Let's talk about bugs.

[Konachibi]

Not a specific bug, but the sheer volume of bugs currently present in the game. I'm going to write up the ones I commonly come across on a daily basis, and feel free to add your own.

1: Inactive parties getting 'stuck' while active party progresses, or the many other bugs with inactive parties.
This is something that has been tormenting me since I unlocked a new modron core. I have Shandie and Black Viper doing a gem run on Mad Wizard while my other team progresses through Avernus. My gem find party is using 4 familiars, one to increase click damage, one to do click damage, and two to activate and level up BV and Shandie (Because I want to power up BV's red gem collection). While my other party is adventuring through Avernus, I keep checking my BV party and neartly always see that it's 'stuck' in an area. When I switch over to it, it isn't even in that area, and there may have been a reset happen at some point, but the area counter doesn't keep track of this. Other common happenings with this is the party genuinely being stuck for no reason, BV not getting any red gems whatsoever, resets happening but the game doesn't log those, nor does it reward me with the gems they've collected throughout the run, or Black Viper not getting any red gems whatsoever even though the info window when switching over says she has. Another frustrating part of this is if the inactive party is running a patron free-play, sometimes it simply won't award any patron currency when the run resets. Sometimes the modron core will say there's been a reset when there hasn't. This morning I woke up to it saying the adventure had reset 5 times, but somehow, after resetting 5 times at area 125, Black Viper had only gained 8 red gems, so either that's some god awful luck or the game just isn't actually keeping track of what rewards an inactive party is gaining through multiple resets.

2: Ultimates turning off or not functioning when offline or inactive.
Much like the first bug, another common one is to switch over to an inactive party that has Havilar only to find that her imps have magically disappeared for no reason, which causes a big drop in the formation's DPS. Another common one with this is setting up Spurt to constantly use his ultimate to power up Strix's Haunted ability, only to come back and find that despite the fact he's been doing that ultimate over and over, not a single one of them has added a count to Haunted.

3: Things turning invisible.
A constant nuisance. It seems to be pretty commonplace for some enemies to spawn but not visually appear on the screen, and this can happen with bosses too. I've seen it happen many a time where a boss will load at say... area 50, and then when hitting area 100, where the boss would appear again, it's invisible, for absolutely no reason. Normal enemies do this all the time, and there have been instances where champions sometimes turn invisible, or the entire formation, or their attacks either are invisible, or the champion simply doesn't animate at all.

4: Effects infographic below the Area window becoming 'stuck' or overstacking.
Below the window with the area information are a bunch of boxes that will let you know if you have an empowered boost, what kind of area you're in, or special information regarding bosses or enemies. This information panel commonly becomes 'stuck', so even once you've completed the adventure that applied that panel, it will continue to show up in the next adventure, and the next, and the next, and the only way to make it read correctly again is to turn the game on and off again. Sometimes some boxes will overlap, sometimes they'll stick out from the area they're supposed to be, in one instance it told me I had two seperate empowered boosts that had different timers remaining on them.

5: Time gate pieces 'disappearing'.
This is something that's popping up a lot lately. During a run it seems common to go to your inventory window to find that all your time gate pieces have mysteriously disappeared. Hovering over the time gate panel also reads that you have none, but if you click it and go to the time gate information on the world map, it'll show that you DO have pieces, and then it'll read correctly on the panel and in the inventory again... for a time. It seems to go back to reading zero again after a few areas.

6: Enemies spawning with incorrect debuffs.
This is something I've only encountered a couple of times, but it still comes across as odd. During a few runs using Alyndra, I've seen enemies spawn with a snowflake symbol on them, and they move at a slow speed. This would be fine... if I had a champion in my formation that actually caused it, but I don't. It was a simple free-play adventure, so it wasn't an effect caused by the area, those enemies were simply spawning with debuffs that nobody caused.

7: Formation automation not selecting the correct champions.
Another annoying one. Sometimes if you've done an adventure using a different formation, then you go in to a fresh run using an automated formation set up on your modron core, it will instead not switch the champions over from the last run, and will spawn those instead. As an example of this, imagine a run where you've just used a champion like Stoki, and then you go in to a fresh run and set the automation to use a formation that uses Ishi. Instead of Ishi appearing, Stoki does instead, because it didn't switch the slot from the last run, despite the saved automated formation being set to Ishi. This happens on every single champion slot too, forcing the player to have to switch out all the incorrect characters that spawn.

