<Long post alert, you only need to read the seventh paragraph, but it's a nice story either way ;-)> I am a big fan of MMOG's, an addict if you will, I am also a big fan of FPS Multiplayer. Before these I was THE BIGGEST fan of Diablo, I remember in Diablo when I figured out how to dupe gold (this was... before I even owned a modem... so yes, I did figure it out on my own terms) so the first thing I would always do when starting a new character would be to sell everything and dupe the gold, then outgear all the dungeons. It was sort of fun. Especially when I was able to buy the elixirs that permanently increase stats and make myself a level 10 with level 60 stats, then hack my way through the dungeons barely gaining levels so I could fight diablo at around level 15. Of course, the more I played the more glitches I found, when I started lanning with my brother we'd both dump all our gold, disconect the lan cable, and both pick it all up again. When I finally got into the brilliant world known as 'Tribes' I soon figured out how to 'ski' another brilliant glitch that was much more fun to take advantage of than simply duping. I soon became bored with Tribes and started playing games like CoD, CS etc. The most memorable glitch I found was in CS when I found this corner in DE_dust that had invisible ledges connected to it so I could jump up so people would not be able to see me without looking up. Another memorable glitch (which I just recently discovered) is in CoD II, there's some water in one of the levels that you can jump into, no one can hurt you if they fire at the water, but you can hurt them through the water. Of course, I became bored with these as well (except FEAR which I still play religously every friday on the server 'RuniteSharks playground') and bought WoW. The first character I levelled up was a warlock. I soon heard about the 'Deadmines glitch'. Basically, mages could blink through the entrance to the deadmines (dungeon side) and end up in a magical outland-esque area. as soon as I hit 20 I confirmed my suspicouns: This glitch worked with summoning portals (since been fixed. :() I managed to convince my guild to hold our guild meeting there. After I got my *horde* warlock to 60 I decided to try alliance side. I re-rolled on another PvP server a Dwarf Paladin (Named Flansburgh, my friend joined me and named his Linnell. Ten cookies if you guess the reference, ten more if you can point out why it's ironic). I was protection specc'd and retro specc'd, strictly a non-healer. In fact, I set up macro's so that my healing spells and buffs only self healed and buffed. When I finally finished putting points into protection spec I had a 100% chance for reckoning to proc when someone hits me with a critical strike. Basically (for all you non-wowers) this means whenever someone hit me... hard... I would get a bonus attack, regardless of weapon speed. There was, however, a glitch. The most entertaining glitch I ever exploited. So long as you are not attacking the target, your reckonings build up. After about a minute of being hit by an NPC one could have enough reckoning procs to INSTANTLY kill the next PC one saw. Needless to say I spent many-a-night in orgrimmar getting raped by the guards in order to jump down and one hit some epic'd out level 60. And yes, I did kill Valimathras with only me and a priest. I just let him hit me while I healed myself and priest healed me for about an hour until enough reckoning proc'd. Anyway, enough with my WoW talk. What I'm trying to get at is why do developers not allow such glitches to live? In fact, why not create an entire game where rules are set out and everything, but in order to play your character effectively you have to figure out all the glitches you can take advantage of? Is there much to dwell on there, or am I talking like an idiot?

The reason that developers do not like thes glitches is that although you might be having fun, the people that you are useing these glitches against are not. How would you like to spend weeks getting a character up in wow, only to have some "Greifer" (and that is what you are by doing such things) keep killing you through an exploit that ruins the game?

So the reason that these glitches get fixed is that they make the game less fun for the majority of players.

I also knoticed a trend with your play. Once you had expl;oited these glitchs you rapidly lost interest in the game. In MMOs this is very bad for the developer. They have put a lot of investment into such games and the on going cost is quite high. If players became bord due to lack of a chalenge (by usieng exploits to "by pass" the gameplay) then they would not make money, and no investors (which are needed to make these games) will back them. This will cause these types of games that you seem to like to never be made any more. This is the ultimate end of what you are doing (if enough people also do it).

So by griefing the griefers are destroying the very thing that they desire. That is stupid.

You're talking like an idiot, you damned dirty cheater.

The reason game designers do not allow bugs to live is because they're bugs not part of the game design. They [except for skiing] break gameplay, not add to it. They're not required to play effectively, they're required to play overeffectively, essentially giving every other player the shaft.

It's like asking why steroids are banned in sports. Even if everyone did them with no health effects, the games aren't designed around the bigger/stronger players. It's far easier to fix the bug than to ultimately rebalance every single other aspect of the game.

Note that skiing [the one bug that actually added to gameplay] was left in, and in tribes 2, maps were better designed around the ploy and the different armor classes better balanced to use it. It's not as though designers are particularly out to ruin your fun, they want to make a good fun game and bugs/cheats harm the game.

I think bugs can give games a certain level of character and appeal, like in Quake with Rocket-Jumping, it wasn't intended, yet managed to become quite the gameplay feature. Some people enjoy bending and testing the quirks of the engine, and i think it can actually enchance gameplay.

But i think when dealing with an MMO environment (AKA: a persistent environment) these kinds of quirks can inevitably destroy the game. Because the world is always there, there are persistent trends and economies that need to be balanced, if someone finds an exploit to get 10,000 fur pelts by zoning, then it won't be long before everyone and his mom is doing it, destablizing the world.

The same can happen with inherent gameplay quirks, for example if someone uses a particular set of skills that renders him invincible in combat, it won't be long before everyone uses that "tank" build, because they won't be able to compete with anything less, and will otherwise get slaughtered at every turn. this can have a dramatic effect on gameplay, essentially rendering other classes both impractical and useless.

