never did recover back to pre bug levels.

Another pretty cool story is the one of GunZ, an old TPS online where what was originally an exploit became so popularized that eventually replaced the actual core gameplay.

It was born as an arena shooter with guns, shotguns, rifles, knives, katanas and some Matrix style movements such as wall runs, doublejumps etc, very cool concept.

However the whole game physics was tied to your FPS and that allowed for some janky stuff, said janky stuff eventually evolved into an entire different style of gameplay called KStyle (named after koreans who discovered and popularized it.

Stuff like swapping weapons between katana and shotgun at precise frames allowed you to move faster, jump multiple times, do infinite double jumps up walls and stuff like that, so you'd see people flying around waving their swords like butterflies and shotgunning your face, it was honestly very fun and hilarious and eventually it was just so weird, original and better than playing the intended way that it just replaced the gameplay altoghether.

I remember practicing a lot and being able to pull off a couple of the moves but due to my crap PC and connection at the time I was never able to pull off the more advanced stuff

In WoW, if you had the Inscription Job, you could buy endless stacks of Herbs from the Auction House and mill them all. On average, every second stack (20g/Stack = 40g) you would get an item that you could simply vendor for 75g.

I spent multiple days buying and milling Herbs and made millions of Gold before they fixed it.

I stumbled across the infinite cash exploit in fable, basically you bought a house, put your trophies in, sold it for a profit, broke the door down, stole your trophies back and could then buy it for the original price again.

Minecraft there was a rail duplication bug. Noticed it, exploit the fuck out of it.
I made chests full of rail and turned those into a bunch of rollercoasters.

I have a few off the top of my head!

• The Rainbow Road shortcut in Mario Kart 64
• the care package glitch in MW2 (equipping your care package marker made you hella fast for some reason)
• the nightstalker infinite bow super glitch in Destiny 2
• theres an exploit in DA: Inquisition where during the big boss battle in the Avvar expansion, you can stand in a specific spot in the arena and basically wail on him (I usually played a mage) without being hurt (tbh this was the easiest way to kill that boss, he was really annoying)

pokemon gold, you could duplicate any Pokemon, attached item, allowing you to have unlimited masterballs or any items. you do it by saving and suddenly turn of the power, you usually use a throw-away pokemon as a sacrifice. they however patched this in crystal.

Cabal online. We discovered that cheat engine works. We had unlimited str int dex… it was not patched for months 😂

Well without needing to farm airdrops you can just go in and out of Stuffed Turtle and get the stuff in the first hour of playing the game, well maybe 2.

In one of the 2K NBA games, I think I did something and my PC accidentally slept. When I woke it up, the game was very slow. But, I was able to know when in the jump to release a jumpshot. it was ridiculous. Every shot went in even in a regular game.

In Destiny 2, after the great sunsetting, they redid the Last Wish raid in a new scripting engine. As a part of that, they introduced a few strange glitches. One of the strangest ones was that for the final run of the raid, where you're escaping the boss room with Riven's heart, you could predunk at the end, and the encounter would immediately end after you start it. Getting the predunk involved loading from a checkpoint, and racing to where Riven would spawn to get pushed out of map. This would cause a very buggy completion which would only count in some senses. You'd receive loot, but not get credit for a completion. You'd wipe and respawn at the start of the raid, effectively soft locked.

Combining this with a large number of other glitches, we were able to get to the very beginning of the raid. In Last Wish, there is a Wall of Wishes where you enter codes to do certain things. One wish puts you in flawless mode. Completion in this mode awards you the "Petra's Run" triumph. but any death after this would kick you out of the raid.

By breaking into a few teams, we could predunk the heart, have someone waiting to start the encounter, and have another person return to the wish wall to enter the code for a Petra's Run. You can then have people join in, give no inputs at all other than someone picking up the heart, and the encounter would instantly clear, awarding a Petra's Run from a checkpoint, with no need to do any encounters.

Here's the guide I made if you want to see the insanity: https://youtu.be/DlVYJGIlYU4

Sadly like it's patched in like 3 different ways now, so you can't quite do it, though skipping back to the Wall of Wishes still lets you complete a Flawless Raid without needing to do the first two encounters.

I sadly don't remember the name of the game any more, but it was an open world rpg around the time of Oblivion and Gothic 3.

It had an alchemy system to create potions and, depending on your skills, it was possible to get a debuff effect instead of a buff. You could also use a potion as an ingredient for a new one, compounding the effects. The exploit was a pretty basic variable underflow: keep combining bad potions and you would get worse and worse results, until at some point the sign on the effect would flip from a number in the negative millions to a positive, giving you a massive boost to whatever stat you had selected for the potion.

So, this one is tiny by comparison, but it is the biggest one I ever discovered myself.

Back in the Stormblood expansion days of Final Fantasy XIV, melee DPS Jobs had a skill called Diversion, which cut their enmity (aggro, threat, w/e) gain by 50%. Ninjas specifically had an additional skill called Smokescreen, which had largely the same effect, but had a shorter duration and needed to target someone else.

Not too long into the expansion, SQEX realized that Diversion didn't quite cut it due to its long cooldown, and increased its effect to 80% instead.

Now, curious as I was, I decided to bring a friend and do some Science™, and lo and behold... the effects were additive, not multiplicative. In other words: The effect of both buffs stacked wasn't (1 * 0.2 * 0.5) for a total of 10% enmity generation, but (1 - 0.8 - 0.5) for negative 30% enmity generation, leading you to lose enmity for each hit.

The effect was admittedly negligible; Smokescreen was much more useful on healers than on melee DPS in the first place, but it's a moment I remember fondly. I also submitted a bug report for that, and it was fixed not too long after.

In Civilisation 3 (or 4, can't remember) - when you encounter AI early in the game, if you demand a very small sum of money from them, they refuse. If you demand an absolutely huge amount of money from them, they somehow pay it, and then you're set for cash for the remainder of the game.

....it....sort of ruined the game but teenage me didn't care.

Borderlands 2 Money Glitch:

Trade all your money to a friend and turn off your Xbox without saving and start the game again. All your money will still be there and your friend gets to keep the money you sent them. We basically did this several times until we could play the weapon slot machine however many times we wanted until we got the best guns in the game haha

Pokémon Red. My first Pokémon game. I discovered you don’t have to use multiple Pokémon. Fuck type advantage. Fuck building a whole team. Charizard is my full team. I was like 9 years old.

Using only my starting Charizard for battles I beat the entire game. Slash is a guaranteed crit if you have higher speed than the opponent in gen 1. So you basically just hella over level charizard and slash everything to death in one hit.

The other moves barely matter but I did flamethrower as well for things that had high defense and low special.

The other Pokémon in the party are just HM slaves for cut/flash/surf/etc. They literally don’t matter for anything else because the charizard almost never died and if it did you just heal it up while some of the shitty pokemon get one shot. Whatever lol