8: Automated formations not selecting or 'forgetting' specialisations.
Seems to be a pretty common one for me. I save a formation, set it up as automated in the modron core and select all of the specialisations. In the very next run, using that same formation, their specialisation window will appear on the screen, making me have to select it, despite the fact the modron core's specialisation window still having the selection for that champion saved. It can do this whether or not it's the active or inactive party, and can lead to some adventures coming to a grinding halt because it's waiting for the player to make a selection that is already set on the core.

9: Boss areas becoming stuck.
While not common, it does happen at times where the champions will defeat a boss in an area, and despite auto-progress being switched on, they will simply stand there doing nothing. No new enemies spawn, no loot sack appears, nothing happens. it's a simple fix, you just click auto-progress off and on again, but if you're not paying attention to the game when this happens, it can waste hours of time making no progress at all.

10: Some distractions are unclickable.
As it says, sometimes distractions will spawn on the screen that no amount of clicking will kill. It could be a rat, a bat, a crow or a seagull, but you can mash your mouse on it all the way across the screen to no effect. At other times, you can be mashing click on it across the screen only for one click near the edge to register and the distraction dies, sometimes they entirely ignore the clicks, sometimes the click only registers when your mouse pointer ISN'T hovering over them.

11: Positional formation abilities not being displayed as arrows in the formation.
A lot of champions have this problem. For instance, Hew-maan will not show any arrows saying which champions he's affecting if he's in the back column, Farideh doesn't show who she's affecting with Hellish Rebuke, Deekin's Story Of Doom does not show as effecting everyone if you make that specialisation selection. It's a long list. Along with this, some formation abilities seem to become 'blocked' with certain formations. For instance, putting Dhadius in the second column on an Avernus run will show his Skill Empowerment ability as not reaching champions in the fourth column, despite it's range being two slots from Dhadius. A lot of formation abilities seem to become blocked by holes in the formation setup.

12: Switching champions in the slot windows will not always replace them in the formation.
Indeed, sometimes you switch out a champion for another one just to check some information or to use an ability of theirs, only to find that doing so does not switch out that champion in the actual formation, forcing you to click and drag them in to the formation. Sometimes they do switch out, it's completely random whether it works or not.

13: Sometimes leaving an adventure results in a black screen instead of the world map.
As it says, sometimes you'll complete an adventure, end the run, and instead of the sword coast map appearing you get... nothing. Sometimes the other parts of the UI will render, like the patron window, or your gold find information, but the map itself will not appear. Since it's impossible to work out where to click to start a new adventure with nothing on the screen, it forces a restart to fix it. This seems to be becoming more common lately.

There's over a dozen I encounter practically every single day. By all means add your own bugs that you come across daily.

[sircrimsonfox]

You are a bug-hunting GOD!
Well done!

[Noeh23]

1) i gave up on complaining about this one, I just consider background party a nice bonus if they work. I am more concerned about the active party getting stuck. Also, I would not use background party to gather stacks on anything.
2) Ultimates work offline? I thought otherwise.
3) true happens, unless it results in a stuck party I don't care that much
4) super annoying ... if I get too annoyed I restart the game
5) just a visual bug, I don't think it even prevented me from opening a TG actually
6) I consider player helping bugs to be a counter to the annoying bugs :-) also note that with new heroes and new cored you can get effect bleeds from other parties.
7) yup annoying, I just switch off all automation before any manual reset (would be cool to have a single panic button for that)
8) if you saved your formation after selecting specs this rarely happens, usually a delete and new save of formation fixes it (till it breaks again)
9) usually new levels ... I try not to rush doing the new ones ... wait till they flush out the bugs
10) never happened to me ... interesting
11) the UI is cluttered so much that I stopped caring about the graphical display of effects long time ago :-(
12) this usually happens if the formation is under attack or something else prevents the new hero to show up in the formation. Did not really have an issue with this.
13) happened to me only once a few days ago .. hopefully will not be too common

BTW ... steam is probably the worst place to report/discuss bugs if you want CNE to notice :-)

[thegrassyknoll]

this is what they need to hear! I have encountered almost every item you listed and many of my own bugs that i have reported for years and have gone unfixed. Fix the bloody game already!

