Only jumping into this… Whatever it is… to correct this claim, that keeps appearing again and again:
The Priest never ever protected against Mark of the Void (the attack of the final boss). Mark of the Void simply didn’t work on release. And then it was fixed
Are you? 
Because it looks like you are annoyed with devs making changes to balance and annoyed by (truly annoying if I may add) last mission, and not the fact they change balance because they consider them exploit (regardless if it was an exploit or not). If they would never call them exploit (yet still change exactly as they did) you would be still annoyed, right?
The question that had not been answered… What are the designers’ intention? If they put it into the game and a player opts to use it, are they exploiting beyond the design?
Not really. By calling it exploit they tell me that I would not have been able to win the game by playing the way they intended to.
THIS is what I am “not happy” with. - Sure this might be a special circumstance with my second try of the final mission. “But that’s just the way it is, baby.” (great Song be the Rembrandts)
The decision is probably right for 98% of the game. But not for the final mission.
Why don’t they differ the difficulties more? In new X-COM different difficulty settings you change the health bar of enemies, effect cover significantly and stuff like that. Or is it a special easteregg that the difficulties are practitally the same (bug in OG)?
In MY opinion devs are heading into the totally wrong direction with “balancing”.
Could I recommend PP to a friend the way it is now?
HELL NO! A playthrough of the game is at least twice if not 3 times as long as an XCOM which COULD be a good thing - but is not as the game is far to repetitive from mid to endgame.
And the topping of the cake is the balancing of the final mission which does not fit the rest of the game at all…
@Kaltorack , I don’t mean to offend in any way. That said… if you’re this mad about this, while mostly everyone here disagrees with you because, you know, all of the internet uses the term exploit for any game mechanic that gives unintended advantages to players (just look at patch notes from mostly any game)… you should probably seek some help because this is hurting you more than it should. If you already do, then talk this through. Again, I’m not trying to offend you, I just don’t see this kind of (over)reaction as healthy and it got me worried enough to write this.
Try being jumped on by a horde of trolls, who show just to crap all over your thread and then tell me that I’m over reacting. But, thanks for showing up to offend me and belittle my concerns, while saying “I don’t mean to offend in any way”. And no, I actually posted the most generally accepted definition. One of the trolls even explained how the page was created by THIS community for THIS community, and then inexplicably argued that that is why we should ignore it as a definition for the term used in THIS community.
At the end of the day it should be obvious to all of you and to Snapshot Games that “exploit” is a loaded term. It is not neutral.
But, I am no longer interested in splitting hairs with any of you. I don’t mean to offend you, but fuck off. (It makes it OK because I said “I don’t mean to offend you” right?)
Good that you let off the steam… ADHD can be cruel.
Now please accept that there are exploits in the game, people use them, and devs try to limit such practices. YES it is their fault, and they fix it. Now get over that they called exploit an exploit. And try to adapt to little less non-exploited world.
You have posted a poorly written Wikipedia page that was never “generally accepted”, by anyone. You asked me to give you better one and I did. Do you agree with current Wikipedia page or not?
Please understand, that just because something is written on Wikipedia page doesn’t mean it is applicable definition. Refinement of Wikipedia pages is an ongoing process and may take years for some niche terms or idioms. This one is clearly abandoned and is very far from being “generally accepted”. Moreover, Wikipedia was never meant to provide strict definitions. Its purpose is to gather as much reliable information on particular topic as possible and it failed for this one. Wikipedia purpose is to explain, not to define.
Hey guys.
Does it really matter what the perfect definition is or isn’t?
I can understand that you can feel a little annoyed by the way the words were chosen to inform us about the change.
I was even thinking about starting a thread about it but thread starter was faster…
Are there more important things in live? Thanks god a lot!
Let’s agree to disagree and go on to more important things.
That can be fixed in a HOTFIX… no need a patch for that super fault that can be exploited by players who want to win at all costs. It is incredible that after one year, this situation continue happening… imo that is ULTA bad design and lack of respect for fair players who wants beat the game with merit.
So I assume all this fuss is about this line:
Game balancing
We’re continually optimizing the game for all our players, thanks to the feedback gathered from our community. In this first re-balancing effort, we looked at a few abilities and weapons that had the potential to be exploited and tweaked them to align better with our vision for the game. We’ll be keeping an eye on the reception and have other areas we’ll be addressing in the future.
Note that they dont actually call anyone an exploiter. They say they are rebalancing some abilities because they felt they could be exploited…
As was already said here numerous times, something can be considered an exploit if its used in a manner not intended. They arent calling anyone an exploiter or a cheater. They noticed skills had some interaction in manners they dident intend for them to be used, and they nerfed them to prevent that from happening.
Which is their right to do, its their product.
Whats all the fuss about?
From what I can see, it’s a drama queen looking for attention.
Then all the “casual” players will start to shout to SG. This game created for the people who only plays multiplayer FPS games and never touched to a strategy in their life. If you know that, the answers come automatically. For a reason nobody knows, SG got a dedicated mission to make those people a TBS player. All the exploits, easy mechanics, no restrictions, OP skills, OP weapons, colorful maps, cartoonish horror creatures, oversaturated visuals and nights brighter then days are for that reason.
Yes, trully. Even I would prefer soldier to progress by weapons use, more natural, super-power system is in place too long
https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Experience
While you might focus on the averages stated above, the actual points assigned are entirely random . The range is what you should expect for any one soldier on any one combat mission. This follows the usual X-COM behavior of defining a range and rolling randomly within it.
Do your best to get every soldier you are interested in developing, to get at least one primary action (not including throwing). This will trigger secondary stat increases. Then try to shoot for the big breakpoints of 3 or 11 primary actions. Doing more than 11 actions does not increase a particular primary stat any more, so give other soldiers the chance to perform actions once your favorite soldiers have maxed out on theirs.
Any soldier can (and will!) ultimately become a maxed-out superman. (Not counting Psi-wimps with a low psi strength, who will never improve at all.) The worse a secondary stat is, the quicker it will rise. And you can try to target who performs which primary actions. Taking advantage of the breakpoints of 3 and 11 can also help you manage potential skill increases (a.k.a. targets) as effectively as possible. That said,
Early in the game, don’t spend much time or money fretting over stats. Any soldier is liable to come up snakes with their Psi strength. And every soldier can otherwise eventually become a superman.
Once you have strong Psi soldiers, you can easily use Experience Training to optimize advancement.
In the endgame (when you have tons of cash), if you’re a micromanager and wish to have soldiers maxed across the board, the main focus when screening recruits is the stats that can’t be improved - Energy Recharge (which is equal to a soldier’s starting TU, divided by 3 and rounded down) and Psi-Strength. So one would screen incoming (psi-locked) rookies for TUs, keep the ones with 60 TUs (who have 20 Energy Recharge), and then put the remaining rookies through a month of Psi-Lab training and discard those with Psi-Strength below some threshold (100 might be too strict given the one-month investment of time in each, but 90 or 95 is attainable given sufficient funding and a large number of Psi-Labs). All other stats are of secondary importance, since they can be improved with experience, and as such screening will only save you time training them while further increasing the number of rookies you need in order for one of them to “pass muster”.
Remote control is great but can be used to shoot 4 times with very advanced turret. Vanish is part of stealth, see no evil, hear no evil.