I get really iritated when a game leaves out friendly fire. I recognize that there are assholes out there, but it always feels like a significant aspect of strategy has just been cut out; powerful area of effect weapons are only overpowered if you don't have to worry about who's in the target area.

I go back and forth on this. I agree with you with the strategy part but I also love the Battlefield franchise which by default has friendly fire on. The reason Battlefield Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3 were so good was they incentivise and encourage players to not be jerks, the major way is by giving you points for helping your team (and more for helping your squad) and the other is by leaving friendly fire off. Because of this Battlefield 3 games tend to be much more fun and strategic than say Call of Duty games. So I guess my point is no friendly fire can be bad, but if done right it at least is not a big deal.

I'm in the same boat. I used to be an avid defender of keeping friendly fire enabled, as I loved the additional layer of gameplay it provided. I was painfully aware of the consequences, but the positives outweighed the negatives. Now that I've played a few games in which friendly fire is (for the most part) disabled, I'm torn. It has been quite nice to pick up a sniper rifle without worrying about some self-professed sniper god whacking me in the back for it...

I get really iritated when a game leaves out friendly fire. I recognize that there are assholes out there, but it always feels like a significant aspect of strategy has just been cut out; powerful area of effect weapons are only overpowered if you don't have to worry about who's in the target area.

I go back and forth on this. I agree with you with the strategy part but I also love the Battlefield franchise which by default has friendly fire on. The reason Battlefield Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3 were so good was they incentivise and encourage players to not be jerks, the major way is by giving you points for helping your team (and more for helping your squad) and the other is by leaving friendly fire off. Because of this Battlefield 3 games tend to be much more fun and strategic than say Call of Duty games. So I guess my point is no friendly fire can be bad, but if done right it at least is not a big deal.

I get really iritated when a game leaves out friendly fire. I recognize that there are assholes out there, but it always feels like a significant aspect of strategy has just been cut out; powerful area of effect weapons are only overpowered if you don't have to worry about who's in the target area.

Honestly I don't find these stories disconcerting because everyone I know that's been unjustly banned by Bungie has been unbanned. The reason the system has to be this way is because there are way more people doing questionable things in online games than any reasonably sized group of people can check on. Many on these forums already complain about the cost of games and DLC etc., which unfortunately is part of the way game companies make a living nowadays, but imagine if they also had to basically employ a call center sized group of employees just to review every single flag that pops up for every player that might be cheating?

I don't mind the price of games, it's low if you take past games and inflation into account. I'm not sure what to say on DLC. What concerns me is XBL, especially since they raised the price and especially Sony decided to copy them even though most of us remember their security failings.

Interesting. The way that game companies hand out bans and adjudicate in situations like this is interesting, as in many ways it's analogous to being prosecuted for a criminal act, only unlike a proper judicial system you don't automatically start out with a presumption of innocence. I think the fact that they could false-positive flag you is a little unsettling; the behaviour itself might have been suspicious, but clearly they had no proof of wrongdoing whatsoever. And if atypical patterns of play can trigger this system, it's quite feasible it happened more often than we know about.

Disconcerting.

Honestly I don't find these stories disconcerting because everyone I know that's been unjustly banned by Bungie has been unbanned. The reason the system has to be this way is because there are way more people doing questionable things in online games than any reasonably sized group of people can check on. Many on these forums already complain about the cost of games and DLC etc., which unfortunately is part of the way game companies make a living nowadays, but imagine if they also had to basically employ a call center sized group of employees just to review every single flag that pops up for every player that might be cheating?

The much simpler way is to autoban people that are doing things that are almost always seen as behavior of an abuser and if they file a request for a review you check and make sure. If you remember from Bungie's old weekly updates they even at one point had an entire section devoted to people that would write in claiming they weren't cheating and Bungie would confirm they were. They even told us that they constantly monitor the banhammer and that the accuracy was as close as they could make it to 100%.

Disconcerting.

And it was crazy to see 3 million credits suddenly pop back into the game. I had to purchase the armor again, but it gave me a chance to buy what I wanted first and not buy some things I had wished I hadn't bought.

It was more of a reset than a ban. I got everything back. I also was told that I was only 1 of 2 people to get the reset returned.

What happened?

Do we even know if Destiny will have an economy?

They haven't confirmed it, but the Edge article strongly hinted at a crafting system. Crafting systems mean raw resources, and that kind of a system is always more interesting if there is an economy for trading the raw resources in some form.

In an MMO you have to very carefully protect your economy so that makes sense, but a lot of people were upset (even if they didn't take advantage of the exploit). It'll be interesting to see how complicated Bungie's banning policies have to be.

Do we even know if Destiny will have an economy?

That's the main reason I added the question at the end. It is hard to know from what we've seen how complicated or not the banning system will be. On the other hand though Bungie was looking for an economy designer for Destiny at one point (not sure if they still are, can't access Bungie.net at work).

In an MMO you have to very carefully protect your economy so that makes sense, but a lot of people were upset (even if they didn't take advantage of the exploit). It'll be interesting to see how complicated Bungie's banning policies have to be.

Do we even know if Destiny will have an economy?

I'm obviously speculating here, but let's say somebody discovers a gameplay bug which permits a player to ‘bring home’ a hostile and dangerous enemy, which then goes on a rampage in the Guardian Tower, killing players all over the shop. Does this player deserve a ban? Maybe. Permanent? Hmm, maybe not. Luckily we do have analogues in other MMOs, but if you recall the Zul Gurub plague in World of Warcraft, whilst this lead to a lot of disruption for low-level players at the time, it was also a fascinating incident which people even talked about in terms of how pandemics spread.

This is a concern of mine as well. There are many cases of MMO players being banned for nothing more than being clever, and by that I mean simply exploiting game rules to their benefit in unusual ways. I like to push the envelope so to speak, and I cannot know ahead of time what Bungie deems acceptable and what they deem bannable.

Ask Bluerunner about his ban during Reach, pretty sucky.

I recall getting autobanned from XBL one time because I had been playing a ton of cave shooters. On the phone, they told me I got banned because I was playing import games, and this meant I was modding. I had to explain that yes the games were import, but that they were REGION FREE and could be easily played on a regular console.

It got cleared up, but it shouldn't have happened at all.