[Konachibi]

Originally posted by Noeh23:

BTW ... steam is probably the worst place to report/discuss bugs if you want CNE to notice :-)

It probably is the worst place for it, but the idea is to build a huge comprehensive list of every bug people encounter. Try ignoring a Steam forum post that has multiple pages and every one is a list of commonly encountered bugs. CNE would have to take notice, or risk having potential players not play and/or pay money in to their game because those potentials see a forum post with a gigantic list of bugs that aren't getting fixed.
It happens a lot with Digital Extremes and Warframe. For all their chiming of how many players they have, they never mention the amount that leave due to frustration of constant game-breaking bugs never being addressed for years.

[Noeh23]

Originally posted by Kønachibi:

CNE would have to take notice

From experience I can say no. At best they tell you - "open a ticket"
That is what they care about ... they don't have staff to transfer complaints from Steam to the developer ticketing system.
And even if ... most of these things is already gathering dust on their issue tracker so making a list here (even if it's the most commented list ever on this forum) will do nothing.
But maybe I am a pessimist on this one :-)

[Konachibi]

Originally posted by Noeh23:

Originally posted by Kønachibi:

CNE would have to take notice

From experience I can say no. At best they tell you - "open a ticket"
That is what they care about ... they don't have staff to transfer complaints from Steam to the developer ticketing system.
And even if ... most of these things is already gathering dust on their issue tracker so making a list here (even if it's the most commented list ever on this forum) will do nothing.
But maybe I am a pessimist on this one :-)

True, I'm likely just being too optimistic, but still, if there's a chance, it's worth a try.

Also, to drive a point home about bug #1, here is a screenshot:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2444034407

According to this screenshot, it has been 16 hours since I last checked on this party, when it has in fact only been 7 hours. The run resets at area 125, so only 3 resets with Shandie using Dash in 7 hours is pretty terrible considering every enemy that spawns is immediately killed by click damage, and during that entire time, after defeating at least 75 bosses, only ONE of them dropped a red gem for BV despite her having the gem collector specialisation. That isn't just bad luck, that's a statistical impossibility.

[VallejoM]

1) They've said this week that offline/inactive party issues are currently top priority so hopefully we'll see some improvements.

re: some points you mentioned...

a) You'd be better off running the Avernus party in the background and swapping over to level it now and then...whilst actively running your gem farming in the active party. You'd get more gems that way, both green and red gems for BV. I ran BV that way for quite a while in my gem farming team and only stopped when I got to 70k...figured that'd probably be enough IF she ever gets a rework.

b) Have you made a note of what gems you had prior to turning the game off or leaving it as an inactive party and checking the actual totals in the UI and in BV's kit (incuding looking at the Loot tab of the journal) when you return. I've noticed that often you are getting more than what the pop-up display says...but, fairly recently, the discrepancies seem to have worsened. Clearly, there's some issues...but I think some of them are sometimes partly self inflicted...which I'll mention in point 2.

2) Ultimates turning off or not functioning when offline or inactive - this is a misconception of what is happening in offline/inactive parties. The game is NOT being exactly simulated as though it were running as an active online party whilst in the background. Most things, such as ultimates, are not actually factored in to the offline/background party calculation. That is why champion abilities, most notably, speed effects don't work in offline progress...because they're not programmed to do so...that's not how it works. The only things that can effect offline/inactive parties are those things that specifically effect the whole game...i.e. speed potions etc...and even then I believe it is only the epic ones that have been factored in...you'd have to test that, I've never tried it. It is also the reason why gaining stacks on champions such as Zorbu or Torogar is much, much slower...because of what's going on...

Offline/Background progress - the game periodically calculates IF you have enough power to beat 25 things at X level in 1 minute...if not, then it extends that time...if after that time it determines that you still have not had enough time to kill 25 things with the power you have at that point then it may extend the time further (we know that it does this, but we don't know how often that calculation is made or how many times it extends the time allowed) until eventually it determines...nah, you can't beat this in a reasonable timeframe and stops your progress.

As a side note - This is why people that try to use only familiars in their background party sometimes run into issues. When they come up against obstacles or hit-based/segmented health enemies...because they are ONLY using familiars, they can ONLY click off 1 segment per 5/6 seconds regardless of how many familiars they have or regardless of how much click damage they can do. For example, an enemy with 50 segments cannot be killed by familiars any quicker than 250 seconds (1 segment per 5 sec)...which is over 4 minutes...and it's obviously double that for enemies with double the number of segments.

