Loophole Abuse/Video Games

"Mo: Now what do we do, Tin Star? Why are you looking at that Good Guy Code of the West? Tin Star: Looking for loopholes. Aha! Mo: What? Tin Star: It says here "never shoot women and children." Mo: Yeah, so? Tin Star: So these are just women on their own! Get my guns, Mo!"
 * Leet Speek, or "1337 sp33k" was this to bypass server filters on curse words.
 * Aint No Rule against "Ghosting" or "Stream-sniping".
 * To elaborate, professional people often stream their games. Their opponents are well aware of this, and will join in their stream as an anonymous watcher or as a dummy-account and spy on their opponents when the game doesn't let them do it. Against the rules? Nope - Aint No Rule saying you can't do it, since it's not part of the game itself.
 * The party in Tales of Hearts scales the tall Tower of Heroes King's Cross as part of the Inevitable Tournament, only to be greeted by the recurring tourney champ Ameth, who informs them that there Ain't No Rule about riding an airship to the top of the tower.
 * Referenced in Baldur's Gate II with a magic ring that fires a blast of fire. The text indicates it was used in a duel between two drow, where each was allowed the use of one magical item. It was used by a friend of one of them, who shot their opponent in the back from the stands. Being drow, everyone agreed it was a brilliant interpretation of the rules.
 * The World Ends With You has the entry fee, in which the Conductor takes from the player whatever is most valuable to him or her. The loophole is that the Conductor gets to choose what that entry fee is.
 * Sim City 4 Deluxe can ultimately allow a player (through some basic building making and basic modding of course) to have apartments on light density zones and who knows what else. Sure, it says no apartments develop on light density, but who said anything about pencil towers or duplexes for that matter if you truly cared? In fact, half of modding the game is about ballooning zone densities to unbelievable sizes with building types.
 * In the Half Life expansion Opposing Forces protagonist Adrian Shephard can avoid the order to kill Black Mesa personnel to cover up the incident because he never officially got that part of his orders. He should be able to reasonably deduce that part of his orders by asking (or just watching) the others, but remains purposefully ignorant.
 * Explicitly invoked by Aegis in Persona 3: "Nowhere in the school regulations does it state that canines are prohibited from attending school."
 * My World, My Way is built around "Ain't no rule" as a gameplay aspect. Why struggle when whining can change your situation?
 * Sissel turns this in Ghost Trick.
 * Given that it was a widely-played MMORPG, World of Warcraft has had a few instances, some controversial, some not:
 * Given that this achievement is typically extremely difficult (or, depending on your class, nearly impossible), it's generally considered that the intended way of achieving it is through abusing the rather literal wording of the achievement
 * Another Loophole Abuse in the game was involving Warlocks. Demonology warlocks used to have a talent point where their active pet would give them a buff, and if they sacrificed it, they would be given a different buff to replace the one granted by the pet. However, one curious player who had invested in engineering attempted to use the goblin jumper cables on his pet, and to his surprise, the pet then came back to life and granted them the buff...while they still had the buff from sacrificing the demon on top of it. Other warlocks begun to try this too, although it was still a pretty low chance of success, it worked. It wasn't even removed in an Obvious Rule Patch, believe it or not - Blizzard even encouraged people to try it. It was removed before expansions, though.
 * Before it was removed, someone described a pretty creative use of Hello, Insert Name Here as a hunter. Aint No Rule saying you can't give your pet the same name as you to screw up targeting macros.
 * Aint No Rule against making a couple toons for PvP and then giving them really long names that're hard to type (and start with the same letter) or really similar names for the same purpose.
 * Griefing has had many loopholes....
 * "Rooftop camping". Before there was no rule against people with ranged attacks (especially hunters) standing on the roof of a building in contested territory and firing. Normally, guards should have been able to come in and hurt them, but since the guards could not get up to the roof, couldn't do anything to stop players from picking off others on the ground. Duskwood was the best place to do this because there was a ledge where you could jump onto a roof and the guards woudln't spawn. However, they would normally die from you and not suffer durability loss - in Gadgetzan, it was far more annoying, because people would just shoot one person and then feign death as the guards run over and pummel the poor player to death. Snipers were added on the roofs to prevent this.
