The game has always had "Red Herrings" and undocumented "Features", but a "Bug" by it's very definition, is never by design. The problem is that defining what is or is not a bug can be difficult. I recently found out that something I thought was a bug was actually by design, but I think that it is far more likely that players are using bugs that they think are features.

As a general rule, anything that gives one player or corp an unfair advantage is probably a bug.

Would this also include a attempt to control scripting? To give it a more *human* effect?

I am not sure what bug gives one group an unfair advantage that doesn't extend to every player. The game doesn't differentiate between "Wolfen" and "Promethius" on what it allows.

I do know that if a player is among the first to figure out a new tactic, then they are usually accused of "cheating" and "bug" use. I ran into some players a long time ago that didn't understand wSSM, and I was labeled a "cheating sysOp".

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

Bugs give players unfair advantages because their opponents don't know about them. In most cases, these so called "new tactics" are just new ways of cheating. These people know they are cheating, and they don't care.

I know what SSM is, but what is wSSM?

World SSM,

To elaborate on Helix's concise reply; WSSM roams about the
universe searching for 'evil pairs' to do SSM. After running a
sell-steal-move routine until busting, the script moves on to
either the next evil pair, or off to refurb holds lost.

Since you are limited to only cashing at evil pairs, (xxB-xxB ports)
WSSM covers quite a bit of ground searching, so quite a grid
is built up. Another benefit is only one port of each busted pair
is down, so once WSST is started, those ports are known.

This thread has gone off topic....

There are two of us. Me and you. All the rest were abducted by aliens.
Back on topic.

I know the thread is off topic, but I'd like to weigh in on the question of bug vs feature vs new tactic.

When something seems out of place, it's probably a bug. For example, every time you view the Who's Online on Thursday at noon, you get 5,000 credits. Feature? Or bug?

If you find a novel way to use actual features to get an advantageous result, that's not a bug, that's a tactic. But even if that's true, it doesn't mean that the tactic was "by design", and it should always be considered whether or not the tactic is good for the game. The answer depends on whether the advantage of the tactic is within the realm of other tactics, or if it's so powerful that the existence of the tactic reduces the game to just one or two winning strategies, with every other tactic becoming useless. TradeWars was a game where a number of different strategies could give you a win. When it became a game where you had to grid, and you had to pdrop, etc, it became too one-dimensional. The three or four of you who are playing it today happen to like the small set of powerful tactics that dominate the game now, and the rest of the players have gone on to other more interesting games. Now I'm looking at these tactics to determine if there is a way to restore balance and open the game up to a larger variety of play styles.

So whether it's an old, long-standing tactic or one that was discovered yesterday, I will always be looking at it to decide if it's in the best interest of gameplay. But we should recognize the difference between a bug and an unintended tactic. Both need to be addressed, but it should be obvious to everyone when there's a bug, and it should be reported as soon as it's discovered, and not used as a "tactic".