One thing Bungie does right (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Tuesday, April 19, 2016, 00:31 (3234 days ago) @ Kahzgul

When you make a game that revolves around loot, and especially revolves around giving it out slowly, you can't get mad at players for using anything and everything to give them an advantage to gain loot faster.

Why not?

Why does a developer lose the ability to enforce the rules they made in the game they made just because you don't like their rules? Does using "anything and everything" include killing other players with plastic sporks? Not their in game avatars, the actual players. It's a game with a loot system, the universal unlimited get out of jail and consequences card in gaming, so "anything and everything is justifiabl", right?

Personally, I think players should have the responsibility to play with fairness and sportsmanship. And those that don't should be punished. And when what is and isn't fair comes into question, they should err on the side of caution, especially when not doing so negatively and adversely effects the experiences of other players.

It's one thing to enforce the rules. It's entirely another to not tell people what the rules are or that you're going to enforce them, and then retroactively punish people for doing something you've now decided is against the rules.

But, did the players suspect that what they were doing was against the rules? If they were perfectly innocent then sure. But if not...

The long version, as this relates to gaming, is - hey, aren't you're supposed to be writing something right now?

Heh. The point of storing the Xbox was to allow me to make some content instead of only consuming it. This evening, I've chosen to make a point. :p

As for the rest, you see the nuance, it seems, but only from a great at distance. :(

A few things:

1. Chiefly, you left out mistakes in the programming or reduced them down to a meaningless and ignored "given." Can the developer perfectly define the rules of the world they give to players? No. Not really. Not in practicality. Nearly all evidence across decades of game development tells us that bugs, crashes, and exploits will always exist. I cannot think of any game I have ever owned that is coded to absolute perfection. Demanding something of developers that is basically impossible for them to deliver greatly hurts your examples.

2. Yes, there is the risk that something players thought was ok turns out not to be and they get punished for it, but how often does that really happen? Has it ever happened? A player should use common sense and sportsmanship to guide their actions. It's not like I have hard data to back this up, but I'd guess that relying on an honest sense of sportsmanship has rarely steered players wrong. (Well except when they are losing to less honest player, in any event...)

3. If we were discussing players being punished for something they honestly did not know was wrong then I'd be firmly on the players' side in this debate. Unfortunately, so far in this debate the main player action we've discussed is pushing through a wall they know they shouldn't be able to in order to damage a boss in a way they shouldn't be able to in order to get loot more frequently than the developers stated they were supposed to. As much as you or anybody else wants this to be about poor innocent players who were retroactively punished without a hint that their actions might bring consequences... that's not what is happening. At all. In what we are actually discussing, each and every player likely knew exactly what they were doing and that it was almost certainly be frowned upon. Instead of a hypothetical situation, why not talk about the one that's actually before us?