It's like outsourcing jobs. Even if you aren't a profiteering douchebag, you've got to compete with the guys who are willing to fire their neighbors so they can buy a bigger boat. You're eventually going to be faced with a decision like, "Either fire half of your employees and move the jobs to India, dooming 50% of your workers to hobohood, or keep your domestic staff, go out of business in two years and go live on the street with 100% of your personnel." Wouldn't it just be better if the government stepped in and kept the jerks from doing it first?

The glitches mentioned in this thread belong to different categories that should be judged differently.
Rocket jumping is usually considered "emergent behaviour", since it is a fun implication of reasonable physical rules; a map with unintended invisible ledges causes similar map accessibility issues, but it is defective content that should have been corrected by sufficient playtesting.
Gold duplication is a vulnerability that can be exploited by cheaters (who would unplug the network voluntarily while playing?); getting huge bonus attacks after being hit many times is a badly unbalanced feature that affects every rule-abiding player (being hit by A before attacking B is perfectly normal).

Personally, I understand players who like to find exploits and glitches and like to win single player games through their hard earned shortcuts, but in multiplayer games glitches should be disclosed to other players, both to be recognized as a smart person and to ensure a fair game to everyone; using glitches to win (e.g. camping on invisible ledges) isn't something to be proud of.

A kind of games Timus might like are those based on simple rules and thousands of exploitable special cases like Magic: The Gathering, Nethack, Munchkin, Cosmic Encounter and many others.

I think you're taking the wrong approach to this.

I'm talking about a game in which all people have the oppurtunity to grief all others, given specific scenarios. You're dismissing a game based around glitches based on the definition of the word glitch. I put some thought into this, at least put some thought into your responses.

Okay, I gave some bad examples like Gold Duplicating and what not. But what about wall climbing? Hiding amongst visible yet non-solid objects? Rocket jumping? The deadmines glitch was well known to everyone, and was simply an extra area for people to explore, yet blizzard made it suspendable to go there. Reckoning bombs put the player at risk in order to score potentional one hit kills, which is why reckoning only procs when you are hit critically. Only epically geared paladins can succesfully bomb orgrimmar, but they blow all their mana on healing per kill, and even then it's not guaranteed they'll survive.

There are some glitches that can either: a) be figured out by all players, giving all players the same advantage or b) balance themselves out. These are the only glitches that would be included in this theoretical game. The basis of the game is that players aren't told how to play in a way that benefits them the most, they are told basics, but not how to *exploit* (exploiting really is an awful word to use) the basics.

Sure, a lot of the people who generally play MMOG'S may be turned off that it takes intelligence to gain an advantage in this game rather than time, but who cares.

Personally the idea of the reckoning bombs sounds interesting to me but I think it could be something that should have separate uses for PVC and PVP. If you build it up by being hit by critters, it should only be used againts critters and the same for with players.

This is still something very hard to work out but that seems like one solution to avoid a player working for hours to build up a massive kill shot that takes out another player the minute they log in. Even then it could be abused by a player being attacked by a friend in order to take out an enemy.

So perhaps the unbalancing effect of this stratigy is that you can build up the change of a powerful attack that is not used against the offender who is allowing this attack to be build up... (random thought stream off).

The glitches you're talking about are all unintentional aspects of the game, exploited by optimizing players. Now if you make this intentional, how is this a 'fault' or a 'glitch'? Then it will just be a (maybe more difficult) part of the gameplay, not a glitch.
Personally, I hate it if I discover such 'shortcuts' in a game. Usually they are very boring yet seducing. Be it unbalanced gameplay or a genuine 'bug', the degree to which a game is free of such glitches is one criteria of quality to me. I'm very surprised people call these glitches this fun.

I'm talking about a game in which all people have the oppurtunity to grief all others, given specific scenarios. You're dismissing a game based around glitches based on the definition of the word glitch. I put some thought into this, at least put some thought into your responses.

I did put a lot of thought into my response and it is based on how people play games, what attracts them to games and what keeps them playing games.

If all players can "cheat" each other then you will have to balance these actions so that the development time you put into makeing them will be well spent (otherwise you could save a lot of money by just hainvg 1 weapon or such). This then takes the entire gameplay that you were hopeing to replicate. and throws it out the window. Cheating is not available, as you have had to balance the "cheats". The "cheats" become standard gameplay features.

Your idea can not work becaue to make it would make its self invalid. So you haven't though too much about it. You might have though up (and spent time doing so) many cool ways that you could kill or otherwise inconvienince other player characters, but you end up with just a game where there are lost of unconnected actions that players can do. It might make an interesting game, but you will still have to balance it and thereby eliminate your purpose of the game (ie making a game where "cheating" is rewarded).

Cheating is by definition, acting out side of the rules to give an advantage. But, by making the cheating part of the rules, you have in essence, redfined those actions as part of the rules and therefore they are not cheating.

If these actions are not balanced and fun, people will not play the game (or they might but not for long as they will get bord as you seem to do when you cheat at a game).

If you are interested in game design (and it sound like you are), you will find, as you learn more about it, that some things that sound ,like a good idea and would be fun are not (and some things that don't sound like fun, can be).

As an annalogy: What can initialy attract players to games is good graphics. But if all the game has is those good graphics then people will stop playing it and buying it very quickly.

Your ideas are like those graphics, they look good and sound like they would be fun. But the will rapidly loose appeal and the game will not be played.

Would you like to spen 18 months developing this, only to have people play it for a couple of weeks?

Even if they are just your friends and this is a hobby game. The amount of effort you would put into a game like this will not give you a satifying result.