Hello, I'm Michael "Kayin" O'Reilly, creator of I Wanna Be the Guy, and I am here to disagree!
Actually to be fair I think the article was actually okay and pretty non-bias. Some of the examples were pretty weak (Sequence breaking in L4D2 and boomers using the kill command are the only things that even really seemed possibly unfair). Still, I got a few things to say.
I was an idler for TF2. Grinding was too much work, and I don't find fun in receiving 'alternative options' the more I play. I want my options right away. I'll decide when I'm ready for them. Now, if I was playing MW2 or something I'd understand. The game packaged as a multiplayer games where you level up and get new unlocks. TF2 on the other hand started as one thing and became something else. Suddenly there were unlocks, and grinding and all sorts of BS. I liked the new content but could not understand why it was not available to everyone from the get go. So when idling became possible, I idled. Then I ran the idler program to save power and CPU cycles.
When my items were removed, I was pissed. Not so much because I was 'caught' for 'cheating'. They definitely had a case that it was cheating. So when I wrote an angry letter to Robin Walker, I did not complain that I was unfairly treated for cheating, I complained that they, and their amateurish unlock system drove me to cheat. The system was bad and myself, and many others cheated to avoid that undesirable part of the game. This should have been seen as a failure on their parts as game designers (I love Valve, but they seem prone to REALLY REALLY DUMB design decisions sometimes, like this or dynamic weapon pricing.)
What made matters worse is you could still use idle servers. The only difference between 'cheating' and 'not cheating' was cpu and memory usage.
Now I just grind for achievements though, because now the achievements are designed to be easily doable. They actually devalued achievements (not that I care at all, I think achievements are retarded, but I know some people love them) to support the unlock system. It's all bad and valve should feel bad. And they did, so they made the most useless crafting system ever which only encouraged people to idle more to make hats. GREAT.
Anyways, the other thing I wanted to say..... Developer Intent is bubkis.
As a developer, when you release a game, THATS IT. Thats what the player has to play. Unless you patch it, its over. Trying to figure out what the developer was intending is stupid for a number of reasons. There are probably a number of obviously fair tactics the developers didn't intend or think about. Players won't and shouldn't play in some sterile 'what would jesus-imeandeveloper do?' way. They figure out and exploit the nuances.
Games that are interesting are not interesting because the designers perfectly plotted every little detail of the game. That is umpossiblz. Instead, they make games interesting by creating environments where interesting nuances and details will emerge. Whether or not something is a glitch doesn't exactly matter. Glitches and exploits have often been legitimized in games by the developers, and obviously intended tactics have been removed because the developer went "My god, what was I thinking!"
Straz said:
I feeled compelled to mention the care package glitch in MW2.
People who used it used to tell me that it was in the game, and thus a legitimate stragegy.
It got removed, and if the developers didn't see it as such, it mustn't have been as such.
Yet they still beleived in it, until it was removed.
Well yeah, but are you saying that just because the developers removed it, that it wasn't legit? Legit stuff gets removed all the time from games by developers. Developers are not infallible. They jump at things that are harmless and miss things that are horrible and they do so because they are humans with bias perceptions like the right of us.
So while that glitch was in the game it was fair to people to say it was legit. But once the developer removes it, thats it. It doesn't matter if it was legit or not, you aren't able to do it so theres no more discussion. Developers may be fallible, but the game code is the final ruling on everything and if they change that, what can ya do?
Frederf said:
95% of the time anything that even raises the question "Is this legitimate?" guarantees the answer "No." Human beings have a persistent habit of desperately trying to justify their behavior.
Quite the opposite in my experience. Unless it involves an external program, 95% of the time if people ask if it's legitimate, my answer is pretty much always 'yes, yes it is.' This isn't hard, since people gripe about EVERYTHING, and rarely on anything that is a significant problem. Maybe I'm a little bias here because I tend to play polished games. People who play MW2 online might have a different perspective. But REALLY? 95% no? Are you like.... a gaming Nun?
Anyways (and this is a little bit lateral to the discussion since this is single player) I'd like to say as someone who released a buggy game, as a developer, I LOVED seeing what people did with IWBTG. They'd find super obscure bugs and exploits that would make me just drop my jaw in amazement. Very few of these 'interesting' glitches got patched. I tired to remove stuff that made you invulnerable or made you teleport (though if you check youtube, I've clearly failed at that
), but tons of other little exploits that were beneficial to the player were legitimized by me often as features. Things like that are part of the 'lore' of a video game. Part of the texture of a game that people can talk about, find, and explore. Certain bugs, glitches and exploits very much add to the character of games, often beneficially.
Anyways, for me (lol sirlin.net again), the line is whats in the game. If the game is so broken with exploits that I can't have fun while playing my best, I don't blame the community, I blame the developers. Fuzzy rules just lead to people being mad and each other and fracturing communities.
I do think developers should be more willing to speak out. I would have appreciated it if Valve came by sooner to say "No, idling is dumb, knock it off", and then set to fix the problem. Communications can act as a stopgap solution before a REAL solution is implemented, but at the same time, depending on the exploit, that doesn't mean some people can't continue to safely perform it.
