>>32700863Words like bug or exploit are simply a short way of saying 'unexpected behavior i dont like'.
There may be good reasons for not liking it even. What im trying to push back on here is the uncritical blindspot over the notion that there could even be a debate over such a thing in the first place. To push back against the notion that either, 1. anything unplanned is automatically bad, or more importantly, 2. that anything being more advantageous than other things is automatically bad.
The one argument you always see every time a subject like this comes up anywhere is something like, 'one choice being especially stronger than others makes a game trivial by rendering all other possibilities superfluous', which, on a theoretical level, can certainly be true. This is not an argument against that notion. It is a notation of that fact that, so many think of nothing *except* this notion; their minds are closed off to the idea that there exists anything else in possibility space *beyond* this concern. That a situation where *all* choices are trivial and functionally interchangeable in utility is not only possible, but is in fact the *most* common failure state of popular games in practice, far more than the former case.
There are sociological reasons for this tendency of course; when true equality is achieved by leveling everything to the ground, it may suck, but it also means that there is nothing for anyone to feel *spiteful* over against anyone else, either. The human animal is all too willing to accept things sucking if everything sucks for everyone else, too. Any time a shitter has a bad time while other people are having a good time - or indeed, even the *perception* of other people having a different (and therefore better) time - they will become extremely voiciferous over it - irrespective of whether it is justified or not. And since most developers are humans, they are sensitive to these dynamics too. The squeaky wheels get the oil, and the cycle proceeds thusly in one instance to another over time. The optimization process working towards optimizing for social stability, rather than optimizing for depth of gameplay. Many such cases.