 * In neutral Goblin cities (Booty Bay, Ratchet, Gadgetzan, Everlook), Rogues would often grief players by sneaking up to them, sticking a knife in their side, and then vanishing while the guards beat up the player who was busy wondering what the hell was going on.
 * Aint No Rule against kiting ridiculously strong monsters into capital cities.
 * A few rather hilarious examples resulted in an Obvious Rule Patch:
 * Before it was given to Mages as a talent, a boss in Molten Core named Baron Geddon would make a certain raid member a "living bomb" which would cause them to eventually explode and damage all people nearby. He could also do this to pets, too - and people realized that you could get past this by simply dismissing the pet. However, one time a hunter did this and then called it out in the middle of a heavily populated city...and he still ahd the living bomb debuff. A few seconds later, there was a mountain of corpses in the middle of the auction House. Cue people replicating this until it was fixed in a patch.
 * The famous Corrupted Blood Incident resulted from a hunter taking an infected pet into Ironforge&Orgrimmar and spreading the plague across the cities.
 * Aint No Rule against putting a single item for sale at a huge price so people buying stuff for crafting professions accidentally buy one item instead of a full stack.
 * In one instance, a programming oversight resulted in a Worgen mob being able to be tamed. So a bunch of hunters eventually caught and tamed this pet. Unfortunate Implications resulted as Worgen became playable characters around this time..
 * Aint No Rule against bringing friend(s) into the Raid Finder and have them roll on gear they don't need to increase the chances that you'll win it.
 * A rare positive example that could honestly have been done in any game (and has been rumoured to have been done in Majora's Mask before), a player in a guild had a buddy who was rendered blind by an accident while stationed in Iraq. He regularly performs very well in-game, so how does he do it? The blind player and his friend acting as a "Seeing eye dog" used mods, macros, and private-sound channels so that he could literally play the game blind.
 * Humans in Mass Effect under the Treaty of Farixen are only allowed to build one dreadnought per every five the Turians have. Instead they began building carriers which were not subject to any restrictions. Of course, this was mostly due to the fact that Humans were the ones to introduce the concept of Carriers to the Galaxy in the first place.
 * In Mass Effect 3, there are several ways the quarians try to get around this rule: they were arming every single ship they had so even the huge ships would be armed (and as such weren't purpose-built dreadnoughts), they were salvaging destroyed dreadnoughts thus making what the quarians were doing technically rebuilding them, the Council is too busy prosecuting the war with the Reapers to pay attention to them, and even if the council wasn't, the quarians never signed the treaty in the first place and they largely operate outside the Council's jurisdiction anyway.
 * Saturos in Golden Sun lives and breathes this trope, routinely making the heroes offers that he words so they don't get anything out of them. The most memorable deal is offering a girl's safety in exchange for a MacGuffin... a girl that he needed safe anyway, and he never said anything about letting her go. It's part of his charm.
 * Metal Gear Solid has an interesting one. There are laws limiting the use of nuclear missiles. Metal Gear Rex uses a rail-gun to fire nuclear warheads.
 * In Disgaea 2 you will repeatedly be subpoenaed by the Dark Court for various "crimes" committed by your party members. This being the Netherworld, you want to have extensive crime records, since it gives benefits. While the rules stipulate that a person has to find and enter the gate to the Dark Court, it doesn't actually have to be the person who did the crime. It also doesn't say only one person has to go in - you can form a ladder and throw up to nine people before the judge, who will write up everyone for this underhanded behavior.
 * Played with in Inazuma Eleven 3, when Coach Kudou forbids the entire team from going outside to practice or play soccer. To Endou, no soccer is probably as bad as having no food to eat, so he grows restless and starts kicking a soccer ball around indoors. Several of his teammates notice and realize that Kudou only forbade practicing outside, so they start doing Improvised Training indoors, as silly as that may sound. But then it turns out this was exactly what Coach Kudou wanted them to do, as being able to control and keep possession of the ball within tight boundaries would turn out to be extremely useful against their next opponents' tactics.
