|
|
 |
A short opinion article by Keith Cronin.
Hackers, Cheaters and Assholes
-- Why Online CRPGs Will Never Work
With online games having become so popular, you have to wonder why. I played a few myself and in my experience, most other players are rude, obnoxious and almost never never roleplay. So why are there so many people asking for more and more MMORPGs? Well they have to be one of two things: a masochist or an asshole.
Masochists would like a game experience that is frustration, full of being screwed over and never getting anywhere.
Assholes would like more MMORPGs so they can go to another game and keep thier reputation of hacking, cheating, and making other peoples lives miserable.
Anybody else playing that aren't one of the above will eventually learn to hate these game because of the assholes. I have had the displeasure of trying out a game of Asheron's Call, and when I started I tried asking sombody for help. Wrong thing to do, as I was immediately surrounded by several people who screamed "Fresh Meat!!" and promptly hacked me to bits. I promptly threw the game into the recycle bin.
I used to play an MMORPG called Nexus: Kingdom of the Winds, which was my first MMO game. At first, since the game was new, it was kind of fun. Then after a few months the game hit the "big time" and suddenly it was just all about people trying to steal accounts by sending official looking posts to players asking for password info (ala the AOL email frauds) and stealing each other's kills. Most of the new people did not role play, and in fact it seemed alot of them hung out in gangs that got together to just steal things from others and rip them off. They tried to modify how the game worked to reduce this, but they always found a way around it. By the time I left in disgust these groups of ppl have resorted to just following people around and doing things like Pking via helping out and/or healing a boss that person was fighting so the boss could kill that person and the asshole could take all of his belongings, plus get the kill for the boss. Eventually they made even more changes to discourage that which destroyed the integrity of the game completely, making the game so hard that you had to hunt in groups because even a level 99 character was not strong enough to walk thru much without getting torn apart.
These things will never be solved in the industry without totally having the game and the player character reside on their servers. But even then they would have to have a totally hackproof system, and everybody would need OC-3s and extremely fast computers. And even then I bet the hackers would find a way to cheat! Not to mention, you cannot force people to roleplay. An asshole will always be an asshole and their will never be a way to filter them out other than to make a game that is 100% cooperative, and they would probably even find a way to get around that also. An MMORPG is only as good as the worst apple in the player tree.
This is why I am glad Bethesda is making Morrowind single player only. And I hope that they continue making single player only games in the series, and keep any multiplayer versions as a seperate product. There will be less single player games in the future, let's hope the industry does not forget those that do not like it. Sometimes integrity is more important than the almighty dollar. And they may be surprised, with the unavailability of quality single player games, one such game may bust through the roof and make people think twice.
-- KC_2
|
|
|
|
|
