04-29-2003, 02:11 PM
Responding to random points in random order:
"The right to sell items" - I think that while a company can certain ATTEMPT to control this, it's as futile and pointless as trying to regulate the selling of accounts. Items can be traded in game, and there's no way of proving that a trade was done because of external influences (money, friendship, whatever). Also, you can just move the item to a new account and sell the account in some games (Diablo 2 and anything where accounts are free). I also think that it's the persons item, they should do what they want with it.
Diablo 2's failure to control hacks. Looking at all the MMO-RPGs out there, I notice that D2 has a MUCH worse cheating problem. MMO-RPGs respond quickly and take the time to track down who did it and what they did. All the hacked items are killed quickly, and the accounts are banned. Since an account costs you money, this hurts a fair bit.
Final point before I head to sleep: Game size. I think that the problem with size is two-fold: A lot of times there isn't the infrastructure in place to deal with it, and a lot of times the GM-to-player ratio gets worse and worse. Infrastructure is stuff like having a swearword filter in place so that you don't need as many GMs focused on it. The ratio is pretty self explanitory. 1 GM for 10 people works a lot better than 10 GMs for 1,000 people. However, I think that infrastructure helps the problem quite a lot. Also, CRPGs have the nice advantage that there ARE no rules questions, and the plot can be repeated by everyone, so the GM only exists to deal with bugs and cheaters for the most part (although some writers are necessary).
"The right to sell items" - I think that while a company can certain ATTEMPT to control this, it's as futile and pointless as trying to regulate the selling of accounts. Items can be traded in game, and there's no way of proving that a trade was done because of external influences (money, friendship, whatever). Also, you can just move the item to a new account and sell the account in some games (Diablo 2 and anything where accounts are free). I also think that it's the persons item, they should do what they want with it.
Diablo 2's failure to control hacks. Looking at all the MMO-RPGs out there, I notice that D2 has a MUCH worse cheating problem. MMO-RPGs respond quickly and take the time to track down who did it and what they did. All the hacked items are killed quickly, and the accounts are banned. Since an account costs you money, this hurts a fair bit.
Quote:--Which rules apply to whom? (Should everyone be punished when a few people break the rules? A big example is Blizzardâs purge of 131,000 D2X accounts for hacks, including some 3rd party storage programs that werenât really cheating but fell under the category anyway.)If you cheat, you cheat and you deserve to get kicked off. It doesn't matter that it was "harmless" - you knew it was a cheat and you took that risk. HOWEVER, I think companies should focus on the harmful cheating more. Whether harmless cheating should be tolerated should be a matter of unpublished policy, but that policy SHOULD be followed - It's bad to let people come to think that a form of cheating is acceptable UNLESS it really is.
Quote:--What is considered offensive matter and material by the designers of multiplayer games, how the designers implement these censors, and tactics used by players to get around them. (Examples: ânudie packsâ for Sims Online, profane character and account names.)I like how DAOC handled swearword filtering - It's on by default but it's turned off with a simple command. The same could be done with offensive names, and if you add a client-side filter then things are quite easily managed. If the client-side filters can be shared then the problem will be fairly self policing, which is always a good thing. However, I think that the company should make an effort to deal with people who are trying to get around the filters. DAOC again handles this quite well - You can appeal a name and an actual human will look at it and make a decision.
Final point before I head to sleep: Game size. I think that the problem with size is two-fold: A lot of times there isn't the infrastructure in place to deal with it, and a lot of times the GM-to-player ratio gets worse and worse. Infrastructure is stuff like having a swearword filter in place so that you don't need as many GMs focused on it. The ratio is pretty self explanitory. 1 GM for 10 people works a lot better than 10 GMs for 1,000 people. However, I think that infrastructure helps the problem quite a lot. Also, CRPGs have the nice advantage that there ARE no rules questions, and the plot can be repeated by everyone, so the GM only exists to deal with bugs and cheaters for the most part (although some writers are necessary).