 * In RuneScape, the "Falador Massacre" was a result of a player abusing a glitch. The first player to reach level 99 of Construction held a party in his house. Eventually, so many players flooded the house that it crashed and booted them all to Falador. However, players inside the arena in the player's house were still flagged for PvP (which the other players weren't, and was disabled in that zone at the time) and proceeded to go on a killing spree.
 * The Cavern of Transcendence trial in City of Heroes required a team to get through the enemy-filled caves beneath the Hollows and then enter the Cavern, a massive room filled with monsters, and then activate 8 triggers (one for each team member) simultaneously that were spread throughout the room, in 90 minutes after receiving the mission. The obvious intended challenge was obviously for the team to fight through the caves, then clear out the monsters before activating the triggers. However, activating the triggers is all that's required to actually successfully complete the trial. A standard tactic quickly became having one team member with superspeed (which has a stealth benefit) and/or flight plus invisibility or some kind of stealth power, and recall (teleporting one teammate to your position) race through the caves, past all the enemy mobs, to the Cavern door and teleport in teammates. Upon entering the Cavern, the stealth teleporter would go to each trigger in turn and bring in a teammate, again without alerting any of the monsters. End result? A 90 minute trial that could be finished in a few minutes without having to engage a single enemy.
 * A shortcoming in the engine that supported Defense of the Ancients allowed players to kill their own mobs. So what this encouraged was someone to stay behind and kill every single one of "Their" mobs so the enemies couldn't get experience at all, and thus the "Deny" mechanic was born.
 * The sequel by Valve added a pause feature so people don't have to have a Bladder of Steel (or in case something happens that makes their game client crash.) don't cost their team the game. In order to prevent people from using this as an excuse to pause the game and plan ganks or other elaborate plans, any person can force-unpause the game. However, this appears to have encouraged the perverse Double Standard that whenever the afk player is on their team, the other team will wait for them...and whenever they're on your team, you can practically hear the other team saying, "Aint No Rule saying we can't constantly force-unpause the game and get further ahead while they're gone,"
 * In-game example in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: If you use Thu'um shouts within the view of a hold's guards, they'll get on your case and tell you to stop that "... shouting thing". If you take the "Make me" route in the dialog, they say there isn't any rule really, and then cut off with "I'm watching you..."
 * League of Legends often gives deals to get champion skins for free. However, if you do not have the champion in question, you can still get the champion and the skin for free.
 * Related, PC gamer magazine often runs a code to receive a freebie for a game in its magazine, such as a free pet in Guild Wars or a free champion (and a skin) in League of Legends. There's always at least one person who goes onto their forums and asks them for a new code because theirs didn't work - Aint No Rule saying people can't just go into a magazine store, take a copy of the magazine, snap a picture with their phone or write it down, and then enter it into the game without having to pay a cent for the magazine.
 * Fate/stay night is filled with these.
 * The Holy Grail War is a fight between Servants. Aint No Rule that you can't kill a Master (who is usually a Squishy Wizard) to make their Servant disappear.
 * A Master is given the power to summon one Servant, and if he loses it he can form a contract with a Servant whose Master was killed. Aint No Rule that he can't form contracts with multiple Servants at once.
 * Aint No Rule that a Servant can't summon another Servant. Or that Assassin has to be an actual assassin, apparently.
 * Aint No Rule that can't compete in the war.
 * The Berserker class has probably never been used for its original purpose (powering up a weak Servant to usable levels), with every known Master opting to make a powerful Servant even more powerful.
 * Aint No Rule that you have to wait until the war begins to summon your Servant.
 * Broken Phantasm is a technique that releases all the power in a Servant's legendary weapon at once, destroying it in the process. Aint No Rule that you can't use it with temporary copies of weapons.
