Fable 2 Pub Games glitch was intentional Comments by Robert Purchese

How does it know you cheated?

Usually it's from the shifty look on your face.

>Usually it's from the shifty look on your face.

LMFAO!

so you know how you get the option to merge pub game characters with your fable character? well can you have a character that is merged with a cheater of your own accord or is there no way of escaping it?

I wouldn't mind playing a character that starts with nothing, i.e hadn't played pub games at all, one who is in serious debt, one who has fairly gained wealth and one who is a cheater.

if the game is as varied with as many consequences as molly claims there is, surely its a no brainer to allow people this re-playability?

How many of you lot ACTUALLY BOUGHT pub games anyhow?

And if you did WHATS THE MATTER WITH YOU? Do you not READ REVIEWS?

Nut jobs...

I think Pete went to the Denis Dyack school of marketing - he doesn't care if you hate him or his games just as long as you keep talking about his games.

I *really* want to know how it'll know if you cheated...

If it really was an intentional exploit then they can tell, but I saw an interview with PM where he says they were adding in the consequence in Fable 2 at the last minute. In that case the best they could probably do is see whether you start with vast amounts of money. We'll find out in October.

Rumour has it they will make your teeth black.

Hold on a second....something just struck me while reading these comments....

Why would, or indeed, should, Moly Poo and Lionhead punish players for cheating?

I thought their whole Fable 'Experience' was based on the fact that you can be good or bad? Therefore...isn't it up to the player what they do, to punish the player for this would be a bit of a contradiction in their games logic wouldn't it??

Oh....sh!t.....hold on, phew, crumbs, don't know what happened there, I almost starting believing Moly Poo's bull$hit that he's actually going to do anything about this in the full game!!! .... he definitely has mind control powers I'm telling you! resist!! you must resist!! he'll control us all!!

;P

Ik

It's somewhere in the pages of Eurogamer that Lionhead was working on a PATCH to the pubgames. But they didn't say it was to actually patch the PUBGAMES. So, I reckon the patch will be applied to Fable2 at launch.

There is no way to detect whether an extra button is pressed milliseconds before another one, short of running a keylogger. Which would be a SERIOUS breach of privacy. So, the patch must be along the lines of if your money is high, you cheated. Whether you did or not.

Lionhead must know that the game was so bad people wouldn't legitimately gain huge amounts of money anyway.

@IkariW

First off, what is with putting $ into words seemingly randomly. People put $ into MS because MS make a lot of money. I'm not sure that pissing or bullshit have much to do with money. And the Moly Poo thing is a bit childish too, lets face it...

However, now that I have callously attacked you, I shall confuse you by saying well done for making one of the most important points of the thread.

"Why would, or indeed, should, Moly Poo and Lionhead punish players for cheating?"

PM could do with reading Chris Crawford's excellent work on game design (though actually, I'm sure the punishment will actually be aimed at the player character rather than the player, and will fit the game workd and probably deepen the experience overall... but the principle stands dammit).

@seasidebaz

"There is no way to detect whether an extra button is pressed milliseconds before another one, short of running a keylogger. Which would be a SERIOUS breach of privacy. So, the patch must be along the lines of if your money is high, you cheated. Whether you did or not."

I'm not a coder, but surely the "cheating mechanic" could write to a file when used, recording its use for posterity. So the patch could simply check said file to see whether it says yay or nay.

This appears to me like a debug option that has been left in (contrary to what was stated in a previous post about professionalism, a minor non-intrusive bug such as this could easily lie undiscovered and overlooked by any otherwise competent QA dept) and so it would likely include helpful debug functionality, such as recording whether it had been used or not.

Yes, it could be a debug thing, but I seriously doubt it. It's a bug in the way that combos in Street Fighter 2 were bugs. I also seriously doubt that it writes anything about a cheat being used, as I don't think Lionhead knew the glitch existed, and now PM's trying to cover it up (as usual)

Developer's blog clearly says a patch is coming to sort out the money glitch. It also says that if you owe too much money in Fable2, you go to prison / do community service. I reckon the "patch" is that they also do the same thing for owning too MUCH money.

A one-button "glitch" to increase your bet tenfold without any consequences? Yeah, that sounds accidental! That sure wouldn't be picked up in testing! O_o

After reading the Developer's Blog, it's almost blatently obvious it was intentional. It's an exploit, not a bug... it even fits in perfectly with the ongoing themes of Fable and Fable 2.

I doubt they are going to take anyone's ill-gotten gains, but as i said, they'll probably have something in game anyway if you have made loads of money from gambling, and well, if you have made more money, it'll hit you harder.

Seasidebaz is probably right with 'Thus cheaters = fat + balding.', but this is because making money from gambling = fat + balding?

Maybe?

"A one-button "glitch" to increase your bet tenfold without any consequences? Yeah, that sounds accidental! That sure wouldn't be picked up in testing!"

Does the button not do anything throughout the rest of the game?

I myself am a software engineer for a fairly large semiconductor company. I won't get into the mechanics of it, but it is my belief that the "glitch" was intentional because of the nature of the glitch. I have played the pub games so I know how terrible they are. (Free with game reserve.) If the glitch was not intentional, you would be able to raise up to the max bet at any time during the hand. This is not the case, you have only a small window to press the RB to get the extra bet. This leaves the possibility that it was a debugging "Break" or testing feature. This is more likely to be true than a simple programming error but I don't think it was a testing feature either. This testing feature would serve no purpose to a programmer that I could see. If you would like me to fully explain my reasoning just ask.

How do people find out you have to push the RB in a timewindow of milliseconds when placing a bet?

Doesn't seem like a bug though, I expect that the outcry comes from people who feel uncomfortable that they´ve been caught cheating. Like XdarXideX said, it fits nicely within the Fable theme.