For best results...ignore click damage, you're better off fielding actual champions and don't bother with familiars on ults either. I don't go offline often, but I have a background party churning all day in the background and I can see the gems coming in just fine in the journal...most of the time...I will say there's been some instances lately where progress has stopped though, so yea, there's issues for sure...they know that.

3) Mildly annoying, Agreed...but graphical glitch and likely to be low priority.

4) Same as previous...I've personally not noticed this on PC but on WebGL it happens a lot. I wondered if the 'info panel' glitches had something to do with resolution and/or UI scaling settings but it's never bothered me enough to troubleshoot it.

I did enjoy the Kraken tentacles from the Fleetswake event waving around in the background of a subsequent Mad Wizard run...but again, hard to replicate...and mainly a graphical glitch, again likely to be low priority.

5) Same as previous...graphical glitch...hard to replicate...low priority. Unless someone can come up with specific steps to replicate, these are always going to be hard to fix.

6) Have not seen this one. I'd be interested to see what the icon/symbol you're seeing looks like though. If you can replicate it and get a screenshot you should probably submit a ticket to report it.

7) Formation automation not selecting the correct champions. - this tends to happen when the drop down box at the bottom of the automation window isn't set to the correct campaign you're starting a run on. As well as there being a formation selected...you need to make sure the drop down list is also displaying the correct campaign. It's possible sometimes to mix the two, particularly if you have had a similar formation for a patron version and then tried to jump into a normal non-patron free play...you don't always notice because one reads 'A Grand Tour of the Sword Coast (Mirt) and the other reads somethng like 'A Grand Tour of the Sword Coast' etc...sometimes you think you're on something that you're not...and then it trys to load in the formation but can't. Always check prior to starting that you're loading from the actual campaign saves that you're going to run.

Formations can also fail to load properly with the correct champions if you have them in another party and try to load in a formation with them in...then it throws in the last used from that slot.

8) You need to pick specialisations THEN save the formation...not the other way around. They need to be saved first in the formation then you can mess around changing them if you like via the UI...but they must be saved first.

9) Boss areas stuck...known issue, it's on their list.

10) Some distractions unclickable - agreed, I've seen this, and it typically tends to be the first few at the start of a run...after that I haven't noticed that it occurs after that.

11) There may be a reason why not all show. I don't know what that is though...I mean, if you're using Farideh and have her 'Hellish Rebuke' spec choice set it does show in the character sheet of the champion receiving it under 'incoming effects' but I don't know why some characters have positional arrows and some don't. Presumably it's how they have categorised abilities as positional or not...but I don't know that's a bug.

'Putting Dhadius in the second column on an Avernus run will show his Skill Empowerment ability as not reaching champions in the fourth column, despite it's range being two slots from Dhadius.' - I can't replicate this, it looks fine to me. Did the champion you had in the 4th column actually have 14+ INT to qualify in getting the buff from Dhadius? I just tried it with Melf and he was receiving the buff just fine according to Melf's character sheet and Dhadius had his 'positional arrows' just as you would expect them to be.

'A lot of formation abilities seem to become blocked by holes in the formation setup'. - This is a misconception...'holes' in formations are NOT counted as though there was a slot there in most cases. For example, if an ability has something like a 'within 2 slots' restriction, you can't count the hole, you would have to count around it. Except for Dhadius, as it happens, whom has an ability that specifically states 'as the crow flies'...I believe that's the only ability with that specific wording and does (or should) count across formation holes. Rest of the time they do not.


12) Switching champions in the slot windows will not always replace them in the formation. - No, they won't do...if you have a champion on the field and you swap to someone in the same bench slot...they are NOT automatically placed on the field...because you haven't purchased them yet. It should say 'Unlocked' under their portrait. The only times that would happen is when you have used a champion and benched them, then used and upgraded another...then swapping back and forth between those champions that have both been already used will swap them in the formation OR if you have a champion on the field and have a familiar on their upgrade button...then swapping to another champion should place them (unless the formation is under attack).

13) Haven't seen this one.

If anything is not working as you think it should then it's always best to submit a support ticket with as much information as possible...even if you don't think that you have anything to add, sometimes one line of explanation of what you were doing can point to something that helps resolve the issue. There's little that can be done via forums...submit tickets if in doubt.

^That is exactly what Shawn says time and time again...submit a ticket...then he can take a look at it.

