Caliostro said:
BrotherRool said:
Ah good to see the voice of reason here. Sir there's something wrong with the game.
Well can we ask the players to stop doing it?
NO! BURN EVERYTHING!
Seriously hacking out an entire game feature rather than let it be known that exploits aren't allowed? You should run for the Republican candidate
Actually, wrong. A correct analogy would be:
"Sir, a completely unimportant part of our toy is broken. It's not really hurting anyone, but people aren't playing with it the way we want them to!"
"Well, take it away while we repair it then give it back."
As opposed to what they did which was:
"Sir, a completely unimportant part of our toy is broken. It's not really hurting anyone, but people aren't playing with it the way we want them to!"
"Break. Their. Arms."
Okay fair enough, I'll play serious now.
So let's do this step by step.
First exploiting in MMOs is wrong. When you sign up to almost any MMO they warn you, that any attempt to exploit the game is wrong and will result in punishment. So you are doing wrong by the rules of the game you agreed to play, this happens in fact in lots of multiplayer games MMO regardless.
However it's a more serious offence in an MMO because everything is attached to an actual economy that affects every player experience. In EVE for instance, a game known for letting a player do almost anything, you try exploiting and they will ban your arse so hard it will hurt forever. Exploiting, as pointed out above is breaking the rules so players who don't break the rules are going to have a small disadvantage against those who break the rules, and that ain't fair.
This isn't even a minor exploit, this is taking no damage during combat, the core mechanic of the game. Someone farming stuff doing this is going to be able to do it much quicker and with much less effort than someone who is playing fair. You can grind out more XP exploiting and do better in PVP whatever, advantage cheats.
So the act in itself is deliberately gaming the system to further yourself, breaking the rules when you agreed to when you signed up and hindering the experience of normal players. It's roughly the same sort of offence as griefing (a little less because it damages the experience for other more subtly) and so deserves some sort of temp ban, whatever the situation.
However you posited, the practical idea, that a way of resolving this situation would be to remove the dance feature. Lets assume that this is really easy to do and they could do it now for everyone, without causing problems and without particularly extra work on the people trying to program a solution to the general problem.
I argue that this is a destructive and incorrect solution. Dancing is a minor feature and really just window-dressing, compared to the much more destructive effects of the exploit (I presume we agree it's a bad exploit because you advocate removing dancing). So I can see where you are coming from.
But this behaviour in the end, is damaging the playing experience (very marginally) of every single person who plays this game, regardless of their honesty. I don't think it's better that a perfectly clean player who is deliberately avoiding exploiting, should feel even the twinge of annoyance when they can't muck around dancing in a public place because some people won't stick to the rules. I would say that banning the players doing it (temporarily) is the much better solution, because it's fair to those who play fairly.
You were right to pick me up at first, because I was being flippant and in being flippant over emphasising the importance of dancing (virtually nil) but I hope you agree with me, now we're more serious that in the end removing something for everyone, because of the acts of a few is wrong. Even if you don't think exploiting is wrong (and I hope you do, because I can list of examples from every MMO if I tried, WoW is famous for banning the people who exploited there way through a boss and relabelling the boss as undefeated afterwards), then banning dancing would still be wrong. Because if you place the blame at the feet of the developers for having a bug in an MMO (which I hope you'll agree would be a bit harsh), then punishing every player in the game for the devs mistake would be just as wrong.
In the end this is about the idea of not punishing the innocent to stop those who are doing wrong and I like to think we'll both agree on that
