I want to preface this by assuring you that this thread does not in any way condone or even hint at how any exploits are performed, and simply discusses the effects of it existing. I have checked the Forum rules per the post in the Announcements Category to make sure this is fair game.
We are currently seeing the singular most insane money/rep exploit this game has ever seen. Sea of Thieves prides itself in being able to consistently one up its previous Season with a new exploit stronger than the last. The LoTV Exploits, Various Hourglass Exploits, the Guild Farm exploits, The Fleet Diving Exploits, voyage exploits, sea fort exploits, etc. The new exploits allowing you to gain over 50 rituals in a single Skeleton Camp, that's 3.125 Million Gold per Camp, and there's potential for it to be even stronger up to over 100 per camp. That's not even including Gold Rush, nor if this exploit persists until a 2x event.
This is going to negatively impact the Burning Blade once the exploits are removed. The hardest commendations being to get 10 streaks of 8, 10 streaks of 4, and sell 50 swords of 3, these are all a lot easier for people currently abusing the exploit, which due to how widespread it has become its clear so many people are using it. Even if they aren't going crazy doing 40 at once, they're doing at least 4 or 8 to get that commendation progress, and that's really hard for other crews to figure out if its an exploit because its within a sensible number. The only way to know would be if you literally watch as the number increases on the map by more than 1. You also then have crews fighting the exploiters getting swords worth absolutely insane amounts with hundreds of rituals on them, and progressing the commendation to selling blades of high ritual count. All of this is also levelling their Reapers Rep and Rep of any faction they choose due to the sword being sellable to anyone. I sold a sword and got 96 Athena Levels. So now you have people progressing their commendations, getting insane money, and levelling all factions.
There's pretty much no chance Rare bans people for this exploit, or if they do they only ban the people going on like the 500+ ones. Even then what does that tell people? ''you can get away with it if you are careful''. Almost all of the crews I'm fighting doing these exploits are full Galleons meaning 4 players a pop. And I'm finding so many exploiters. They would have to ban actual thousands and thousands of players. As this would be a ban-wave for doing gold grind its likely that the accounts used would be peoples mains, as why would you grind on an alt? The majority of people would not be bothered to do the hundred+ stacks so you would also be banning mostly experienced players. I have encountered easily 20+ golden skelly and golden ghost doing the very big ritual streaks. This increases the likelihood that a pretty big number of said banned players return and cheat, as one of the big reasons people cheat in sot is because they previously played legit, got banned for reasons they deem unfair, and decide well if I'm gonna get banned for evasion I might as well cheat. I'm obviously not condoning that mindset, but that is how people often think, which I have even heard from cheaters I have encountered in game.
As far as we know nobody got banned during the Fleet or Sea Fort Exploits due to how widespread it got and how many people would need to be banned. However they did ban people that did insane abuse of the LoTV Exploit despite it being relatively far less impactful than either Fleet, Sea Fort or new Ritual Exploits. The key difference is that Rare managed to crack down on the LoTV Exploit very quickly and as such there was not as many people that used it, and even less so that used it an insane amount. This would mean not as many people need to get banned, and would hopefully show to everyone that in the future you should not using exploits out of fear of getting banned. This sentiment is lessened by the fact that the last 2 major exploits that were much bigger did not get any punishment.
Another key issue with banning players is of banning players that steal the exploited loot. Is it possible for Rare to identify who created the loot and differentiate who sold it? This was a big concern for people stealing exploited Sea Fort loot, as if Rare just look at the kinds of loot Sea Forts Generate and look at who sells a high quantity, that would both catch the high end exploits but also people who have stolen from those high end exploiters. There was also a very damaging case during the Storage Crate Duplication bug, where a Youtuber on multiple occasions in order to test Rare decided to duplicate Fish, give all the Fish to new players (real players not just their own alts), have them sell it, then reported them. This actually resulted in those new Players getting banned, despite them not being the ones that did it, they simply sold it. Experienced players are often in the know of what exploits currently exist and can tell when loot is clearly from an exploit, but the vast majority of the playerbase are not this aware. If they manage to take some exploited loot and sell it, are they now at risk of being banned? Or maybe Rare might believe you have a moral obligation to not sell Exploited loot if you know its exploited, and would they possibly punish for doing this? Rare can clearly tell apart who is doing the Ritual exploit and who is just stealing it, because if its stolen it comes in the from of the Sword rather than just the turn in. But would they also look at the Sword sells and punish the very high ones? Could a crew similar to that Youtuber stack Rituals, then intentionally sink in front of a noob and have them sell the Sword, then report them? Or could they instead empty their crew, turn it to open crew and get the crew to return the ship, then report all those players that joined in for exploiting?
I think a great tool this game desperately needs is a kill switch. A system that means every individual form of content can be manually disabled without the need to turn the servers off. If any exploit is discovered they can immediately nip it in the bud in real time, and then work on a fix while it is disabled. Instead of what we currently have where they are presumably racing against the clock to fix it as soon as possible and ship it all the while people are currently abusing it as best they can. Even then... What would you kill switch? Skeleton Camps? All S13 added was the BBlade and the Camps, if you kill switch the camps then all you have is the BBlade, but the BBlade's loot value is a measly 20k before the Chest of Fortune, which makes it 40k. There would also be nothing to do when you have the ship. Realistically could they even afford to kill switch this even if they had the means to do so? Maybe set a temporary cap on Rituals at 6 so that people can still do camps normally and do all camps on a server once before turning in. That way the Season is still for the most part fully intact but prevents insane abuse of the exploit, and then remove the cap once they can roll out a fix?
