Yes, I know, working in the industry teaches me nothing about game design, what do I know? I only get paid to do such things.

It is very simple. If you do not want a Horde character being able to engage in a fight with a mob, while an group of alliance characters are fighting it, make it not possible with the code to do so.

If you don't want people fighting on rooftops, don't make it possible to get on top of the rooftop.

In IRE, you have a choice of Time or Money, however, in the end it comes down to your skill, and your skill alone. I can put in 10billion hours into playing an IRE game, and someobody else could theoretically spend 100 hours, and beat the snot out of me who put in 10billion hours.

As has been stated many times here by the people defending WoW, that just isn't possible in WoW. If It was possible, nobody would have problem with them selling gold on the side.

Are we playing the same game?

Yes, you'd think it would teach you a thing or two about game design.
I was about to say, "Dude, you sure you're a coder..." then I remembered you work with Adobe Flash (If I recall correctly), and realised you're not. You have no idea what trying to make a mind-bogglingly complex codebase like WoW behave in such baroque and Draconian ways would do. Simplicity works, plain and simple; just trying to find a definition of "engage" that you can teach the software to understand without being exploitable is difficult enough
Blizzard coders have better things to do. Seriously. How do you even know it's possible to implement a working definition of "rooftop" into the codebase that can be checked against? And consider the problem of speed - Imagine if every time someone attacked, the code had to check for millions of niggling conditions which may or may not cause attacking to be impossible, on top of all legitimate game conditions (Like effects of spells and such). It's called elegance; baroque, overcomplicated codebases crumble under their own weight, trapping the hapless programmers underneath them, becoming a part-living, part-data gravestone that serves as a warning to those who would tread into the land of Creeping Featurism and try to lift their own jury-rigged Towers of Babel.

I win. We need :victorydance: as an emoticon.

*cough* Krellan *cough*

Please differentiate between Time spent leading to greater ability of the -player- and time leading to greater ability of the -charachter-


A level 45 charachter in wow can never beat a level 55 charachter in wow, or so the wow players keep telling me.

In IRE games, a level 50 charachter can defeat a level 80 charachter, and an omnitrans.can easily lose to someone who just has 2 or 3 trans skills.

Here is simplicity for you, in places where PvP is possible, make your rooftops angled to a degree that the built in physics makes it impossible to stand there.

Whatever code is implemented to detect your ability to hit the target, make it such that if you have the right conditions, you always miss.

There are simple ways to fix these things, you don't have to get all convoluted.

And stop with your personal attacks allready!

Krellan is an absolutely terrible example. He is the exception, not the norm. Also, he's a Moondancer. He wouldn't be able to do the same thing if he was a Serenguard, for example.



I don't care about WoW, and time is time is time (is money).



Show me an example of a level 50 character beating a level 80 combatant. Levels mean nothing if you don't have at least one trans skill, which you can't get from just leveling. We also can't forget that, like you said, they usually need "just" two or three trans skills. Finally, remember that a lot of this has to do with the example's guild, not ability.

Murphy was often quite proud of his ability to kill people many levels above him.

As for Krellan being an exception... Thats the whole point about skill. You are able to become an exception...

That is why people care about skill, -individual- ability gets you places that others who don't have the individual ability don't. Meaning, no matter how much Time or Money I pump into my charachter, unless I train my skills to revolve around combat, I'm not going to be able to be good at combat.

This is not true in most MMOs.

And then he left for WoW. He's back now, yes, but can't do that anymore (so far), and definitely isn't level 50 or lacking in credits.



He's also a high-leveled, multi-trans, overpowered race that becomes even more OP in certain guilds.

Yeah... and when the creative team concepts an Arabian-themed town, you turn it down because you can't have flat roofs. In fact, virtually every world architecture would be bad and wrong, including any familiar "high fantasy" look. Let's not get into how annoying it would be to go back and angle all the roofs, in all the cities - And then have the players download all those new data files, because you don't want people fighting in the roof! Brilliant thinking, there.
Even assuming it can be done, why would you add more checks and tests the system has to run on every single attack? An attack is probably the most oft-performed action in the game, short of movement. Any addition to it would slow things down immensely, and needs to be weighed very very carefully. Besides, in your original example, you defined "Not make it possible for a Horde character to attack a mob engaged by Allied characters." Define "engaged". And the prove this can't be further abused, e.g. by Horde players attacking mobs to deny Alliance players a kill, making them waste time, buffs, etc. The more complicated you get, the more potential for abuse there is. The tighter you squeeze, the more slips between your fingers.

Simple doesn't mean "easy", "fast", nor "effective." Oftentimes the simplest way is to have humans do the policing, because they're capable of making judgements machines can't. As the game becomes more complex, architecture becomes increasingly deficient in its ability to arbitrate. With single-player games, that's not a problem - Many modern RPGs have bugs or ways of gaming the system to create super-powered characters - But that doesn't matter, because they only interfere with their own enjoyment of the game. If The Sims was multiplayer, would you allow people to burn your Sims to death? Yet would you want to make such an accidental fire impossible?

For you, punk, kiddie gloves are always off.

Only comments I have read in response to Sirlin's article that made the most sense to me, was the question of whether or not we really only want skilled people to be able to play the games, but I think thats a completely different discussion.


Just to make sure, we are on the same page.

Aikon's article discussing buying Gold with Cash, and the outrage that the community has to it, I think is clear testimony that time invested in gathering gold is the end itself, and not really a good means to an end.

Unlike in Lusternia, where we don't care if somebody buys 5,000 credits and then sells it all instantly becoming Omnitrans with all the best equipment they can afford. We know, that they will still require the skill to be able to use those skills properly.

I believe this thread has served its usefulness and due to the mud slinging and personal attacks, far beyond its original scope, is now closed for business.