 * From the 3rd Holy Grail war in the backstory and Fate/hollow ataraxia: Aint No Rule that you can't apply your family's "cast spells twice" ability to the ritual that summons Saber. Meanwhile, the summoning of Angra Mainyu as Avenger was an attempt at Aint No Rule that suffered from Epic Fail and Gone Horribly Right.
 * Similar to Germany before World War Two (see Real Life example below), USSR in Red Alert 2 manages to build up a large military partly through this trope. One of the restrictions is the limitation on military aircraft. So, the Soviets build thousands of armored zeppeling to act as bombers. Aint No Rule about mind-controlling giant squids to sink Allied ships, right? Of course, having powerful psychics under your command means you can have every Allied inspector come back saying exactly what you want him to say, even if he just saw a column of Apocalypse tanks roll by.
 * Tin Star has an example, with the sheriff Tin Star trying to figure out how to deal with an invasion of bandits dressed up as women without breaking the code "never shoot women and children".


 * Used to thwart the fal'Cie's plan in Final Fantasy XIII.
 * The Professor Layton series absolutely adores this trope. With each game's puzzle collection, you can expect at least 20% of it to be comprised of puzzles that can only be solved by exploiting loopholes in the rules.
 * Many WWE Games in recent years don't permit Divas VS Superstar matches, but there's isn't a rule about replacing the character with a "vacant" or invisible character and implied the specific sex, especially in Create-A-Story mode. This means all a gamer has to do is place a vacant character in the place of a Diva or Superstar and have they go after either gender. For example, a vacant character would be implied to be a Diva and can attack a Superstar.
 * There also no rules against creating transgender characters either and have them fight against their "birth" sex. For example, someone can create a drag king and fight follow Divas though dressed as a guy.
 * In Halo: Infinite, Bassus is a huge, hulking, very fast brute who  swings a nasty hammer, and is the Boss you face at the end of the Excavation Mission, in a close-quarters Boss Room where such a brute has a clear advantage - he will be That One Boss if you face him the old-fashioned way, but a Breather Boss if you get creative. Now, some brief explanation of how a cutscene works in this game - they are rendered directly in real time, so everything in the environment before a cutscene triggers is preserved and remains the same after the cutscene. So if you were to, say, pick up an explosive on a shelf, carry it to a console in another room, then trigger a cutscene, in that room the explosive would still be right where you left it when the action started again. The Excavation Mission level has many explosive devices, and the Boss Battle does not start until a cutscene is triggered. So if you gather up all the explosives in the level and pile them next to the switch that triggers the cutscene, Bassus will be standing on a powder keg booby trap just as the fight starts, and seeing as the cutscene ended with him throwing you across the room and he doesn’t even notice them, all it takes is one shot from your weapon to trigger it and bring this big lummox down.
 * Elden Ring is one tough game, but combat at least can be made easier with  Spirit Summoning, which summons ghostly beings to help you. Many of these are really cool monsters, like a big, ghostly jellyfish, a pack of ghostly wolves, and best of all, the Mimic Tier. This one looks just like you (just pale and glowy) and has all your skills, abilities, and weapons. Even better, some Mooks will assume it is you, meaning often you can just watch as it fights the easier enemies while you conserve your resources and heal. One small catch, though - before you can summon it, you have to defeat it, and that means you're fighting a Mirror Boss. How do you outfight yourself? Easy - first you take off all your gear, entering the Boss Room unarmed and almost naked (take note, this method does make it easy, yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s dignified). When the Mimic Tier appears, it will also have no gear, and have to fight you bare-fisted. Then, put some distance between it, and because opening the inventory pauses combat in this game, you can simply re-equip your gear and this becomes a Zero Effort Boss that you can defeat in one swipe of your sword.
 * Children of a Dead Earth has a tragic, horrifying use of this in the Cataclysm Backstory. Two warring factions pledged to never use nuclear weapons on each other, but never said anything about using them or other WMD-level effects indirectly in other ways. This led to things like using nukes to create artificial tsunamis or EMPs, forcibly melting the Arctic icecaps, and dropping asteroids. Earth-That-Was ensued.