Website & Forums Rule 19 & Rule 3

A suggestion/feedback hybrid about the wording of two certain rules. Note that I'm not a moderator in any Minecraft server actively, so take all of this with generous amounts of salt.

Rule 19 sort of needs clarification as to which builds are defined as "AFK builds" so people can avoid building them in the first place. In addition, a few things can (and should) be done in order to either avert or prevent the inconsistent enforcement of the rule 19:

• Definition of AFK Farming
  • "AFK farming is using any method to kill mobs while no input is required from the player, and is not allowed to be used to kill any mobs." - Before
  • "AFK farming is using any method (e.g. poison cactus, unkillable cactus) to kill mobs while no input is required from the player, and is not allowed to be used to kill any mobs, including Guild Wars mobs." - After
  • Reverting the "Reflection/Thorns procs Poison" change made in 1.19 will eliminate one type of cactus builds (poisoned cactus), and will also fix a massive issue with PvP - rampant Revenant + Toxoplasmosis abuse in Hunted mode. I've made a thread earlier about poison changes, but I digress.
• Farming Boss Minion Drops
  • "Boss minions are mobs spawned during boss fights that can sometimes spawn in large numbers. Killing these to farm their drops is not allowed. Killing the minions and collecting their drops while fighting the boss normally is allowed." - Before
  • "Boss minions are mobs spawned during boss fights that can sometimes spawn in large numbers. Killing these to farm their drops is strictly forbidden." - After
  • This segment can be removed altogether by disabling mob drops from boss minions, with the exception of Health Potions. Getting rid of mob drops from boss minions, such as Corrupted Spawns from Corrupter of Worlds, will result in the omission of this particular segment of R19, as there's nothing to exploit here.
• Further Changes
  • "Grinding quest areas for mob loot (e.g. Gateway Island, Redbeard's Booty quest areas) with or without mob totems is not allowed. These areas are intended to be used for the purposes of a quest, not for grinding mob loot."

Speaking of exploits, another rule improvement suggestion is rule 3, which states:

Rule 3 puts bugs, non-bug exploits and bug exploits under the same "glitch" umbrella, which is not the correct term from a programmer's perspective (but makes sense for non-programmers(?)). Glitches are short-lived anomalies in the end result of the code, and is a symptom that something has gone wrong with the program. Bugs are problems directly caused by the code, for which glitches are usually a symptom, and usually denotes that there are issues with the code that results in unintended behavior.

Exploits on the other hand have a different definition - an exploit is a player using a bug, glitch or any other unintended game behavior to their advantage, often to the detriment of the other users. For example, certain chests appearing in unintended locations (and you see plenty of them courtesy of the Misplaced Loot Chests megathread) is a bug. A player exploiting a bug with certain items to deal millions of damage per hit is an exploit.

Here's a quick (and sort of janky) exploit flowchart:

By those definitions, rule 3 should be reworded to:

Just my 2 emeralds.

 

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