23 June 2008

MMO Corruption

I have no doubt that corruption exists in some form in every MMO out there. See, it's a double-edged sword. Either the people who make and maintain the game have no interest in playing it, and then they can easily miss the mark on what's fun. Or the GMs and Devs are avid gamers and as a consequence probably make a pretty fun game, but they daily are tempted to put their self-interest above their integrity by cheating. And there are shades everywhere in between those two.

But I had to laugh the other day when I read about the EverQuest 2 dev "scandals" that happened months ago. There were a couple of instances where a dev told someone how to defeat raid encounters.

Lol, is that the best you can do?!

Heck, in Eve, a GM or Dev spawned items on the Live server and let their corp profit off of them for many months. It was discovered by Eve staff, and nothing was even done about it. And then when it was discovered and forced to the forefront by an (arguably malicious) player, that player got banned, any mention in the forums of it got you banned or moderated, and the Employee in question was not even fired.

Granted, enough people were outraged by the cheating that CCP now has a player-elected representative visit Iceland to inspect the works. However, I'm not so confident in most any player's ability to detect cheating by the game's own developers, lol. But anyway it was a nice gesture, and a sign that perhaps they will take cheating a bit more seriously next time.

So anyway, a GM telling someone how to defeat an encounter or use a pathing bug to defeat a mob was bad, but ridiculous to get too hot and bothered over compared to those things.

I thought the more heinous thing that the EQ2 GM did was to quote word-for-word someone's bug report who was reporting the pathing bug, and tell their friend to use that to defeat the mob. I can't imagine the horror on the face of the guy who submitted that bug report if they ever saw how the GM used it instead of actually fixing the bug. That GM gets bonus evil points in my book.