Disagree

by stabbim , Des Moines, IA, USA, Monday, February 18, 2013, 12:54 (4079 days ago) @ Cody Miller

This deserves a response. If you've ever seen or played on pirate MMO servers, the quality is not nearly up to par with official servers, since they have to reverse engineer content that lives on the developer / publisher's servers. This is why piracy for MMO games is of little concern - the pirate servers are always worse than the real thing. It's no solution.

To be fair, it is a solution. It's just not a great one.

I'm not sure if the context of this discussion is clear to everyone, so I'll posit something, and please correct me if I'm wrong in this paragraph - I think the core of what you're concerned about here is for things we've all come to love doing in Halo games (skipping parts of levels, getting out of maps, bringing vehicles into places they weren't intended to be, and so on). These things are typically not of much concern to a developer in a single player game because, whatevs right? It's not affecting anyone. Whereas in an always-connected multiplayer-ish game, it may be a concern because it could put players who know how to do it ahead of players who don't. I hadn't really thought about this potential aspect of Destiny before, but now that I have I do share your concern.

There is some cause for hope, though. Take Spartan Ops in Halo 4 for example. I have yet to see 343i take any action to prevent any exploits in maps there. We managed to get some tanks where they weren't supposed to go fairly easily during co-op night last week and I don't think anyone's getting banned. I also doubt they'll bother fixing the map to prevent it, because it's not really affecting anyone outside of our group - we didn't grief other players, and I PROMISE you it didn't get us through the level faster (lol) to farm XP or anything. These sorts of things probably will depend on the context of the exploit, and whether they have potential to ruin someone else's experience. Borderlands 2 is another example - as far as I am aware, no one's been banned for duplicating items. Because although it is an exploit, the nature of BL2 means you having a particular item isn't really causing problems for other players (I just want to note, I don't participate in duping).

I think you're right that there are likely to be rules. The nature of an always-connected online game makes it very likely that Bungie will have to enforce certain things to prevent some players from ruining the game for other players. I also think ZackDark is right in that, in theory, it could be possible to design a game where even if exploits are found they don't cause problems for players who aren't doing the exploits, and thus no intervention is necessary. Whether that will happen remains to be seen - Bungie's good, but there's always another exploit waiting to be found, and we can't predict what might happen there.

However, until it is known specifically what the rules are, it's not possible to know whether Destiny offers more or less freedom than any other game. So let's see what happens.