Original Comment by: Patman
"They (generally, and probably rightly) feel that you ought to code against exploits, not merely make rules -- because they regard undesirable exploits of that magnitude as bugs, and feel that bugs should be fixed.
There's many reasons why this isn't always immediately practical, but I do have to admit that some of the examples that Dave cited in his article are cases where code probably should have followed up the ToS with a more permanent fix. The classic examples in (countless) other games are line of sight issues."
If you think it's the case that players are so very concerned about having exploits fixed immediately, you should get to know the WoW community a little. Tales of a certain class' ability which was used by a player to kill the boss, Lord Kazzak (who was mentioned in the article), still thrive. As do tales of how the ability was changed to prevent doing that within 24 hours. In fact, ask around enough, and you'll be told something along the lines of "If you want a bug fixed, find a way to use it to your advantage. It will be hotfixed within 24 hours."
I think it's also worth bringing up the example of another undesirable method of interacting with Lord Kazzak. This involved the ability to get Kazzak to follow a player all over the continent he first spawns on, which includes 3 of the 6 major cities in the game, wreaking quite a bit of havoc, and most certainly ruining plenty of peoples' playing experience when he killed their characters over and over again. I think pretty much everyone can agree that this is wholly undesirable from the developers' perspective, and that they were within their rights to do something about it. This is now prevented prevented by a hardcoded solution, not the Terms of Service.
So we can see quite clearly that Blizzard does NOT rely on their Terms of Service as their first line of defense when something unintended and detrimental happens within WoW. Now, maybe I'm incorrect, but I'm pretty sure that this renders about a third of the article-in-question's complaints essentially void.
Of course, I suppose a nitpicker (or David Sirlin) could say "Why they don't just alter their design and code so you can't do these things is beyond me." Well, Mr. Sirlin, if you provide me with a list of every possible bug, exploit, and undesirable or harmful method of interacting with the world of WoW, as well as how to hardcode them without requiring a massive rewrite of the majority of the game code, and a similar list for every future patch, I'll be happy to admit that Blizzard should be doing better.
"They (generally, and probably rightly) feel that you ought to code against exploits, not merely make rules -- because they regard undesirable exploits of that magnitude as bugs, and feel that bugs should be fixed.
There's many reasons why this isn't always immediately practical, but I do have to admit that some of the examples that Dave cited in his article are cases where code probably should have followed up the ToS with a more permanent fix. The classic examples in (countless) other games are line of sight issues."
If you think it's the case that players are so very concerned about having exploits fixed immediately, you should get to know the WoW community a little. Tales of a certain class' ability which was used by a player to kill the boss, Lord Kazzak (who was mentioned in the article), still thrive. As do tales of how the ability was changed to prevent doing that within 24 hours. In fact, ask around enough, and you'll be told something along the lines of "If you want a bug fixed, find a way to use it to your advantage. It will be hotfixed within 24 hours."
I think it's also worth bringing up the example of another undesirable method of interacting with Lord Kazzak. This involved the ability to get Kazzak to follow a player all over the continent he first spawns on, which includes 3 of the 6 major cities in the game, wreaking quite a bit of havoc, and most certainly ruining plenty of peoples' playing experience when he killed their characters over and over again. I think pretty much everyone can agree that this is wholly undesirable from the developers' perspective, and that they were within their rights to do something about it. This is now prevented prevented by a hardcoded solution, not the Terms of Service.
So we can see quite clearly that Blizzard does NOT rely on their Terms of Service as their first line of defense when something unintended and detrimental happens within WoW. Now, maybe I'm incorrect, but I'm pretty sure that this renders about a third of the article-in-question's complaints essentially void.
Of course, I suppose a nitpicker (or David Sirlin) could say "Why they don't just alter their design and code so you can't do these things is beyond me." Well, Mr. Sirlin, if you provide me with a list of every possible bug, exploit, and undesirable or harmful method of interacting with the world of WoW, as well as how to hardcode them without requiring a massive rewrite of the majority of the game code, and a similar list for every future patch, I'll be happy to admit that Blizzard should be doing better.