[Konachibi]

Originally posted by VallejoM:

2) Ultimates turning off or not functioning when offline or inactive - this is a misconception of what is happening in offline/inactive parties. The game is NOT being exactly simulated as though it were running as an active online party whilst in the background. Most things, such as ultimates, are not actually factored in to the offline/background party calculation. That is why champion abilities, most notably, speed effects don't work in offline progress...because they're not programmed to do so...that's not how it works.

Actually ultimates do continue to happen when inactive/offline. I used the Strix & Spurt synergy as an example because NORMALLY when I come back, Strix does have multiple stacks of Haunted, because the game still records Spurt as using his ultimate despite it not being an active party, but it doesn't always do that. Sometimes I come back and Strix has 40 stacks of Haunted, sometimes I come back and she has none. It's completely random whether the game remembers it's meant to be firing off Spurt's ultimate or not.

b) Have you made a note of what gems you had prior to turning the game off or leaving it as an inactive party and checking the actual totals in the UI and in BV's kit (incuding looking at the Loot tab of the journal) when you return. I've noticed that often you are getting more than what the pop-up display says...but, fairly recently, the discrepancies seem to have worsened. Clearly, there's some issues...but I think some of them are sometimes partly self inflicted...which I'll mention in point 2.

Yes I made a note, and yes Black Viper only obtained one single gem, as the screenshot said she had. Powering up Black Viper has become infinitely more annoying because she simply doesn't gain red gems unless she's part of the active party, because the current implimentation of multiple parties is so utterly broken than any inactive party simply does not function the way it should.

3) Mildly annoying, Agreed...but graphical glitch and likely to be low priority.

Annoying yes, and a persistant bug this game has had since it first came to early access on Steam. The bug is as old as the game itself, and has never been fixed. There's a point when 'low priority' becomes 'pure negligence', and this bug is that point.

8) You need to pick specialisations THEN save the formation...not the other way around. They need to be saved first in the formation then you can mess around changing them if you like via the UI...but they must be saved first.

Yes. The bug I'm mentioning is that, besides formations being saved, and despite the modron core listing the selected specialisation prior to the champion levelling to the point of obtaining it, the specialisation window will still appear. The modron core knows what you want selected, it just, for whatever reason, decides to not assign it automatically and makes the player select it.

7) Formation automation not selecting the correct champions. - this tends to happen when the drop down box at the bottom of the automation window isn't set to the correct campaign you're starting a run on. As well as there being a formation selected...you need to make sure the drop down list is also displaying the correct campaign. It's possible sometimes to mix the two, particularly if you have had a similar formation for a patron version and then tried to jump into a normal non-patron free play...you don't always notice because one reads 'A Grand Tour of the Sword Coast (Mirt) and the other reads somethng like 'A Grand Tour of the Sword Coast' etc...sometimes you think you're on something that you're not...and then it trys to load in the formation but can't. Always check prior to starting that you're loading from the actual campaign saves that you're going to run.

This isn't the bug I mentioned. What I'm saying is, say, you've just run a variant where you could only use high charisma champions, so rather than using your normal formation, you've had to build a whole new one just to do that adventure. You then complete that adventure, and then before beginning a new one (without changing adventure or swapping out patrons), you set your modron core to use your normal formation. Upon entering the adventure, despite the modron core being set to your normal formation, it will instead deploy all the champions you just used for the high charisma variant instead. The familiars will all deploy correctly, it'll just send out whatever champion was last used in the slot, instead of switching them to the ones it's meant to be using.

12) Switching champions in the slot windows will not always replace them in the formation. - No, they won't do...if you have a champion on the field and you swap to someone in the same bench slot...they are NOT automatically placed on the field...because you haven't purchased them yet. It should say 'Unlocked' under their portrait. The only times that would happen is when you have used a champion and benched them, then used and upgraded another...then swapping back and forth between those champions that have both been already been used will swap them in the formation OR if you have a champion on the field and have a familiar on their upgrade button...then swapping to another champion should place them (unless the formation is under attack).

Yes they are... normally. What it's MEANT to do is immediately swap one champion for another if you change the selection in that slot. For instance, if you're using Bruenor, then swap that slot to Deekin, it should remove Bruenor from the formation until you purchase Deekin, and then it will place Deekin on the field. If both are purchased, it should switch them the moment you make the selection, that's why the button reads as 'Swap'. Sometimes however, this doesn't work, and the previous champion in that slot will continue to linger in the formation, forcing you to drag the new one in to that space to replace them (e.g/ Swapping Bruenor for Deekin causes Bruenor to still be in the formation, and you have to click and drag Deekin over Bruenor to swap them out, even when the formation is not under attack.)

