People *will* abuse your system… any system. Plan accordingly.

Nice writeup.

Don’t agree with this at all.

Everyone has a notion of what is admissable and what is over the line but this varies wildly from player to player. Some examples:

Boosting: “need SM boost paying 5g” This is power-levelling in its purest form – cheating or not?

Muling: your character came with 5 bag slots and 7 bank slots plus the main bank space. Surely getting more bank slots by creating dummy level 1 alts you have no intention to play is an exploit?

Spying. On pvp servers you can’t role an alt on another side to spy on rival players. Unless you buy a second account. Is that cheating? In fact, is it pay-to-cheat?

OK, so like Monopoly, Blizzard has rules. All we have to do is look at the rules and all will be made clear, right?

Wrong

The WoW rules are written by lawyers to protect Blizzard from litigation. Basically what the rules say is anything and everything is potentially a bannable infringement and you agree to accept this as a condition of play.

So if we attempt to play WoW by the rules we can’t actually do ANYTHING at all since it might be an infringement and we’ve agreed not to infringe. Possibly playing with the character creator might be OK since it doesn’t actually impact anyone else.

In English law we have two main types of law, Statute Law which is laws which are made up by legislators then applied and Common Law which is general practice that everyone agrees makes sense and which is usually confirmed by a previous court ruling. To draw an analogy with WoW WoW is a jurisdiction with no statute law pertaining to what you can’t do. Everything is based on precedent and accepted practice.

And if something can be exploited, it will be exploited. Even if people know for sure that they are bug-using or found a flaw in the game mechanics.

Sometimes the line is blurry indeed.

You are abolutely right:
“But when you find a large proportion of the playerbase jumping onto the bandwagon, you have to ask what’s wrong with the game at a more fundamental level.”

The whole mission designer idea is flawed, and City of Heroes always had problems to keep people playing the game. This is just sad, but to put it bluntly, City of Heroes is not too good and just cannot be more than that, the basic design idea is rather limited.

They recently rebooted their idea with the upcoming “Champions Online”.

But I am grateful that they do not go the usual “add an achievement system” route and gave players totally crap tasks that take a long time to complete.

Even if the reward is totally not worth it in the end, people must love achievement systems, they keep people playing and paying.

(err, just occurred to me that will mean nothing unless you play on the standard UK board. Oops)