Ellipsis

It's a bit late but I've got a pretty good story about exploiting an MMO's mechanics. I made a character that could beat almost any other player in pvp and could stay in stealth even if a high level player was searching for me. He only took a few hours to get from level 1 to unstoppable, but it's kind of a long story. Way back in the day there was a free to play MMO called RPG World Online that I was really in to. After playing for a while as a warrior type I started considering making a wizard secondary character to mess around with. The default wizard had black magic and spell cost reduction specialized, meaning you got double experience to those skills. I wanted to specialize black magic and stealth so I'd be invisible to everyone while I fried them with magic, but this would use up ALL the skill points you get at character creation. Without spell cost reduction you can't even kill the weakest monsters in the game at level 1. This is where the Frost Drakes come in. You got experience in this game from doing damage, not killing enemies. In addition to that, resisting magic attacks cost mana, no matter how weak they were or how strong the monster was. There was a randomly spawning monster called a frost drake that had a freezing spell that cost 50 mana to use. They also had exactly 50 mana to cast it, meaning there was a short window where they were completely vulnerable to any kind of magic, even though they're these crazy strong monsters with really high levels. If you hit them with a spell that stops mana regeneration, then hit them with blind so they couldn't hit you and freeze so they couldn't move, you ended up with an EXP pinata that you could beat on for a ton of experience, heal when they were close to dying, and repeat the process to level grind crazy quickly. I tried to kill the weakest giant roach in the starter newb quest and couldn't, my character was so weak he couldn't even carry the lightest piece of armor and so slow it took ages to get out to where the frost drakes were. Once I got out there and a friend blinded a frost drake for me long enough for me to learn white magic and mana cost reduction i was in business. I got every magic ability in the game in a matter of hours, level 1 to the mid twenties in a morning. This is where phase two of the plan came in... golems. You could use a type of magic in the game to create golems out of metals to protect your base or help you fight. Part of helping you fight was that they constantly checked for stealthed enemies. If your stealth is high enough they won't spot you and your skill level will go up. If you filled a giant room full of nothing but high level golems and went into stealth in it, especially with double exp, you could become permanently invisible to everyone in a matter of no time. It didn't matter if my spells hit the first time or not, I could stay hidden and wait for a lucky hit if my black magic skill wasn't high enough. There weren't many magic using enemies in the game so most players had low magic resistance. Using stat boosting items i picked up with my other character I could already get my magic attack up way past any player's ability to defend against even with my level in the mid 20s. Black magic also had such a high range that if you adjusted the view of the screen you could hit other players from so far away they they wouldn't be able to spot you even if they were checking for stealthed players. The game used to have daily pvp tournaments hosted by admins. I entered and basically 1-shot everyone without ever getting taken out of stealth. The admin running the game was so surprised he ran another tournament out of schedule right afterwards to see if I could do it again. Even against players with levels in the 40s and 50s I still won. This character came out nowhere, didn't even exist the day before, but was winning tournaments he shouldn't have been able to and had unusually high stats in stealth and magic. Keep in mind training your character this way was considered an exploit that could get you banned if you got caught. Since this was such a small game and we all basically knew each other I told him who I was and that this was just an experiment to mess with the game mechanics. As long as I gave back the tournament's reward and promised never to enter one again with that character they were cool with it and let me keep him. I could only use him in the free for all PVP arena after that and couldn't make bets against other players for money or items. I kind of wish other games had things like frost drake training or infinite stealth by design, but even newer MMOs seem to be all about the grind.