Post by SongRune on 2022-10-23 14:46:45
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If you don't want water damage, you need to do both.
If you don't want a toxic community, you need to do both.
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Why would you ever do that? You do both. No one here has ever suggested banning exploiters and then not fixing the exploits, because that would be stupid. You fix the exploit, then review the server logs, find the list of people who did X thing Y times during Z period, and feed it to "banhammer.pl".
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Here's an interesting philosophical question: If an exploit exists, and no-one exploits it, does it matter? Hint: The answer is 'no'. But if someone is exploiting it, then you have the 'help detecting exploits' you wanted.
The more important thing to realize is this: You don't need exploiters to find exploits. Normal non-abusive players will do so. I understand you may not know many programmers, QA professionals, or even professional security consultants. Take it from one of those people who knows a lot more of those people: A lot of them are not toxic cheaters. You don't need toxic cheaters to have the expertise, or even interest, to break or exploit systems. Plenty of people with the skillsets in question will celebrate their cool find, report it and move on.
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The real problem is that 'more people exploiting' makes damage control more difficult, creates negative gameplay experiences for more players, and fosters a toxic community by creating mindsets similar to the ones you have described earlier in this thread. "Letting exploiters stick around" isn't free. What you are suggesting is a good idea if "keeping exploiters around" is free. The problem is, it has a lot of relatively steep costs, and no-one wants to pay them.
Sure there will always be more exploiters, but you don't have to tolerate the community type that develops in games where cheating is encouraged. You don't have to tolerate the extra GM and developer (cleanup) time involved in dealing with incidents that are exploited by 5000 players instead of 500. You don't have to broadcast to the world "exploiters here aren't punished".
Exploiters are a type of person that should not be welcome in any game. They provide no benefit (including testing) that is not available from better sources (all the random programmers, QA professionals, and security consultants that like to play video games in their downtime, and are invested in creating a good experience for themselves and for others), they cause concrete, measurable harm to a game community, and they increase developer costs. They're not worth the harm they cause, and they never will be.