4 ms·

It is a hard and fast rule of online games that no matter how the game is designed, players will find holes in the game design to abuse it. IMO the only good w

It is a hard and fast rule of online games that no matter how the game is designed, players will find holes in the game design to abuse it. IMO the only good way to deal with this is to build the game from the ground up with the assumption that players should be allowed to abuse most core aspects of the game. EVE Online did this pretty well and to date the developers have continued to encourage all kinds of cheesy tactics. Of course, even they have their limits, and will ban people for a few extreme abuses, but scamming, griefing, and even suiciding into newbies in secure areas is all perfectly fine. If you try to lock down the game and prevent players from doing anything except what the developers intended, the game will usually end up being rather uninteresting.

flatline 17y ago
Agreed in principle, though I've never played EVE. The other option is to police - moderate, I supposed, in an online game - and we've all seen how well this works in regular society. I would imagine that this only becomes feasible when the number of "illegal" actions are relatively small and capable of being adjudicated by a few mods rather than a flat-out broken part of the game that is widely exploited.
jfarmer 17y ago
EVE is great, but WoW is way more profitable.
- DarkShikari 17y ago
  That kind of comparison is exactly why the MMOG market is filled with so many failures. Everyone says to themselves "WoW does this X way, if we do this X way, we can earn lots of money like WoW!" So you get a ton of failed WoW clones that earn pennies. Just because WoW does something in X way doesn't mean that doing something in a way other than X prohibits you from making a lot of money. And it also doesn't mean that doing it in X way ensures that you will earn lots of money.
  - jfarmer 17y ago
    Fortunately I never said any of that!
    - jfarmer 17y ago
      Alright, I'll elaborate, you vicious downvoters, you. EVE is a great game. The way the game world evolves naturally it's fascinating for all sorts of reasons, and I love open-ended gameplay. I played A Tale in the Desert for some time. But this time of gameplay is hard for people to get into. It demands a lot from the player. You might call it "active" gameplay. WoW is the opposite. The story is crafted for you, not by you, and it is more about pure gameplay than these higher-order things in EVE. It's a much more passive experience. I don't think it should surprise anyone that EVE is less profitable. It is, by it's nature, less inclusive. EVE is your favorite indie band. WoW is the latest pop hit. Also, I wouldn't discount the amount of time Blizzard puts into crafting the in-game experience of WoW. It's very polished and very fun, even if on some level it's less fulfilling than the do-it-yourself nature of EVE. The upcoming Cataclysm expansion is just one example of the kind of thing that can happen in WoW, but could never happen in EVE.
- potatolicious 17y ago
  All the more reason not to be like WoW - seems like WoW has the "being WoW" market pretty much cornered.
chrischen 17y ago
I think it's a fast rule of life in general. People will form together for collective power. Their "mafia" is similar to unions, communism, and real life mafias because cooperation is economically advantageous to individual pursuit.
joe_the_user 17y ago
Uh, Actually, this is an argument that one should encourage something like a community within multiplayer games. If there is a responsible guild/team/etc that players can join for basic protection and where there's some effort to make sure the leaders aren't, say, psychotic, extorting real money, etc. then the virtual world would work much more smoothly. Mafia and similar entities are certainly real world phenomena but they are a product of the breakdown of community, the rule of law and similar things rather than being a normal phenomena one ought to simply knuckle under to. It certainly seems like some people would like a game where everything was truly wildwest and you immediately got "powned" as soon as you logged-on till you figured out the angles. But I suspect most people would prefer a game where connected with functioning social system - especially if they were paying for the experience. The question of how to educate people to understand the choices involved is worth looking into. People do have choice about what game they are going to play. Most don't understand where that choice lead, however.
- joe_the_user 17y ago
  Actually, This line of reasoning makes me think that setting up an online game as legitimate multi-level marketing scheme would make sense. If you had subreferee/dungeon masters/etc who were given a piece of a world to both police and market a subsection of a world, you could offer a much more personal guarantee of an enjoyable game. But I don't know gaming that well - I'd bet this has tried before.

flatline 17y ago

Agreed in principle, though I've never played EVE. The other option is to police - moderate, I supposed, in an online game - and we've all seen how well this works in regular society. I would imagine that this only becomes feasible when the number of "illegal" actions are relatively small and capable of being adjudicated by a few mods rather than a flat-out broken part of the game that is widely exploited.

jfarmer 17y ago

EVE is great, but WoW is way more profitable.

DarkShikari 17y ago
That kind of comparison is exactly why the MMOG market is filled with so many failures. Everyone says to themselves "WoW does this X way, if we do this X way, we can earn lots of money like WoW!" So you get a ton of failed WoW clones that earn pennies. Just because WoW does something in X way doesn't mean that doing something in a way other than X prohibits you from making a lot of money. And it also doesn't mean that doing it in X way ensures that you will earn lots of money.
- jfarmer 17y ago
  Fortunately I never said any of that!
  - jfarmer 17y ago
    Alright, I'll elaborate, you vicious downvoters, you. EVE is a great game. The way the game world evolves naturally it's fascinating for all sorts of reasons, and I love open-ended gameplay. I played A Tale in the Desert for some time. But this time of gameplay is hard for people to get into. It demands a lot from the player. You might call it "active" gameplay. WoW is the opposite. The story is crafted for you, not by you, and it is more about pure gameplay than these higher-order things in EVE. It's a much more passive experience. I don't think it should surprise anyone that EVE is less profitable. It is, by it's nature, less inclusive. EVE is your favorite indie band. WoW is the latest pop hit. Also, I wouldn't discount the amount of time Blizzard puts into crafting the in-game experience of WoW. It's very polished and very fun, even if on some level it's less fulfilling than the do-it-yourself nature of EVE. The upcoming Cataclysm expansion is just one example of the kind of thing that can happen in WoW, but could never happen in EVE.
potatolicious 17y ago
All the more reason not to be like WoW - seems like WoW has the "being WoW" market pretty much cornered.

chrischen 17y ago

I think it's a fast rule of life in general. People will form together for collective power. Their "mafia" is similar to unions, communism, and real life mafias because cooperation is economically advantageous to individual pursuit.

joe_the_user 17y ago

Uh, Actually, this is an argument that one should encourage something like a community within multiplayer games. If there is a responsible guild/team/etc that players can join for basic protection and where there's some effort to make sure the leaders aren't, say, psychotic, extorting real money, etc. then the virtual world would work much more smoothly. Mafia and similar entities are certainly real world phenomena but they are a product of the breakdown of community, the rule of law and similar things rather than being a normal phenomena one ought to simply knuckle under to. It certainly seems like some people would like a game where everything was truly wildwest and you immediately got "powned" as soon as you logged-on till you figured out the angles. But I suspect most people would prefer a game where connected with functioning social system - especially if they were paying for the experience. The question of how to educate people to understand the choices involved is worth looking into. People do have choice about what game they are going to play. Most don't understand where that choice lead, however.

joe_the_user 17y ago
Actually, This line of reasoning makes me think that setting up an online game as legitimate multi-level marketing scheme would make sense. If you had subreferee/dungeon masters/etc who were given a piece of a world to both police and market a subsection of a world, you could offer a much more personal guarantee of an enjoyable game. But I don't know gaming that well - I'd bet this has tried before.