User:Racthoh/Gaming
Gaming[edit]
There is something I will never understand when it comes to the gaming world, specifically a game like Guild Wars and Diablo II (just recently stopped playing it again for the former) and that thing is ingame wealth. It's easier for me to relate to Guild Wars because I have been playing it since pretty much the beginning, think I had it maybe two weeks after its release. Like a number of people I farmed a lot, mostly because I wanted to buy my pretty obsidian armor but also because it was really fun to fill the screen with numbers killing 20 things at once. By farming I was able to eventually do just that, obtain that pretty armor. It should be noted how the most expensive armor functionally has no benefits over the armor a fraction of its price. It's merely for looks, something for the players to spend their wealth on. Personally I believe this was a great system and keeping in tune with the skill over time theme of the game.
What I can't wrap my mind around is why measures were taken time and time again to stop botting. While I am fully aware that in the EULA it says not to use any 3rd party programs but the way the game was changed to deal with those users ruined the game for others. In a game where wealth has so very little bearing on a player's performance I cannot fathom the repeated changes made to Guild Wars to stop bots, and the players who purchased gold from them. We had the removal of the griffins, AoE scatter, to loot scaling, all in an effort to stop botting, and all of which greatly upset a portion of their community. And for what? To prevent players from easily acquiring something that has no effect on the experience of gameplay? The fact that a simpler method would've just been to zone to spots where the farming was taking place and just ban those bots! They KNEW the bots were at Augury Rock but instead... changed the zone removing the fun that real players were having? I could probably jump around all of the known farming hot spots and get all the bots in one day, but if the programmers feel their resources are better spent developing code that won't get the job completely done while pissing off their real customers in the process I guess that works too. Their game, not mine.
Also adding in limited numbers of mini-pets certainly doesn't help to deter people from buying gold either, especially when it does become harder for the typical player to amass wealth. Really if you want to stop botting you don't try to cure the problem by making gold harder to obtain then continue to add absurdly rare items into your game.
Which leads me to Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. Creating items with a 0.000001% chance of dropping, and then requiring like 6 of that item to make a runeword is begging for your game to become corrupt and full of dupes. There is a serious lack of common sense when it comes to these gaming companies, and their solutions always cause more damage to the playerbase instead of the intended targets.
Is there a problem with designing a system where the player has to complete a task to receive a reward that can't be given to another player? In other words if you want something you actually have to get off your ass to get it? Guild Wars had it right with titles, and some of them at some point did hold value to others. Respectable one could say. However once these became easily attainable through the use of consumables, absurdly overpowered PvE skills, and now perma-shadowform builds any sort of achievement became moot. What is the purpose of creating something that is supposed to be difficult to achieve only to dumb down the difficulty for it to be attainable by all, especially when Guild Wars was supposed to be about the better players being successful. Like the expensive armor and pretty weapons titles had zero effect on making a player better. Having a title did not make you a better player.
... Until that changed as well. Lightbringer, PvE skills, and the Eye of the North Reputation titles. The bigger issue is the skills tied to these titles that made them a problem.
I think my train of thought took a turn. I'll stop now.
