Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General One thing I don't understand: patching trade exploits in a game where theft is really easy.

This has been bugging me every time I see it in patch notes. I mean I get that it's unintended, but...so what? It's already really easy to steal and face no repercussions whatsoever. If you get caught, you can just have Withers solve the problem.

I play on console, so I haven't had the opportunity to use trade exploits(all the trade exploits I've seen have relied on mouse inputs that cannot be done on controller UIs). As well as stealing being really easy and having no practical downsides(with rare exceptions), I don't normally steal from merchants(a rogue is going to rogue though) because there isn't a need to. If I ever get desperate, I could just sell some of the 4997397926100346 camp resources I've accumulated in the past ten minutes of game time. Difficulty settings don't make it much harder either, there is still quite a surplus compared to the amount I'm actually buying.

It just seems so strange to devote time and resources to fix. I don't see the logic of fixing it. Am I weird or does anyone else feel the same way?

I agree this has been an odd use of Larian's limited resources.

And an odd use of time for the players figuring out these exploits. Couldn't they just pickpocket like an honest thief 😂

You may as well use modsif you're going to cheat. Everyone is and should be free to play as they want, of course, but I think it's quite silly.

I'd imagine that the reasons for patching trade exploits would be:

- The potential to do them unintentionally. Whereby people might do them by accident and not want to have this extra gold.

- Multiplayer interactions. It's a lot clearer to see when someone goes out of their way to pickpocket stuff. Less so when they're using some exploit to get more gold and resources. If not everyone agrees to using exploits/theft then it can cause some issues.

- It may simply be low hanging fruit. Something very easy to fix that someone does because they have a few minutes to spare.

- It provides them with experience. Knowing exactly how and why the exploit is possible, and the way to answer it means that you can prevent it from occuring in the future.

So while it's not the most pertinent thing to overall game balance, what with the ease of stealing and the fact the game throws literally tens of thousands of gold at you for doing nothing... There are still reasons to bother with fixing exploits.

I like it that they patch them, because this makes playing the game a more consistent experience.

When I want to betray someone in the game, I use stealing. When I’m buying in a store, I want that to actually work correctly. Otherwise it makes it harder to suspend my disbelief.

This is whats called a nobrainer. If you find a trade exploit, fix it.

And considering what enormous amount of manhours was necessary to make this game, talking about limited resources at Larian is super weird. Its not like trade bugs are rocket science or whatever to fix.

Your reply is whats called a nobrainer. Have enough sense to not just insult people, its super weird. Its not like basic manners are rocket science or whatever.

Speaking of no brains, here I am.

We’re stepping away from friendly conversation, so please play a little nicer.

BG3 has a long history of getting changes that are very important to some players and inconsequential to others. “Why did Larian spend resources there despite the problems here?” is a common theme on the forum.

In this case, my guess is that it’s important to some players they beat the game on its own terms, through intended mechanics rather than duplication bugs. Why these bugs annoy this crowd I can only speculate, but they gave their feedback to Larian who acted on it. That’s the logic, in my view.

Um. Sorry ? Where exactly did I insult people ??? I stated my opinion. Not less, not more.

The wording "nobrainer" can feel insulting. Doesn’t feel that way for everyone, but the threshold for a word being insulting isn’t "hurts everyone" but "hurts some".

⇒ careful with words. Their interpretation differs a lot for people with different backgrounds.

Well, you are weird for complaining about it, more than anything.

And the underlying logic of your argument "there's another issues/vulnerability/exploit so this one should be given a pass, too" is more than a bit contrived.

I'd be first in line to say that Larian misused (or at very least underutilized) some of its own systems and there are a lot of "holes" open to the most trivial manipulation.
For example they have a trader attitude system in place that is hardly ever affected by what you do for that character story-wise, but it's open to goofy manipulation through "gifting" to the trader with a weirdly and unnecessarily convoluted system that scales with levels.
It's almost as if they put the attitude baseline in the game and then had no idea of what to do with it.

Still complaining about fixing a blatant exploit (item duping, UI swapping or what else) sounds way more bizarre than ""devoting time to it" to me.

We’re still not playing nice enough, in this moderator’s opinion. Please be extra mindful going forward, especially when discussing other members’ opinions.

?

No-Brainer has no negative connotation in English as far as I know. Now I'll just put my finger to the side of my nose and away I go

Though maybe brainer should be fielding this one

To answer the OPs question it's because they can only tell an exploit is harmless after properly investigating it, and with things like gold exploits once you understand them the solution is usually so obvious that there's zero extra work in fixing them.

They have to be investigated because at their core an exploit is unintended results due to circumventing validation processes. This means they have a ton of potential for erratic/dangerous behaviour. It may present as an extra stack of gold in your inventory but what happened/is happening under the surface is a mystery. In the case of persistent data like inventories that are serialised, saved and loaded this has the potential to be especially dangerous. In BG3 there's the added issue of multiplayer. Players can join a game, perform an exploit and leave without the host ever knowing it happened. The host saves the bad data and then a week later their game is crashing 'for no reason.'

Beneficial exploits also tend to be higher profile and meticulously documented by the community so investigating them is significantly easier. A lot of the time you can watch a YouTube video and know before it ends exactly where you need to look to fix the problem. Being more visible means that they have to be investigated more urgently. If there is the slightest chance the advice given when a player types 'bg3 easy gold' into YouTube will crash the game/corrupt a save it has to be patched out.

It's frustrating to see 'fixed - game breaking when players go really far out of their way to break it' in the patch notes instead of more important issues but it's rarely a trade off. They aren't dedicating resources to stopping players getting extra gold it's just the general maintenance of inspecting leaky pipes to make sure they aren't about to burst. The real alarm bell is when they don't have stuff like that in the patch notes. That's when you know the team is spread too thin.

That’s a beautiful way to put it. Thank you!