[VallejoM]

Originally posted by Kønachibi:

Originally posted by Noeh23:

BTW ... steam is probably the worst place to report/discuss bugs if you want CNE to notice :-)

It happens a lot with Digital Extremes and Warframe.

This is not a useful comparison...Digital Extremes is a studio with over 300 employees and a game with close to 35-50k concurrent hourly users day in day out. Idle champions is a game made by a studio of about 30 and a player base a fraction of that of Warframe...and it's not their only game. Not all of those people are involved with I.C. and then subtract admin, management, artists, support staff, marketing etc and you're soon down to what amounts to a surprisingly small dev team.

The fact is though that dev time is always going to be limited regardless of how large the company is...and that's compounded when the team is small. To say that they don;t fix things though is , quite honestly, ridiculous...take a look at the change log in game and you'll see that there are regular fixes...only last week they pushed out about 30 fixes and there's been others applied since. Sometimes Moandalorians like to make out things to be worse than they are...

...and some issues are always going to be a) very low priority i.e. minor graphical glitches and b) if something has not been fixed then it could well be that maybe they can't track it down...especially when i) people don't bother to report things or think that someone else has posted about it so don't bother adding anything or ii) the reports they do get don't shed any light on the issue...I've worked in support and can tell you, when you get tickets that say stuff like 'X is broken, fix it!!! OMGZORZ!! YOU SuCk!!' or something to that effect, there's really not much that can be done.

They said, for example, a couple of weeks ago that they'd tried to find the issue with Jim not attacking when in his box and had spent quite a fair amount of time trying to replicate it...but nothing they had could reproduce it. That's how it goes...and that's why tickets (proper ones with accurate info) are ALWAYS more important than forum bleating...even if you think that they aren't.

[sircrimsonfox]

I recently hit the one where game won't progress beyond bosses. So random. So annoying. And it had never happened before this week.

[Coo Coo Pigeon]

why do you only list 10% of the annoying bugs? o.O

[Konachibi]

Originally posted by Coo Coo Pigeon:

why do you only list 10% of the annoying bugs? o.O

Well feel free to include your own, like the original post suggests.

[Coo Coo Pigeon]

It wasn't meant as "omg its incomplete" just wonder if there was a reason to leave most out.

But lets talk bugs which work in the players favor (also a small sample):
- You can suck in 2 parties through the veil to get e3xx BUD atm.
(Be careful on breaking area 1100 tho)
- You can receive double gems, chests, favor and patron currency
- Speed core level can give you a permanent 10x speed for 1 party
- Per click you can progress 10 area's at the time
- Hew Maan can have e10% chance to double quest count
- Speed core can run on infinity Gold Find (does crash game)
- Briv jump animations can be skipped (saves time to progress to next area)

[Noeh23]

Originally posted by Coo Coo Pigeon:

It wasn't meant as "omg its incomplete" just wonder if there was a reason to leave most out.

But lets talk bugs which work in the players favor (also a small sample):
- You can suck in 2 parties through the veil to get e3xx BUD atm.
(Be careful on breaking area 1100 tho)
- You can receive double gems, chests, favor and patron currency
- Speed core level can give you a permanent 10x speed for 1 party
- Per click you can progress 10 area's at the time
- Hew Maan can have e10% chance to double quest count
- Speed core can run on infinity Gold Find (does crash game)
- Briv jump animations can be skipped (saves time to progress to next area)

the point is that not many people know them, can or want to execute them.
If you really want CNE to care you can start promoting these bugs as allowed (not handled by CNE over long period of time even though known) exploits and once people start using (or at least attempting) them on large scale I bet you they will start to care.

For me it would spoil the game. One of my first managers had a picture of CLS Mercedes at his desk. He told me that that's a car he'd want some day (he could totally afford it as he had the money plus his wife was a VP at Mercedes Benz). The reason he did not buy it is people need stuff to strive for and if the striving part is more fun / important then you better postpone achieving it, otherwise you are basically going against yourself.

[Coo Coo Pigeon]

I've used them all (thats how I found them), some I can't even get around if I try.
Exploiting them, is another thing.