Before MMOs I used to play Diablo 2. In that game people devised various cheats. Speed hacks where a character could zoom in and kill you. Dupes where you could manufacture infinite copies of rare items. And in Diablo 1 there had been townkill, a hack that allowed you to kill people in the safe area.

Not only does cheating make a game unplayable when it becomes over-powered and rampant (it did for Diablo 1) but it is very hard on the servers. Duping for example was done by transferring an item to a mule, logging the mule off (so the mule is saved) then crashing the game (hoping to roll back your main character to get the original item restored to inventory).

Certain forms of behaviour are best kept in certain games. In Eve for example it’s a dog eat dog world where someone can pretend to be your friend, work hard for your guild and then destroy it from within. That’s normal and admired gameplay. In WoW a guy I know specialised in robbing raid guilds. He’d join the guilds, play well, be proactive, work his way to officer status then steal the guild bank. He did 3 of the biggest Alliance raid guilds on my old server Scarshield Legion EU. Admirable in EVE, lame in WOW.

Some forms of cheating are clearly going to kill the game. If someone developed a hack in Free Realms or Hellow Kitty Online that allowed them to corpse camp and teabag the little kiddies who play that game it would break the game.

As for the issue, no they don’t want players metagaming encounters by using weakness in code. Usually there is very little you can actually do to deviate from most encounters as planned in an MMO. Usually thinking outside the box means exploiting weaknesses discovered more than being able to truly use different tactics.

I’d be hugely impressed if it was hard to break… I can’t help but be skeptical though.

Few words I’m gonna try:

pygmy
marmot
lung
graviton
amoeba

I think that our current tactic in XT feels very much like a bug. Tanking him right on top of a scrap pile should make it harder in my mind…but noooooo.

Likewise I remember my first ever ‘internet research’ for a Boss giving me a hard time…it was the big statue guy in Uldaman. Our newbie 5 man group was in serious trouble. I printed out maps, I read everthing I could get my paws on. We kited him out of his room and back up stairs giving our rogue plenty of time to kill the adds and the rest of us impunity to nuke the boss. We were so proud! But it sounds allmost exactly what 5 guys got banned for on FlameL. Okay they took less people but we were getting serious ganked before that tactic…

Blizzard really is just all about control. You didn’t see bans like this in EQ. Hell there’s STILL some things you can exploit in EQ that were never fixed, but were well known. The EQ team simply released a fix for the more important exploits and went about their business.

The best example of this I can think of recently is in Left 4 Dead. In L4D, there’s sections where you have to do something like flip a switch or wait for a plane to start or what have you. And while you do, huge hordes of zombies charge out at you. It should be a desperate, frantic fight for your life. But eventually, someone worked out if you all pile in the corner, rather in the various defensible spots that will eventually get overrun, you mow down the zombies hordes fairly easily. Which, y’know, is fine from a gamist point of view. But isn’t actually all that entertaining and serves to make the experience less enjoyable. But it’s what everyone does now because it’s the ‘out of the box’ solution that worked.

IT’s fun for the first guy but it does result in everyone else having to do something irritating and stupid half the time.

This is true. I’ve seen Spinks when we lose the pub quiz…